Actually the snow has been rather disappointing during this ‘blizzard’

BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT – Myrtle Ave.

Not every nexus needs glamour but where Myrtle and Wycoff Avenues meet there is – of a seedy sort. Where the M- and L-lines cross, where Ridgewood, Queens slopes down to meet Bushwick, Brooklyn, is the densest concentration of beauty supply stores in New York City. Here, for the discerning consumer of polyvinyl wigs or discount hair dyes, is a bonanza of buying opportunity; but for the rank amateur, he who follows behind his expert choking on her fragrant ketone contrails, these are a rare opportunity to spot postmodern potions shorn of marketing magic. Row after row, they reduce to bare bottles stacked on stamped steel.

Reasonable pricing diluted through volume. Cash accepted gladly. Cards keyed reluctantly in on a gooey pad, while those in the line behind chitter and tap booted toes.

North. Transverse. Traverse, bags of swag rustle and crinkle. What had been predominantly white semaphore extends bluing, vanishing in a blurred dot of cars, people and buying opportunity. Primary colors appear. Discount department stores become big box banks; taco stands become Taco Bell; bodegas become 7-11s; Food Dimensions, A&P; and families of arm-linked Puerto Ricans give way to jostling sharp-elbowed Italian teens who seem threatening until they clamber into cars, leased, but costing many multiples of plastic-bag laden pair’s yearly scrounge.

Onward. A triangle square; benches for resting, inset, a World War I memorial hemmed in by fluttering flags (billings, not battle colors). Christmas lights coil around railings, cycles streak by, Teutonic surnames carved on columnar base, symbolic squad teeters on top, its perimeter observed by crenulated balconies; the gothic script stamped but fading on the apartment awnings below. Then up, past Pizza Hut, and the porn store, to another transverse, Freshpond Road, marking the end of the BID, the beginning of Maspeth and a hypotenuse back to the beginning of Myrtle.

~JAMES MCGIRK (Group II)

Dear Margaret,

I do apologize for the long lapse between letters, Mom, a year slips by so fast; first we moved, then we waited for our luggage to arrive and then… a year had gone by.

So thank you for your letter. And the lilies, which arrived intact if withered. I passed along your kind, kind condolences to Jonathan. And you were right: I was crass. Jasper and Jeanne were ancient, their decline long and slow, and like you said, cold, old, weird and despicable as they were, losing parents hurts, and he’s an only child and… yes, you were right. See? I concede sometimes. When you’re right. Ha.

-and yes I do think it could happen to you and dad; I think about it constantly, and fume and fuss and scream and curl up small when I do, though quietly, as we must always be, lest our kindly domestics be doing double duty for Spetsnaz. Or SLORC. (Or, worse, Mi5 – British House is next door and rather than record and store our weak moments, our special friends would tattle and scupper James’ ambassadorship).

Thank you for copying your will and recommending dad’s Lion’s Club lawyer crony. (And you are still a Lioness? One who grips her Lion’s ruff and Saturday evenings sways to soft swing?) James has a small swarm of attorneys attending his needs so we won’t contact him now but it was a sweet, sweet gesture. And I saw the college fund marked for grandson Julian… You didn’t have to. You don’t. We are so well provided for, surely it could better be spent elsewhere? (On a trip out here? Please?)

Julian loves his grandmother. He talks about you all the time, and yes we really should call in more often now that trunk calls rates are finally coming down.

And the package! How could I forget? What a haul!

You remembered everything!

Julian adored it. Adored it all. We all did, food being the most important, a tether back to Huntington Beach, ‘the tummy teleportation treat’ (as Julian called it in his cuter days), a need even our Government recognizes. Or at least in embassies employing more than a dozen souls it recognizes.

This dinky Consulate does not yet have a commissary or a PX, and all the American club serves are hotdogs and hamburgers and little else. As for local shopping, there are puzzling gaps in the Island’s grocery stores. Crisps exist – and are sold under the familiar British marquee – but come only in the most disgusting flavors: pudina, alleged to be mint but smells of swamp sulfates; masala, a concentrated curry spice, plus more conventional Anglican atrocities like ketchup. My little boy (not so little now, he turned 11 in December!) refuses to try any of them. Julian remains the most finicky of eaters and continues to dress as if he stepped out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. He demanded a linen suit for his 11th birthday.

I worry about Julian; I do. He barely remembers Madrid, but he’ll remember London. He liked it so much. Affected their accent. Here he gloms onto British things. Crown cap postboxes (they are green here); Double-decker buses (also green)… what will happen during the changeover? I hope he doesn’t take it personally. He takes everything so personally. He is caught between childhood and adolescence. One moment I hear him muttering, playing some game with himself, the next he’s pestering me for subscription to The Financial Times and bickering with us about stocks and bonds.

Christmas was so strange. We decorated a palm tree. The poor thing’s leaves drooped under our ornaments and tinsel and the lights left burn marks on the leaves. Julian was furious with it. I cannot fathom why. It was the best we could do, comfort from home with an Asian twist. He hated it. Refused to open presents left underneath it. Actually dropping the smaller ones into a wastepaper basket on Christmas Day rather than opening them. His father was close to tears over the whole thing. I told him to just leave them there in the trash and let the trash pickers have his Reynard the Fox and Osborne Science glossies, but he was intractable. James folded first. Fished the wretched things out of the trash and unwrapped them for a smirking Julian, who has of late developed the most smug expression one could possibly imagine.

