Marine Park
Description
“Chiusano . . . [has] formidable talents. It will be worth watching what he does when he leaves the neighborhood.”—John Williams, The New York Times
“[A] cult classic." —Our Town
An astute, lively, and heartfelt debut story collection by an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction
Marine Park—in the far reaches of Brooklyn, train-less and tourist-free—finds its literary chronicler in Mark Chiusano. Chiusano’s dazzling stories delve into family, boyhood, sports, drugs, love, and all the weird quirks of growing up in a tight-knit community on the edge of the city. In the tradition of Junot Díaz’s Drown, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, and Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, this is a poignant and piercing collection—announcing the arrival of a distinct new voice in American fiction. |
• Recipient of a 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention •
“The stories in Mark Chiusano’s debut collection all have links to Marine Park, a part of southern Brooklyn far removed from the gentrifying hordes. . . . Those that range more widely, either thematically or geographically — including one about a retiree who gets into trouble running a shady errand and another set in Los Alamos, N.M., during the Manhattan Project — showcase Mr. Chiusano’s more formidable talents. It will be worth watching what he does when he leaves the neighborhood.”
—John Williams, The New York Times
“Mark Chiusano’s debut collection, Marine Park, homes in on the Brooklyn neighborhood of the title, where the 23-year-old author grew up, offering sparkling and concise linked stories about coming of age hard by some salt marshes, where backyards are boat docks and ball fields are showcases.”
—Elle
“Absolute genius . . . Marine Park . . . has every anecdote of life in an all-American community, from family to sports to drugs. . . . Filled with life stories we can all relate to. . . . [Chiusano] makes it seem like you’re hearing these stories from an old friend at a bar, venting about his life, his regrets and his lost dreams, over a couple of drinks. Stories that are short, entertaining and explosive. Stories that will elicit at least one, if not many, memories and experiences from your life and that makes reading Marine Park totally worth it.”
—The Boston Herald
“Chiusano gives a voice to the lesser-known Brooklyn neighborhood of Marine Park in his collection of interconnected stories that unearth broader truths among quotidian events, from haircuts to train rides.”
—The Huffington Post
“Astonishingly good . . . Marine Park feels like you’re reading an experimental version of the Great American Novel–like the slim volume was once an 800-page behemoth that has been cut down to its elemental moments . . . vivid, emotionally rich . . . the sheer range of human experience and emotional depth that [Chiusano] reaches in this debut reminds me of readingWhite Teeth, the incredibly precocious novel that Zadie Smith wrote while in her final year at Cambridge.”
—Brooklyn Based
“[A] promising debut collection . . . 23-year-old Chiusano revisits his native Brooklyn—specifically, Marine Park. The neighborhood, distinguished by its salt marshes, canals, and large waterfront park, serves as the collection’s focal point, bringing together a multigenerational cast of characters. They include a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project in “Shatter the Trees and Blow Them Away”; an ex-high school basketball star turned gun-toting drug dealer in “Ed Monahan’s Game”; and the brothers Jamison and Lorris Favero, whom we follow from adolescence in the early 2000s to adulthood in the present, in eight of the stories. In two of them, “Heavy Lifting” and “Open Your Eyes,” Chiusano is at his best, carefully delineating sibling relationships and building tension.”
—Publishers Weekly
“From slice-of-life tales to hair-raising thrillers to traditional relationship dramas. . . . Chiusano’s debut collection takes readers along the streets and through the history of an isolated Brooklyn neighborhood, portraying everyday people who call Marine Park home. . . . Chiusano’s impressive prose and topical range suggest the onset of a promising literary career worth keeping an eye on.”
—Booklist
“In clean, honed prose, Mark Chiusano gives us an intimate tour of a neighborhood of Brooklyn not offered up in fiction before. His explorations of loyalty within a family, and the breach of it, are startling and affecting—his sense of story is impeccable. Marine Park is a debut worth a reader’s close attention.”
—Amy Hempel, author of The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
“The stories in Marine Park are funny and touching and elliptical, and all about coming of age at the edge of the city and on the margins of the good life, with some moving forward and others left behind. Mark Chiusano is wonderful on how our minds can be elsewhere even when we wish to be wholly present, and on the oblique ways in which we therefore often have to signal our indispensability to one another.”
—Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad
“One of the most subtle, tender, emotionally powerful books that I’ve read in a long time. Set mostly in Brooklyn, but its subject is the whole of America. If you’ve never been to Marine Park before, by the end of this collection you’ll feel like you’d lived there your whole life. This is a stunning debut.”
—Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Will Be Free and Brief Encounters with the Enemy
“Here’s the spirit of dear Sherwood Anderson in Mark Chiusano’s Marine Park, another village brimming with all of the odd drama of families and loners. There is something a little old and wise in this talented writer’s debut. At times the stories read like the news, letters from a friend, and at times the tales seem elegiac glimpses of a lost world. Mr. Chiusano is writing family from the inside out and he makes this world an aching bittersweet pleasure. Here is the kind of affectionate particularity which marks a fine writer.”
—Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine
“In Marine Park, Mark Chiusano shines a light on lives that are too often left in the dark. He shows us, with humor and deep-hearted compassion, the complexities of growing up and growing old in the blue collar shadows, and he gives us, story after story, the chance to see ourselves in his longing, hopeful characters. This is a wise and affecting collection, and it marks the arrival of a voice we’ve not heard until now, one that will carry through the streets and alleys of contemporary literature for years to come.”
—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This
Copyright © 2014 by Mark Chiusano
AIR-CONDITIONING
For a while there was only one air conditioner in our house. It was in the living room, and we put it on during birthdays or
the Fourth of July. It covered the heat in the kitchen from my mother burning things, like the half-sausages, the hot ones, which had a black crust on the bottom from where they touched the pan for too long.
Lorris slept in my room during the summer, even though he had his own room, because mine had a ceiling fan. It had wooden slats with small holes at the edges so that in the winter we could hang our model planes and cars o? the ends. After our mother had dusted the top of the slats, we would set the fan going on a low frequency and the planes and race cars would spin around, getting higher and higher with the centripetal acceleration, until the Lego ones started to break apart and Lorris ran shouting from the room.
Our parents had been arguing in the living room, with the air conditioner masking the noise a little, and we were building Lego cars in my room, when ?nally I came and sat on the stairs and started reading a poem I’d written the week before about how cold the pancakes were that morning.
The pancakes, I said, were cold this morning. I was sitting with my knees together on the top step and Lorris was lying on his stomach clutching the two-by-two Lego piece I had asked him to ?nd. I started over: The pancakes were cold this morning.
That’s enough of that, said my father. I’m just trying to help, I said.
Jamison’s just trying to help, said Lorris.
It’s none of your business, my father said. This is an adult conversation. From downstairs we could hear the kitchen cabinets being slammed shut. Conversation, he repeated.
One day my father came home carrying a second air conditioner. He was carrying it the way you carry birthday presents, as if someone was about to stack more boxes on top. He had to put the air conditioner down to ring the doorbell, even though Lorris and I had seen him through the upstairs window, and our mother went to answer it, us behind her, her shoulder and neck cradling the portable phone. She put a hand over the receiver to say, I don’t even want to know.
My father was a driving instructor. He worked at the place on Kings Highway under the train tracks, where the storefronts grow on top of each other until one of them covers the other. The o?ce for the Kings Highway Driving School was on the second ?oor, and they were ignoring Department of Health requests to make it handicap accessible. They posted a sign that said, for handicapped, please call up. will come down and get you. So far they’d never had to do it.
I was thirteen at the time, and taking any seconds in the car I could get. Technically I was too young, but if we went in the practice car and lit up the sign on top that said student driver, no one said anything. Everyone in our neighborhood was a cop, and they knew me and my father pretty well, so we always drove out toward the sanitation plant on Gerritsen, the shit factory, where you could make the widest turns. Sometimes we let Lorris in the back, because he always begged to come, and he took his favorite Hot Wheel, the red one with the white stripe down the middle. It was always the fastest on our yellow racetrack. He held it in both hands, mimicking the turns and motions I made while I drove.
