The woman had parked her shopping cart several yards away and was rummaging through the nearby garbage cans, gathering bottles and whatever other odd pieces of trash she found useful or interesting. I was gaping at her unabashedly, since, as I said, the reality of the situation wasn’t really registering. This seems to happen to me frequently: Reality doesn’t quite register—but when it does, suddenly and without warning, it crushes me.

Like right now, when to my surprise, the woman stopped, looked right at me, and spoke. Her teeth were black but her eyes were sharp and intelligent. I pulled my headphones out, embarrassed to have fallen into such a solipsistic trance. She smiled: “Have you been downtown yet?”

I stared at her, struggling to understand.

“The protest downtown,” she said. “You look like you’d fit right in.”

The protest. It was September 30, 2011. I’d heard about Occupy Wall Street, of course, but I was startled to hear myself being cast in this light. My hair and beard were overgrown, certainly—after all, at that very moment I was waiting for an appointment with my barber—but had things really gotten so dire? I tried to smile back at her as I shook my head “no.” In all likelihood, she meant it as a compliment, but my vanity was wounded. I’d like to imagine that my beard is much more grand, more regal, than the scruffy growth on some young protester’s chin. Not knowing what to say—how to defend myself, how to explain my extreme self-importance to this poor old woman—I fell silent, and eventually she shuffled back toward her cart.

I got up and hurried off to my appointment with the barber. Obviously it was long overdue.

*****

Several weeks later, on my way home one night, I got stuck behind a man on the 8th Street subway stairs with a bag on his back that was large enough to fit a small piano. Oversized bags of any kind in Manhattan are a pet peeve of mine: Rolling suitcases that drag like dead tails behind the crisscrossing hordes of office workers in Midtown; giant strollers with enough pockets for a baby and its mother to live out of for a month; piles of shopping bags so vast they take up two seats and the entire floor on a subway car. I loathe all of these things. But, for some reason—my arbitrary, peevish mood, perhaps—this guy with the enormous bag was more than I could stand. He was blocking the entire staircase, teetering slowly back and forth. I raced up behind him scowling, hoping he could feel my contempt. But when he turned to look at me, his smile was disarming. He was young, in his early 20s probably, with blue eyes and the scruff of a man who might one day grow a very respectable beard.

“Youfromzoocotty,” he said.

“What?” I said, although I wasn’t even sure he’d asked me a question. As always when I’m talking to a stranger, I felt like I understood nothing.

“Zuccotti,” he repeated. “You from Zuccotti?”

That clicked. It was November 15 and that morning in a surprise raid the NYPD had cleared the protesters out of Zuccotti Park and removed their tents and other belongings, using the pretext that the park needed to be “cleaned” and made “safe” for other New Yorkers to “enjoy” as well. According to Mayor Bloomberg, “Health and safety conditions became intolerable.” I had laughed into my morning orange juice when I read that; it sounded so phony. I could have mentioned this to the man with the piano on his back, which I now realized was probably everything he owned (or at least whatever he’d brought with him to Zuccotti Park), but instead I just blurted out: “Oh, no I’m not!”

And I probably delivered it with some contempt. But not contempt for him or his cause. Once again, I was bristling at being misidentified as part of a group I had no actual relation to. And with that dismissive exchange, our inchoate bond was broken. He turned away, and I pushed past his giant bag and fled into the rainy night.

*****

Two days later, November 17, Occupy Wall Street held their national Day of Action, with marches throughout Manhattan (and other cities too) and a rally at Liberty Park that night. I watched the event streaming live on the Internet from my cubicle at a magazine in midtown, where I was freelance editing for the week. At first, I felt like watching a video of an anti-corporate protest from my desk at one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world was a bit too brazen. But as the hours passed and I got more and more excited text messages from friends, I thought, Fuck it, I don’t really care what these people think and I barely care about this job either.

In fact, I would have been thrilled to have been scolded for watching the video feed. I probably would have even escalated the situation myself. After all, quitting a job is one of the most life-affirming experiences a person can have, and I was itching to get up and leave this one forever. If I was being really honest with myself, I’d have liked to have been downtown, rallying in favor of better jobs, or better benefits, or something. The only thing keeping me at my desk was my sense of commitment: Despite the low pay, long hours, and endless frustrations, I had agreed to do this job and I would see it through for that reason alone. But I certainly wasn’t going to enjoy it.

