The Irishman

Exeunt omnes

I came across this ticket stub recently for The Irishman, a movie I apparently saw at Cobble Hill Cinemas on November 16, 2019. I am pretty sure that the last time I had been in this particular theatre was over twenty years ago, in 1999, when the movie featured was The Cider House Rules. I had just moved to Brooklyn and was living a few blocks away on Clinton Street in a fifth-floor walk-up. At the time, I had a job at a packing and shipping company in the West Village. The price of a movie ticket would have probably constituted about half of my hourly wage. This packing and shipping company was a new Mailboxes, Etc. franchise, operated by a woman named Kathleen, who hired me after a brief interview in a café on Hudson Street that later became Employees Only. I was their first hire.

One day, while I was working, I decided to create a sign which I framed and posted over the cash register that said “Stamp of the Week.” The sign was the image of a stamp, rectangular with perforated edges, and drawn by myself in red and blue magic marker. Each week, I would remove the sign from its frame and insert a new set of postage stamps. I purchased these stamps directly from the West Village post office and then we would just resell them to people who came into the store. I don’t know how the economics of this worked out, or if they worked out at all. I was nineteen years old and didn’t know anything. Most of my job consisted of packing, weighing, and labeling customers’ packages and telling them we did not have a restroom.

Recently, around the time the lockdowns began in the city, I walked from our apartment in Park Slope to my old building on Clinton Street. When I lived there, I was subletting from a tenant named C—, who was a dancer and choreographer and who, during my sub-tenancy, was mostly out of town, giving me, a teenager, the run of the place. It was three rooms and it was in the rear of the building, facing Lower Manhattan, where the Twin Towers poked up over Brooklyn. Today, the area around the building is virtually unchanged: the same Key Foods on Atlantic, the same laundromat across the street. I was not surprised when I looked at the buzzer to find C—’s name still listed next to 5R. It was somewhat stirring just to behold it, this entirely casual connection with a past I have made into a personal myth: the year I didn’t go to college but moved to New York.

I think it is New York’s dispositional rambunctiousness that makes its underlying stability so hard to discern. The city is constantly being torn up and rebuilt, but there are whole sections of it where, despite the turnover of tenants and retail, virtually all of the buildings on every block are of the same relative vintage. This is especially true in Brooklyn, where zoning restrictions and historical districts ensure in certain neighborhoods an almost uniform style. “Brownstone Brooklyn” is just a more venerable form of tract housing: row after row of imperishable four- and five-story townhouses. The block where I currently live was entirely built between the late 1890s to around 1920 (the exact date, according to the NYC Department of Buildings, when my building was constructed). Before that, it was mostly a patchwork of farms and little villages. After that, it became a kind of architectural palimpsest: the same architecture, but with different people and things overlaying and replacing each other.

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According to IMDb, The Irishman is three and a half hours long. What I remember about this movie is knowing that it was this inordinately long and yet choosing to go see it anyway. I remember virtually nothing else about the movie except that at some point what was happening on screen ceased making sense to me. I whispered to Katherine, “let’s leave,” and we left. The photo below was taken of me in the upstairs hallway of the theatre as we were leaving. I was at the time rather insistent on being photographed regularly, as if I meant to pin myself in place, to make myself in some, not wholly metaphorical sense, adhere. I hit on a phrase to to describe the way I was feeling. I said that I felt “light.” Sometimes I would say to Katherine, “I feel as light as a feather.” Something about me had become insubstantial, susceptible to light breezes and easy toppling. I no longer felt confident of my body’s corporeality. I felt like I was floating away.

When you are diagnosed with cancer, you know in advance it is going to happen. That is what it feels like. The shock is so shocking that some scurrying part of your brain rushes to outflank it, turning the gravest surprise into the grimmest expectation. The blow is not softened, but your response to it becomes strangely proleptic. The doctor examines you for something minor and asks you during the examination, “how old are you again?” Was that the point at which I knew? Was it two days before, returning from a work trip and feeling feverish and exhausted? Or was it four days before that, when my primary care physician told me that there was something concerning in my labs? Certainly, it was before the examining doctor, having asked me if I someone had accompanying me to the office, informed me that he had detected a large growth. I must have known then. But, the thing was, I had not asked Katherine to come with me to this appointment. I did not have someone accompanying me. I never even considered it. I therefore must have had at least some expectation that the appointment would be entirely routine. So, the question remains, when did I know?

