The Crumpstack Guide to Ridgewood
I’ve been hanging out in Ridgewood lately
I’ve been hanging out in Ridgewood lately. When I was visiting New York in 2021 before moving here, I usually stayed in Bushwick, and I had imagined my life in New York to take place around there. That didn’t end up happening. Instead I’ve always lived around Prospect Park, and, from there, Bushwick/Ridgewood is hard to get to. It’s really only with K that I’ve gotten a better sense of that whole vibe.
I always knew that eventually I’d get around to it. Over time, L-trainoids have often told me that I need to get out of the fascist Lower East Side and go somewhere “real,” implicitly meaning Bushwick and Ridgewood—though those types also tend to be cagey and gatekeepy about this endeavor, especially if I mention writing anything about it. (Ironically, there’s already a local news blog called “Grime Square”—no clean escape from the downtown subcultural vortex.) K, at least, has an appetite for satirizing that crowd, which makes her the ideal tour guide.
K has lived in Ridgewood for six years in three different stints over the past decade. She’s from LA originally and talks with a vocal fry. She paints and surfs and works as a product designer for a tech company. She has the most impressive collection of clown books of any girl I’ve dated, including such tomes as 1000 Clowns and The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown. When we first met, she told me that she hated intellectuals, which I found refreshing.
K and I read Querelle together, and she was inspired to write a short piece about jail memories from 2009, when she was 18 and arrested in New York for shoplifting and drug possession and booked by “a lady cop with the biggest pair of tits I’ve ever seen.”
In the story, K pleads guilty on her public defender’s advice, gets three days community service, and walks out with her molly still in her bag. From there she goes to the Guggenheim in her jail clothes, bumps around the Upper East Side, stays with a high school acquaintance at NYU, watches Spirited Away, slips out at 2am, meets a boy at the Continental bar on Astor Place, goes back to his dorm, sleeps with him, steals $80 and his weed while he sleeps, takes a cab to Penn Station, smokes a spliff in the handicap bathroom, and passes out on the train upstate, where she goes to college.
***
K lives in M-train Ridgewood, which is nicer than L-train Ridgewood. K claims that Ridgewood is “spiritually fat,” in fact, it’s “the fattest place on earth.” Bushwick, by contrast, is spiritually skinny, though that doesn’t make it any better. She says that she loves Ridgewood and is a NIMBY about it and doesn’t want the spiritually fat Ridgewood hipsters to build another tacky gay bar close to her and ruin everything.
Her mental map is oriented by the NYC subway map. I realized this after being very confused by her directions for a while. She lives on Fresh Pond, which in her orientation runs east to west, and sits near the top of her map. (Oriented by true magnetic north, Fresh Pond runs more like north–south.) Bushwick and most of the rest of Ridgewood are “south” of her.
Sometimes we go to Variety Coffee on Forest Avenue (south, in her orientation, west in mine) and in front of the coffee shop there’s a tiny traffic island called “Korean Square.” When I pointed that out to her, she said that every man she’s ever dated while living here has pointed that out to her.
One time at Variety Coffee we met Billy, the building super and lifelong native of the neighborhood, who supplements his income at New York Comic Con by selling plastic wrapping for merchandise. He was supposed to go to Comic Con in Saudi Arabia, but the Iran War cancelled those plans.
***
On Fresh Pond Road there’s a tall, bearded man with deep-set eyes who growls loudly to himself. It’s deep and guttural but also vaguely silly, like someone pretending to be the boogeyman to scare kids. Some people on the Ridgewood subreddit call him the screamer, but K says they’re wrong, it’s more of a growl. So she calls him the Growler. Also from the Ridgewood subreddit she learned that his growling is the result of a motorcycle accident, and that he was normal before.
K says that the Growler is like the Russian concept of юродивый, the holy fool, the village idiot who is tolerated by the local villagers because he talks to God, because he has become stripped of conventional social wisdom.
Sometimes we sit by the window in K’s apartment overlooking Fresh Pond and hear the Growler walking by. Sometimes he’s accompanied by an elderly Polish woman who K says is the Growler’s aunt. Sometimes he’s accompanied by another woman, who walks with a cane, and K isn’t sure who exactly she is.
