&
In this essay, Brian Buchanan shares he’s thoughts on Funbubble, The Dump and more! In what might be his last article for a while here with Shaolin Art Party
part I
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Fun Bubble, you know, as one does. When I say a lot, a lot is doing a lot of work here. Because really, I don’t have any good reason to ever think deliberately, seriously, or critically about the Fun Bubble, let alone on a regular basis. What I’m saying is: the fact that I think about it at all by definition means I think about it a lot. Such as it is. I’ve done it enough over the course of time that I can close my eyes and instantly recall the Fun Bubble as a hyper, vivid picture in my mind’s eye. I could be anywhere, except no, I’m actually back in the 90s, inside the bubble of fun. You might assume, then, I’d be able to explain the Fun Bubble down to the minute detail for persons unfamiliar. You’d imagine I’d be able to use my words to conjure its vibe, give you the rundown, the general mise-en-scène. But the Fun Bubble is a paradox: it is, both at the same time, incredibly obvious yet utterly indescribable. Like, in one sense, it was—structurally—a bubble, and it was, yes, a fun spot. In another sense, however, the feeling it gave me as a child—as it gives me now!—is the reason the English language invented catch-all words like ineffable. My hunch tells me, “I don’t actually know how to put this to words,” is not what my editors at the Shaolin Art Party blog want to hear, but I’m pinning the foundation of this article on this impossible task, and so I must try.
Let’s see. OK, first: the Fun Bubble looms large in the collective memory of a segment of Staten Island’s (now) adult population. As with anything that once had a mythic quality during its operation, it has since attained a legendary status in its defunctness. What’s interesting is we had another bubble on the island (there was for many years a similar, if not even larger bubble sports complex in New Dorp) and other places renowned for delivering on fun (such as Fun Station). But there was only one Fun Bubble. And because it was unique and because it’s no longer around, it allows for the best type of lip-smacking gate-keeping imaginable. I guess that’s another reason why trying to explain it is a futile endeavor: let’s say I could describe it down to the millimeter or paint that picture in my mind I just described or use hundreds of words to tug at every string in your heart, it wouldn’t be enough. Not by half, and not if I had twelve eternities to try. You just had to be there. You had to be a kid getting that party invitation. You just had to. And if you didn’t, I don’t know what to tell you. Clearly. I’m 99% certain everyone who does know what I’m talking about is vigorously nodding along to every sentence in this paragraph.
There’s something funny about all this, though. See, even though I was there, even though I have a clear picture of it in my mind, and even though I know what I feel when I think back about it—and those feelings are real, I promise!—I don’t have any distinct memories of the Fun Bubble. I was young, it was a long time ago, and it’s not even that my memories are mush and run together. I’m not sure what I think are my memories of the Fun Bubble are of the Fun Bubble. Part of why I’ve been hiding from describing the Fun Bubble is because I can’t verify any particulars. The absolute last thing I’d ever want to do in life is spread misinformation about an institution as sacred as the Fun Bubble in an esteemed publication such as the Shaolin Art Party blog. Googling ‘staten island fun bubble’ yields very little (which only adds to its myth); I’ll save you the trouble:
Here is a Reddit thread from ten years ago of someone asking for some pictures. No one shared any. Some people gave simple anecdotes, but none of them feel particularly resonant to me.
The Advance ran an article asking “Do you remember the Fun Bubble?” about five years ago. I don’t subscribe to the Advance, so I can’t read it, and I’m too lazy to find a way to skirt the paywall.
The invaluable Instagram page classicstatenisland has a post of what I believe might be THE only photo of the Fun Bubble on the entire internet.
ANYWAY. I’ve put it off long enough. This is my full and comprehensive list of what I think I specifically remember about the Fun Bubble. I remember there being arcade-type games lining the round walls. You know the type—skee-ball and such. I vaguely recall they had a small booth with trinkets you could trade for using tickets won at these games. I’ll be honest: Fun Station had a bigger booth with better prizes and was only around the block and up the street on Victory Boulevard. Already, I displayed entrepreneurial thoughts about an exchange rate between Fun Bubble and Fun Station tickets. My most prominent memory—or the one I feel most secure about, what I see when I close my eyes—is this: I’m looking down from a great height, near the top of a massive jungle maze. There are tubes and slides and nets and a ball pit somewhere beneath me. I might as well be at the top of the Tower of Babel with the bubble ceiling mere inches away, a porous firmament with Heaven itself on the other side.
That’s it. That’s all I got. I know I went to birthday parties there, but the particulars are lost to time. The post from classicstatenisland has some crucial details. I have no way to corroborate these facts, and I’m not a journalist, so I’m just going to take their word as absolute truth. They say the Fun Bubble opened in 1994 and closed abruptly in 2000. That tracks—I would’ve been seven or eight around then, and likely already a little too old for it, maybe. They say it had four distinct party rooms. This is surprising to me. Maybe sections were cordoned off for parties (and I supposed you could’ve gone to the Fun Bubble independent of being invited to a party just to play), but gun to my head, I would’ve said it was all one big room. I mean, it was the Fun Bubble, not the Fun Bubbles, you know what I mean? Lastly, they say there was a three-level play maze, which confirms the image in my mind as being, amazingly, based on something.
We are eleven hundred words in. Why in the world is the Fun Bubble so important to me? To be clear: it is not. At least, not outside the device I’m constructing for the rest of this article. I do not miss the Fun Bubble. I’m not calling for its return. While I do think about it “a lot”, I don’t, actually. But it’s an intriguing childhood institution in that it represents a definitive shift in my life.
One day, travelling along the West Shore Expressway, it was simply not there anymore. I believe I cracked the joke, “Who popped the Fun Bubble???” but I was likely more than a little bit bummed out. When you’re young enough, everything around you appears like it’s been there forever, and will always be there forever. I didn’t think about how businesses could end, or that a place such as the Fun Bubble even operated as a business. At seven years old, a bubble of fun feels like a money (or at least ticket) printing machine. That it could go away or—worse!—not even be replaced was unfathomable. It was simply a part of What Is, and even when What Is becomes What Was, if that’s all you’ve ever known, that becomes your baseline for Normal.
And so you go through life thinking what’s Normal for you is Normal for everyone else. That’s what makes Normal normal. Later in life, you casually mention offhand in conversation how, when you were growing up, you used to go to parties at the apex of amusement called the Fun Bubble. The name alone doesn’t provide any context, and then you find yourself tap-dancing around the conversation, trying to explain what a bubble is or what made it fun. The things that make the most sense are always the most difficult to explain, because what is there even to explain? It just makes sense! It’s innate! Normal! Actually, you’re the weird one if you didn’t grow up with a Fun Bubble!
There are maybe a million Fun Bubbles in my life, large and small. I take them for granted. Some make themselves apparent on a daily basis and others that will remain unknown to me until my dying breath. Most of my Fun Bubbles run somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and the spheres of their influence wax and wane over time. Like bubbles. More and more, however, I've been thinking about the outsized influence of one thing I accepted as Normal for too many years. Something that, although it has also closed, still crops up in my day to day life in unexpected ways. Something that has become the defining symbolic representation of Staten Island. Something that, funnily enough, used to call the Fun Bubble its next door neighbor.
I’m talking, of course, about the Dump.
part II
The only thing more fucked up than growing up with a dump is thinking that shit is normal. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to adequately explain how strange it was going out into the wider world and learning that peers and acquaintances from far beyond did not also grow up near towering mountains of garbage. Why me? Why us? I tried to rationalize it and be practical about it: I take my garbage to the curb two times a week like everyone else on my block; sanitation workers haul it away and I never think about it again. It must go somewhere, right? But I don’t know where. I don’t want to know. Theoretically speaking, no principled person wants to be a NIMBY, but the central crux of NIMBYism is that it is the crossroads where the theoretical meets the practical. Put another way: I’m worried I’ve kicked the can down the road, literally! Maybe there is another town somewhere, in parts unknown, where children just like my younger Fun-Bubble-going self are growing up in the shadows of my trash heaps, thinking it is Normal. One day they too will discover the confusion and shame as I did.
And the Smell.
The Smell! Talk about the anti-lip-smacking gate-keeping. If you’re unfamiliar with the Smell, consider yourself lucky. Everyone has dealt with something rotten, lurid, pungent, fetid. But the defining characteristic of the Smell wasn’t what it did to my nose. I remember hot summer days, begging my parents to take me to the old Toys ‘R’ Us by the mall, where the stench was everywhere. And strong—you didn’t get the sense it was simply hanging in the air. Instead, it was as if the Smell was embedded within everything, not unlike how ink gets in and under the skin for a tattoo. The Smell didn’t come from that big hill over there, it was coming from the car door handle, the sizzling parking lot blacktop, my new toy. I’d want to go home and shower, but even if I did, I couldn’t wash away what was already inside me. I would be clean and fresh, but actually that was just my nose-blindness setting in. I swear, even today, you can catch a whiff of the old Smell if you’re in the area. The conditions have to be perfect—as if trying to ritualistically summon a ghost on a warm day—but weak as it may be, when the Smell hits, it is as unmistakable as it is undeniable. Once again, I can sense those who know what I’m talking about nodding along vigorously.
The Dump has been closed for decades at this point. As I type, it is in the process of converting into the Freshkills Park, which will take—(and jeez, my eyes popped out of my skull like a cartoon character when I just looked this up)—another decade at least (wtf). If and when the reclamation is complete, it’ll be about three times larger than Central Park. I’m sure it’ll be beautiful. I take the West Shore Expressway to work every day, moseying along the area, often wondering if Staten Island can go through a similar reputational rehabilitation. A recycling, if you will. It’d be a big job. For starters, we’ve been on the wrong side of history forever:
The original Dutch, and later British settlers expelled the indigenous populations so thoroughly that, in a state with Manhattan, Schenectady, Canarsie, Ticonderoga, Nyack, Poughkeepsie and many, many, many more, there is not a single town on Staten Island with a name of Native American origin.
During the Revolutionary War, the Island was largely Loyalist.. We were the landing ground for a huge number of hired Hessian troops. The Peace Conference at The Conference House was a failure.
The whole secession business.
I could go on and on. I should mention the abuse at Willowbrook. I ought to mention the killing of Eric Garner. I know my writing here can come off as glib or flip, but I take our history seriously, that and everything I hear from friends and peers that don’t make the news or the history books. I’m not trying to whitewash Staten Island’s reputation. I’m also not wishing to sing a happy song and get everyone to join hands. We need real change that addresses systemic, institutional problems. That’s just a given.
What concerns me is how messaging re: Staten Island gets transmitted through the arts (this is an art blog, after all). There’s a link—I strongly believe—between our depiction in the art world and how we ultimately end up being perceived by the masses beyond Staten Island. Now that I write that down, it feels kind of obvious and true for everything. Where it gets sticky for us, though, is that in the most mainstream circles, Staten Island exists solely to be dunked on. We are Jersey Shore, we are Mob Wives. Our patron saint—Pete Davidson—has “joked” about the island being taken out by a huge, biblical tidal wave because this is a terrible place filled with terrible people. My issue isn’t with the veracity of statements like this. My issue is that: even if we do suck, instead of ever sparking action, these claims simply give the masses license to pile on.
I have an example. In 2020, powerhouse author N.K. Jemisin published The City We Became, a dazzling tale that imagines New York City and its boroughs as living avatars. Despite being a card-carrying nerd, I tend to read more literary fiction than science fiction or fantasy, but this book’s blurb made it too enticing—too personal—to pass over. That, and Ms. Jemisin’s reputation as a writer was unimpeachable as a three time Best Novel Hugo winner (for the Broken Earth series). I started reading and, well, my feelings about The City We Became are complicated!
N.K. Jemisin’s prose is unlike anything I’ve ever read. The words hum, the pages vibrate. I literally cannot sit still when I read her work. Like all the best stories, The City We Became was honey for the soul, expanding in real-time the limits of my imagination… and then I’d read the Staten Island sections. It’s been a few years, the details are foggy, but the gist of the main Staten Island character is that she’s a white woman of Irish descent; her father is a cop and he tries to set her up with a white supremacist. And then SPOILER ALERT this character ultimately sides with the villain, royally screwing over the rest of New York City.
I have a problem with this. If you’re expecting my issue to be with how Staten Island is depicted in The City We Became, however, that isn’t it. Aside from one minor factual quibble, I found the snapshot of Staten Island and its people accurate. Trying to write about a real place is not a difficult task, but an impossible one (double impossible if it’s about the Fun Bubble). There’s simply no way to capture everything, and so all nuance gets whittled away. If I’m disappointed at all, it’s that someone whose prose is a magnificent feast settled on the nutritional equivalent of McNuggets when depicting my home. Or put another way: I didn’t read anything I hadn’t already heard a hundred thousand times before. What N.K. Jemisin wrote was truthful. Full stop. And it was only a truth, not The Truth. Not the whole truth.
