I bike past Spike Lee’s office all the time: a carriage house, hardly nondescript with Knicks banners flapping in the wind and Hammons’ flag on the rooftop. I once went to the bar next door without realizing its placement in the neighborhood (Fort Greene, next door to 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks), only to find it loud and a bit brash for a Sunday evening. Did I not remember whose neighborhood I sat in?
I rarely remember its existence. The house that built Do the Right Thing and Bamboozled is simply there, and I stumble upon it after a wrong turn or a directionless walk. (You can find it on any map.) Most nights it’s late, and though it’s a wild 30 feet from Lafayette Ave — the minor hill I drag myself up on the bike and swerve around idling Amazon vans and clueless Uber drivers — I still forget I’m passing the office where, on good days, you can just go see Spike Lee, hanging out or on the phone.
I spoke with him briefly a few times before. Just for kicks, but who am I? He’s approachable, sure, but he’s also at the sidelines on the TV, or sitting next to David Byrne in a mini-doc, or in commercials he directed. I keep my hellos brief as I do with all notable names, because he doesn’t know me from Adam. I did the same the day after the Knicks championship win: go up, congratulate, and leave.
This is New York City. Brooklyn, to be specific. Everyone lives here, and many of them are around the corner. The curly-haired kid who played reggae on Saturdays and got inappropriately drunk at the bar where I got engaged eventually ended up starring in The Bear. Jeff Mangum would stand outside the bodega where I would get sandwiches on the way to “see my dad in Queens.” Guy Picciotto and I shop at the same kitchenware store in Park Slope. (We own the same ramekins.) I found Peter Kember nodding off three different times on a train line I rarely took. David Cross sits in the corner window of some bar on Vanderbilt, thinking.
Name dropping, sure, though not out of interest in the cult of celebrity and more of a fascination with the idea that I’ve pressed a button on my phone or TV remote and these people’s works have appeared, only to walk outside and see them appear. The world is a big place and so is New York. But it’s also small enough to watch the Knicks win one night and wander over to Spike Lee’s place the next day, an impromptu street party in full effect and the man himself just saying hi.