I knew at least an hour or so into The Irishman. What I knew was that submitting yourself to three and a half hours of lethargic Scorsese is no way to unwind after a week of medical Götterdämmerung. The Irishman is about a mob hitman, played by an animatronic Robert De Niro, who claims to have killed Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino in a—ahem—Michigan accent). The problem of self-care is virtually boundless after you are told you are ill and the forms it can take vary wildly, depending on how hard you’ve been walloped and how much you need to anesthetize. One of the less advisable forms of palliation is seeing The Irishman. It is a movie I would hesitate to recommend to the halest of marathon runners. In my condition, exactly one day after being told the bad news, it was like sitting on a Greyhound bus that was broken down on the side of a highway. I truly thought it would never end. I thought I would be watching The Irishman for the rest of my life.

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Katherine and I left the theatre around 3:00 p.m. We walked for a while in Cobble Hill, along Court Street, near where I used to live back when the city was entirely new to me, an expansive and apparently inexhaustible blob of hyperactivity. In 1999, the news about Brooklyn was that it would be receiving its first Starbucks, which duly arrived while I was living there and in my very neighborhood, on Court Street itself. The “Manhattanization” of Brooklyn was decried by various hand-wringers, a perennial concern that seems almost equally likely in reverse; sections of, say, Morningside Heights getting “Brooklynized” by some late-coming totem of hipsterdom. Whatever. I love Brooklyn. I think I knew even back in 1999 that I would one day make a home here, though I could hardly have known how proximate my address would be at age forty to what it was at age nineteen.

Lately, I seem to be catching previous versions of myself in passing with increasing frequency. Having visited my old stomping grounds in Cobble Hill, I found myself down a Streeteasy rabbit hole, looking at photos of old apartments I’ve lived in, along with their current listing prices. In not a few cases, I was able to find photos of our furniture and decorations, and, in one case, our cats. The other day, I managed to locate the listing for an apartment we lived in the year we got married. It was a problematic place and we ended up having to move out in haste, but it was also, by far, the largest apartment we have ever lived in. What was odd, looking at the photos, was that although I remember the apartment itself quite distinctly, I have very few memories—aside from a couple of parties—of anything that actually happened there. I suppose this is because it never quite felt like home to us; hence our hasty retreat.

Then, one morning, taking a cab to Penn Station, I was at last visited by a true ghost, a real ghost of Christmas past floating up in the pre-dawn. This was before the pandemic, before my diagnosis, when everything was “normal.” During this time, I would regularly awake at four a.m. in order to arrive at Penn Station in time for the 6 a.m. Acela to Washington. I would work for few days in D.C. and zoom back to New York. The travel was arduous, but its reward was coming home, a recapitulation of the way I came to the city in the first place: out of the dark of a tunnel and into a dazzling frenzy. What had once been an arrival had at last become a return. The frenzy was where I lived. It was what I had chosen. It was home.

Anyway, on this particular morning, the driver, after crossing the Manhattan Bridge onto Canal Street, turned up Hudson to Eighth Avenue, instead of taking Sixth and crossing over, which was the more typical route. On Hudson Street, approaching Abingdon Square, I could see that my Mailboxes, Etc. was now something called Manhattan Mailboxes. You can find it on Google Street View, but you won’t be able to see on Street View what I saw through the window of my Uber. There in the dark, and right where I left it some twenty years ago, was my old “Stamp of the Week” sign, still hanging above the register. It is, in fact, still there, today. Perhaps it will always be there, like some Latin-inscribed rock kicked around the Roman Forum for millennia, a post-climate-change puzzle for space-suited archeologists. Stamp of the Week. That, scholars posit, must have been at some point a thing.