The following is a four part non-fiction short story about moving to Brooklyn, NY.

Most days it was back and forth from the Quintana’s, biking through Brooklyn sweating from the hot breath of bus exhaust and the Autumn light that smoothed dented streets. I’d pass the Hasidic women all pushing strollers with a freshly baked baby. The little Hasidic girls made monkey bars out of sidewalk scaffolds. Clambering up those beams, they looked like miniature demure 19^th century housewife ninjas. Most days, I was almost hit by a Honda Odyssey, or what some call the “Hasid-mobile.”

For those unfamiliar with Radical Orthodox Jewish culture, particularly in Brooklyn, read this. I have read about total fertility rates for Hasidic Jewish populations anywhere from 6.6 to 7.9 babies per woman. This gives you some idea of the demand put on a Hasidic woman’s hips. (For comparison, the CIA World Factbook ranked Niger as the country with the highest birth rate in 2012, at 7.16. For further comparison, at risk of being inflammatory, the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) ranked Niger second to last in the world in 2012. Make of that what you will.) Anyway, Honda Odysseys. Why are they the Hasidic vehicle of choice? Only a minivan can accommodate the heavy flow of children. Why Honda Odysseys rather than any other minivan? Beats me. But I’m sure it has nothing to do with hive-mind and the fact that their religious doctrine dictates that they all dress exactly the same and have the same haircut.

One day, while I was trying to explain transversals to Gordy, Pookie came home and sloughed off his Toy Story backpack and doll-sized jacket. It was his first day of preschool. I felt a misplaced proud feeling. Pookie smiled showing the deep dimples in his cheeks. His head looked huge and bulbous. He galloped down the hall. There was something bothering me that I should have addressed long ago.

“Is his name really Pookie?” I asked Gordy.

“No, it’s Jeremiah,” he said.

“…are you kidding?”

“No, it’s Jeremiah.”

“Does anyone ever call him that?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s Pookie,” he said.

“How is he ever going to learn his name if everyone calls him Pookie?” I asked. Gordy paused.

“When he’s old enough, we’ll just tell him.”

Illiana, the matriarch, had picked Pookie up from school. She told us he wouldn’t respond to the teacher. He kept saying his name wasn’t Jeremiah, it was Pookie. I looked at Gordy.

Pookie hopped around, high on the excitement from his first day of school. He jumped onto the couch, landing on his back and flailing his legs in the air. He crawled through chair legs under our feet, letting out squeals and non-sense words. My session with Gordy was over. We hadn’t made much headway editing a practice essay I had him write on Othello, which he was reading in English class. His copy had the original Shakespeare on the left page and the 2012 vernacular translation on the right. I had him write it on Othello because when I asked him to tell me about the play, he was animated. That pale stare was gone.

“—and Iago’s like real sick. He’s awesome. He’s like an evil mastermind.” Gordy was talking with his hands.

I sat forward, too. Much of the time, tutoring sessions with Gordy digressed into how writing was arguably the greatest human invention, and reading it, the greatest gift. Instead of limiting your learning to the generation preceding you, you can plug into the river of human history and knowledge. But it never came out like that. I always degenerated into sounding like an adult who forgot what it was like to be a kid who thought adults only gave valid advice if you wanted to become like them, but you didn’t want to become like them.

Anyway, Gordy liked Othello. And there you have the inconceivable universality of Shakespeare’s plays. That guy tapped into some occult reservoir of shared human experience. Everyone can relate. Even people hundreds of years later living in circumstances as divorced from Elizabethan England as Elizabethan England was from the feudalist baronies hundreds of years before Elizabeth. Even Puerto Rican teenagers on the sixth floor of a housing project in Brooklyn can relate. Even gangsters.

Naturally, Iago, the shrewd insubordinate who makes marionettes of Othello, Cassio, and the other characters, was his essay topic. It was about Iago’s shortcomings as a villain. The premise was retrospective advice to prevent Iago’s wicked plan from collapsing. Gordy’s ideas, with coaxing, were borderline cogent. But getting them on paper was like translating it into a language he didn’t know.

Right then, Pookie emerged from under the table with a mouse glue trap stuck to his hand. His pupils were dilated with panic. His scleras were getting wet.

“We caughta Pookie!” Angel said as he scooped him up. Of course, Pookie cried hard.  Harder than usual. The household was attuned to the pecking order of Pookie cries and this order of cry made the whole household to show up one by one to investigate. Pookie sat in the kitchen sink and screamed while Angel ran his hand under warm water, gently peeling off the trap. The rest of the family shouted about who had left the glue trap under the table, presumably. No habla español.

