I attended Kate and Justin joint “welcome to our new apartment”/“we’re gettin’ hitched” shindig. Their new place is the top floor of a house in Astoria near Jackson Heights. Their tiny, shared front yard features decorative cement pineapples, big fake flowers and, as Kate points out, “a Jesus statue and a tiny secondary Jesus statue at the foot of the big, primary Jesus statue.” It was an easy place to find even though I was unfamiliar with the neighborhood.
We grilled hamburgers and such on their equally small patio out pack. It was my first time viewing what’s a staple for house-dwellers in Queens: the garages behind the houses are topped with tall steel poles. From the pole to the house is strung a clothesline on a pulley for line-drying freshly washed laundry. I’m told a certain generation of Queens-dweller has burned into his brain the distinctive squeak of rusty laundry-line pulleys.
When it began sprinkling, we retreated back around front and up the steep staircase to the top floor, where Kate and Justin have a large collection of defunct media (VHS and audiocassette tapes), wind-up tin toys, dolls, taxidermied alligator heads, a few animal skulls, a tangle of homemade mutant sock moneys, and various prints and paintings, including an etching of the Ebola virus that Kate made and was unsure what to do with. Everyone shouted at once: “Etsy!”
When we were good and drunk, we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s, where a kid can be a kid and apparently also brazenly steal your Skee-Ball the moment you’ve inserted your token into the machine. We bought a chocolate cake to-go and ate it with our beer and cocktails at a local Irish bar that was authentic in that it featured actual Irish drunks.