The next morning, on the subway back to work, the gloomy silence of the commute—the rows of ears plugged with identical ear-buds and eyes trained on rows of indistinguishable electronic devices—was interrupted by the voice of a rabble-rouser: One of those bold men that sometimes takes advantage of a captive subway car to push his own crazy agenda. A hero! The speaker was a black man, middle aged, with a strong beard and a sly smile. He was wearing a high-school-football-style jacket, but on the left breast where a name is usually printed, instead it said simply: “Somebody.”

“Listen up, folks,” he said, looking up and down the subway car at a timid crowd that would not meet his eyes. “Slavery never ended! It has just been given a new name. You all think you’re important people, going off to your jobs, your careers … but you’re no better than slaves.”

He held up a copy of the Daily News. The cover photo was of the bloodied and distraught face of a protester at the previous day’s march, with a condescending headline that read: “For Cryin’ Out Loud.”

“You all work hard, right?” the man went on. “Forty, 50, 60 hours a week, and you think you’re lucky. Well, there’s a lot of people in this city who aren’t going to do anything today.” He smiled, and by this time I’d taken out my ear-buds and was smiling too, almost laughing. “You know what Mr. Bloomberg is doing today? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Well, maybe he’ll have another press conference to remind everyone what a nuisance the people that do want to make a difference in this city are. And there’s a lot of other people doing nothing all day too. That’s what they have you for: To do the hard work, to slave away all day at jobs that make them rich.”

No one looked at him. Perhaps they were too ashamed, or angry, or they thought he was the nuisance, another crazy black man on the subway who ought to be ignored. I felt my body getting hot, starting to tremble. He was articulating my feelings so exactly: The dread I feel every morning when I get up to go to work, the despair I feel when faced with the complacency of so many of my peers, the humiliation of being stuck in what feels like a trap. The subway doors opened and people began filing off the train.

“I’ll tell you what,” the man said, still smiling, as people pushed past him, their eyes downcast: “You all should learn the words to Kumbaya. Trust me, it helps.”

As I passed him, on my way out the door to spend another eight hours staring at a computer screen, checking blogs and chatting online while intermittently doing a bit of work, I nodded, as if in solidarity, as I had something real in common with this man. Maybe I did. And maybe I’d had something in common with the man on the subway stairs I’d acted so contemptuously toward. And with the woman in rags who’d been so polite, so genuine in her assumption that I was part of something. Part of what, however, I still couldn’t say ... and I was worried that this, whatever it was, was already coming to an end, before I’d even had a chance to understand ...

Rob Williams is a mercenary copywriter and copy editor who lives above a meat market in the East Village. You can find more of his stories at www.itmustbebobby.com.

We received many responses; here are a few.

Phone Numbers of Strangers

by Neesha Navare

She Looked Like She Was Dancing

by C. R. Lofters

Dear NYK People

by Christian Bonnard

Guided Tour

by Susan Volchok

NYC Me

by Adam Baer

Another Visit

by Peter F. Eder

Dear Jon

by erika

My Friend, The Fire Chaplain

by Kathleen Crisci

October 7, 2001

by Patrick J. Sauer

Photographic Memories

by Christie Grotheim

Manhattan Eyeline

by Jackob G. Hofmann

I Have to Be Here

by Kate Walter

“Let them see that big yellow head of yours,” Tiffany would say. We broke tradition only once, separating at a corner during a light summer rain in Greenwich Village. The ugly truth left me stunned and incensed. The cab, a canary yellow mini-van with sliding doors, slowed to a crawl. Tiffany reached for its handle just before the driver gunned his engine, bolting past her for a white couple thirty feet away.

We started taking cabs back to Brooklyn from Manhattan because, as Tiffany explained, I stared too much on the subway. If a father trained his son to do cartwheels for change on the Q train, I stared. If a man spoke to his wife in Russian while casually shaving his neck in the reflection of her compact, I was mesmerized.

I grew up in a suburb where everyone drove. Tiffany said my gaze wandered too much. I didn’t have my ‘train eyes’ yet. The two of us always enjoyed a healthy rivalry when it came to our respective upbringings yet it was the interracial aspect of our relationship, the burden and beauty it supplied, that needed to soak into our pores over a stretch of time. Regardless of how well my train eyes developed, I would never truly know what it meant to be black in America, but I was now part of a team that did.

