Breaking and Entering in Bushwick, Brooklyn

Imagine, if you will, settling in on a Saturday night. Pizza— ordered, thankfully. Wine bottles—empty, orphaned on the kitchen counter. Your roommate beside you, denting the cushions and lighting a blunt, generous with puff puff, less with the pass. The outside world may be churning with headlines and heartbreaks, but inside— inside, Saturday night is a sacred place. 

And like all sacred things, it must be guarded.

How unfortunate, then—

Would it be—

If someone were to interrupt you.

On January 29th, my worldly friend invited me to a screening in Bushwick. I agreed to go, despite the fact that it was in Bushwick—a detail that, in itself, could be both a promise and a threat. My excitement grew with each jolting subway stop as she elaborated on the invitation.

“I was invited by those opera-heads I told you about from the poetry reading last week,” she said, stringing together words that could only be spoken on the east side of the L train. “There’ll be a bunch of artists there—actors, playwrights, you know, your people.”

My people. Something in me fluttered at the inclusion. The very idea that a fellow playwrights who speak fluent subtext and have equally thin wallets— may find me tonight and give consideration to my two cents made me wonder, not for the first time, where artists such as us might find an excess of cents to rub together.

Such was my excitement that I hardly noticed the mounds of snow that walled the curbs, nor the crisp chill in the air. I was acutely aware of the slush that seeped through my boots, but I was buoyed by the hopeful hum of potential: a night of networking, of artistic solidarity, of something. The gift of the girlboss, it seemed to me.

I was surprised that the address provided led us down a rather residential block, snow-covered stoops lining each side of the street. But who was I to doubt either Google or Bushwick? If this was how the artists lived, like ghosts in brownstones, I’d haunt the place too. So I followed my worldly friend down the snow-laden street and up the iced-over stairs to a brownstone that faced south. 

The snow had crept uninvited into the entryway of the house, the front door propped open by the breeze. I squinted my confusion at the snowy doorway, but my worldly friend only shrugged, explaining that one of the earlier guests probably left the door open and the snow must’ve followed them inside. 

Yes, an earlier guest; that rang true to me as we were, per usual, fashionably late. It had nettled me the whole train ride simply because the nature of the event was a screening, and I worried that should we miss the first act of the film, we would be utterly lost for the rest of it. How would I perform empathy for the male characters to build trust with the men in power if I didn’t understand the full scope of the inciting incident? 

As it stood, we had arrived all of twenty minutes late and could already hear the movie muffled through the apartment door. We tiptoed up the main staircase, whispering to each other about the logistics of entering the apartment without fully disrupting the showing. My worldly friend texted the host and then texted again, but there was no answer. We tested the door— unlocked, of course. Looking to each other in social anxiety, we slowly mustered enough courage between the two of us for my worldly friend to open the door and me to push her through it. 

From the hallway, I heard her name from a voice in the apartment, and I kicked myself for letting us be late to an event full of “my people.” I sighed, anticipating the awkward wade through the crowd as we shuffled in, and followed my friend through the door. 

Big mistake.

It turns out, we were not late. In fact, we were quite early. Two weeks early, if you must know. It turns out the door wasn’t ajar for guests—it was just... ajar. Not invite guests in, but rather because it seemed this was how the typical Bushwick artist lived: with doors open to inspiration and wandering women.  

At the moment, I figured I could turn tail and run. I could cry. I could yell “Fire!” or even better just start a fire and evacuate the whole building. But instead, I was frozen in fear behind my worldly friend as we stared down two very surprised men sitting on their couch, drinking their beer, in their very empty apartment. 

Luckily, this was Bushwick, and we were in the company of “my people,” so everyone thought the whole situation was hilarious. The men laughed, scrounged up some bottom-cabinet wine, and held out the half-spent joint that was hanging from the string of smoke drifting up from it. 

We sat on their couch and learned that the movie we’d heard from the hall was not the new screening of the third roommate’s film, but instead Hannah and Her Sisters. I had never actually seen this particular Woody Allen film. (I’d never seen Hannah and Her Sisters. My dad was more of a Love and Death guy, rightfully so, and then with the whole scandal, I never circled back.) But the four of us giggled through its second half, each scene peppered with commentary to fill in what my worldly friend and I had missed. 

By the time the credits rolled, we’d met the third roommate (the actual filmmaker) and her cat (unsurprisingly named something too pretentious to remember now— Freud or Magnus or something of that ilk). Someone put on Girls. None of the actual girls in the room had ever seen it. The Bushwick episode was queued up with a kind of reverent irony. I turned toward one of the roommates, who was half-baked and wholly dedicated to being an “artistè.” 

“I hear you’re a playwright.” 

He nodded, “Yes, you as well?”

“Yes.”

We both turned back to the show and laughed with the rest of the couch. 

“I’d love to read some of your work,” he said.

“Of course, and same to you.”

He smiled. “I want to get a group together. Really try and make playwriting sexy again.”

Lol.

We stayed for another episode—the beach house one. Girls surprised me. I had heard of it, envied it, and rolled my eyes at its praises, but I’d never actually watched it before, and I admit it was better than I had expected. (I won’t apologize for being a biblically accurate shithead 23 year old. I never needed to know something to loathe it.)  It managed, at points, to do that wonderful thing that Seinfeld and Sex in the City had done, when, in a span of thirty minutes, any true New Yorker could identify at least one moment of commonality. It manages to find a moment where you say, That’s me, how’d they know? 

Which is, obviously, painfully, the job of the New York “artistè”. To find a unifying moment amongst a city of millions. And we can laugh at their pretentious cat names and “sexy playwrighting” because yes, most of them will not be able to do the job. And far be it from me to tell you not to loathe the people you don’t know. But there is something to be said from the ones who can get it done, with all the theater closings and grant cancellations. 

Because in a city so impossible to capture, where experiences are as mundane as soup lunches and as wild as Bushwick raves— or casual breaking and entering, one true moment in thirty can be a lot to ask. But not, according to New York’s artists, completely impossible.