My issue is this: for many people, The City We Became is an authoritative text on Staten Island, informing them from a blank slate or confirming whatever they already assumed. It’s worth saying N.K. Jemisin isn’t a Staten Islander—she’s a Brooklynite. I’m sure that’s enough—combined with her clout as a recognized, successful author—to legitimize her version of Staten Island in the hearts and minds of her readers. The Hugos were another stamp of approval when they gave the book a (deserved!) Best Novel nomination. And sure, there might’ve even been a redemption arc for Staten Island in the follow up novel The World We Make, but that book did not get nearly the same amount of critical or commercial buzz. And so: it does not take an advanced X or BlueSky search to see how The City We Became is THE representation of Staten Island for a not-insignificant number of people:
brushwoodmutt.bsky.social, BlueSky, 11/4/2025: N.K. Jemisin even has a book that explains Staten Island to those unfamiliar with NYC boroughs! The City We Became
alyssaharad, X, 11/9/20: For one explanation of Staten Island’s Covid rates please see @nkjemisin’s THE CITY WE BECAME.
dahoovster.bsky.social, BlueSky, 11/4/2025: I loved @nkjemisin.bsky.social’s “The City We Became” as a non-New Yorker she made it clear what persona Staten Island has
andrew-weldon.design, BlueSky, 11/4/25: I am not from New York but everything I need to know about Staten Island I learned from The City We Became
Toepick5, X, 11/12/2020: Having just finished N.K. Jemisen’s [sic] THE CITY WE BECAME, I finally understand Staten Island.
I stopped at five examples. I have to assume there is a legion more around the globe that believes similarly but didn’t broadcast it online. I also recognize that N.K. Jemisin is not responsible for what readers take away from her books. But I’m not making this stuff up, either—these are all real things real people said. Consider the laugh you’d have if, after reading this article, you saw someone tweet:
“Wow, just read @brianbuchanan57’s piece on the Fun Bubble and now I’m an expert! AMA.”
You can guess how I felt when I learned the New York Public Library’s first ever Big Summer Book Club chose The City We Became as the book to read this summer. Externally, I’m like: it’s an incredible book that New Yorkers specifically will find resonant and thrilling—I might even join in! Internally, I’m like: sick, cool. Cool cool cool. I’m going to see all this dunking across my social feeds again. Curiously, too, there are six branch discussions at various libraries across Staten Island for this Big Summer Book Club… and none of the libraries on Staten Island’s South Shore are participating! Where it would uniquely challenge its community compared to Manhattan or The Bronx! Instead, we’ll be reading this book all across the city and everyone will reaffirm every preconceived notion they already had for us to begin with! Super!
When you put it all together: if this is the only exposure to Staten Island people have, it piles on even more inertia whenever we try to move forward. How we’re perceived becomes all the more entrenched. That’s more hearts to open, sharper rhetoric to grind. It’s a downer. It’s frustrating. We have so many actual battles to fight here on Staten Island and beyond, yet so much of our time and energy is spent fighting these cosmetic ones.
Which brings us back to the Dump. You could not imagine a more perfect symbol for everything wrong about Staten Island than the Dump. People might say the best vessel for bad faith, incomplete, and narrow understanding of our little borough is all the secession stuff, but those people are wrong. I was a BABY at the height of all that nonsense, and now I’m a wrinkly greybeard. Our other borough neighbors can snidely dismiss Staten Island, but we aren’t going anywhere. Not physically, metaphorically, spiritually, whatever. So secession initiatives come and go, but the Dump… the Dump is forever. I could find someone on Reddit, X, or wherever calling Staten Island actual trash this second. We’re going to be stuck with this until the heat death of the universe. We’ve been “figured out” as a runaway feedback cycle: Staten Island is a trashy place, which attracts garbage people, who make trashy babies, who grow up and inhabit the garbage land, making Staten Island a trashy place. Such ouroboric logic is always self-evident and self-fulfilling. The city not only sent us their trash—which was bad enough!—but there’s been this persistent attitude that this is what we deserved, and still deserve.
We’ve always been trash because we will always be trash. We have it coming and we ask for it. All of us. All the time. Do you know how long it’ll take us to wash off the stink of this reputation? And just like the Smell, this stink doesn’t just hang in the air—it’s in us. We’ve internalized it. That’s just how Normal becomes normal, and you know what? I’m tired of this, Grandpa!!!
I don’t know about you, reader, but I am so beyond ready to stand up and say, “🖕EAT SHIT, ASSHOLES!!! 🖕” “Enough already.” Enough. There are many benefits to cultivating a thriving, supportive art scene on Staten Island, but this is one of them. We need visionaries. Boundary pushers. We need people that can dream of a better future, not to rewrite what’s true and mask our ugly, but to make more space in our collective imagination for what we can become. We have the potential. I see it. I feel it. I’ve been writing about this on this very blog for years now. But, I don’t know, we’re cooking, but maybe we’re not boiling yet? I don’t know. We can do this, though. We can. And while we’re doing it, wouldn’t it be better still if we could use a place like the Dump as a part of our reimagining? To take the symbol of our shame and humility and reclaim it? Recycle it?
