Steve Buscemi

On the 3rd floor of 606 Liberty Avenue we have stepped through a wormhole. It is located in the middle of a small apartment sitting above a deli. Steve Buscemi is with us. It’s the morning of October 20th.
            I’m not asleep.
            A few minutes earlier Buscemi is standing on a street corner, in front of the home and school in which he spent the first eight years of his life. He’s traveled back to the middle of East New York to see us. We are conducting an interview and a photo shoot. It’s early. Sleep still drifts inside his body. But even through this 9AM haze, you can tell this spot is special to him. He’s looking at these corners and slabs of concrete like mislaid photographs found hidden in the pages of an old book.
            And then Chance, a well-known personality on the streets of Brooklyn, leans its head out of a top-floor window.
            From the apartment above us, the very apartment Buscemi grew up in, a man looks in on our actions.
            “I’m Steve, I used to live here as a kid,” says the actor to the face staring down at us. “Do you mind if we come up?”
            Soon after, I’m climbing a crooked white staircase dressed in slanted sunlight so dramatic it’s sucker-punching my early morning eyes, making them tear. As I push down on the backbones of the napping, cranky steps, they let out measured bellows. If I was dreaming, this might be my mind imagining some bizarre ascent into heaven side by side with Steve Buscemi.
            But I’m not asleep.
            I’m following a man named Michael Rosario as he leads us towards a four-room dwelling on top of a deli. He turns to Buscemi as we go up.
            “This is strange. I was just watching one of your movies,” he says. “The one where you are flying.”
            “I’m not sure which one that is,” says Buscemi.
            “You know, the one with the plane,” says Rosario. “It was just on the T.V.”
            “Con Air?” asks Buscemi as we near the top.
            “Yeaaaah! Con Air! That was a great film!”
            Rosario and his family now live in the residence. It’s a typical Brooklyn home, lived in and comfortable. Photographs on walls. Coffee tables and carpets. But as we stand inside the place, after a mere three minutes, we are undoubtedly in Buscemi’s old apartment. It’s the early 1960’s.
            “It was actually in this kitchen where I first started performing,” he says. “This is where I got my start. I entertained my parents and my brothers and my relatives right in here.”
            The eyes of Steve Buscemi are a gift. On enormous silver screens they are twin focal points - chameleon pools of anything, everything. Two coals stoking the souls of imaginary characters, giving them life, grit, compassion, reality. Today they are a million times more powerful. Today they are revealing genuine tales. Moments stored and stowed for years and clamoring into the air like heat rising through an old Brooklyn radiator.
            He criss-crosses slowly through rooms and the stories continue as we followed him through doorways and decades.
            The times his father climbed through the top of a hallway closet, below a skylight, to unlatch the front entrance when keys were forgotten.
            The day his mother’s apron caught fire in the kitchen. “Mom, you’re on fire,” he calmly told her. Disaster was averted.
            The time he was hit by a bus across the street from his home – his padded winter clothes saving him like modern armor. The city’s settlement money later providing him with a way to go to acting school.
            How he slept in the same room as his brothers, the same house as his cousins. How his uncle had a chicken coop in the backyard. His family was all here - until they slipped off to other places.
            “One by one they all moved to Long Island. We were the holdouts until we left. My grandmother actually lived here for a long time after we were gone. I used to visit her here.”
            We were on our way down the crooked stairs soon after that. Back down the white passageway. Back into the streets of East New York and a 2005 morning. As we left Steve Buscemi on the corner of Liberty Avenue he lit up a cigarette. He was still looking up at the buildings above him, still casting those eyes – those compelling eyes – through the air like butterfly nets, searching for his cobwebbed, vanished memories. Smoke filling his lungs. The early 1960’s still drifting inside his body.