Herald Culture: Breaking In

CULTURE Shooz!

by Adam Moftah

I

broke into the criminal scene at the tender age of 10, when I first encountered Shooz! 128. For those of you lucky enough not to know what Shooz! 128 is, it’s (or rather, to my satisfaction, it was) a stupidly named shoe store on 7th Avenue in Chelsea, six blocks from the hospital where I was born.

The purple doorframe displayed a button with the label “Push me if you’re ready for shit.” My sixth-grade self didn’t know how to process this. But my friends marveled at the idea that we could witness something clearly intended for a more mature audience by simply pushing a button. Since I was the tallest one and therefore the most intellectually developed, my friends figured that I should be the one to ring the bell and propel us into middle school maturity. As soon as I’d pressed the malformed doorbell, I regretted succumbing to peer pressure. A crusty-looking man came out and barked at me, “Are you ready for shit?!” I’d never been spoken to so explicitly by an adult, and by the looks on my friends’ faces, they hadn’t either. I mustered a quiet, “No thank you, sir,” and departed with my cohort.

After we left, my friends and I pretended to think the encounter was anticlimactic and so we decided to try it again the next day. So there I was ringing the bell once more, but to a much grander surprise: our old “Shooz!” salesman was nowhere to be found. Shocked, my other friend rang the bell with added gusto. Shoozman torpedoed out of the storefront and chased us down a crowded sidewalk with a fury I’ve never since seen from a man of his age. Fortunately for us, he was old and raggedy, so we escaped. Unfortunately for me, my pretensions of moral superiority crumbled before this act of delinquency. My mother would never again be able to truthfully call me “her good little boy.” I had broken bad.

18 – The Yale Herald

Midnight tea at the Lizzy by “Sunny Turner”

F

olks lucky enough to be invited to tea at The Elizabethan Club, one of Yale’s oldest literary societies, generally sign the guest book upon entry. This, however, was not the case for me and three friends when, against all odds, we found the Club’s back door left heroically ajar.

One by one, the four of us—Forest, Samson, Rick, and your humble correspondent—tapped down those worn stepping stones toward a sitting area cushioned by a row of hedges and a hood of winding ferns. And there, nestled in the half-dark yard of that sanctuary of inked page, Forest (or maybe it was Rick?) produced the first of our pre-rolled wands of worldly wisdom.

A spark, a cough, an exhaled exaltation, and here we were, delighting in the wild environs while greedily breathing that perfumed, alternative air the enlightened keep so strategically for themselves.

“In sooth, I durst not recall an eve more gay than this,” Samson proclaimed, the combination of proximity to first-folios and herbal influence already beginning to take effect.

“Indeed—our three-pronged God doth look down smilingly on us presently,” I remember responding with a chuckle.

Spirits were high, to say the very least. Too high, perhaps, because soon after we had finished ceremoniously burning the third of our joints, a light flashed on from the library. Then came a call, far off, yet undeniable—a melancholy sort of plea to “please vacate the premises.” The owner of the voice, emerging from the gloom, wore an unnaturally yellow jumper and menacingly brandished a flashlight.

Off we scampered, dizzied by the fumes and the sudden disruption, though not without the sweet memory of our midnight tea at the Lizzy.

Learning to look back

by Jordan Cutler-Tietjen

T

he first words I saw and the only ones I remember were on the cover: Sacred and Chaotic Fields, 1991. As I repeated the words in my head, memorizing their rhythm, I felt proud of my mother in a way I hadn’t before. I was 11 years old.

When friends asked me what my parents did, I would always say, “My Dad’s a physicist,” and pause; then, faltering, “And my Mom used to be a writer.” Now, in the midst of moving books from Grandpa’s shelf to our cardboard boxes, I was holding real proof of her past in my hands.

She walked into the room five minutes later, as I flipped through the pages of poetry.

Jordan, please, you shouldn’t read that, she said, and I heard something in her voice that I hadn’t before, something that made me feel like a trespasser. Her eyes jerked to find mine, as if to ask what I had stolen, or maybe what I had understood. I put the book down, disappointed and confused, and stretched out some tape to close a box.

