postcoitus’s pillow talk

I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t been to Greenpoint before, I have. But I did have an entirely new experience there and found out things I didn’t know through my research for this project.

Greenpoint, the northernmost part of Brooklyn, part of Brooklyn Community Board 1, “Little Poland,” was originally founded by the Dutch like the rest of New York. However, it has become a haven for immigrants, especially Poles. It has, unofficially, the second highest population of Polish immigrants in America, next to Chicago.

It made its name in the shipbuilding world and now many of the working-class residents, especially the immigrants, are being pushed out by gentrification and hipsters: it is following the same pattern in gentrification that Williamsburg used.

According to the 2000 census, there were 8744 families living in Greenpoint. This does not include rat families.

When I was in Greenpoint earlier this evening, I saw something I had never seen before and, honestly, never thought I would. I saw two rats mating. Or trying to mate. It’s hard with a group of college kids watching.

In the safety of the Greenpoint Ave. subway station, these rats were putting on an amazing show for us. At first, we weren’t sure if they were really trying to mate, maybe they were just playing. The larger male rat would mount the smaller female one for a split second, but mostly they would just run around chasing each other. The female would play like she was going to run into a pipe in the wall but then she would run in circles and chase the male. I did some research on rat mating and found out that this is perfectly normal. What we couldn’t see from across the tracks was that her vagina was apparently gaping open, which is also supposedly perfectly normal, but weird and a little disconcerting.

The male rat really had some persistance. He would grab her by her scruff and try to mate but then she’d run away. Although she’d always come back; she wanted it. We could even hear her make these little squeaking noises. And it just went on like that for at least ten minutes. Sometimes he would run away, then she’d scamper around the mountains of trash looking for him, sometimes she would run away and he would look for her. But sometimes, sometimes, he would succeed. Apparently it’s also normal for the male to repeatedly mount the female for very brief sessions, although I didn’t find this out until afterwards. We weren’t sure if this was normal or if we were watching Rat Rape.

I was amazed most that when the train finally started pulling into the station, he kept trying to pull into her station. They seemed completely unfazed by the screaming of the train. How could their little rat ears handle such a loud noise? Rats have pretty intense hearing, too, and still they kept flirting and touching like silly teenagers. I realized that love, or maybe just sex, makes us do silly things. And even if it’ll deafen you, you, or a rat, will do anything you can to be with the one you love.

Also, Mae West is from Greenpoint. So is Pat Benatar which is even funnier because I was just listening to “Promises in the Dark.”