My mother didn’t like the idea of me driving, especially with my father, because she said that someday we would get caught and it would go on my permanent transcript. That was the kind of thing she was always ragging about, things on my permanent school transcript. Even though I was about to graduate, and Madison doesn’t turn people away. She thought that those kinds of things ride on your bumper forever, and maybe they do, but I try to ask as few questions as possible. She wasn’t around when we drove any way, because she worked eight to six as a school secretary.
My father lounged around most mornings, doing his shifts in the o?ce three days a week, but other than that he stayed at home until four, when the ?rst lessons were usually scheduled. Some- times he’d paint the basement just for something to do, or sweep the stoop. I got o? the cheese bus from school around three, which left almost an hour for driving. Some days, if Lorris was late at an after-school program, we’d go pick him up. Our mother liked that the least. How could we explain ourselves picking a nine-year-old kid up at school and say this is still a lesson? She was mainly just unhappy because she thought our father wasn’t a good driver, and that it was terrifying that he was teaching the whole borough below Fulton Street. Technically she might have been better, but he was con?dent about it, and didn’t worry about hitting the brakes too hard or conserving gas. She was always stopping at yellows.
When he brought the second air conditioner home it was April, but one of those hot Aprils that remind you what summer’s like, before it rains again. In Brooklyn we waited for thunderstorms. Once our father left for work and before our mother got home, I’d get the key for the garage and open the heavy door slowly, hand over hand. Lorris would be drumming on the metal as it went up. We’d pull our bikes out, his ?re-yellow, mine blue and white, and race down the side streets to Marine Park by the water. There were trees on the outside of the park, basketball courts near the street. In the middle, a wide paved oval studded by baseball ?elds, their backstops open, facing each other across the grass. At that point in the afternoon you could feel the heat through the handlebars. We’d make it one lap around the oval, 0.84 miles, before we heard the ?rst thunder, and then Lorris would yell and dart ahead even though he’d just gotten his training wheels o?. The rain came down all at once then, and all of a sudden it would be cold, and this was the best part, when I pulled over by the water fountain and Lorris circled back to me. I pulled the two red and blue windbreakers out of my bike basket and we put them on, invincible. We rode two more laps in the storm until racing each other home.
Dad put the second air conditioner in his and Mom’s room. It was just the bathroom and a closet between their room and mine, and if we had the fan on low Lorris and I could hear the air conditioner clearing its throat all night. That’s what it sounded like—like it was constantly hacking something up from deep down in its throat. Sometimes if I was awake after going to the bathroom in the early a.m., I could hear our mother wake up and walk over to it, and turn it down a few settings. It took them a long time to get the hang of how high they wanted it to be. It would be too warm when they went to bed, but then freezing by morning, unless Mom got up to ?x it. We could tell when she hadn’t gotten up, because when we went in before school to say good-bye to Dad, on the days he was sleeping there, he’d have the white sheets all wrapped around his head from the middle of the night.
A few weeks after we got the second air conditioner it was so hot they started putting out weather advisories over 1010 WINS in the morning. Stay inside unless absolutely necessary. Mom took this to heart, and tried to get Lorris and me to do it too, though we didn’t. School was winding down, especially for eighth-graders, so we didn’t have homework anymore, even from Regents math. My math teacher, Mr. Pebson, had taken to sitting in the back of the classroom and spraying Lysol at anyone if they sneezed too close to him. This was in independent math, where we worked at our own pace. We took the tests when we got to the ends of chapters. At this point, everyone seemed to still have a few pages before being ready for their tests. Mr. Pebson didn’t mind. He was concentrating on staying ahead of the sickness wave that always happened the ?rst time the weather changed like this.
It got so hot that the cheese buses broke down, and we had to walk home from school. Dad would have picked us up if we told him, and he did pick Lorris up, but I convinced him that we’d gotten some special buses shipped in from upstate, where the kids biked to school all the time because it was so safe. My friend Hayden and I walked toward our neighborhood together, taking everything in.
One of those days, Hayden told me that I couldn’t walk straight. I told him he was being ridiculous but it turned out he was right. I’d step with my left foot and fall two or three inches o? my forward motion, and then readjust with my right foot, but four or ?ve inches too far. Then I’d have to ?x it with my left, but that came o? the line a little too. I didn’t know it was happening. Somehow I got wherever I was going, but Hayden showed me how, if he was standing pretty close to my shoulder, I kept knocking him, on every third or fourth step.
