Sweet Somethings in Your Ear
I’ve given a lot of thought to voices lately. So many of them are too loud to hear or too soft to know, my own distorted behind insecurity and that whole inner-ear-to-own-voice weirdness.
In my mind I drip Brooklyn, though besides the waater and the cawfee it’s mostly a benign, dormant leak now. Unless I’m tired. Or angry. Or shootin’ the shit with someone from the neighbahood. Or any neighborhood, because New Yorkers from the borough of Kings find each other, no matter where we are, even when we’ve never met.
When I mention I’m from Brooklyn, I know what’s coming next. You have a cousin Joey, or you knew a girl named Maria that lived near that place where there’s a lot of shopping.
Maybe you’ll straighten up, try the exaggerated accent. “You know a guy named Frank? I don’t remember his last name, but he lived on that street with all the traffic.”
Sure, I knew a guy named Frank. But the chances of my Frank, who was a sweat soaked kid who stuck gum to the seat of my chair, and aimed for my windpipe during life and death rounds of sixth grade dodgeball, being your Frank are slim to none. Plus, I think his name was Tony.
I grew up in a building called the “Sutton House,” but everyone knew it as the big white one next to the cemetery on Ocean Parkway. My father liked to joke that you couldn’t find quieter neighbors in the whole of the city.
I recently found myself exchanging pleasantries with a woman in Northampton, MA. We started on an opening round of Brooklyn geography. I was excited, not having run into skilled players for a while. I told her where I grew up. She said her mother-in-law lived in that building.
“Who?” I asked, assuming I’d break the news to one more person that in a sea of millions, I’d managed to miss their Frank.
When she told me, I sat in stunned silence. Her in laws lived down the hallway from my family’s corner apartment on the tenth floor. Shirley was one of my mother’s closest friends.
I teared up. Finally, a Frank I knew. And loved. I accepted it like a hug. Brooklyn can sometimes be a smaller town than you imagine.
It was a harsh place in the 1980s and unmerciful, but it wasn’t bland. Nearly everyone had a story and an accent. If they weren’t willing to share it with you, someone who knew it would. It didn’t have to be true.
Brooklyn expands and contracts with the waves and needs of people who find themselves on her varied, fluid shores from the Gowanus to Gravesend. Everyone has an accent. Or they did. The adults from the old country, the kids with a “suck-my-dick” practicality of language and fire that can only be born into. Not for nothin’ but with all my fuckin’ A Brooklyn pride, I don’t want to live there anymore. She’s moved beyond me. Only the traffic is the same.
Truthfully I’m more of an accent parrot, catching the tune of your words and singing it back to you in what I grew into understanding as offensive, but couldn’t always help when I was younger.
Still, the mama luschen, the mother tongue is born from two Bronx parents, one sounding like a Jewish Edith Bunker—a sweet slow leak from a balloon, the other like a stoned and business minded Larry David. Sprinkled in are various voices of immigrants settling in all around me.
It’s rough but I’ve learned to turn it on when I want. Thankfully, because it’s gotten me out of many scrapes. At least in my imagination, where everyone is coming after me.
It seems to be a human imperative that the more slurred a consonant or a suffix is, the more danger a person feels. If I don’t include the closing g on the in, you might think I can kill ya.
“Uh oh,” my kids used to say. “She’s got her Brooklyn on.”
I enjoy it now like a party trick. Every once in a while, when I’m deep in the gossip or it is otherwise inappropriate, this sweet Mom and wife will stun someone with a razor edge deadpan, “I’ll cut a bitch.” Not for nothin’ but I love the shocked silence on the other end.
We all have the potential to cut a bitch, though not everyone will sound like it. It’s a good lesson in how you can’t ever really know a person.
My thoughts are drenched in sound. Music. Words. Crickets. Frogs. The throaty bark of tussling dogs. My aunt arranged for a kind man to sound a gong in my honor on her fairy dusted, riverside hill. I felt myself bend toward its resonance hoping to hold it until the last echoes moved beyond me, as so many have in this world. Because the sound other’s make is soothing on a level it’s taken me a long time to appreciate.
Which brings me to my own voice and why I’m excited to announce another layer into the Kate Chronicles. I will be whispering into your earbuds, or emanating from your speakers, reading these stories now, embedded into the feed if you’re so inclined.
And look out on Tuesdays, for the enhanced release of the stories that began this journey in case you missed them or are looking to play around with an authentic Brooklyn accent.
Check your inbox! They’re coming soon!