Crazy Stable

And now, on a brighter note (as the cretinous news anchors like to say after every unlikely segue from tragedy to infotainment):

As promised, that's Jesse L. Martin of Law & Order and me.  I am "acting like a damn fool," as my mother would undoubtedly have observed.  Hey, I am making up for lost time, atoning for never having heard of him before an episode of the series was shot at our house a week ago. He is obviously gorgeous, suave, and enormously kind to goofy starstruck middle-aged ladies.  I promise to go see "Rent" when it comes out! (He was in the Bway show, and is in the upcoming movie as well.)  If you missed it, scroll down to find out why this delightful encounter was the direct result of our having neglected to fix up our house for 19 years.

Four years ago yesterday, this was the view from our third-floor guest-room window, looking out across Prospect Park.

 I had never before known precisely where the towers lay over the treeline, only that they were out there somewhere. This was always my soul-freshening window, with its vast swath of open Brooklyn horizon. From it, I've watched countless thunderstorms move in from the west, and smelled rain and lake and forest in the wind; gazed at the soccer players, gaudy dots of Brownian motion, after hours locked downstairs in my mother's struggle with walkers, wheelchairs, and pain; and sometimes, if a rocket climbed high enough, seen a few errant stars bursting from the Fourth of July fireworks.

I came straight to this window from the television set that morning because I truly believed that seeing the horizon, placid and unmarred, would awake me from this hideous and too-realistic dream. By the time I fetched my camera and pressed the shutter open, I no longer really understood whether I was dreaming or not.

Over the weekend, the Tribute in Light came back on, two cool blue beams shot straight up to the heavens at night from near Ground Zero. They will be lit at sunset tonight, too. (Thanks for this news from the September 11^th Families Association.) I love those towers of light, for laying down another image over this one.

Remembering, then. The closest person of our acquaintance lost that day was neither friend or family. It was Dave Fontana of Park Slope's Squad One, the fireman father of one of my daughter's preschool buddies, and the husband of our "Mommy and Me" teacher, Marian Fontana. Marian was an aspiring performer with merry eyes and a mop of dark curls; her little guy spent every class in her lap, as did my little girl. I saw Dave only once, carrying their son on his big shoulders out of the dance studio; I briefly thought, "Cute fireman, great daddy...you go, girl, you deserve him!" The last time I saw Marian was in front of Dave's (empty) casket, where she accepted a rose from my daughter with a sweetly rueful smile; she was already emerging as an activist for the families involved.  I will read her just-published book, A Widow's Walk: A Memoir of 9/11, to find out what has happened since; I know she has moved to Staten Island, and I wish her and Aidan, and Dave, every grace and blessing.

Sky of blackness and sorrow ( a dream of life)
Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life)
Sky of glory and sadness ( a dream of life)
Sky of mercy, sky of fear ( a dream of life)
Sky of memory and shadow ( a dream of life)
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life)
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life ( a dream of life)

© Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP), The Rising, 2002

...when you walk around my neighborhood. Well, neighborhoods, actually--we live in the pleasant but scuffed borderland of a pristine and magnificent historic district called Prospect Park South. Here are some of the cool kids on the next block (our block's houses are almost this big, but in less consistently "mint" condition):

The CrazyStable sulks on a block just north of this mansion-filled enclave, which we nicknamed The Magic Land, for its surreal air of enchantment and distance from its often gritty adjacent environs. (Our own area, between Prospect Park itself and this historic district, calls itself Caton Park, but I dare us to redub ourselves "NoProPaSo," or "North of Prospect Park South." I think it has a dashing faux-Spanish rallying-cry sound to it, and it is no sillier as a real-estate-boosting neo-name than "NoLita" or, most absurdly, the "BoCoCa" being tried on by Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens.)

The greater area is quaintly termed "Victorian Flatbush," although its development began just about the same year that Victoria drew her last breath. (Queenly references don't stop there; any house in Brooklyn with a sagging porch and a few bits of wooden "gingerbread" trim is trumpeted as a "Queen Anne.") And yesterday the real estate section of the New York Post took its turn marveling at our leafy streets and sprawling domiciles. (To read it, go here, and submit to an innocuous-looking registration step.) Here's how Mary Louise Clemens, a house-hunter from the brownstone powerhouse 'hood of Park Slope,  reacted when shown a house on nearby Argyle Road:

"I walked into the foyer, and everything changed," says Clemens, who's now moving into the seven-bedroom house she bought for $945,000 with her husband, Bruce Tyroler. "Something spiritual happened. Every floor got better and better. I said, 'That's it, Bruce. That's my house.'"

[Cute story, the evil twin of our first encounter with the CrazyStable. Every floor got worse and worse, starting with the pirate-ship plank we walked up onto the porch and culminating in the locked third-floor washroom whose door I kicked open to reveal a reeking pea-soup-green hellpit with no floor. "Oh, God, honey," I said. "That's our house."]

