The Transplant Draft is an interview series with the newest team picks in the greater North Brooklyn/Ridgewood area. Read the last one here.
It’s Draft Day, baby, and I’ve got no fucking clue what’s going on. I watch so little college football that the Draft’s a sort of magic 8-ball that’s yet to produce the right scry for Minnesota. Rather than looking forward, I can look back to seasons past, when the Vikings evicted Sam Darnold straight into a Super Bowl parade, and to more recently when they picked up noted genius Kyler Murray, freshly exited from a high desert dumpster fire.
I think of Sam Darnold a lot, though he’s married now: for years, he was a placeless man, but now he’s found a home far from Minnesota, which out of spite will pretend not to miss him, though will still have an absence that can only be filled in by the what-could’ve-beens and what-should-bes. That’s so many faraway places that rest their laurels on bygones: Carthage, Youngstown, even New York City.
What the Vikings really need is a poet, someone who writes, “Persian pomegranates / at Food Bazaar,” or at least someone to write them a sort of Groundhog Day “Light Brigade” for their perpetual non-contender status, for Brooklyn, to misquote E.B. White, “is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music.” That broken glass, a stanza; those warehouses, together a sestina; that rave, a rave.
That poet exists, somewhere west in a place called East Williamsburg, which is whatever you want it to be. Gabby is not a poet to my knowledge, and she’s fresh off the boat, but regardless she’ll do just fine. She’s already at ease among the Dutch and descendants of les goddamns. And she’s ready, because there is no real enemy for a hybrid Quebecois/Nutmegger in North Brooklyn: anti-transplant discourse exists almost entirely online as a figment of the collective transplant imagination. Heritage New Yorkers intuitively know that transplants are not the problem, only the symptom. Any argument to the contrary belies an astounding disdain for locals.
I’ve always wanted to show one of these transplant draftees a photo of a Latino family and ask, “How this make you feel, white boy?” But there’s just not enough guts in me. I don’t think I’ll ever give myself the chance. There’s a whole lonely country inside every hater.
Aaron Tomey: You’re in the local library, printing flyers for your mutual aid popup, when you see a guy you don’t want to see. How do you run away?
Gabby: I’d grab onto whatever flyers I could hold, and go for the shelves and try to inch my way around him that way. Or try to grab a very nondescript looking cover and shelter my face that way until I can make it to the door. But I don’t think that man would ever be in a library to begin with.
AT: What’s your defensive approach to laundry?
G: Every other week. We have a laundromat right around the corner, and I lug as much as I can. And it’s always heavier on the way back because I almost never use the dryer. It’s too expensive. It’s made me more sustainable for both economic reasons that have transformed into maybe some ethical reasons as well. But I do miss an in-unit for sure.
AT: What’s your Mamdani Commune dream job?
G: Snow shoveling, which feels pertinent.
But I don’t even have my proper winter boots here because it doesn’t feel necessary. I moved here right after the first snowstorm, the one at the end of January. But during the second one, I was like, should I get paid $30 an hour to shovel snow? It’s comical that New York could not handle that just because in Montreal, that’s what it is every other day. The snow infrastructure there is very impressive. Meanwhile, walking along the BQE, you’re just trying not to fall into a pothole.
AT: What’s your touchdown/interception celebration / restaurant night out
G: Oh, I went to Rocka Rolla recently. We were playing shuffleboard. I played for the first time. And I won. But, the way I celebrated comforted the losers. We went to get birria tacos afterwards at the little truck right outside.
AT: How many connections would you have on InkedIn (my tattoo-centric pre-build stage Bushwick social media app)
G: Well I feel like I’d be in the contrary with having zero connections considering my zero tattoos.
And a lot of my closest friends surprisingly don’t have any either. My dad was like a musician in New York during the 80s and 90s. And somehow he came out of it unscathed. No tattoos at all. And he only had one ear piercing
AT: What crime would the transplant gestapo charge you with?
G: In terms of public transit, I’m so used to it being more calm and orderly, in comparison to the New York ways. So I’ll try to form some sort of line when waiting for the bus. And everyone gets so confused. Especially when I’m trying to let all the old ladies who were there before me get on. I feel like my biggest problem would be that I was raised by two very proud Manhattanites, and so I guess my biggest faux pas would be still being so unfamiliar with the Brooklyn ways, especially South Brooklyn. I don’t even know anything about where each of those neighborhoods are placed. I’m pretending to be a New Yorker, but being generally uneducated.
AT: Why the hell am I meeting so many people who went to McGill?
G: I think it’s got something to do with the guidance counselors. People are in the know in Connecticut. Massachusetts and New York know, too, but nowhere else in the Northeast.
Maybe this anecdote will help. I was in a ‘Disability in Literature’ class, and the book we were reading at the time had an autistic main character. And somehow, this one girl from New York in my class was able to twist it around to talk about how she was—what was the word she used?—a gifted student. No, she said, “prodigy.” She was like, “I’m from New York and since preschool they told me that I was a prodigy, and I had to be in this specific track for the rest of my academic career.” And then this other girl raises her hand and says, “I’m actually also a prodigy. And I’m from New York. And I also went to a special preschool.”
