Child at the Dump

Our beloved (silent) partner in blog, Petrova, hails from Staten (Drama) Island. Long ago, when we were first friends and roommates, I would beg her to regale me with tales of the Motherland, tales of car bombings and rotating marble observatories and men at the medi-spa. Perhaps the most poignant, were her descriptions of the dump at Fresh Kills (what a name for a neighborhood!) and the peculiar psychosis of the borough assigned the unsavory task of receiving and processing our fair city's waste. The story arc was fascinating--young families escape the turmoil and otherness (diversity) of Brooklyn/Queens/the Bronx in search of suburban sameness, something a bit more in step with the rest of the country, yonder over the Verrazano; instead, they build a colony of Guido strangeness, a true New York stepchild to which all dust and rot is exiled, a bitter grave for the remains of the Twin Towers. The dump (and all of the failings and seeming punishments it signified) became fodder for nueroses among Staten's settlers. Sometimes, fed-up and a tinge manic, Petrova would throw our detritus out of the window and into the quad, anything to get the garbage out of sight and mind.

When I first played "There But for the Grace of God (Go I)," the socially conscious, narrative disco song produced by August Darnell (of the incomparable Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band), she was thrilled. It is esentially the story of the Island presented in its favored medium, the club anthem, top full of the dynamic intermingling of tragedy and synthesizer. Fresh Kills may be in the midst of a spectacular transformation, a return to Staten's state of nature, a haven for Unami Indians and Transcendentalism, but within the six minutes of a song, we can still recall the kamp and struggle of the last quarter century: