The Transplant Draft is an interview series with the newest team picks in the greater Bushwick, Ridgewood, and Williamsburg area. Read the last one here
Sevanny said she’s from LA, and I told her that I’m sorry to hear that. She told me to go fuck myself. We were off to such a great start.
Sevanny’s parents came from El Tránsito and Sonsonate in El Salvador before meeting in Los Angeles. She’s a television news producer, and hosts at least two sports podcasts, “Major League Deals” with Korey Matthews and the even newer “Harris & Sevanny Figure It Out” with Harris Newman. This is the end of me pretending to know anything about football. She corrected me multiple times on the Rams’ ownership and franchise history, and my only Rams-related question was sourced from a friend in St. Louis. Every day I find a new angle from which to show my ass. I get to be ignorant again. That’s its own kind of beginning: always something new to learn.
Outside of New England and the Pacific Northwest, things are over: everyone else’s teams, including mine, are dead again, and the Super Bowl is a wake for those teams. It’s not an excuse for various dips, but your moment to consider opportunities lost, and how you’re a big, fat loser rooting for bigger, fatter losers. You lost because you came up late, came up short, with a QB made of paper mache and trashbags full of autumn leaves. It’s an apocalypse—a revelation— for almost everyone.
The landscape here is changing. It’s patrolled by suburbanites vamping ruralites, dressed like 2008 Walmart customers in this era’s rendition of the urban pioneer. They circulate around the playing field. The rules conform to the new. Ridgewood used to just have really bad Italian restaurants. Now it has good ones, too. Ridgewood still maintains its rowhome charm, but westward, in Bushwick and East Williamsburg, everything’s becoming the same three colors. It’ll come here, too. So I sat down with Sevanny to talk about what’s carnage for some, and more days of progress for others.
AT: What’s your run game approach when jaywalking the 101?
S: I only drive over that. Uh, defensively. I’m terrified of it. I’m terrified of getting stuck behind a truck.
AT: Walk me through your trade history.
S: I moved from L.A to a college in Missouri. Then I applied to grad school [in NYC], because I had a professor that actually believed in me, and I got in. So I moved to Washington Heights, when the pandemic hit. The two apartments next to us had squatters while I had an internship at the Latino News Network. One day, I was recording for a show, and I started hearing, like, rattling coming from my old roommate’s room. Someone was trying to open the window. I think they assumed that my place was one of the squatters’ apartments. And there were a lot of roaches and not a lot of room. We tried to live very sterilely because we were so scared of the roaches. Then I had to call out [of work] for like half the day because the toilet flooded the entire hallway.
I needed to get out of there. So I found a place in Astoria, and stayed there for two more years. I was really lucky that I lived right around the corner from one of the big streets there. Everything was right around the corner. I had absolutely no problem getting drunk at 2pm in Astoria.
But then the relationship between the landlord and I broke down quickly. Then I found a place in Ridgewood within a week. It was Halloween when I got here. Around here, I don’t really know anybody, so it takes a little bit more effort. So in terms of convenience, like where’s my local watering hole or whatever, I’m still making it up. I like the fact that there’s five grocery stores around me. But I haven’t really had the time to go and explore. When I moved to Astoria, I was an intern. And now that I’m in Ridgewood, I have no time because of my schedule. But it has afforded me a very nice apartment.
AT: Who’s the Grime Square equivalent of Stat Patford?
S: I love [Stat Patford]. He’s so boyish, but with a little bit of gray in his beard. But I actually fucking hated him when he was on the Detroit Lions because he was epic. And then they traded [Jared] Goff and Stafford and I almost cried because I was like, we just have the developed Goff guys. I don’t know if I’m the appropriate person to ask about this considering that I sleep all the time… For some reason, a light, loose-fitting Canadian tuxedo comes to mind. With a yellow mustard Carhartt over it, orange beanie, and an olive green scarf. With Tims.
Facial hair, obviously. And curls quaffed as they are right now [atop MVP Stat Patford’s head].
AT: Who’ll win the Super-Ridgewood Bowl: people who aged out of Bushwick, or people who couldn’t afford to buy in Fort Greene?
S: Guys who aged out of Bushwick, for sure. Bushwick always wins. I think their survival skills might be a little bit better. With the actual Super Bowl, I think it would be really hard for the Seahawks not to win.
The best game of the year was last Sunday, bar none, even though my team did not win. They went down fighting, though.
