Bunny Claws: The Place

I never did make it to work that day.  Instead, Chai took me back to his loft in Bushwick.  He said he lived with seven other guys, but most of them would be at their start-ups.  We ascended three incredibly long flights of stairs, littered with crates of old copies of Paper Magazine, boxes with tangled wires sticking out of them, and, for some reason, more brooms than I had ever seen in one place.  “What’s with the brooms?” I asked.  He shrugged and told me that Astor, his ex-girlfriend, had been doing an installation about witchcraft for some shoebox gallery on Lorimer.  “It was supposed to be a comment on expectations and assumptions about modernity and post-post-post-feminism,” he said.  “Oh, I think I went to that show,” I said, smugly.  “My best friend Dahlia was in that show.”  Did I have a best friend named Dahlia? I found myself wondering as Chai slid open the monstrous, industrial door to his loft.

I gasped.  It was paradise.  Cables and wires stretched over almost every surface and sliced through the air, which he had to duck under several times.  A pile of old TVs and VCRs set up camp in the corner of the main room.  I commented about how I was looking for a little black & white, so that I could watch the classics like they were meant to be seen.  He smiled a little bit, which actually turned me off for a second.  What was I doing?  I had followed a strange boy back to his weird loft in Bushwick, for what?  Just as I was about to cut and run, he slid back the curtain the separated his section of the loft from the main room.  Inside, was the largest collection of Casio keyboards I had ever seen.  Chai swung back his bangs with swift turn of the head and said, “So, you wanna make some music?”