And what if I told you we already have an example—a book!—that does just that?
part III
Ravi Gupta’s resume reads like a CVS receipt. He:
is an alumnus of Binghamton University and Yale Law School
worked on the first Obama campaign
was a special assistant and speechwriter for Susan Rice
started a network of charter schools in north Nashville
founded Mississippi’s first charter school
co-founded the political organization ARENA in 2016
was involved in starting the nonprofit media company The Branch
hosts the Majority 54 podcast
has a nonfiction book releasing in September
In between all that, he found the time to casually write a novel, Garbage Town, a story that brought him all the way back to his roots on Staten Island. “Starting from the beginning,” Mr. Gupta told me, “My dad is an immigrant from India. My mom grew up in Travis. Her family [are] Polish immigrants who arrived in Travis at the turn of the century.”
It is impossible not to see Mr. Gupta in his protagonist Raj Patel, the plucky, braces-adorned, young entrepreneur growing up in 90s Travis. Garbage Town—which Mr. Gupta initially, “wrote as a script, and it got some traction in Hollywood,” before being reworked as a novel—follows Raj and his crew at the start of summer break. After being introduced to this colorful cast, we soon find them in a heart-pounding sequence, dodging a rival gang in the parking lot of the old UA movie theatre and through the Showplace Bowling alley. The novel’s point-of-no-return follows soon after, as the action escalates to the most violently tumultuous night in Raj’s life, set within the Fresh Kills Landfill.
I was dumbfounded to learn about Garbage Town nearly a year and half after its publication. I grew up in the 90s. I’ve bowled at Showplace. I saw Fellowship of the Ring with my father at that UA Theatre. I ate at that Wendy’s with my SIBFL football team. I’m a major stan of the Fun Bubble. Someone wrote a book about Staten Island and it flew under my radar? How? Surely the Advance would’ve covered it, right? Guess again.
“It dumbfounds me that the Advance doesn’t cover this book,” Mr. Gupta said, “They never responded to anything. … I’m like, are they offended by it or something? That’s my question.” I did not ask if Mr. Gupta is not an Advance subscriber either, but I think I have my answer. The lack of coverage in Staten Island’s only major news publication is curious, though, especially after garnering widespread recognition including Staten Island’s first Gotham Book Prize nomination. You would think the Advance would want to champion a book that, in a cast of heroic characters, sees an Advance reporter as arguably the biggest hero of them all. There are theories: “Are they offended by it or something? … My guess is maybe they saw the title Garbage Town and didn’t realize I’m from Staten Island. … If you read the book, it’s a love letter to Staten Island.”
This I can vouch for. When Mr. Gupta recreates the settings from his adolescence, he does so with a fair balance of accuracy and esteem, never coating Travis with a too-saccharine brush. Quite the opposite, in fact—by anchoring Travis as a place with a gritty edge, it becomes a vibrant character unto itself. But some of the actual characters are born out of pure admiration, too, such as the owner of the old Phene’s Deli. “Chicky is based on a real guy who was amazing! And even though the book character is a bit of a grouch, it’s written from a place of love, because the real Chicky was just a great guy. He used to scare me as a kid, but he was a great guy.”
Staten Island certainly isn’t painted as an island paradise, either. By page 100, for example, Raj is on his way to a meeting with the head of the local crime family, filling out the cast with… well, they ain’t boy scouts. This is where the plot for the rest of the novel is laid bare, and also where narrative credulity stretches to its max. Creatively, it’s a big swing that ultimately justifies the risk taken if only for the entertaining ride to the eventual payoff. Let me put it this way: there’s nothing in Garbage Town that’s wackier than any of the more zany episodes of The Sopranos (of which there were plenty).
Raj also confronts casual—and uncasual—racism from his friends and enemies alike. This feels unavoidable when a Staten Island story rests on the shoulders of a kid with a mixed background. But Mr. Gupta contends he, “wasn’t setting out to make a statement about race at all. I started out from the perspective of, ‘Write what you know,’ because that was my experience.
“I come from Democratic politics, [and now] Ivy League kind of media where I think there’s this sort of ‘English Lit’ sensibility where you have to find the grievance, whether it fits or not. And so as I was writing it, I was conscious of the fact that, to write a story of a kid like Raj is to constantly find reasons to make him aggrieved because of his difference. I did not want to write anything that wasn’t true to my experience, and what wound up coming out was a kid who maybe had a few things here and there that were obstacles, but by and large was accepted and loved by the people around him. … [E]verybody was aware of race … but it was not the defining thing about anybody. … You would hear a group of friends who are five different races, five different people making fun of each other. But loving each other and being friends. And we’re still all friends, those who made it out.”
