seedlings of a new story - Democracy in America

My first apartment in Brooklyn was above a bar where none of the regulars looked under fifty. I'd go in to give my rent check to the bartender and heads would barely raise, nod slowly before going back to their Bud Light bottles. When I turned off the lights to go to sleep, I usually heard the moans of the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith drifting through the floorboards.

The rest of the block was quiet, except for on the first of every month another U-Haul would double-park on the hill, young mothers and fathers with babies attached to slings on their chest unloading antique bookshelves, new Ikea beds and lamps, raising their hand in apology to the Car Service guys who'd honk and mouth "Dios Mio" through their blue-tinted windshields. Usually the month would drift by, the mornings and nights marked by the rising and falling of the metal grates on the bodegas, but when I walked up the block and saw mildewed boxes of paperbacks and floral-print dresses hung on the iron railings of a stoop, I knew that another move day was coming, more honking, more apologies, more change.

One night I remember watching the snow trickle past the street lights as I sat on my radiator. I had plans to meet some friends at a bar on 14th Street that gives you a free pizza with every beer, and all I wanted to do was sit on the futon in the living room and watch a cop drama or a replay of a Yankees game, but I put on my boots that gave me blisters on my in-step and my puffy jacket with the zipper that stopped halfway up and headed toward the above-ground subway station. I tried to read a free newspaper on the platform, but the cold gnawed at my reddening fingers and I had to shove them in my pockets until the F came chugging out of the tunnel.

It was like any Saturday - we had a few beers and pizzas and then hit up another bar down the street where men watched the baseball game and complained about the weather and traffic. There were more young people than usual, all crammed in the back and throwing their arms over each other, some pumping dollars into the jukebox and looking for songs that they could dance to. We figured the bartender decided to stop checking IDs. Maybe they were short on rent for the month and needed cash fast. One of my friends went to the back to meet some girls and waved to us a couple minutes later, but we ignored him and finished our beers and gave a good tip and braced for the cold.

The subway back was fucked up, it was always fucked up on weekend nights. We waited at Jay Street, I thought about walking to the end of the platform and pissing into the dark tunnel, but then then the train came and we packed in and smelled the booze on everyone and tried to stay out of the way while some kids danced and flipped in the middle of the car. I got off at Fourth Avenue and trudged up the hill, slid my feet to make long tracks in the fresh powder. The plows had not made it down here yet; the quiet was perfect.

Towards the end of the block, I saw a cardboard box in front of a brownstone. It was half-filled with snow, but when I brushed it off with my hand I found a stack of books, some texts on school subjects like biology and geometry and a notebook filled with nothing more than the dates and titles of different novels. Pushed against the side was a copy of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America".

The cover was a picture of a rolling pasture with smoke billowing out of the chimney of a small gray house in the background. On a dirt path, a boy rode on a red carriage pulled by a horse and two men carried huge planks of wood down toward a shelter they were building by a pond.

I took it because it was in surprisingly good condition, and I couldn't remember if I'd read it before. Maybe it had been assigned in my government and politics course in high school. The only thing I remembered about that class was a mock campaign video that I made with some friends. I played the candidate. In one scene, I was dressed in a suit and tie and stood in front of a wall covered in grafitti. I pointed at the wall, and the grafitti disappeared.

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When the war of independence was terminated, and the foundations of the new government were to be laid down, the nation was divided between two opinions - two opinions which are as old as the world, and which are perpetually to be met with, under different forms and various names, in all free communities - the one tending to limit, the other to extend indefinitely, the power of the people.