We were walking down Thirty-Third, which comes o? Kings Highway at a curve, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it all the way home. The more I thought about my feet the more inches I diverged right and left. Hayden held my right arm and tried to force me forward, but I started breathing heav y and told him I needed a break. That’s when the station wagon pulled over, and someone rolled down the window.
It was a high school kid, with a Madison football sweatshirt and the chinstrap beard that everyone who could was wearing that year. Hayden was pretending that the white tuft on his chin counted. The driver also had a Madison sweatshirt on, and I saw him use his right hand to put the car into park.
Don’t you live on Quentin? the guy in the passenger seat said to us. You coming down from Hudde?
Hayden said yes.
Jump in, he said. We’ll drop you o?—it’s too hot to walk. He leaned his arm out the window and reached behind to open the back door.
Once we were in the car the Madison kid in the passenger seat turned the music up, and it wasn’t that it was louder than in our car but it was thumping more in my chest. You like Z100? he said, smiling, leaning his left hand behind the headrest.
I was watching the driver while Hayden answered for us. He was driving with two ?ngers, his index and middle ones on one hand, his other arm out the window. Somehow we were going just as fast as my dad always goes on side streets, but we were getting the soft stops that only my mom, at ?fteen miles per hour, was able to get. At the stop sign on Avenue P, he jolted out to look twice, in exact time with the music. His friend was drumming on the dash- board with both hands.
Dad was sitting on the stoop when they dropped us o?, and he stood up once he recognized me getting out of the car. The car waved away. I was able to walk again, the zigzag curse gone. Hayden said, Hi, Mr. Favero, and then turned to me. That car was disgusting, huh? he said. I was looking at my dad’s face. When I got up to him, he grabbed me under the armpit and dragged me up the stoop. Hayden didn’t look away. We were inside with the air-conditioning on when he ?at-palmed me in the stomach.
Are you serious? he said. Are you serious?
When Dad came home with the third air conditioner, it was still blistering out. There were tornadoes in Texas, more than they’d ever seen before, and in earth science Ms. Donatelli said it was what we had to look forward to: global warming in America. Someone in the back asked if this meant no more snow days, and she said, Maybe no snow, period.
He had the air conditioner in the trunk of the driving instructor car. You don’t notice until you’re close to it, but those cars are a little skinnier than regular ones. Dad says it helps the kids who have a bad sense of hand-eye coordination. There’s more wiggle room when you’re trying to squeeze through tight spaces. He says that the ?rst thing he asks a student when they get in the car is whether they played sports when they were younger, or if they still do now. If not, he’d know it was going to be a long day. You can’t imagine how crappy those kids are, especially the Hasidic Jews.
Why’s that, Daddy? asked Lorris.
Because they didn’t play sports as a kid, he answered, wiping his mouth with his napkin. I had set the table, and we used the white ones with blue borders that I liked.
This is how you raise your kids, Mom said. She was twirling her fork in her ?ngers. She’d gotten home late and he was back early.
My kids, yeah? He shrugged. It’s just true.
The new air conditioner was bigger than the others, mostly because it had extendable plastic wings on the side that were sup- posed to be for ?tting in a window. That afternoon before Mom got back from work, he put it in the kitchen, balancing it above the heater and extending the wings so it sat snug. He got some blocks of wood out of the garage and pushed them underneath.
When she came back she had immediate problems. They had a session up in their bedroom where we couldn’t really hear what they were yelling. When they came down, she was pointing at the kitchen window. How am I supposed to hang the clothes out now? she said. I guess Dad hadn’t thought about that. The clothesline comes out the kitchen window. He moved it one window over.
That was the spring of people breaking their wrists. I had three friends who did, and at least two more from school. Everyone was walking around with casts on their arms and permanent markers in their back pockets to ask you to sign. It happened to our next-door neighbor ?rst—he was playing basketball at the courts by Marine Park, and when he went up for a rebound someone kneed him the wrong way. He fell full on his knuckles. I wasn’t there, but Lorris had been riding his bike and said he saw him waiting for the ambulance, his hand doubled over and ?ngers touching forearm.