There’s much to commend this book on outside of its portrayal of Staten Island. The first twenty-five pages are fueled by pure octane. The language throughout is crisp, the writing well paced, and the narrative structure is a fresh take on a classic formula. That said, I did encounter a few points of friction. For example, there were some incongruities that I bumped against, such as when one character weeps and Raj remarks he’s never seen this character cry before… except that same character cried in front of Raj just a few chapters earlier. In the second half of the novel, new characters tend to be introduced—and subsequently dropped—depending on their convenience to the larger plot. Personally, I could’ve lived in the smaller scale, The Warriors—esque world for the whole book, but I’m not going to fault Garbage Town for its ambition and inviting meatier stakes. If anything, there was one quirk of this novel—if you can call it that—that ended up leaving me profoundly impacted.
Raj’s father is largely absent from this story, a reality taken from Mr. Gupta’s own life: “Yeah, the dad situation. … My dad did leave, move down south, and it wasn’t until later on that we reconciled. He was just not much of a figure in the day-to-day in Staten Island. … The trope is that the missing dad is this big void.” Garbage Town tees up and plays this expectation in the form of an unopened letter from Raj’s father. Rather than have this letter fall into the hands of some rivals, Raj tears the letter up. For the rest of the novel, we never learn its contents, nor do we hear from Raj’s father again. Despite this—perhaps by having twisted father figures fill the void in the form of some Made Men—Raj remains largely unaffected. “In some ways, I was trying to invert the trope. … [Raj] was concerned about [his father], … but he was not consumed by [him]. … [That’s] what my experience was.” All novel I waited for the other shoe to drop regarding Raj’s father, but it never came. After sitting with that when I finished, I found this lack of closure stunningly realistic. More than that, my imagination ran wild with what the letter—and the continued radio silence—signified. I couldn’t help but craft head-canon theories, the most prominent of which involved an illness disclosure relating to exposure from the Dump.
“The big thing looming over everything in this book is the Dump, right? … The environmental impact and health impact of it. There’s been all kinds of studies debated and whether there’s proof or not that there’s a higher cancer risk in that area. … It feels like—and maybe this is just life in modern times—but it feels like everybody had cancer growing up.” I’m aware of a few local studies conducted, one from New York City in 2020 and another from New York State in 2019. The city’s study concluded: “Although we found higher rates in [thyroid and bladder] cancers in the former Fresh Kills Landfill study area, we were unable to find evidence to support a link to potential landfill-related exposures.” Similarly, the state study concluded: “Results from the environmental investigation did not show any unusual environmental exposures that could explain the excess in thyroid cancers on Staten Island.” These studies attribute a spike in reported rates to an increase in screening for people living in Travis and other surrounding neighborhoods. But a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Toxics in 2021 found the overscreening explanation lacking when compared to the statistical signature of a screening-driven spikes elsewhere: the tumors weren’t disproportionately small, early-stage, or in younger patients. Paired with the demonstrable and measured presence of carcinogenic materials found within the Fresh Kills Landfill, the Toxics authors come just short of blaming the Dump. They call for further, more expansive studies. I’m not holding my breath that Staten Island will ever get a straight answer. In the meantime, I can understand the skepticism of Travis residents who heard stories from their neighbors, who smelt the Smell for themselves, who saw leachate overflowing in their streets after a storm. “[Travis] just feels like a very unhealthy place to live. The fact that the city kept [the Dump] going for so long explains a lot about that area’s genuine posture towards the rest of the city.”
All told, I believe Mr. Gupta—through Garbage Town—offers Staten Islanders not just a compelling, worthy read, but the blueprints for imagining our island fully. I asked Mr. Gupta if he believed this was possible, the same way the Wu-Tang Clan transformed Staten Island in this blog’s own namesake. I want to give his words the floor: “I’m always talking about how interesting I think Staten Island is, especially the period of time I write about. … I think it was among the most fascinating places to grow up at any point in history. … A place like Staten Island—which has such a unique landscape and can be such an exciting place to be—has so many cool places to explore. Abandoned hospitals and little patches of woods and neighborhoods that feel different from each other and have different ethnicities. It was just primed for wandering children. … It was meant for kids to roam and conducive to that.