AT: Rank your favorite local stadiums by their best concessions?
I’ve been to most of them except for MSG. I did want to go for Ghost. I’m a dude in a dress, basically. [I can confirm that Sevanny arrived at Gottscheer Hall wearing cargo pants.] Alright, so… Five is Barclays Center because I hate the process of getting a beer. Four would be MetLife. I love the nachos with the pickled peños. And they always give you a good-sized beer. Three would be Yankee Stadium. I didn’t have the best dining experience there, but at the time I was eating like a baby bird. Number two would be the minor league team in Coney Island, the Cyclones [Maimonides Park]. The popcorn, the hot dog, beer, all of it was awesome. And then number one would be Citi Field because it’s the best. And you can get a whole thing of nachos in a baseball bat. This season, I’m getting the nachos again.
Otherwise, I’ve been to Rolo’s and—not really my thing. But I do want to take my mom there, so I’ll do it again. Why do we take people to places we hate? And I went to Pierogis Boys recently. I don’t know if I liked their Borscht, but their cucumber salad was so lovely. It’s got walnuts on it. I dream of it. And I thought While In Katmandu was really great. But Aunt Ginny’s is my favorite. The spice bag is the way to go for dinner. I cook a lot too.
AT: Who was your favorite player from the Greatest Show on Turf [99-01 Rams]
S: Let’s do Kurt Warner. He’s Catholic, I’m Catholic. [I congratulate Sevanny for being Catholic]. Reluctantly.
AT: If a Caribbean Civil War breaks out, are you taking the side of the Dominicans or the Puerto Ricans?
S: I’m a Latin woman. I try not to discriminate against my own people. I just hope that they cancel each other out.
AT: How do you identify Ridgewood Republicans?
S: Blonde. With really good posture. Broad-chested. I go to Force [Fitness] on Fresh Pond every once in a while. Hi Force, love you. It’s really affordable, which is why I signed up, but I assume everyone there is a Republican. Their weights have the Captain America logo on them. I go in there and there are guys wearing waist things [belts] to lift weights. I’m looking for the belt. Or if they have a very Italian haircut.
AT: How would you best and most ethically park in front of a fire hydrant?
S: I wouldn’t. [I tell Sevanny that, in this hypothetical, she must park a car.] Go park in a different zip code. [I explain to Sevanny that, in this hypothetical, there’s something really urgent that requires her to parallel park nearby said urgency.] I’m not going to do it. I’m just not going to do it. I also don’t have a car out here. I don’t drive a car when I’m home [in LA], either. My best friend there usually drives me around. The last time I went home, we had to get on the highway, and I threw the world’s biggest fit because I got stuck in traffic.
It’s all ending for someone who’s been around here forever (born 1978), beginning for someone else who’s coming up from behind (from Florida or “Somewhere near Chicago”), carrying an intricate cup full of something—”the objectified guilt-free… monotonous abundance”—and it’s steaming signals into the air on the morning walk to the train, the signals are heard.
Something responds to those signals, and it moves; it all moves so fast! Modernism could be defined by an acceleration that at least felt observable. In the contemporary, we see speeds that are so speedy that tracking no longer matters. We’re all too tired to make it possible. Jonathan Crary says, “The accelerated tempo of apparent change deletes any sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, which might sustain even a nebulous anticipation of a future distinct from contemporary reality.” But don’t worry: we have so many humanities-focused men here, so literate in the Verso catalog, and they’re thinking very hard about the situation at hand. One day, they might start positing options. By then, it’ll be another of the “countries of the dead,” as Ismail Kadare says in the Palace of Dreams. Luckily, these boys own guitars, and know how to play them. They’ll sing songs of it all. A record will be kept.
In that way, it’s a relief that things are over, if only for a bit, because you will suffer again: this is all a cycle of death and rebirth, and right now is the part where all the lights are off except for the ones showing others the lived dreams they so badly wanted. Don’t worry: you’ll be back to be dashed again, soon enough. There’ll be another season, another apartment: you’ll always have more work to do, even when you’re dead.
But now, what work is there to do in the end? Rubble spreader, label remover (antagonist to future digsites), the millennial picklers and woodworkers who might one day reclaim the earth with their rustic hobbies (consumptive preppers will never win). Even in the apocalypse, there’s work to do.
Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have previously appeared in Hobart, Bushwick Burner Phone, and Apocalypse Confidential. He can also be found on Twitter: @ecstatic_donut.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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