We both taught English at a large high school in New York City under Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control. When the Department of Education declared the building unsafe and its students failing, we vehemently disagreed with city politics and got to know each other better. Every year the building lost another wing to a trendy boutique academy and every year Tiffany and I grew closer. By the time there was nothing left of the place and our classroom belongings had all been packed, my ring was on her finger.

Initially, I just wanted to know the beautiful teacher who shared my classroom a little better. Yet when things progressed and it was time for Tiffany to inform her parents of the new boyfriend, she made a conscious decision to do it in stages. First there was a new man in her life, and his name was James. It wasn’t exactly a lie. James was indeed my first name. I just rarely used it, opting for my middle name instead. So now I was James on my birth certificate, James on my taxes, and apparently James to a loving couple in Brooklyn with strong Southern roots whom I never actually met. It was simply an easier crossover name than Bryan, which served Tiffany well until her parents demanded to know who this James character was exactly.

“You’ve been dating this guy for months now,” her mother finally said. “How come we’ve never met him?”

“Well, James lives very far. Way out on the Island.”

“Tiffany?”

“Yes?”

“Is James white, by any chance? Because you know that’s perfectly fine.”

Back in our respective classrooms, diversity was never handled quite so delicately. The students simply had no use for political correctness of any kind, producing an atmosphere of equal parts honesty and madness. Moments of tolerance could turn ugly and raw in a New York minute, occasionally taking precedence over a lesson.

“Okay, who can tell me why Macbeth wants Duncan dead..?”

“Hey, Mister, what are those white ladies doing?”
I peered down at my book. “What ladies, the witches from the opening scene?”

“No, those three witches outside!”

Heads turned. Desks and chairs groaned across the floor. Deep inside our texts, Macbeth waited patiently inside Duncan’s chambers, dagger in hand, for the twenty-first century to get back to him.

“Those aren’t witches, Tyrell. Those are secretaries and you know it.”

“But what are they doing out there?”

“Getting some sun on their lunch break.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it looks good.”

My answer was greeted with snickers and smirks. Someone said something about white ladies and wrinkles. Someone reminded the rest of us that ‘black don’t crack,’ then thankfully we were allowed to return to the much easier topic of Macbeth’s ambitious mayhem.

For the most part, my relationship with Tiffany or ‘Miss Young’ was greeted as a fun novelty item by the students. Although the union was never confirmed or denied, each year graduating seniors gleefully awaited their wedding invitations in the mail or demanded we start producing as many ‘Obama kids’ and pretty ‘Derek Jeter babies’ as possible. Light heartedness aside, Tiffany and I did plan on having children one day yet I still had much to learn about race relations. After seven years of teaching in New York City, I could not produce a suitable response whenever a student informed me that I was a ‘good white man.’

The death of a New York City high school turned out to be a long drawn out process. Once a building was declared ill there was nowhere to go for a second opinion. As the years wore on, the school’s troubles only increased. The population took its final plummet once the faculty was required to pass out flyers to students stating that we were a dangerous, failing institution and it would be best if they transferred immediately. For Tiffany and me, it was akin to studying for years to be gourmet chefs, landing dream jobs in a wonderfully diverse restaurant, then being forced to hand out leaflets saying PLEASE DON’T EAT HERE. Our student body changed dramatically. It was simply no longer the same place and it broke our hearts.

We received our letters of excess at the same time. The school where we found each other would close its doors for good in three years, operating with a small skeleton staff until that time. It was now a matter of finishing up the school year with dignity, to not let feelings of confusion and resentment filter into the classroom. Frankly, it was exhausting.

To offset the final months of our teaching time together, we began to see a lot of theater on the weekends. Here again was another lesson to be learned. Even the plays I selected for us needed to be done with an awareness I had never considered before. Tiffany had no problem sighting performances, even audiences themselves for a lack of true diversity.

She did have a valid argument. Just this past June we saw a performance of Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama, The Normal Heart, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, less than twenty-four hours after New York lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The audience that evening was so eclectic and charged with victory that when a wedding ceremony took place in the final act the house broke down and sobbed as one entity.

It would be foolish to deny ourselves similar experiences on a stage or even in our teaching lives. We’ve since made a point to seek out theater that will enrich our relationship, as well as our careers. It was at a recent performance of an August Wilson play, an author both of us have taught for years, where the audience mix was as interesting as the performance.