The one wrist I did get to see was right by our house. Behind the house there’s an alley for the sanitation trucks to get the garbage. This way they don’t clog up the avenues in the mornings. Hayden was over and Dad was showing Lorris how to skateboard. The alley has a little hill on each end and dips down in the middle. Dad had him getting speed down the hill and then showed him how to glide. Hayden and I were on our Razor scooters, trying to do grind tricks o? the concrete sides of the alley. Then, after Lorris beat his own glide record and Dad was giving him a high ?ve, Hayden decided to come down the hill backward.
Dad wasn’t watching. He was pretending to shadowbox with Lorris, who was saying, I’m the greatest, I’m the greatest.
Don’t do it, man, I said. They don’t even try that on Tony Hawk.
It’s gonna be sick, he said, and gave it a little hop to get his speed up.
He made it all the way down before falling. I have to give him credit for that. But then he swerved toward the wall and got scared and fell. He wasn’t even going that fast. All I heard was a squelch, like the sound the black dried-up shark eggs make when we squish them on the beach at Coney Island. It was the same sound. His wrist looked bent sideways. He jumped up and was screaming, My wrist, my wrist, and my dad came running over, Lorris right behind, and that’s when the third air conditioner fell out the window, crashing and breaking into pieces, and my mom yelling from the kitchen, Goddamnit you’re an asshole. Dad and I drove Hayden to the hospital ?rst, but when we got back we swept up all the pieces.
It wasn’t long after that until it was my birthday, and to celebrate Dad took me out driving with him. It was the weekend, so we had plenty of time. Mom was home with Lorris playing Legos, because in a recent school art project his portrait of the family had her smaller than the rest of us, o? in the corner. She’d been at work a lot. I don’t think Lorris meant anything about it. He was always a terrible artist. But you could tell she was upset.
When we weren’t rushed, Dad liked to pull out all the stops in the driving. First he drove us to the parking lot in Marine Park, and let me drive around there for a few minutes. We pulled into and out of vertical spaces. Everybody learned how to drive in the Marine Park parking lot, and the cops didn’t mind as long as you were being safe. I’ve heard they’re much more careful now—they jumped all over the two underage kids last week who ran their mother’s car into a hydrant—but this was a while ago. We were particularly safe, of course, because we were in Dad’s driving instructor car. It had a problem with the wheel so that it lilted a little to the left if you didn’t correct it, but it was perfect and I loved it.
From there we pulled onto Quentin, rode that all the way down to Flatbush, which was heavy six-lane tra?c. Dad took the wheel again at that point. I was still getting used to cars on both sides of me. He exaggerated all his driving motions here, the point being for me to observe. Hit the left blinker. Make sure you’re keeping up with tra?c. Always check all three mirrors.
If you stay on Flatbush and keep going you hit the water, Rockaway and the Atlantic, twenty blocks from our house, but that’s getting onto the highway, and I didn’t want to deal with that yet. We made a right onto U, and Dad stayed in the right lane the whole way. Then, after passing the public library and the salt marsh where the water mill used to be, where you can still see the foundation coming out of the surface, we were in Gerritsen. Dad ceremonially pulled into an open spot and put the car in park and pulled the keys out and handed them to me when we passed each other going around the hood.
This was my favorite moment, using the key, the throat- grumbling the engine makes when it comes on, how if you do it wrong it kick-starts like someone laughing hysterically. Then the way the wheel shakes a little in your hand, your foot on the brake, everything ready to move.
I pulled out and Dad said, Good, good, keep it easy, and I imagined the fake line in the middle of the road like he told me to, keeping a little to the left of it. I hit my right blinker and we were on a one-way street, and my turn came perfectly into the center. I accelerated a little and tried to ease o?and onto the break at the red light, completely smooth. I navigated around a double-parked car without my dad saying a word.