It's been a fine few days for relishing the neighborhood(s), turning our attention outward after the frantic self-absorption of the Law & Order shoot last week. On Friday night, we moseyed down to a local restaurant, walking back after dark through the Magic Land, stealing delectable glimpses of house-porn through mullioned windows: a luscious curve of oaken banister, a burnished mantel or library shelf bathed in golden light. Saturday afternoon, we hung out with old friends and neighbors at the NoProPaSo block party, snarfing down jerk chicken while the kids rode their scooters and drew with chalk in the middle of the street.  Our street life has not always been so idyllic--in the nadir of the 1980s, a very different sort of chalk outline might have decorated the blacktop hereabouts--but the friends and neighbors have always been our lifeline through bad times and better ones. In the early days (see "The Bad Beginning" for a glimpse), they helped us dumpster and invited us over to eat because we had no kitchen.  When we agonize aloud over (still) being an eyesore after 19 years, our NoProPaSo  neighbors say things like, "It's a fine house. It just takes time."   Many struggle as we do to master their "money pits," but they never seem to lose heart. And after a while...something spiritual happens.

Yes, that's our garage yesterday afternoon at about 4 p.m. and that's Jesse L. Martin, gorgeous Detective Green of "Law & Order."  A stunt man inside the garage is about to have his arm set on fire. 

 This scene immediately preceded it, in which Jesse and Dennis Farina (Det. Fontana, his partner) knock on our front door, while a crew swarms all over our porch. They're looking for the bad guy, a bomber of some kind--the one setting himself on fire.

And do you know why television stars and a hit series production crew were here, paying us for all this fun?  Because we are a dilapidated house. Yes, that is what the script called for..."a dilapidated house."  After 19 years of sheepishly emerging each morning from our facade of peeling paint and broken stained glass, gazing longingly at the immaculately restored landmark homes of neighbors, we have been chosen and exalted for being exactly what we are. Dilapidation rules!

The crew couldn't have been any nicer.  Which we expected--Law & Order shoots a lot in this neighborhood, and has a good reputation for putting things back as good or better than they found them. But "better" in this case is much better--we get to keep the cute cottage-exterior garage wall! The garage has gone from being a hulking dark beast to a charming potential studio. Thanks, guys! (Unfortunately, we do not get to keep Jesse--but he did admire my ongoing efforts to strip the white housepaint from our stained glass front-door panels.)

Next came the garage. Dressing this set required creating a sort of reverse Potemkin village; they had to re-scuzzify things inside and out. Rich Irony: They covered our gorgeous, budget-busting new lattice-top fence with...faux crappy stockade fencing, just like the stuff we took down. And a truck from a prop house disgorged a workshop's worth of rusty wheelbarrows, grills, shelving and other detritus, just like the stuff we dumpstered awhile back. (If I'd known, I'd have saved it for them.) My favorite prop was a gruesomely realistic barrel marked "TOXIC." We never had one of those, but it is so utterly the sort of thing we might have had. 

My main worry was the garden. Don't step on my blue suede shoes, or my struggling perennial borders, or my 'Martian Giant' tomatoes. And while the garden in general is pretty brown and crispy (especially the poor ferns), there was still plenty left to get trampled. But they were touchingly considerate (see sign they made, left), and several folks (especially the set painters) asked about particular plants, including the red-berry-laden cranberry bush viburnum and the hyacinth bean vine covered with purple sweet-pea-like flower bracts.

Det. Green had to enter the garage, gun drawn, and toss a blanket over flaming guy. (That's his stunt double, on the right; they don't let the real Jesse get near the real flames.) The stunt men generously showed me the tricks of the trade of self-immolation. You paint yourself with fire-retardant stuff, explained the veteran stunt pro who was dressing and rigging the actual stunt man. You saturate underclothes made of Nomex (the same stuff racecar drivers wear) in still more flame retardant (a foul-smelling brew, worn wet even in winter), and then cover the area to be engulfed with an indestructible-looking woven material. Then you paint the area to be ignited with BestTest Rubber Cement, and do your thing with the mandatory presence of an EMS crew and a representative of the FDNY. To rehearse the set-up, the gaffers set off a "flame bar," which produces the requisite alarming lighting effects; the director yelled "POOF" as a cue. Once "rolling," the actual stunt apparently went well (I saw the red flare and heard the "POOF"  from within). Or, as someone said contentedly afterwards, "A good day is when no one gets injured." (The senior stunt man recalled going back to work the same day after getting 10 stitches in his forehead from "falling down dead"; he recommends morticians' putty to cover fresh stitches on camera.)