Usually when I see the Growler he’s growling, but every now and then he’s perfectly tranquil. In the blizzards this past winter I remember seeing him walking around in shorts.
***
Also on Fresh Pond there’s an Italian restaurant named Rustico that we go to often. It’s owned by this funny old Italian guy. K went with one of her gay friends one time and the owner said that he wouldn’t tell me that she goes here with other men. Usually the clientele are older people but on the day that I decided to write this piece there were a lot more hipsters, and K said that she suspected the Times or some other outlet would write about it and blow up the spot, and I said that I might as well do it here first. We also saw a normie blue-collar Polish couple that looked like they were fighting, or at least there was some tension apparent from their body language. “I’m trying to eavesdrop,” K said. But she heard nothing, and their world remains inscrutable to us.
***
K says that she wants to make an all-girls Grateful Dead cover band called “Box of Babes” and play keyboards in it.
***
A few blocks to the north of Fresh Pond, in K’s map, is Jones Bar. That’s the local dive where K knows the bartenders and usually gets drinks for free. They do karaoke sometimes. There’s a big portrait of the country singer George Jones. The first time I went with her she ran into a former-friend-turned-opp. Their beef was over a guy.
***
K and I go to a free music show at Cassette. She had suggested it as “a place that brings me much dread—many insufferables should be there.” It turns out to be a Radiohead cover band, but they also play some Portishead songs. The only other people there are two couples. The show is actually pretty good.
Cassette used to be called “Sundown,” and apparently the name was changed because it sounded too close to “sundown town,” though K insists that the name Cassette is actually more offensive to good taste.
K is left-wing but her idle political fantasy is more right-coded: she is the dictator of a fascist state that ruthlessly punishes people for the crime of tackiness.
***
K found a copy of The Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up at Deep Cuts on Catalpa Avenue.
***
One day K wanted to go to this home goods store called Lichen, on Woodward Avenue. The place was very chic and smelled like incense and a lot of the furniture looked like it was designed by Donald Judd. Then there was a free library, and many of the books were also by or about Donald Judd. It was clear to me that Judd himself was present, spiritually. I could sense the man telling me to wear Arc’teryx. While K shopped, I got sucked into reading a book called Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives. The book’s essays talked about design through decolonial, queer-feminist, anti-racist, and activist lenses.
Intriguing. I wanted to see how I could incorporate these revolutionary design techniques into my writing. I started to fantasize about rebranding as a “designer.” And what would I be designing? Words, ideologies. I would become an ideology designer.
***
One night back in the winter, K’s ex’s friend was doing a performance-art album release at a church a few blocks from her. It was funeral-themed, a “celebration of death.” This friend was a terrible artist, K said, so we should show up to hate-watch the performance. She would maybe need to hide behind me.
At the church, we were given a program. “This DEATH is both ending and opening, an invocation for our mutual unmaking before all that we consider to be TRUTH. Let us gather in our grief for what has been lost, and use the decay as ground from which THE POSSIBILITY springs.”
I immediately noticed several familiar faces from downtown parties. K recognized her ex’s brother, but not the ex himself.
There was some kind of dreamy video loop projected on the wall behind the altar, but we arrived too late for the musical performance itself. The program described a retelling of the myth of Persephone. Now everyone was lining up one-by-one to partake in the death ritual. “Are you ready to die?” we were asked. I said I was ready. We were the last in line.
When her turn came, K asked if she and I could go together. “The Gate Watcher” opened a blank scroll, and pretended to read it, and then nodded. We walked up a flight of stairs to the next stage. Upstairs, “The Angel” looked surprised but went along with it. We both drank a dark salty liquid. Then on to the next stage. A gravestone with fake grass around it. “Death” held a polaroid camera. K said we were doing this together, and asked if we could both fit in the grave. “Yes, if you can fit. Don’t mess the grave up,” said Death. K and I lay down together in the pretend grave while Death took the picture. We went back downstairs.
Done with the death ritual, we left the church. I think we went to karaoke, but I forget what we sang that night.