Isaac ordered a shot and a beer from the weathered bartender. She had the face of someone who’d just been exhumed. Her mottled, leathery skin was proudly displayed through her low-cut blouse, along with tattoos on the side of each breast: a skull with a shamrock backdrop on the left one, and on the right a Gaelic harp wrapped in barbed wire. 
A row of TVs above the bar displayed horse races and results. Two or three men were studying racing forms. Lottery ads on plastic flaps were draped like bunting all around the dim space, giving it the air of a moribund carnival. Whenever someone opened the front door a thin ray of sunlight pierced the bar’s gloom, then flashed on the video poker machine as the door closed behind them. 
More Big Sky Brooklyn: The Novel
Monday
Temples of Languor
Tuesday
Thursday
Spring Fever (The Brooklyn Streets are Calling to Me)
Coney Island Avenue (4/19/08, Saturday)
The avenue’s squalor and tackiness abuts the greenery, Victorian charms, and near-rustic placidity of Kensington/Flatbush/Ditmas Park. In this juxtaposition one sees the epitome of Brooklyn’s profound resilience and allure—the Glorious Mesh: naked commerce cum residential life . . . A stretch of miles with no building higher than four stories and nary a chain store in sight, family/homespun businesses wall to wall. (In another time this would not be remarkable, but today it stands as one of Brooklyn’s distinguishing features vis a vis America at large.) . . . Wind-blown streamers sizzle in the used car lots . . . muezzin’s call to prayer . . . further down, Midwood section of the avenue, every place shuttered for the Sabbath.
Union Street Bridge (4/20/08, Sunday)
Every loose shingle, every paint-chipped building ledge or grating— Patinas of decay: oh to see it all, every time, with the faculty of complete, virtuosic sensitivity and awareness. Or, like now, brimming with imperfect humanity and entrenched cognitive/sensory flaws: to notice something different each time I pass—the wonder of the details, the pleasures of discovery . . . The textures of ruin lead me to muse on the process of sensitization and the feeling of power that comes from growing sharper, more attuned vs. the oblivion/inattention of all the times before (evidence of obtuseness/desensitization). Knowledge and proficiency; wonder and oblivion—a cause for celebration and despair (simultaneously).
Bennett’s, Ft. Hamilton Parkway (4/22/08, Tuesday)
The Mets are playing a rare weekday afternoon game and I ask the bartender to turn it on, for I find a solitary drink in a bar while watching baseball a rare pleasure. Johnny the bartender busts my chops (and everyone else’s, he tells me). He’s a real wag, funny, roughly personable in that Brooklyn way, with his steel gray, pompadour-like helmet hair. “This is one of the top five bars in all of Brooklyn,” I chirp, to which he pours me another shot of bourbon (I didn’t need that) . . . Jukebox: “Oh oh oh it’s magic”; Mungo Jerry, “In the Summertime” [someone turns it up]; “Ring of Fire” . . . A Steve Buscemi lookalike at the other end of the bar is getting the business from Johnny, as is the only woman in the bar, who’s glued to a cell phone . . . “She would give asprin a headache . . . she’s got the minutes ‘cause boy she can talk . . . shut—da—fuck—up!”
Intoxicating Variety: Anatomy of a DrunkWalk
Big Sky Brooklyn is less an attempt to document or “capture” the elusive richness of real-life than an effort to communicate the intoxicating variety endemic to Brooklyn. And “intoxicating variety,” as I have found, is best appreciated when one is intoxicated. This is only fitting since the blog grew out of a series of “DrunkWalks,” which started as random wanderings and steadily became more rigorous, through the use of maps, satellite imagery, and other research.
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The well-planned, dutifully executed DrunkWalk™ succeeds as a narrative and fulfills a personal quest to create a poetic map of the terrain. Last year, for example, at the height of Indian summer (an 85-degree day in early October), I set out early to walk the entire length of Stillwell Ave. and a large chunk of Bath Beach. The day was gorgeous, the route was scenic, and more than once I found just what I was looking for: communion with the sublime. It turned out to be an epic DrunkWalk. Following are some images and impressions from that memorable day.