As daylight waned, I handed out bug spray (why an epidemic of killer skeeters in a dry season after we paid to have the gutters cleaned? Why?) Then came the final set-up, in our ground-floor rental apartment. (Our wonderful tenants absented themselves, since about half their furnishings had been stowed across the hall.) The detectives did five takes of this brief interviewing-a-suspect scene, hitting their marks each time on the pink wall-to-wall carpeting over which my mother tripped and shattered her hip and what was left of her life in 1993. Directly overhead, I rustled up frozen fish filets and Kraft mac & cheese as the blazing white "day for night" lights in the driveway flooded the kitchen with Close Encounters-like mood lighting.  We had to have coffee in the living room, so that our footsteps wouldn't squeak overhead; we got our own "handler" to tell us when to shush.

And when they got the take they liked, at 10 pm, the whole gang rolled it all out ...the kettledrum-sized lights, the artificial trees outside the windows, the reflectors, the cables, the "honey wagon" full of wrap sandwiches, the tissues for blotting actorly brows...in a lightning operation that would put FEMA to shame (as if that weren't redundant).  Dennis Farina shot out into the night, but Jesse (as I call him), still a new enough star to have imperfect pounce-proofing reflexes, hesitated long enough to be captured by my fawning burbling self for a picture. (It's on film, not pixels,  and will be uploaded very shortly.) And you can also be sure I will alert you to the episode's air date, sometime next month.

Speaking of FEMA, this whole surreal and delightful episode provided a welcome respite from the harrowing coverage of Katrina and her ghastly wake. My nightmares of vulnerability--the house torn apart hanging open to the rain, the cats scattered, the family God knows where--had gotten so bad that I've being going on a "news fast" every few days, which seems rather cowardly.  And as tens of thousands scrounge their salvaged bits of stuff in wet garbage bags, it was a strange time to turn our dilapidated house into a fantasy world under the golden dappled September sun. (I still don't trust that kind of sun, those deep blue skies and crisp-shadowed first-days-of-school; they can be as treacherous as hurricanes.) It'd be grand to sign over our entire check from NBC to the Red Cross, but it's come just in time to pay the gas bill and the first month of Catholic school tuition, jobs for which no other funds had yet volunteered. Part of being house-poor is wishing the stained glass was fixed; part is wishing for the ability to make such Grand and Generous Gestures.

On the other hand, breaking my news fast reminded me that "house poor" is a really asinine concept for someone with a roof over her head and a loving family beneath it. Even a roof that leaks (it does). Even after the film crew goes home (they have). All is quiet now, and we have kept as a souvenir the paper sign taped to the house that read, "SET." Nobody has struck our set, and that is enough.

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long-distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don't cry baby don't cry

Don't cry

                                      "The Boy in the Bubble"

                                        (c) 1984, Paul Simon

Welcome to Crazy Stable, the chronicle of a small family and a big old house in "Victorian Flatbush," Brooklyn. As our narrative shifts between past and present, it will involve (but not be limited to) renovation, bipolar disorder, gardening, cats, and Catholicism, all tangled up in an ongoing struggle between faith and frustration, hope and throwing in the towel. Today, however, it is about "Law and Order" and guys tearing up the garage.

Yes, our raffish old house has finally been chosen as a film location...our interior and exterior will play host to the intrepid detectives of "Law and Order" (the "plain" or original one, not "SVU" or any of the other spinoffs). Tomorrow is the shoot; today a crew of polite and highly efficient fellows (and one gal) has removed and chopped up our garage door, and is now busy turning it into some mad bomber's workroom, while replacing the ratty exterior door with a rather charming shabby-chic cottage front. Lots of neighbors here in Flatbush have had their homes used as locations--the cavernous interior spaces of these freestanding 3,000-square-foot homes make for ideal interiors, and the bucolic front porches and lawns can be easily refitted in period garb from 1900 onward. But while we've had nibbles before (including a desperate crew that offered us $10,000 to vacate the house the day before Thanksgiving for an AC/DC video--we refused), this is the first time we've made the cut.

The location scouting crew then informed us somewhat gingerly that the interior of the garage scene would involve "a fire effect," and seemed somewhat taken aback when I enthusiastically endorsed the idea of their blowing up the entire garage (safely, of course--an impressive fireball could perhaps be digitalized in later, no?) We do not use the garage, you see, and I wish to demolish it and plant a small pine grove in its place. They demurred that total destruction would not, alas, be necessary.

 But it is great fun--downright redemptive--to  see this sorrowful structure getting its Extreme Makeover. Up til now, the most attention it ever seems to have had was getting lengthened to accomodate the longer cars of the 1950s. At some later date, the added-on cinderblocks shifted, and the previous owner, General Chang, "spackled" the fissures with old undershirts.

Stick around and someday you will learn more about General Chang, and more about how to spackle with undershirts. Stick around till tomorrow, and you'll hear about what Jesse Martin and Dennis Farina look like, right up close in our house.

"No more shall men call you 'Forsaken,' or your land 'Desolate,' But you shall be called 'My Delight,' and your land 'Espoused.' For the LORD delights in you, and makes your land his spouse." Isaiah 62:4