“Now, when I go back, I talk to parents, my friends—they’re parents now—but I also just see it with my own eyes: there’s not kids anywhere. … I think the experience of kids growing up there is probably way less unique than it was when I was a kid. Being a kid there is probably not that much different than being a kid anywhere, because if you’re staring at TikTok and not going outside, then you can do that from Cleveland. … I just think that one part of the book is specific to Staten Island, but was also a call back to what I think is the better time to live … in terms of your attention and your ability to take in your surroundings and embrace boredom and explore.”
We ended our conversation talking about how all these important locations, where all these important coming-of-age moments occurred, shared proximity with the Dump. And the Smell. “It’s funny, because they [all] flanked the Dump. Wherever we’re hanging out, it stunk. The whole island would smell at times, and it took a long time for that smell to go away. … It [was] a hard smell. Horrible. Whenever you just got out of your car. It’s such a weird thing to have grown up with and think, ‘It felt normal.’ And then it wasn’t until I was older, I was like, ‘Oh, this is not common at all.’” At least for Mr. Gupta, he has a better, lighter reaction than I do whenever he catches a whiff of the Smell these days. “They put the garbage on the sides of the streets in New York, and sometimes it’ll smell really bad. When I smell that, it actually takes me back to my childhood. It’s like whenever I saw the garbage on the side of the street, like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ It’s like a nostalgia feeling.”
I didn’t intend for this article to be a fancy review with a big recommendation. Like, I want you to make that decision for yourself, sure, but also—and you’re not going to believe this—I don’t think I could properly articulate what I felt reading this book. As a Staten Islander, it’s the book I’ve always wanted to read. It’s too personal, I have too much bias!!! As a result, I’ve been wrestling with what to say here for a while. I’m weeks behind my self-imposed deadline. And then, by sheer kismet, the perfect Stanley Kubrick quote found me and bailed me out: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.”
With that in mind, all I can say is this: I loved reading Garbage Town.
part IV
I’m sure when I send this article to my friends for a look-over, before they get here at the end, they’ll ring me up and ask: “Why do you care so much?” Why is it that I seem hell-bent on changing the narrative around Staten Island? The conversation will play out sort of like this:
Them: Who cares what other people think? Fuck the rest of the city.
Me: First of all, it’s not just about them, but us, too. Second, I am (unfortunately) human and am almost singularly driven by what other people think of me. Most people are like this, too, actually, and I’m just more open and honest about it. Plus, I’m tired of pretending that how we’re perceived by other people generally, and the rest of the city specifically, doesn’t have tangible ramifications.
Them: Even if any of that is true—and I doubt all of it—there’ll always be people that’ll remain steadfast in their convictions. They’ll always perceive us in a way that’s best convenient to their own egos.
Me: So we shouldn’t try at all? We should let others—outsiders—define us?
Them: If their hearts are impenetrable, it’ll be better to live up to their expectations of us. Maybe we should embrace their labels.
Me: The solution cannot be for us to justify being the worst shitheads ever.
Them: Fine. But what about the people you care about and respect most? Shouldn't you focus on those people?
Me: I’m already counting on those people as a given, and that’s still a big assumption.
Them: You’re sure you’re not putting a little too much stock in dumb jokes people make on social media? Maybe you need to go touch grass.
Me: More than one thing can be true at a time.
Them: But is it really that bad, honestly? Like, is this a real issue?
Me: I’m not a victim, I’ve not been wronged, I do not suffer any physical or emotional harm from being a Staten Islander. Also: these attitudes affect relations, it finds its way into city policy and legislation—it’s a million little things. It adds up. And even if it didn’t, they call us literal trash! That’s not OK!
Them: So what? That’s just the way it is. T’was ever thus.
Me: Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be like this, and I believe in my heart of hearts it would be better for everyone if it wasn’t.
That’s what it comes down to. It doesn’t have to be like this. It just doesn’t. We don’t have to have this antagonistic, prolonged catfight with the rest of New York. They’ve got their grievances? Let’s hear ‘em. And then we can give it right back. But what’ll it actually do for anyone?
Again, my mission is not even to erase Staten Island being trash. If that’s something that can’t be changed in my lifetime (or ever), so be it. We are trash. I am trash. There, OK? I do not deny it. I admit it. I own it. But I’m looking for more space, I’m looking for what’s next, what comes after. I’m searching for the ampersand. That’s all, truly.
We are trash… & we are teachers, lawyers, sanitation workers.
We are trash… & we are poets, musicians, dancers, singers, actors, comics.
We are trash… & we have Dorothy Day and Alice Austen and Sandy Ground.
We are trash… & we have Wolfe’s Pond Park.
We are trash… & we march for justice, look out for each other.
We are trash… & we have the ferry, the Verrazzano, the Outerbridge Crossing.