Weekdays in obscure Brooklyn parks and playgrounds, among children, mothers, and retirees: another layer of reality, outside the realm of the working world.
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Calvert Vaux Park
Calvert Vaux Park, on the other side of Shore Parkway (pedestrians have to cross a footbridge to get there), was a strange experience all around. The 73-acre park, also known as Dreier-Offerman Park, is in the early stages of a $40 million renovation. It’s still open to the public, though it’s all but empty, save for workmen (not many, though), some baseball players (practicing in uniform—in October), and some fishermen scattered along the bank facing Coney Island. A thick, sloping underbrush shields the pathway from the water’s edge, so you can’t see the fishermen unless you climb through the bushes, and then it feels like you’re spying on them. Odd.
Crossing back to civilization: end of the footbridge, looking east. 
The exceedingly comfortable van seat where I sat at Cropsey Ave. & Bay 46th. When you're planted in a spot like this, the cheapest beer tastes like elixer.
The view looking west. 
The view looking east.
School’s out: Late afternoon, the streets and delis are pulsating with juvenile energy.
Shaba grocery, beneath the tracks, at Ave. X and Stillwell (right next to a section of the sprawling, heavily fortified Gravesend trainyard)—an unwittingly iconic juncture. Notice the play of clouds and sky in the interstices between train and tracks. Appreciation of such a tableau is what DrunkWalks were made for.
Deep in the heart of Brooklyn.
Concrete factory/high rise at Stillwell & Z.
Stillwell Avenue Terminus. I couldn’t go this far without hitting the beach—it was October but it felt like a summer day at Coney Island (without all the people).
Every DrunkWalk is an indolence excursion and a true glimpse of the contemplative life. The epic DrunkWalk is one of new vistas and new terrain, and ultimately new ways of seeing the familiar. Discovery is the watchword and pleasure is the spur; the exhilaration of feeling that I’m part of something bigger, immersed in a microcosm of an intricate world, is what gives me wings when I’ve had more than a few. My Brooklyn DrunkWalks have led to a mytho-cosmic wellspring, an endless source of inspiration—in a realm beyond the local.
SLIDESHOW – Coney Island/Coney Island Creek (Flickr)
Kensington Daze
Denny’s Steak Pub—A complimentary weekday buffet (where else do you find that?), sausage and peppers, with an alluring snack mix at the bar: Cheetos, pretzels and barbequed Fritos. It’s an accommodating place . . . Lotto, horse racing feed . . . A New York Post on the bar: “MISERY: Coroner Reveals Anna Nicole’s Descent into Hell” . . . lachrymose Dire Straits’ songs, one after another . . . nicest day of the year so far, 78 degrees--perfect. [Church Ave. & McDonald Ave., 3/27/07 (Tuesday) at 2:18 pm] . . . Club 773—Oprah blaring on TV . . . trompe l’oeil pics of Elvis and John Wayne . . . an impressive selection of darts accessories for sale, in glass display cases . . . More lottery action, horse racing video, an Instant Lotto vending machine—the Brooklyn version of a gambling bar . . . Ahh, the languor of weekday drinking . . . the sun through the open door reflects off the video poker machine . . . no one here under 60 or 70 [Coney Island Ave. & Cortelyou Rd. at 4:05 pm.] . . . Coney Island Avenue @ Cortelyou to Avenue I—a crazy ethnic mélange: Russian, Polish, Pakistani, Muslim, Christian, Hasidic . . . my love of Brooklyn sometimes makes me tear (5:09 pm) . . . Nitecaps bar--Some bearded dirtbag laughs at an electrocution death reported on the local news, mocking the other miseries dribbling from bland anchors’ tongues—a coarse but understandable response to media abstraction . . . Spring means DrunkWalks . . . McDonald Ave., beneath the F line: Royal Marble, Family Dollar.
