An excerpt from My Camino
The Apostle John Sets the Scene
Let there be light, etc.
A decentered art world oozed across the bridge into Brooklyn, pooling in the area now known as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) to make a new center of culture. A movement that would eventually spawn galleries and cafés, corporate offices in revitalized factories, real estate developments that capitalized on and even trumpeted the area’s once-famous squalor. Photographs of stone low-rises crowded with immigrants, open sewers, street urchins sleeping on subway grates, all became part of the come-on: the black Moschino thong underneath the business suit, mystique with a tang of blood, the whole rags-to-riches creation myth fluffing the asking price.
You’ve seen the brochure, the one with Brooklyn Bridge at the end of every elegant, tenement-lined street, the perspective and scale hinting tiny town, something doll’s house and cozy in the heart of the heartless metropolis.
That’s the place but not the place.
Our (not my) story begins before that time, on the night the bright star (IT) aligned for the very first time between the masts of the bridges, back when DUMBO was a no-go, a district of warehouses and pot-holed asphalt, deserted by all but predators and their victims.
IT appeared above our humble crib, bringing the tide that caused many boats to rise. Into the manger entered a stranger.
Ask Jesus if God-the-Father’s love is all-devouring?
Ask Joseph?
Ask the Virgin Mary?
Then He Peoples It.
This is the story of Floss and Budsy and me, the Apostle John.
Floss and Budsy—not Beatrix Potter bunnies, but flesh and blood, man and woman, woman and man, and even a little something in between.
