A.K.A.: East River Bridge
Built: 1867-1883
Architect: John A. Roebling
National Register Number: 66000523
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: February 1, June 26, and November 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report;
NRHP Nomination Form
This is the famous Brooklyn Bridge! One hundred and thirty-three feet high, fifteen hundred feet long! Contains hundreds of miles of cable! From it, Steve Brodie made his sensational leap into the East River!You know, he actually
did jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Most sobersided historians believe one of his cronies threw a dummy from the bridge, and once it hit the water, Brodie came out swimming from under a pier, very much alive and triumphant. To believe this is to accept a level of stupidity in the New Yorkers of 1886 that defies common sense: even at a distance, who's going to mistake a straw-filled sack for somebody who can swim? No, Brodie made the jump all right. But--and this was Brodie's genius--there was a dummy, too. He made sure people saw it on the river, but the jump was all his and he had the seared skin and the shuffled pancreas to prove it. What he faked was the faking. He was a newsboy, a great one, so he knew stories circulate better when there's the whiff of bullshit about them. Corrupted truths are objects of imagination and opportunities to fight; facts are just schoolday lessons. Later, much later, he'd remind people that we have standard-issue incontrovertible proof that
Robert Odlum jumped and died and that
Larry Donovan jumped and lived but we don't remember
them.
After he died and his family and friends got on with their lives, he walked all the way from San Antonio to claim his title of Ghost Protector of the Brooklyn Bridge. Not that he knew what it meant, but he figured he'd grow into the role by, well, being Steve Brodie. He assumed he'd be treated like a conquering hero, but the bridge was littered with other ghosts, workmen who fell from the towers or got crippled in the caissons. They were vague and insensate, and couldn't be charmed. He got lost.
The Bowery had a more interesting mix of souls anyway; in this new gray world, he only knew some, but they all knew him. But the life was constricting. He missed sex, food, money. His bookie instincts--what made him a motherfucker in his former life--didn't matter in a world without possessions, they withered. He figured it was a kind of mortification. Most of the other ghosts weren't especially game, anyway. Oh there were sweet girls and sporting fellas but a lot of the rest weren't all there, as mute or crazy or incomplete as the bridge men. And all of them eventually vanished from the scene, in onesies and twosies, always without fanfare or goodbyes or even much notice from others. A new ghost would appear on the street so often, usually in a state of confusion or denial, but within a few days' or years' time, they would walk away and not be seen again. Presumably to heaven or hell but he never got any proof of that.
Brodie didn't disappear, which confused him. There seemed no reason for it. And all things considered, he still had his wits about him. He settled for voyeurism, picking a store or an apartment and inhabiting it for months at a time, drinking in the minutiae of its inhabitants' lives like a wine connoisseur.
He spend many hours listening in to their conversations, hoping the subjects would turn to the Bowery or the Bridge or daredevils or whatever, and thus to him. A passing mention of him could make his month, or, if it wasn't cadenced properly, ruin it. That dumb Bowery movie from a few years back was bad enough, and worse yet some Hollywood softie saw fit to steal his name. Then there was
a cartoon--and he
liked Bugs Bunny--that riffed on the jump but featured this classless galoot that didn't look like him, didn't sound like him, and didn't even have the right name. (Brody, with a -y and not an -ie. He coldcocked men for less.) He knew verisimilitude was besides the point with these things, but still, what a fix: his reputation survived, but it was the kind of reputation that only folk heroes get, one where it didn't matter if he
really lived or not. So this is why I'm stuck here, he thought, hardly for the first time. Sin of pride. I'm being shown up, being shown what a paltry thing my pride is.
Eventually he learned to read well because there was little else to do. Mainly it was the newspapers lying on the ground. He slept a lot, and when he did, he dreamed about the bridge. He could slink his way into theaters and watch shows. There was sports. Boxing. He loved boxing. He felt shamed by them; they were gladiators, kings, even with the gloves and the incomprehensible rules. Ali made him cry all the time.
He learned how to haunt, which at first he did for kicks, then to satisfy his mushy side by wanting to
help the living, like he was a guardian angel. Nothing he could do really got through to them. It was exhausting enough trying to throw an ashtray across a room or to manifest himself as an apparition; when it came time to communicate something he couldn't make himself sensible. He was accused by other ghosts of just wanting to be noticed, something he couldn't deny because, after all, that's what his whole life was about.
He went back to the bridge after its hundredth anniversary, sensing once again it was loved. He conquered it once, he owned it, but it proved to be stronger than him. He would, on spring and summer nights, patrol his bridge, walking back and forth or climbing the cables. Cops there would sometimes speak of premonitory sensations when there was trouble, something stronger than a second sight, almost a buzzing in the ear. It was him, going for subtlety for once.
He also found some purpose in kids. By now he had lost his accent and forgot some of his old friend's names but he stubbornly held onto sentimental attitudes about children that were pure throwback. He had this inexplicable knack for being around when kids flamed into purgatory, and a more explicable knack for talking kids down from the anguish and fear they'd usually be in. He was big dumb kid, too (well a
smart big dumb kid), charming them with his bravado and natty flash and his silliness. (Some of them knew him from Bugs Bunny.) He got real good at it. God condescended to meet with him on 9/11--about time--asking him to guide a Cantor Fitz broker through the netherworld. Not his thing, really, but she was so shook and, well, you don't say no to God.
People would walk through him all the time (an mildly uncomfortable sensation) but now they pass down the street and he could just swear that they had shifted their bodies, just a little bit, like in unconscious acknowledgment that they were in the presence of Steve Brodie, Unknown Ghost Protector of the Brooklyn Bridge, somebody not to be fucked with. He tendered the possibility that he might be imagining things but oh, it pleased his vanity immensely.
He wasn't sure he liked these new people who now live in his old stomping grounds. More money than smarts. Folks that would've been cut or cowed round these parts, back then. But the anger is subsiding. He is feeling ecumenical. It gives him no pain anymore. He is still king. He knows it, even if they don't. He thought once his pride kept him here, and maybe it does, but still he lords over these buildings, all of them, the apartments, the kitchen fixture stores, lighting. So little remains. But it doesn't matter, it's OK. His lit from within, incandescent. He gets his energy from unseen channels now. And there is the bridge.
The craziest thing happened a few years ago. He found himself drawn from the bridge to this one dumb bar, lousy with hustler-students and business creatives, a place he'd swore he never go back to again...it had a shot of whiskey in a creche. Whiskey that was a vivid amber and not the pallid washout colors he had known for a hundred years. He remembered something like this happening from some religious ceremony he walked in the middle of once on the Lower East Side, long time ago. (Vodun? Santeria? Krishna? Something totally off the books? His memory was bad.) A shrine with cakes and oranges, forgotten pinks and golds and greens, vivid as the sun; other ghosts politely offered him a bite, but he was too stunned to do anything but demur. Was this whiskey for him? He stared at it for the longest time, wondering if this was some Devil's temptation, or God fucking with his head. He passed his hand through the shotglass. A double of the whiskey emerged, ghosted yet still burning golden. A miracle. He took it to his lips and swallowed and the world's colors returned.
Labels: bridge, Civic Center, John A. Roebling, South Street Seaport, South Street Seaport and Water Street Corridor, Steve Brodie, Two Bridges, Washington A. Roebling
