"Ma #1", Rockaway Park, NYC. 5/09.I went out to my favorite place. The place that has become my second home and also a second, if not a first family to me. I did the usual. I stopped into the Kerry Hill Pub and sipped on a double Jameson straight. This is the ritual, I have followed on and off for the last six years, on and off, as a prelude to my shoots out in the Rockaways. I feel acclimated to the environment. Not necessarily high but part and parcel of the once "Irishtown" that Rockaway Park was and is still is.
A strange afternoon, I don't recognize anyone in the pub. On the way, to the pub, walking down and past the retail stores, some closed for business, some hanging on, the blown up dinosaurs and dolphins are hanging from shops, inviting tourists to spend their money. Streams of adolescents with beach towels wrapped around their bellies, a folded beach chair in hand, a arm around the shoulder march up 116 towards the beach. This is their purpose. Summer season alas is almost here.
Then the stream stops for a half hour. I can see it from the Last Stop Diner and then again the beach goers persist from the subway station up the avenue.
I run into several people, I know in the neighborhood. There is Evelyn dressed head to toe in baby blue and white, always so careful in what she wears. She lives at Belle Harbor Residence and in the afternoons takes up residence at the Cash and Carry to hustle change and dollar bills from passers by.
I like her and vice verse...she has chutzpah, a mission towards fashion panache, and a fabulous Jewish NYC accent.
Like so many of the Rockaway Park residents, their dialects and voices...the folklore of years past is dying out. It frightens me and I suppose now, that I am older, these things really matter to me. I can't accept this change of all the beautiful uniqueness and color of the Rockaways. I want to suck it in and embrace it deep in my lungs, but death is death and you are left with ephemeral glances, voices, smells, and tastes of the past. Maybe, you catch a snap shot memory. I try to string them together and make a film.
The pieces are so keen in your mind and in your being and before you know it, the your mind catches onto the next coincidence in and the moments all is gone.
"Last night, I cried in bed. My father was standing at the kitchen screen door, opened slightly. He wore a beaten up Fruit of the Loom v-neck t-shirt. Streams of smoke trailing between the sliver, from his mouth through the crack in the door held steadily ajar with the side of his foot. I could smell the Pall Malls burning the thin paper down. With every drag, he seem like he was inhaling a deep thought.
He dragged on the on the cigarette mid-way down. Rubbing the ashes upon the stoop, holding the half cigarette in his hand. He held onto the rest, saving it for a later smoke. Other times, in the dark of night, he would walk across the Philadelphia flagstones in the backyard, rub the last bits of tobacco in two hands and throw it into a compost heap of rotting vegetables and fruits that decayed under our cherry tree. He was considerate and cheap."
When I watched him from the kitchen table through the screen door, his walking figure slowly disappearing into obscurity.
"Are you coming back?"
"Don't worry." he said, "I'll be right back".
I have come out on a sunny day. Just a day out there and just not enough for me. I'm sad that I will have to return to my home in Jersey City. There are times that I miss this place and the people. The photos will always be my own keep sake, no matter whom sees it.
Was it the last sunny super extraordinary day in Spring before the rains began?
I had photographed at this boarding house before--a hairy chested man last summer sitting with his dog on a hot day. His eyes glowed through his grit and sweaty filth.
I climbed the steps.
"Hey, how you boys doing today. Gorgeous weather, right?"
A group of 3 men sit under a covered front porch.
Grubble, grubble and a couple of crude pot shots at the photographer with a funny old camera.
Jazmin, my intern and I spend a couple of hours there. And somewhere into the shoot, I realize that several years ago, I had tried to photograph in the same decrepit house.
At the time, I walked in the foyer and a man, noticing my camera and pointing his finger down the hallway towards a door,
"You betta' ask the super. I don't know if you can take the pictures in here."
He was in his room. I knocked on the door and asked politely,
"Can I photograph here in the hallway?"
Big..."No!"
What had changed in his mood from several years ago to a month ago...I don't know for sure. But, maybe it was the summery day or the fact that he wasn't in a lonely drunken stupor hiding alone behind the door to his room with the t.v. blaring. Or maybe because it was because me and my Jazmin had been accepted into the clan on the front porch before entering the parched white painted building.
This time, he was excited to pull out a shredded old picture of John Lennon. A photographer was in the house.
"Do you think you can make this look good. Someone suggested that I rephotograph it."
The poor poster looked like it had been through a paper shredder and taped back together.
I realized the scary man was just an older chubby Hippie dude with greasy hair with a drinking problem. He offered me and my intern a coca cola three or four times, until, neither a drinker accepted his over zealous offer.
"Abe and Lennon", Rockaway Park, NYC, 5/09.We were invited into the room of an older very skin lucid man. I forget his name. Could it have been Charles? I know so, many out there. The room was large enough to fit a twin bed, a fridge, a hot plate on a dresser, a small sink in the corner of the room. Sitting on top of his fridge, leaning up against something--I don't know what--his last will and testament is written with a red Sharpie and housed in a manila envelope.
The bathrooms are always at the end of the hall. They pay around $500. at most to live here. Down the street is a beautiful beach. Like all of this out here...none of this makes sense. I didn't come out here to make sense, but ultimately, I had to understand more.
"Pencil Portrait", Rockaway Park", NYC, 5/09.
"Hot Plate #1", Rockaway Park, NYC, 5/09.We fell in love with "Ma". Her childish demeanor is bundled up in a dirty pilling red dress gown. Her sweet grandma smile and one tooth gives even this broken building a feeling of a home. Everyone living here calls her "Ma". She smiled and smoked her cigarettes and didn't speak one word or if she did it was not on my sonar level. Her tight-lipped demeanor makes me wonder how she managed to get cigarette smoke down her wind pipe.
Now, I must wait for the warm weather.
This might be my last summer out in the Rock....the thought makes me miserable. I am so emotionally connected that I find it hard to finish this project. I will though. As hard as it was to motivate me some days to go out there, find my creative center, and go into the chaos without being the chaos, I found a home.
