Iron Fist

June 3, 2007

Signe sent me a text on Friday afternoon: "I just found out my friend Phil is having a low-key sunset BBQ on his roof in Greenpoint," came a text message from Friday afternoon. "Wanna come?"

I'd never met her friend Phil, but I trust Signe's taste in people, and a rooftop barbecue is hard to beat, so of course we wanted to go. I told her we'd be there.

Phil rents the top floor of a former bathhouse above what is now a guilding studio. There's no buzzer on the door, so when Deborah and I arrived, I called Signe to know we were downstairs.

"I'll be right down," she said.

She opened the door, gave us each a kiss and a hug hello and led us up the stairs, through a sparsely furnished loft, to an expansive rooftop where she introduced us to Phil, an independent filmmaker. An independently wealthy independent filmmaker, I assumed, judging by the size of this place. The roof (with exclusive access) was three times the square footage of my apartment, and the loft was three times the size again.

The place actually had access to two roofs, the one we were on just outside the kitchen area, and another, higher one, with a much better view. But since you had to climb a steep, narrow staircase too precarious for drunkards to navigate safely to get there, we confined ourselves to the lower deck. "It's nice up there," Phil said, "but it's nice here, too. And I mean, c'mon, this one is right outside the kitchen with a fully stocked refrigerator."

Phil overheard Deborah and me discussing what we would do if the roof were ours -- where we'd put the trees and where we'd place the hot tub, all of which Phil agreed would be nice, "In a perfect world of unlimited funds, sure," he said. "But here in reality, it's a cement roof painted silver."

"It's still cool like this," I said. "I actually like the silver."

"The girls love it," he said. "They all say the same thing as soon as they see it: I could get a nice, even tan up here. "

Deborah and I arrived too late for a tan, and walked to the roof's edge as a crimson smudge of clouds drifted lower and lower until it dropped behind the blinking Manhattan skyline on the other side of the East River. Looking down, over the roof’s retaining wall, there was construction everywhere. "What are they building?" I asked. "Luxury condominiums?"

"Probably," said Phil. "All I know is I'd better enjoy the view while I can." He pointed to his neighbor's roof — or rather to a brick wall obscuring his neighbor's roof. "I used to see the guy who lives over there every day. Whenever I was on my roof, he was on his roof. We'd wave to each other. Then that building started going up between us, and he was walled in. When that happens to me, I guess I'll retreat to the upper roof."

"Assuming it's not a forty-story building," I said.

Signe spent most of the night texting back and forth with another friend of hers who was apparently trying to convince her to go with him to another party. The barbecue was winding down, and the small gathering had already begun to talk of things like work in the morning.

"Where's the party?" asked Phil. "Maybe I'll go, too."

"Oh, you don't want to go," said Signe. "It's a James Bond theme party. That means I'll have to go home and try on a bunch of outfits first before I settle on my one-piece denim jumpsuit I already know I'm going to wear."

"And what exactly about any of that is supposed to discourage me?" said Phil.

"You'll have to change into a tux," said Phil's friend.

"Nah," said another. "He can just go as the Timothy Dalton Bond."

Which led to the age-old discussion of who is the best James Bond. The girls all vote for the new guy, Daniel Craig, of course.

"Pff,” one of Phil’s friends said. “Other than that banana hammock he was wearing at the beach, what do you girls like about him?"

Phil insisted that the only true James Bond was — and ever will be — Sean Connery.

"You mean the misogynist Sean Connery ?" asked the Columbia student.

I learned she was a Columbia student earlier in the night when she told me she lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She and her boyfriend had spent about seven months living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn before she'd been accepted to a Master's program and moved into student housing near the Columbia campus. The first time they heard a gunshot outside the window of their Bed-Stuy apartment, they called 911 to report it. "When I gave the operator our address, she actually laughed at us. I mean, really laughed."

The cops came to investigate, and all they could say was: "What the hell are you white kids doing in the neighborhood? You really need to move. You don't understand. You don't understand this neighborhood at all. The people out here are animals."

And so, despite a valiant effort at being a couple of free-thinking liberals, they finally took the cop's advice.

"I stayed with a friend in Bed-Stuy for a little while," said Deborah. "About ten years ago. Someone shot through his front window the night I arrived. I didn't stay long. Ten years ago, it was a lot worse than it is now, of course."

"Wait," I said to the Columbia student, "What did you mean when you said, Misogynist Sean Connery? What are you talking about?"

"He was recently quoted in an interview saying that it's okay to hit your wife with an open hand," she said.

A few of the others said that they had heard that, too.

"So what?" said Phil. "You can't change history. He was a product of his times. You can't write off every book or movie every time the social climate changes. His movies are still good."

"A product of his times?" said Deborah. "What is he, 150 years old?"

"Exactly," said the Columbia student. "The 1960s. Women's Lib, birth control, progressive social change everywhere you look except for the Iron Fist of Sean Connery."

"Well," I said. "In his defense, I heard his wife doesn't listen."

To which Deborah replied by smacking me across the back of the head with an open hand.