Remember the last time you came across a lame overly entitled kid at a bar? Or perhaps a recent conversation sparked the notion that, yeah this guy’s daddy got him a job. Or maybe you wondered how the hell that young guy driving around in a brand new car could afford it. Welcome to real world Brooklyn, where a cast of outsiders hired to play the part is merely redundant.
On the day before Thanksgiving, at the corner of Prospect Place and Washington Avenue, Harvey Keitel put back the driver’s seat of a vintage ambulance and caught a little shut-eye. Looking like his role as the similarly vice-ridden cop in the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, Mr. Keitel awaited set-up for his next scene as Lieutenant Gene Hunt on the ABC show Life On Mars.
“That’s Brooklyn Heights over there,” said the 47-year-old driver of a Brooklyn-bound double-decker Gray Line tour bus, pointing across the East River. “Wherever there’s water, there’s money, and I don’t mean a puddle on the street.”
I had just boarded the at the South Street Seaport, paid my $41 fare, and taken my seat at the front of the top level, prepared to spend two hours Monday viewing my borough through the eyes of a stranger. The driver was warming up the crowd with a rendition of the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” while we waited for our actual guide, an older Southern man named Robert, who has lived in New York since 1971. Robert boarded the bus and we were on our way.
