“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” she said, pointing at me. “Why are you trying to blow this place up? What’s the point?”
It was a good question and the most insightful one I had heard all night. She was referencing a previous blog, which featured some photos I took, taken at the same small Albanian cafe (68-64 Forest Ave.), located just a few blocks away from the train station. These days, as it was that night, it was the source of a healthy nightlife crowd that often crowded the adjoining sidewalk. I suppose it felt European to everyone.
It was nice to imagine the quiet narcissism of thinking that a place you went to would be important or interesting to literally anyone else because they read about it online. Surely people can do this anywhere. But it captured the spirit of the place: a kind of wood-paneled den of white ethnic significance.
There were shows downstairs, these days, riveting performances by electronic acts in the local noise scene. More recently, the indie press Cash 4 Gold Books, which once published a book by the actor Peter Vack, rented out the back room for a reading hosted by the aforementioned Vack and Honor Levy, not herself published by Cash 4 Gold, but instead by Penguin Random House.
At any rate, after complaining to me about the blog, the woman wrote in my phone: “I used to make things, but now I just consume things.” It was something she had said earlier, and it reminded me of something a meme page administrator would say, or maybe Mitski. She actually had her own meme page, she said, but it was entirely private. No followers at all. I wondered how many of us had these, hidden somewhere but no doubt disclosed often. “This is what most male writers do,” she wrote after that, which was something else she had said, and then her phone number. It was nice to think that people somewhere still believed in romance. Someone to believe that we could talk about our shared interests for hours, I guess. We could talk about how we didn’t meet on Hinge.
Earlier that night, under a silently-playing YouTube video of Charlie Rose interviewing Ralph Lauren, the poet Myles Zavelo was reading from a bright yellow book: “And so right in front of her, I go, I’ll take the red Gatorade, the fruit punch flavor / And right in front of me, she goes, we’re all out of the red Gatorade, the fruit punch flavor/ But right there, I can see it, I say, beginning to point / No, you’re colorblind, she says.” Zavelo went on like this and the crowd seemed to laugh at the right moments.
If this was some of the worst poetry I had ever heard, it was nevertheless beautiful in its resistance to saying anything. To their credit, neither Levy nor Vack seemed to have any idea who Zavelo or any of these other people were, sweating here in the backroom with them, with Levy introducing him and everyone else as both “published anywhere you see,” and a faint half-associate from her time at Bennington, itself a recurring theme.
“I was 20, a junior at Bennington College in Vermont,” read Sierra Armor, from an excerpt from what was promised to be her upcoming novella, out sometime in the future from Cash 4 Gold. “And it’s on my substack, so sorry if you already read it,” she said. “I’m sorry that I don’t meet the needs of real people.”
“I spent my days and nights at my desk, eating ramen, staring at Zoom squares, chatting on Discord, listening to podcasts, thinking and writing, which is exactly how I spent my lonely days prior to college. Why am I here, I thought. Why am I going into debt for this?” she asked, before saying that meaning was to be found, at least then, in her 34-year-old boyfriend and his podcast.
Outside, I had run into Levy, who was telling everyone she was searching for pizza. She was from Los Angeles, so that made sense.
“Ridgewood, it’s like the new Silver Lake, or something like that, I love it,” she said, before asking “Is that what you want to hear?” before turning away.
She had been in the area for a reading herself, a year ago, over at Topos 2 (59-22 Myrtle Ave.) she reported. There would always be pizza somewhere, a Papa John’s open long into the late hours of Ridgewood’s semi-suburban comforts. Outside, the crowd took up much of the sidewalk, much like at Relax Lounge (68-17 Forest Ave.) up the street, though it didn’t sound like there were any readings there by modestly published citizens of Brooklyn. I bummed a cigarette off someone who looked remarkably unpleasant and he complained about it afterward.
I would miss Andrew Martin, also due to read and whose work I was quite fond of, but that was okay. Not everything can be complete and some things are best left instead reaching aimlessly upward. The work was getting better as the night went on; Nathan Dragon’s excerpt from something or other was almost coherent and it didn’t feel worth listening to. I could just read it somewhere else.
Before I left, I ran into someone else who told me he was there to write about the same reading, but for his substack. I looked it up and it seemed to publish various dispatches, apparently from various reading series in Brooklyn. “Over 2,000 subscribers.” He must be doing something right.
“I’ve actually been drunk the whole time, I don’t remember anything,” he told me, when I asked, his bearded smile looking up toward the tempered brown windows of the cafe. “But I wish I was on cocaine.”
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