There ended up being three or four girls in this one class of 15 people who were all New York prodigies. They all seemed to think that going to Canada was another way to affirm that. The big fish seeking the little pond. Because maybe that one person from New York is a prodigy, but, lo and behold, there’s actually four of them in one class. Out of my four roommates, for the majority of undergrad, we were all dual citizens, and three of us were American. So it’s really a dime a dozen in Montreal. Or at least at McGill.
AT: Were the Grand and Graham L stations named that way to humiliate us?
G: I think they’re kind of cute. [I ask if they’re fucking.] That would be a bit incestuous. Grand and Graham: siblings. It’s a little taboo.
AT: How do you feel about the CFL having a participation trophy for Canadian players?
G: We’ve got to keep representation in the game somehow. The largest embarrassment surrounding Canadian culture is that it’s defined in opposition to others, like the States. I took a Canadian literature class or two, and that was the biggest theme throughout what we read. It’s an insecurity surrounding a lack thereof. I’m not saying that’s true, but I think that the cringe would be the fear of being misidentified as American, but the fear of being found out to be Canadian is equally scary. Canada is almost as bad as the States, but they have better PR. They keep their problems in-house, on their own scale, considering the fact their population just beat California’s in terms of size.
When I’ve gone backpacking in Europe, I used to lean into my Canadian identity until somebody started speaking to me in French, and then the big reveal would happen that I actually grew up in the States. But about halfway through traveling, I started presenting myself as American because we needed somebody representing us who could hold a conversation without slurring.
AT: What’s your Citi Bike ritual?
G: I haven’t commenced it yet. I was waiting until all the snow cleared up. But I was pretty religious with BIXI [Montreal’s Citi Bike equivalent]. I did heinous things on BIXIs, like jump fences with them. And by “jump fences,” I want to clarify: I don’t mean riding the bike over the fence. I mean throwing the bike over the fence and then throwing myself over the fence because I didn’t want to bike an extra 20 seconds to go around the construction site.
I also love biking with objects that you shouldn’t be able to bike with. I’ve done vacuums before. I’ve also carted some full-ass pumpkins. Anything that you shouldn’t be able to bike with, I want to bring it safely from point A to point B. I’m excited to put Citi Bike to the test.
AT: You just got matching offers from Team Canada and USA. Which one are you taking?
G: Definitely Canada right now. I want to get drafted by the one I’m not currently at.
AT: Describe a Montreal day transplanted into East Williamsburg
G: You wake up first thing in the morning and cry because you can’t go cross-country skiing. You can try to do it at McGolrick, but it’ll never be the same. Montreal has a mountain right in the middle of the city. But I can still go buy equally expensive coffee at a cute cafe. That makes up for it.
One thing that always baffles me is everybody walking around with coffee. You see more people holding a drink on the streets than you do not holding a drink, especially around here. To-go cups aren’t really a thing in Montreal. They expect you to stay, and finish your drink before you leave. It’s a big culture shock: so many people don’t actually stay. Or they stay all day on their laptop.
East Williamsburg is what you want it to be. Sure, we’re half a block west of the BQE, which might peeve local experts, but the dividing lines have always been in question, and either way Gabby lives within the Meeker Ave Plumes. Rather than community boards and vibes defining neighborhood boundaries, neighborhoods should be defined by their various industrial wastes, brownfields, and Superfund sites. We must remember our heritage dumps before it becomes the Northern Gowanus.
On account of its low population density, East Williamsburg often appears desolate, presenting itself as a blank slate. Even its name, as it functions now, implies the expansion of an older town— “East Williamsburg itself is distinctive,” Gabby says. “It’s definitely not quite Bushwick. It’s distinctive from Williamsburg, that’s for sure”—into a land that doesn’t have as much pesky, entrenched community to resist rebranding.
With rampant capital and housing still an unguarantee, the playgroundification of Williamsburg will infect the east. Developers would rebuild the whole world into Domino Park if they could, or rename everything east of Graham and west of Broadway Junction ‘East-East-Eaaaast Williamsburg.’ And everyone coming up from behind would love it. On that playground, they’d discover new ways of seeking. Fixated urbanists would leverage MIT’s foot traffic model of NYC to map out station foot traffic to designate certain L train cars as exclusive to Bedford Ave. Americans. In those cars, they’d sing appropriated spirituals of the Non-Luxury Unit American. Later, over upstate campfires, they’d share condo horror stories of hearing but being unable to reach out (their intercom worked but the door buzzer had been mashed in half by eager situationship fingers). I asked Gabby about something totally unrelated, and she answered, “I think I’m Team New York bagel all the way.”
We need some Domino sugar. I’ll try to suppress the recurring daytime nightmare of a place called the Last Jawn opening up off the Wilson L as a social club for fascist Philly expats. I’ll hope my dream explodes. I’ll stay hoping for the good to bloom within things. Gabby’s going to make it, however that is, and Kyler Murray’s going to get my team a fucking ring, and I’ll cry and cry and cry and cry.
Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have appeared in Hobart, Bushwick Burner Phone, and Apocalypse Confidential. He can also be found on Twitter: @ecstatic_donut.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
Leave a Reply