“Oh, Mom,” Tiffany said, making a quick phone call in the lobby. “You should see this. We’re out in full force tonight!”

So it was on that wet little corner of Greenwich Village where I suffered a momentary setback. As I watched the driver pull away, stopping quickly to retrieve his desired passengers, my immediate response was frustrated rage. It was our last weekend together as teaching colleagues. Rather than celebrating a job well done and looking forward to our future, I instead discovered the true nun-chuck capabilities of a closed umbrella. It bounced off the cab’s back window, skidding harmlessly into traffic. I haven’t thrown anything that hard since the little league all-star game.

My reaction was immature and slightly insane, and in the end only made me feel worse. I wasn’t the one the driver elected to pass by. Mine was anger by association, something I would simply have to process better in the future, especially once children were involved. I should have realized that Tiffany and I had long since formed a unit by then. We needn’t be concerned with foolish cabbie stereotypes or Department of Education numbers games for that matter. We didn’t have to teach together in order to stay together. And as I went through all the machinations of the angry male, the huffing and puffing, the bleating heart and racing adrenaline, a tiny hand rubbed the nape of my neck until I was normal again.

“What exactly did you think you were doing?” she said, smiling up at me. “That guy has nothing to do with us. You know that… Come on. We’ll take the train home tonight. Try not to stare, okay?”

J. Bryan McGeever’s essays have appeared in Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

In Bay Ridge, I studied the diplomas that hung in a home office. In Prospect Lefferts Gardens, I thumbed a young couple’s bedside reading. In Sunset Park, I cracked open the refrigerator and looked at last night’s leftovers.

I’m on the prowl for a new place to live, a job that takes me deep into Brooklyn for open houses across the borough. Veteran house hunters know the routine: the signing of a guest list, the pitch about original floors and century-old moldings, and the questions about the boiler, the windows, and the taxes. Lines of people march through the house, looking to buy property while someone else is still using it. We’re expected to picture the place empty, to imagine what it might be like if we lived there—where our sofa would go, how the space might fit a growing family—and to ignore the current arrangement of armchairs or the mold on the shower curtain.

It’s a tough job, difficult not to see what’s right in front of us. We’re there to study the layout and condition of the house, and yet I can’t avoid noticing how its owners live within it—the mismatched furniture, the acrid smell of cat litter, the vintage exercise bike in the basement. While the real estate agents yammer on about the house’s “good bones,” I excavate clues about its owners and their lives.

At one place, I lingered over the family photos in a hallway, the shots of dated perms and feathered bangs stealing more of my attention than the stained-glass skylight that illuminated them. At another, I noticed stacks of cards for several different businesses and knew we were in the home of a graphic designer. Two weekends ago, I stood in the bedroom of a teenage boy, gaping at the topless girl in the poster thumb-tacked above his dresser. “My mother would not have approved of this decoration,” I told the guy next to me, a man who came to this open house wearing a tool belt. He ignored the poster and me, shuffling off to inspect the copper wiring and the pitch of the waste pipes, I’m sure.

After twelve open houses, I felt like a voyeur. Then, last weekend in Dyker Heights, I spotted a comrade. Three couples meandered around a townhouse, shaking banisters and counting electrical outlets. Wandering a bit, I found myself in the large master bedroom with a stranger, a woman who seemed every bit as curious about the sellers as she did about their house.

While I pretended to inspect the new windows, I watched her glance at a young child’s drawings framed on the dresser, fan the magazines on a stool in the bedroom’s corner, and wipe dust from the wooden headboard—exactly the kind of things I’d done at previous open houses. I continued watching her as she knelt to smell the flowers on the nightstand and made her way to the walk-in closet at the far end of the bedroom. She opened the couple’s closet door, admired its sizable dimensions, and paused for perhaps a second too long at the sight of the clothes inside. Then, with no evident self-consciousness, she reached for one of the shirts—the shirt of a total stranger—and rubbed its fabric between her thumb and forefinger, a gesture usually reserved for racks at department stores or thrift shops. I smiled at the boldness of this woman’s act, admiring her impropriety. Here we were, attending an open house, and she was examining clothes she’d never wear.

