Those We Do Not Speak Of

When I was very young, I used to pass a Sicilian social club every day on my way to school. The club is still there, its walls covered with all manner of pin-up girls and signed photographs of various sports teams from the early 1980s. Aside from these items there is little else besides a wood bar and a large television set. But while the place itself has changed little in the last 20 or perhaps 30 years, its clientele -- i soci in the mother tongue -- have become both older and fewer.

It is rare now, for example, to see anyone sitting outside the club except in very hot weather. There are times during the day when no one is there at all. Back in the mid-80s, however, there was at least one man who could always be found sitting on a lawn chair on the sidewalk out front. His name was Peanuts.

Much of my memory of Peanuts comes from what my parents have told me. All that I can recall for certain is that he generally wore a light blue or gray suit and a fedora, and was a friendly but somewhat intimidating fixture of the block over which he presided. In the summer months the suit jacket gave way to a wife beater, but the hat remained. Back in those days, such an enforcer was still a necessary part of the neighborhood fabric, appreciated by old-worlders and new gentry alike. The bulge on his ankle indicated to all passers by that Peanuts was a man of business, and it surely deterred more than a few errant youths from choosing Sackett Street as the locus of their next scam.

To anyone who did not grow up in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, in the 1980s, I am unable to adequately convey the sea change that has taken place in the neighborhood in the decades since. Indeed, such difficulty extends also to the adjacent precincts of Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Park Slope, Fort Greene, and even Red Hook: nothing I might say about these places would do justice to the overwhelming tide of gentrification that has swept Eastward across Brooklyn in recent years. Now, the Vice magazine set is living further and further afield from Williamsburg -- in Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Flatbush. Their homogenizing march is relentless and cruel in its pace.

Of course, only Chicken Little would tell you that Brooklyn has suffered irrevocable damage as her real estate values have doubled, tripled, and doubled again. There is, after all, no other place like it. It is the home of Coney Island, of Junior's restaurant, of Nathan's and of stick ball. But one still cannot quite escape the feeling that each passing day erodes away a little more: soon, this will be just like every place else.

But this cannot be the case. In Manhattan, it is still fashionable to bemoan the difficulty of traveling to Brooklyn, and to deride friends who are forced by their poverty or poor taste to reside there. For these residual sentiments I am grateful. Even those Manhattanites who occaisionally make the trek to Brooklyn tend to favor six-month-old bars and restaurants to the real stuff of history and culture. Maybe I'm getting out just in time.

So tomorrow I will leave Brooklyn for the third time. As always, I will come back to visit often and will probably return someday, for better or for worse. I only wonder what I will find when that day comes. I don't know where Peanuts is, but there are really only two possibilities -- dead or on Staten Island (or, I suppose, both). But one thing at least is certain: Peanuts got out at just the right time. He couldn't have stomached what has happened since.

Beginning on Tuesday, March 29, the Mister Sketchee! Truck will be parked semi-permanently in Washington, DC. This will mean a happy reunion with Halfzie, a tasteful redesign of the site, and Nationals Baseball. Be sure to stay tuned.