His gift to me, the Shahtoosh, I admit was splendid. And I suspect he had a hand in his father’s one too, a grand set of old leather luggage from a Parisian cabinetmaker, burnished, gleaming. He steals my magazines, but only the British editions, I worry sometimes the kid might be ‘funny’ but the sweaty paw prints I find plastered over the topless photos suggest otherwise. And the girl… this daughter of the rightwing politico he’s managed to befriend… the two of them still meet, once a week, for tea, and once in awhile he will accompany her on a shopping expedition. A horrid precedent is being set in this squashy young mind.

Let me stop complaining about my son. All children his age are awful. He can’t be a monster. Yet. Can he be?

So are you curious about the city? You must be. I insist that you are, if only to better brag about your clever daughter the diplomat’s wife.

Our English citadel in the Arabian Sea, the Opal of the Indian Ocean about to slip from Britannia’s grasp into the grubby paws of her subjects. That’s what the BBC says.

Really it is more souvenir sand bottle than semi-precious stone – you know what I mean, crude designs of layered colored sand poured in bottles; the layers the twin legacies of British class- and Indian caste system, the sand seep leaking between is baksheesh, an imported Indian propensity to lubricate transactions with small bribes, a fragile, strange system on the verge of collapse.

There isn’t even a single city.

Port Lightning is an unstable pile of cities pressed together and spilling over one another; squashed together like layers of flaking slate, boiled together like stew, all held together by a stubborn veneer of Britishness, but I wonder what happens when it falls away.

You can exist in any slice of the city and remain oblivious to others. As diplomats we could join the romp between sleek skyscraper hotel ballrooms and Repulse Bay terraces, I could spend my time fussing over fundraisers for meaningless charities or volunteering in them for an hour or two a day, getting my guilt fix before going back to terrorizing the servants into laying the state silverware properly. There is a crappy art community here too. Peripheral to the Vaccinate the New Territory Nippers set, they haunt outdoor auditoriums mangling jazz standards, hang imitations of twenty-year-old ‘contemporary’ art – inevitably smears of Indian oil paints that smudge into brown and purport to represent some abstract expression like ‘intensity,’ ‘love,’ or ‘poverty.’ I have yet to attend a poetry reading or attend one of the expatriate community’s plays. No doubt these are hotbeds of adulterous intrigue, alcoholism and stupefying boredom they are the world over.

Eventually I will venture in. Or perhaps I shall pressgang Julian into doing one. Or Scouts again. He didn’t like it but he tolerated it. There must be a troop around the school or embassy.

I know how much you and dad hate nepotism. James hates it too, which is why joined the Foreign Service in the first place, but I can’t say his lightning quick ascent through the diplomatic corps was entirely the result of his charm, graying locks and middling state school diploma; no, I hate to say it, but his parents’ influence was a constant benevolent upwelling beneath us, never a direct line of assistance, rather an invite to dine with an old friend of theirs, an introduction, a fond reminiscence about a bygone era… well, with the death of the Frum paterfamilias, I wonder how vulnerable we may be.

With the new administration coming in the new year and I wonder whether they might want a political appointee instead of some insider upstart, and James must have trampled toes on his scramble upward. Financially, of course, we are protected, but I worry James’ career, esteem and mental health are closely linked.

With much love, from very, very far away,

Kitty
October 25, 1988

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OUTPUT REMAINS STRANGE AS EVER IT WAS

JULIAN (10-17): Our narrator. A blossoming snob. Second-order diasporic youth with a diplomatic passport. Dreams of escape. Of a homeland he’s never had a chance to live in. He’s armoring himself against his surroundings with a fatuous obsession with hierarchy. At the age of 10, 11, other fascinations are beginning to emerge and tug at his nascent personality – women, alcohol, fascist iconography, fire, a mild compulsion toward balance. A creep. But aren’t all children of that age?

KATHLEEN (40ish): Julian’s mother. Better educated but from a humbler background than Julian’s father. Slightly rough around the edges, which irritates and intrigues her husband John. Concerned about Julian, she is disturbed by the extreme poverty around her but doesn’t really know what to do about it. She recognizes her role as the wife of a presumptive ambassador but tries to rebel within that position. Avid letter writer.

JOHN (40ish): Met Kathleen while in University. He comes from old money that is slowly ebbing away. John defied his parents pleas that he take business classes and take over the remains of the family trust and joined the State Department. Somewhat reluctantly, he has allowed his parents’ influence to ease his ascent through the ranks of the foreign service. He is first in line for the ambassadorship of Port Lightning, and slightly unprepared for the position. His parents are ailing and their influence fading.

“HARRY”: Charismatic shipping magnate, father of Michelle and Farook and leader of the RATIONAL NATIONALISTS, a minor political group that is something of a hobby for him.

MICHELLE (10-17): Harry Qasim’s rather peculiar daughter. She and Julian are enrolled at the local American School.

CHRISTINE: Harry’s fashionable Western wife.

FAROOK (18-25): Michelle’s older half-brother. More doctrinal than his father, he is obsessed with Fanon, Che and other revolutionary literature. Attending engineering school in Boston at the moment.

JAMES: A minor consular official assigned to look after Julian’s family as they adjust to life on the island. A shadowy figure, he may have a secret agenda. An avid runner, Scout Master, Dungeons and Dragons player, and he is a frequent participant in the island’s Hash House Harrier runs.

A rare cloudy day.

I didn’t write this, but it pertains to my article… [SETH ABRAMSON RESPONDS]

One of these days I will post a real picture of one of the cats. These above and preceding were generated mechanically. This one looks like a female.

Zooming out of frame, using the Esper Photo Analysis technique, reveals an entirely different image altogether :