When we were little, the only activity that Lorris and I wanted every night was wrestling with Dad. He didn’t like to hit us; Mom was the one we were afraid of, her slaps more damaging than any neighborhood scrape. Scarier too because she’d cry after, holding ice to our cheeks, even though we told her it was OK and we didn’t need the ice. But wrestling was something that Dad knew how to do. He’d lie down in our living room on his back, and one or the other of us would run down the hallway and take a running leap and jump on top of him. Then the other would come from behind his head and try to cover his eyes or hold his legs. When we jumped, he made an oof sound, like we had knocked the air out, but he always caught us, in midair, no matter what part of him we tried to jump on top of. He’d keep us suspended there for a few seconds, turning us back and forth like a steering wheel, and then pull us back down and wrap our arms in a pretzel. Mom liked to watch this from the kitchen, where she’d be cleaning the dishes, usually Dad’s job but she let him o? the hook when he was wrestling with us.
Coming down a one-way street like that was the same feeling of being suspended in midair, the windows open, the radio o? so I could concentrate, the car on a track, almost, so it felt impossible to deviate. I could close my eyes or shut o? the driving part of my brain and the car would keep going forward, where I was willing it to go.
It was the corner, the one with two tra?c lights, the one with the old storage warehouse on one side, and the Burger King, where teenagers go after the movies to sky the drink machines and not pay; with the shit factory on the other side, the green fence shaped like a wave on the top that goes on and on forever. There’s a gate in the fence with an entrance to the recycling dump. When Dad saw it, it was like he woke up from being asleep with his eyes open. He leaned forward and said, Make a right here, go into there. We’ve got to pick something up. Then the red Chevy came screaming up from behind us and crunched into the passenger side.
I sat in the driver’s seat. There were doors being opened and slammed shut. I think I heard the sirens immediately. Police cars were never far away. The Chevy driver went right over to Dad’s side and pulled him out and Dad lay on the ground, breathing heavy, on his back, looking up.
I was in the car. I was out of the car. I was sitting on the side of the curb. My dad lay on his back and groaned quietly, talking to himself. There were people all around him. He kept pushing the air in front of him, up and away. My mom got there. My dad was sitting up. She was screaming the whole time. Another fucking air conditioner, she said. Driving with your fucking underage son. You’ve got some fucking lot of nerve. Dad was sitting up and laughing. He was shaking his head, I remember that. He’d just gotten a haircut, and you could see red skin beneath the gray. I remember when Dad came to say good night to us, later, he said, Your mother and I love each other very much. He had his hands on the side of the mattress. Don’t take things so seriously, he said.
It was hot that night, and Lorris was in my room again. Mom pulled out the trundle bed. She smoothed the sheets. She kept her hand on his cheek, her other hand on my arm, her feet between the two beds, until Lorris told her that he wanted to turn on the other side. She went downstairs, and she put the television on, but we could hear her and Dad arguing. They were quiet. We only heard the sounds of their voices. It stopped soon and they turned the television o?. Lorris got out of the pullout bed and stood in front of mine. He put his hand on the side, and I lifted up the sheet. I faced one way, and he faced the other, because I didn’t like it when our breaths hit, but he kept his foot next to mine until four in the morning. Then he got up to go to the bathroom, and I had the bed and the sheets and the quiet room to myself.
OPEN YOUR EYES
Sitting on the bus on the way home from Kings Highway train station with our shopping bags at our feet, Lorris pointed at
the man sitting across from us. It was the years when we fought. Look, Lorris said. When the man reached down to scratch his lower leg his jeans rode up a little, and you could see his gun, just the holster and the leather strap. He’s a policeman, I told Lorris. Lorris nodded. I feel safe, he said.
We fought all the time. We threw punches. We kneed each other in the chest. We knocked each other down, waited until the other one got up, knocked him down again. We got angry. We squeezed each other’s ?ngers so hard they got jammed, or what looked like jammed, in the way that we jammed our ?ngers while playing bas- ketball. We scratched pimples into our legs and called them mos- quito bites.
When ?ghts were over, when Lorris was knocked down, when I had my whole weight on top of him, I gave what was our cruelest punishment
PUBLISHER:
Penguin Publishing Group
ISBN-10:
0143124609
ISBN-13:
9780143124603
BINDING:
Paperback / softback
PUBLICATION YEAR:
2014
NUMBER OF PAGES:
208
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
5.0800(W) x 7.7000(H) x 0.5400(D)
AUDIENCE TYPE:
General/Adult
LANGUAGE:
English