Soaked on the Hippest Train

My Fourth of July ended with me being crammed, soaking wet, onto the L train at Bedford Avenue. Did you know that the L train is the hippest train of the subway? It sure is.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon on the phone with one person after another, trying to figure out what I was going to do and with whom. Talked with CanadaGirl, talked with Wales, talked with Nick, talked with Cute Yale Boy. First I was going to pack myself onto the FDR Drive with Wales and Ontario and Yale Boy. But as the afternoon wore on, the idea of a crowd grew less and less appealing. Nick was possibly going to have people over to watch the fireworks from his roof, and CanadaGirl’s gay couple friends were going to do some grilling at their place, and both of these options seemed like better ideas. Furthermore, Yale Boy called me at one point and said that he was just going to stay home because he wasn’t feeling very well. I don’t know if he really wasn’t feeling well or if it was just an excuse, but that pretty much cemented it. I didn’t really want to hang out on the FDR Drive if he wasn’t going to be there. And Nick’s plans were off because his roommate was still around, and technically he’s just subletting from her. So I wound up going out to Williamsburg (near Sparky’s territory, maybe?) to hang out with CanadaGirl and the gay couple and CanadaGirl’s lesbian friend who was originally from Los Angeles but had an accent that sounded sort of French Candian and sort of an indescribable mishmosh of North American and European.

The guys have a great place — a spacious loft with an exposed brick wall. They’re artsy types; one is a photographer, and I can’t remember what the other one does. There are no cabinets, so their dishes and spices and everything are displayed on open shelves. Two butcher block tables in the kitchen. A washer and a dryer. Two smaller rooms at one end. And a big bathroom, by New York standards, with a Keith Haring shower curtain. And one window in the kitchen opens onto a roof.

There was a grill out there. It was drizzling, but that didn’t stop us. We grilled the food and took it inside: grilled chicken with some salsa that CanadaGirl had made, grilled corn and onions, potato salad, beer and wine, sliced pineapple. Yum!

The rain had stopped and we thought we might be able to see the fireworks from the roof. We went out there and saw cars speeding past on the nearby Williamsburg Bridge. On a neighboring roof about 30 people were standing with drinks and looking out over the sky — a view we didn’t have because it was blocked by a building. We decided to walk down to the river, each putting our Corona in a white plastic bag first; every so often we saw a couple of cops, but the white plastic bags around our bottles must have satisfied them. We walked along a street and still couldn’t get a great view, but finally we managed to find a spot that was only partially blocked by a building. It was an eclectic mix: black and Hispanic families, a few Hasidic Jews, and a few twenty-something white people besides ourselves. We could see flashes of red and green light against the dark milky sky, still filled with clouds. We only saw about half the fireworks — the ones that went higher up into the sky than the others — but it was enough to make my Fourth of July complete.

Afterwards, we went back to the apartment and talked for a little bit, and then I said goodbye and walked back to the Bedford Avenue stop on the L train. It was drizzling again and I had no umbrella, but for some reason I just felt like walking in the rain, doing something different. I just didn’t care. It was about a 15-minute walk, and as I walked the rain began to fall harder. By the time I got to the station I was soaked. My t-shirt had gone from light gray to dark gray and my glasses were dotted with water droplets. I walked down to the platform and it was packed with people, all of whom seemed to have come straight from “Real World” central casting. All these alternative Gen-X white people, half of whom were wet. Don’t they have any umbrellas in Williamsburg at all?

The train finally came, and as it pulled into the station, everyone on the train looked out at us in terror. We all managed to squeeze ourselves on board. The train just stayed there for a couple of minutes while more people ran down the stairs and packed themselves in like clowns in a telephone booth. Finally we took off underneath the East River and I was on my way home.

It was fun to be part of the hip crowd for a night. I often feel like I’m missing something by not being a part of it, so this was a nice change. All in all, I had a pretty enjoyable sesquisequicentennial, despite being soaked on the hippest train and all. Or rather because of it.