Making Space

(September 2018)

Things had a way of simply showing up in the loft. We built our own little bohemia the same way generations of young, hopeful artists crowded in pockets across New York City. In the late aughts of the 21st century, the chosen neighborhood was Bushwick. White kids with rich parents and far less helpful degrees started to show up looking for space along the L line years before, pushing farther east from Williamsburg. But our corner of Bushwick — backed up against the raised M train rolling past our windows every 12 minutes — let us feel apart from the slow eastward creep of Brooklyn gentrification. When you’re still mostly shopping in the same stores, ordering from the same taco joints and Chinese food spots, riding the same trains as the people of color who lived there for decades, you can quickly forget the early role you play in that movement. Especially when your alarm goes off at 3am so you can caffeinate the city’s financial elite.

Dozens of paint cans lined a wall near the door when not holding up shelves around our 4th-floor walk up, leftovers from various projects or picked up free from Craigslist. We found most of our furniture that way, or saved it from bulk pick up right off the sidewalk. Our canvas, we filled that odd triangular apartment with as much art is we could fit. LaLa’s murals covered the walls with faces you can now find all over Chicago’s West Loop and well beyond. Large, abstract pieces from a project by my now-husband and his bestie hung on walls that they framed and built themselves to form bedrooms in an otherwise open space. The large common area left gave me plenty of room to plan dances and rehearse one-acts. With a Tuesday afternoon off, pop open a paint can. And if the paint’s still usable, turn a chair pink. Or put a poem on a door.

I don’t remember where the door came from. Or the poem, really. Not the impetus to begin, at least. Ideas had a way of just showing up in the loft, too. I don’t even remember if the poem existed before the door. The two just suddenly existed together there, like the paint cans and the bubble-gum pink chair, the fajitas by the pound and cheap whiskey, the parties and rehearsals. Like us.

I do remember the object that inspired the poem, however; where it came from, though not why it held my interest so well. A partner at the Starbucks store where I worked in the Financial District gave me the rather large, boot-shaped glass as a gift. While I didn’t fill it to the brim often, I liked that it fit three 12-oz bottles of beer and was wide enough that I could clean the tip of the toe by hand.

That’s where the poem began, with bubbling amber liquid tumbling around that over-sized glass, made for sharing. But why go where it went? Beer wouldn’t become my job for at least another year or two. It quickly obsessed me when it did, though: the way it can bring people together and change them; how it’s built community for millennia. But back then? I still drank a lot of liquor in those days, had never really heard of an IPA, had no real reason to focus in so closely on the drink that would later change my perspective so deeply.

Once combined, the door and poem inspired me and people close to me further. It first gave name to a dream studio I hoped to establish in that loft (and eventually beyond it), a place where friends and fellow artists could come and experiment, to talk and to try. To fail and to fly. “Pour and spill. Stand and drink and fill.” None of the theatre- or dance-makers I knew could afford studio rentals for the kind of time we were used to spending on a project. So we already crowded into tiny outer-borough apartments to rehearse. I had a big one. Why not share it? I didn’t want to make money, just carve out some space for my artistic community. I imagined weekly reading groups and monthly workshops. Every couple of months we could throw a party to share what we made, gather an audience to propel our next phase of work.

The Glass Boot Studio showed up in a variety of notebooks during my time in Bushwick. And we threw plenty of parties there, but no salons. And soon, it was time to leave and not look back. Other, younger white kids started to move in around us, with tech jobs or wealthier parents.

As gentrification crept deeper into Brooklyn, it eventually helped fling the art and artists who populated that apartment all over the country. Both LaLa and Davis ended up in Cali for a time. By chance, Colorado called for both Andrew and Mama-Kina. The pink chair followed my husband John and I to two more Brooklyn apartments before leaving with us for the ’burbs. Goodness knows where the paint that turned it pink ended up.

The glass boot broke, at some point, just like most glasses I’ve ever hand-washed more than a dozen or so times. But the poem it inspired, written on an old heavy door that just showed up one day? It got to the ’burbs well before I did.

My father propped it against a wall in his office years ago, perhaps even as soon as we left Bushwick, years before we left Brooklyn entirely. Even from afar, it gave a name to the home brewery Andrew and I built for ourselves. Like so many hobbyists before us, we felt compelled to organize our imaginary business around some idea, some image, some theory of beer-making and beer-sharing. The Glass Boot suited us just fine.

And like so many other home brewers, the hobby obsessed us quickly as we looked past the messiness of brewing toward the joy of making and sharing what we made. We honored what we loved with recipes and shared our creations with those we loved. And rather than some complicated bit of choreography or jumble of words, it was just beer we shared. Simply, perfectly simply, beer. When we offered it to family and friends and strangers, they knew us a little bit better, we felt. And in the conversation that followed, we knew them too.

We haven't brewed together in a while now, since before he headed west. The name still suits me though. Still holds a set of swirling imaginations: about places where we can share, maybe over-share, maybe just listen, but to somehow connect and to leave more connected. And now I see the door and the words written on it every day. Every time I walk into my father’s office to ask a question, or provide feedback on a draft, or crack a joke, or see if he wants to pick up mom after work and join me at our local brewery, where we’ll chat with the owner or the brewer about their latest creation, make plans for the futures we want to build together and clink glasses and connect with someone new.