The last two apartments I’ve lived in are only a few blocks apart. The bedrooms from each can see the same middle school in Brooklyn from a different angle. Pretty much equidistant between the two is a bar that was my local for a long time.
The bar in question has a huge corner patio, facing right out onto a busy commercial avenue – perfect for people watching. On Friday afternoons in the spring when it was nice I’d often leave the office early and finish up some work from there, sipping on a beer and smoking menthol cigarettes.
Once the weather improved, a group of teachers from the middle school would often show up at about the same time as I did. We got to be friendly acquaintances. We never chatted too much, but two of the teachers would sometimes bum cigarettes from me. I always warned them they were menthols, but they always said they didn’t care.
They’d hang out for a few minutes at my table while they smoked, keeping a watchful eye out onto the sidewalks. On occasion they’d spot a student they knew and had to squat down behind the flower planters lining the patio so as to not be seen; the juxtaposition of grown women ducking behind cover to hide their smoking from middle schoolers was not lost on them.
I can’t remember what that school looks like anymore. Many years ago they covered it in ugly, green scaffolding. One of the teachers told me that it would be up for five years. I found this ridiculous, but she assured me that was the case and I had no reason to doubt her. It was all because the mob controlled the scaffolding companies, she explained. The longer they’re up, the more money they make.
Not too long after this my partner and I adopted a dog. We sometimes call him an abused rescue for simplicity, but honestly all we know is that he was found in the backwoods of Tennessee, emaciated, fur patchy, and covered in ticks. The problems this dog has are too lengthy to explore, but one of many is his hatred for rain.
It turns out that the scaffolding that so enveloped the entire school as to make it unrecognizable was also the perfect place for when the dog needs out in bad weather. It’s a decent sized school on a block mostly by itself. The scaffolding wraps around it like a “U” and the sidewalk out front is broad and wide. It’s the perfect amount of covered space to go sniffing and exploring.
This is because on top of so many other things, he’s not a dog that can just walk out to the curb and back. He has to find all of the “right spots” to go — even when it’s pouring and even when he doesn’t want to be outside. This sometimes means up to an hour no matter the weather. The ugly, green scaffolding had a use after all: it protected us on nights that we needed it.
And then the pandemic hit. Suddenly there was no school for students to go to. There was no bar patio for the teachers or me. Only a few blocks away from one of Brooklyn’s largest hospitals — with multiple sirens ringing out at all hours for weeks if not months — it felt like there was nothing at all.
So I tried to find my own ways to stay sane. I’d head to the park next to the school and sit on a bench directly across from the closed bar with two tall-boys of PBR. I’d put on some music to cheer me up, distract me, or help me cry. I tried to cope with it all.
And that’s when the scaffolding proved useful once again. If it was raining out I could go sit on the steps to one of the entrances – or the benches that line some flower beds out front – and be protected from both the wet and the world for a little bit.
Then I started seeing other people doing the same. Young, old. Alone or sometimes two people “six feet” apart. We generally didn’t intermingle because we were supposed to stay away from everyone and everything, but the scaffolding became a socially-distanced gathering place when the weather wouldn’t let us distantly gather anywhere else.
Nannies, apparently employed by people too important to possibly be interrupted in their new work-from-home world, started congregating with their strollers underneath in bad weather. Rain storms, snow storms, protection from the summer sun — it became a respite and a waiting place.
Two unhoused gentlemen made the benches under the scaffolding their nighttime arrangement. Every night for over a year they slept there — protected from everything but the temperature — until one of them passed away.
The city turned to delivery drivers more than ever to bring us our precious sustenance, and they too used the scaffolding to wait out the rain or just wait for their next order.
I don’t go to that bar anymore. I don’t really know why. Things and people and times and places change, I guess. Every bartender that worked there — save one — has left. Some for warmer climates, some for other industries. I haven’t seen those teachers in many years. I’ve forgotten all of their names.
A few nights ago they started taking down the scaffolding. Whatever maintenance they had been conducting on the building apparently now complete. My dog and I have been walking by on our midnight walks as they slowly tear it down.
I still can’t remember what that school looks like. I don’t know if it’ll look familiar to me once it’s all taken down. But many things will change when the scaffolding is gone.
On our walk last night I smoked the last cigarette in my pack as my dog sniffed trees and got startled as pieces of the scaffolding were thrown down to trucks below. Things and people and times and places change. I told myself I’m quitting again. I read they’re banning menthol anyway.