I think my mother’s fear of what I might have found clouded her judgment of my ability to understand. She knew what was buried in the stanzas—her lost brothers, a childhood rabbit, the lust of a marriage now dry. But that’s not what I saw. I was looking for myself in the lines, some word or phrase that could have been mine. But I could not make her poetry a mirror.

Now, I can only hear her voice reading the title in my head. I feel the same pride I first felt, hear her quiet shame, and remember that although growing up makes the people around you seem to shrink, you finally get to see their shadows.

Barred

by Charlie Bardey YH Staff

I

spent the summer of 2015 deeply and passionately trying to understand what it would mean to be a New Yorker in their twenties.

I’d lived in the Big Apple all my life, but spent 100 percent of my time chilling on couches in the homes of my friends’ moms, all of whom were named Sharyn. If I were to live the hip, urbane life that I felt was my birthright, I had to make some changes, and get into what I’d heard was a thriving New York bar scene. I was 20 at the time, so I knew I had to do it (if you’re a law enforcement officer stop reading now) illegally, and armed with my (again if you’re a law enforcement officer I’m really going to have to insist you stop reading right away) Ohio fake ID, I had my ticket in.

Not content to work my way up, I shot for the moon. The first sceney bar was Kinfolk 94 in Williamsburg, which was hosting a wellknown (I guess) dancehall DJ. I was out of my league, both racially and hipness-wise. I had come with a friend who left after fifteen minutes, so I spent the next thirty minutes awkwardly nodding my way around the bar, accompanied only by my empty Five Points Ale can. I had promised myself I wouldn’t leave until I’d spoken to one person (…………..why?), so I tried to talk to a woman who I thought might be like “hi” but was instead like “wait no.” Fair enough. I left the bar in shame.

While I didn’t know it then, though, this would be a story of triumph. The next summer I returned to the bar for a magazine release party, this time with the law on my side and a cute shirt and some hip shoes. I finally felt, if not actively embraced, that I could drink my Five Point Ale in comfort and peace.

I had left Sharyn’s couch.

Nara Dreamland

by Eve Sneider

O

n a muggy afternoon last June, I went on a four-hour expedition with my mother and sister that involved (among other things) a dairy farm, a fully operational prison, a hot spring brimming with geriatric women, and a defunct amusement park. Allow me to explain.

A few days prior, my sister had stumbled across Nara Dreamland—an abandoned amusement park on the periphery of one of Japan’s more temple- and tourist-ridden cities—in a cobwebby corner of the Internet. We were planning a short trip, and a spooky theme park seemed like a perfect break from shrines and gardens and heritage sites. It was several kilometers away from the city center and promised a pleasant walk. It also just seemed really fucking cool.

We always do this, my family. We like long walks to far-out destinations. Over the years, we have trekked to Jewish cemeteries, steamy bathhouses, and even once to a local museum with a taxidermied two-headed goat on display (I kid you not).

In the case of Dreamland, we imagined ourselves admiring the peeling paint and traipsing down sweeping, lonely boulevards.

I’m not usually one for breaking and entering, but I like the idea of places that are left as they are, to be filled in by brush or chipped away at by time.

As it happens, we never made it inside Nara Dreamland.

Japanese summers are hazy and humid, and on the day in question the sky was just the right pre-storm gray out. A chance encounter with some friendly locals led us to the local prison.

My mother, an architect, inquired about interesting buildings, and they suggested a Meiji-era panopticon on a street lined with townhouses. Then came the dairy with fresh soft serve and cheese (!!!). We stopped at a local temple with flowers blooming all around it and what remains the largest oak tree I have ever seen.

Nara is a small city and, situated at its outskirts, Dreamland is surrounded by farmland. By the time we caught our first glimpse of rusty roller coasters peeking out from behind dense summer shrubs, the air was thick and heavy, and there wasn’t a person in sight. We walked past old rides and their empty tracks. We marveled at the clock tower frozen in time. But we didn’t go inside. We didn’t have to. It was about to storm. And anyway, the walk was the best part.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff

Oct. 14, 2016 – 19