I packed up my binders. It seemed inopportune to get the required parent signature confirming that I had, in fact, been there tutoring their child. But that signature was how I got paid.

I looked at Illiana, the matriarch, shouting and gyrating her head with abundant sass, then over to Angel holding a distraught child in a sink.

“Angel,” I said. “I know this is a bad time, but when you’re ready.” I held up the sign-in sheet and he knew what I meant. Pookie had bloodhound eyes from crying. “Or maybe you can just sign it next time…” I walked out of the kitchen and slipped on my backpack.

“Hey, Papi!” Angel called. “You hungry?”

“Oh. No, thanks.” It’s not that I necessarily didn’t like being there, but I usually wanted to leave as soon as possible. It was work, after all.

“Don’t want some food?” He shucked the last corner of glue trap off Pookie’s hand. I looked at the bickering family.

I was in a rush to go nowhere. I always am. I think that when you have somewhere to get so much of the time, you retain that agitated momentum even when you have nowhere to get. There is a resistance to deviate from that imaginary plan you sketched in your head. But the moments when you scrap that compulsive plan, when you ward off that rush to get nowhere, that agitated momentum that compels you to get where you thought you were going, those are the fond ruptures in your otherwise placid memory. They are the things you remember. These ruptures age into nostalgia and provide you with value when you ask yourself the question: what have I even done in all this time? This is why traveling is so fulfilling, I think. It is a concentrated dosage of these very moments, uncontaminated by routine and obligation. I took off my backpack.

“Sure,” I said.

I helped Angel make dinner. He showed me how to tell when rice is done. He stuck a wooden spoon into the pot. “When it stick straight up, ees ready,” he said. Then he leaned in and whispered. “Like a—“ he pointed at the floor and shrugged his eyebrows, “—bicho.”

We both laughed a hearty laugh. I had no idea what he said. I do now.

The family ate together. There was a shortage of dishes and silverware. I wasn’t allowed to finish completely eating or drinking. My fork was taken out of my hand. When I lingered on straggling grains of rice or the swill of my grape soda, the 250lbs Angel swooped in and fluttered off to the kitchen with my dish, glass, and fork. He washed it for the next in line. Dinner incorporated a staggered start system so that the last eaters ate on the same plates as the first.

Ish, the dark-haired 16 year old, was to my left with the glow of a Nintendo DS on his face and a plastic Country Crock container as a bowl. Pookie was at the opposite end of the table chanting “chi-ken, chi-ken” continuously until his sister, Angie, tore a strip of chicken off the bone and put it in his mouth. Jose, an old family friend who had just arrived, sat to my right. He had an amiable face and lenient smile. He told me, with great difficulty, that he had moved here in 2002 from the Dominican Republic. In a decade he managed to hardly acquire more than a handful of words. The Quintana’s all vied for my attention, mostly by harping on Jose’s poor command of English. Everyone shouted Spanish to and fro. I laughed when they laughed. I tried to decipher words but couldn’t understand anything. All I knew is that they were interrupting each other.

I thanked them and wheeled my bike out the apartment door. I spiraled down the staircase which seemed to get smaller and smaller. It was dark. Not fully dark, more like inside-of-a-Hollister dark. I carried my bike on my shoulder until the second floor where there was a blockage. Six guys clumped in the stairwell. I squeezed through and stepped over a blunt-in-progress, lying open-booked on the landing. I passed through the group and continued down. Just as I was out of sight I heard one of them call.

“Hey! Where you going, blanquito?”

“Yeah, why you running, blanquito?”

“Come back, Papi, where you think you going?”

The laughter faded as I continued down the stairwell. I got on my bike and rode homeward.

I was pedaling through Bedstuy when a black blur flashed against the dark street a few inches in front of my face. Then there was loud shrill pang from the parked car beside me. It was a rock. I looked back and scanned the sidewalk. It was full of people. There was no way to tell who had thrown it. And what would I have done if I could tell who had thrown it. I kept riding.

Weeks of tutoring at the Quintana’s passed. Clouds held color earlier each day. We rounded the half-way point of the thirty hours of tutoring, then the home stretch. There were days it seemed progress had been made. Then the next day would wash it all away. It occurred to me that my clichéd fantasy of playing out the movie Dangerous Minds would not be realized. There was an impotence now. How am I supposed to make up for four years of high school in thirty hours?

On a Monday afternoon, I rode to Hope Gardens. The air was gray and viscous. I waited for a half-hour at the dining/everything table for Gordy as usual. Gordy came through the door and sat down. He folded his hands on the dining table. They were streaked with sutures from the screwdriver he was stabbed with several days before.

To be continued…