We are trash… & in 1776, we held a peace conference; we tried.
We are trash… & for millennia, we were home to the Raritan.
We are trash… & for too short a time, we had a Fun Bubble.
We are trash… & we’re working on it, all right?
Maybe that’s too much to ask for, I don’t know. Someone should do something—anything!— and I’m running out of things to try. Writing sometimes feels like all I know how to do, but even in the make-believe wargames I draw up in my mind to make things better, I am my own most worthless soldier. The good news is: I know I’m not alone, and others are walking the path ahead of me, clearing out the cobwebs.
— — —
I did have one major gripe with Garbage Town that feels like a personal snub: there are exactly zero (0) mentions of the Fun Bubble! Huh??? What??? I could not let Ravi off the hook without asking him about this glaring omission:
Brian: I’ll get you out on this, my biggest grievance with the book: where was the fun bubble? No mentions!
Ravi: You know, it’s funny. I did not spend a lot of time at the Fun Bubble. There were Fun Bubble dances, I remember, and I maybe went to one or two of those. But it’s weird—actually, the Fun Bubble is at the place where [Raj’s crew] would have been running, behind that movie theater, towards the [Dump’s] fence.
Brian: Yes, exactly!
Ravi: I honestly don’t even remember if I considered putting it in. But now that I’m thinking about it—and maybe this was on my mind—there’s only so much information you can give somebody in a critical scene, where it just becomes too much information. And the problem with introducing this weird Fun Bubble is that the goal in that scene is to get the kids into that parking lot, over the fence. And there was so much happening in that scene that I’m not sure we needed anything else, you know? As much as that would be a nice little slice of life, anybody who grew up in that period had so many references that they didn’t need that one.
Brian: Yeah, there’s no way to casually explain the Fun Bubble in passing.
Ravi: No, yeah. It was big! But yeah, it [would’ve] asked too many questions.
So, well, yeah, spoiler alert I guess: the Fun Bubble does not feature in Garbage Town. While this bums me out, I feel vindicated in equal measure. The Fun Bubble is unpresentable, truly—it contains so many multitudes it could not even survive a novel describing everything else around it. I wonder if there will ever be as good an opportunity ever again… Not unrelated: for half a second, I considered making a laundry list of everything I wish N.K. Jemisin included in The City We Became, but I dropped the idea as quickly as it came. What would be the point? That wasn’t her job, and even if it was, the book’s been published. If I care about it that much, I should just write my own damn book…
And that is what I’ve been working on for the past year or so. That’s also why this will probably be my final article for the Shaolin Art Party blog. I tend to skip from project to project regardless, but more than that, I’m not leaving as big a dent as I could. I made a prediction in my first Shaolin Art Party blog article, saying: “In all likelihood, the best I can hope for is that some of my friends will read this and at the next local show, they might say, ‘Hey, yeah, I agree; we do need a venue on the South Shore,’ before we abruptly change the subject to literally anything else.” By and large, I nailed it—such has been my experience with all my articles. I can feel myself getting stale; I feel like I’ve written and rewritten the same thing five times over, always coming to the same point, always drawing the same conclusions. I’ve been preaching to the choir, and I want to go beyond.
And so this book I’m writing takes place on Staten Island, in a quasi-alternate history of Tottenville. My first draft was 157k words, I need to bring it down under 100k if I want agents to even sneeze in its direction. And even then, odds are it’ll never see the light of day. But it’s where my fire is, it’s what’s driving me, creatively. Maybe I will get an agent, and it will get published, and it’ll become an international best seller, and then everyone will love Staten Island (my wife, supportive as she is, tells me this is an unrealistic expectation). As much as I love writing for this blog—and this has been an amazing joy in my life—the practical truth is that every minute I spend working on a blog post here is a minute I spend away from that fire. I’m an old man, and you only live once. #yolo
So thank you. Thank you to those that have given me feedback before publishing. Thank you to Melissa and Jah for letting me lease some space on this platform. & thank YOU—everyone that’s ever been generous with their heart, and took the time to sit here and hear me out as I raise my fist and bark at the sky.
Brian Buchanan is a physics teacher by day and, by night, a masked vigilante versatile artist. His passions span the realms of football, guitar pedals, & the law of large numbers. Brian finds beauty in the patterns of the universe, and his artistic soul is reflected in both his music and writing, where he weaves melodies and stories that touch the heart. At home, he finds inspiration and comfort in the company of two pups: Boo & Jem. Brian's gentle spirit and insights leave an enduring mark on everyone he meets (hopefully!!), making Shaolin a more beautiful place through his diverse talents.