I didn’t stay to see if she checked the size of the shirt or held it up to her torso in the mirror. Not wanting to interrupt, I left the woman alone in the bedroom and went downstairs to inspect the wiring and ask about the waste pipes.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

At 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning in May, a blank white truck pulled up curbside and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in New York opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was dressed in black jeans and a spotless white t-shirt. His hair was military short. His eyes were the color of wet peat moss and dark tattoos ran down the sides of his neck and snuck up his sleeves. He extended his hand and introduced himself.

“I’m Jason,” he said, smiling a set of flawless teeth, straight and white, framed by lush lips. I’m such a sucker for polite, and for a good, strong handshake. I was immediately, completely undone.

My gaze traveled from our locked hands up his arms and across his chest—large but perfectly proportioned muscles, olive skin, a hint of Latino maybe. He smelled like fresh laundry.

“So?” Jason said.

“I’ll take you upstairs,” I said, snapping back to reality and turning toward the elevators.

In my tiny apartment, I showed Jason what had to go. I had separated the heavy things and the boxes full of books, along one wall, and I pointed these out, warning him about the weight.

“You like to read?” he said.

“Yeah. I’m a writer, or…trying to be.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I like to read, too.” He asked me what I wrote and I told him I was working on a book about a cowboy.

“How can I get a copy?” he asked. I told him I’d have to finish it first. He said he’d watch for me. I decided not to tell him all about how I’d been working on the book for five years and was hoping to sell it soon, but how I was also too scared to put all my eggs in the precarious basket of being a writer and so would be starting a full-time, soul-sucking job the very next week for which I’d already bought a pair of black Kenneth Cole slingbacks, several conservative black suits and a professional handbag (black) to carry my office-issue Blackberry. He picked up a few of the book boxes and curled his arm around them, pausing in the doorway. I wanted to ask him what he liked to read, but I didn’t want him to have to answer my question while holding the boxes. Then again, I wanted him to stand there and hold the boxes for awhile, maybe all day. I was suddenly sorry the bed sheets were already packed. I desperately wished Dan would evaporate. The look on my face must have been confused.

“I know I look intimidating,” he said, unprompted. “But my friends say I’m a big pussy cat.”

All I could think to say was, “Okay.”

A half hour later, everything was loaded into the truck and the apartment was as empty as the day I’d moved in. Jason looked around, the way my mother does when she leaves a hotel room, making sure none of her things have blended inadvertently into the landscape of the space that is not hers.

“What’s this?” he said, picking up a stretched canvas propped against the corridor wall. It was a painting of two cowboys riding the range in black and white and shades of gray.

“Oh, that stays,” I said. “I’m throwing it away.”

“Why?”

“I never really finished it.”

“You painted this?” he said, his beautiful eyes wide. “You can’t throw this away. This is really good.” He held the painting at arm’s length and studied it the way people study paintings in museums. “Can I have it?” he asked.

“You want my painting?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think you realize how good it is.”

I think I smiled. I think I raised my eyebrows and smirked a little. It might have looked like a come-on. It might have looked like I wanted to puke.

“Sure,” I said. “You can have it.” And with that I closed the door to the apartment and we turned into the stairwell, Jason carrying the painting carefully by the frame.

Downstairs, Dan was pacing up and down the sidewalk next to the truck. It was drizzling and the door to the truck was open. Jason asked us if we wanted a ride to Brooklyn with him and I said sure. The subway would take us an hour, and it was such a dreary day. I climbed into the cab and took the middle seat and Dan got in beside me, his knees pressing against the glove compartment that was held shut with a piece of duct tape.

I wasn’t really sure, but I suggested we cut across to the FDR and drop down and cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Dan concurred. We wound up taking a wrong turn, and then somewhere along MLK everyone was honking. Jason looked in the side mirror and said, “Oh,” jerking the truck to the curb and jumping out. I looked back through the open window. Boxes were scattered down the street. “I’ll be right back,” Jason said. So Dan and I sat in the truck and waited. When Jason jumped back in the cab he said, “I got it all! Don’t worry!” And I trusted him completely.

A few minutes later, we were negotiating a series of one-way streets through Harlem when he spun around again, hit the brakes and wheeled the van around across traffic.

“Hang on a minute!” he said, leaving us idling on a sidewalk while he trotted into the open door of a junk store.

Dan looked at me, incredulous. “What the hell?” he said.

I shrugged.

Jason came back a few minutes later, got in the van and put the truck in gear.

“I just had to see about that juke box,” he explained without apology. “I collect ‘em. But the guy wanted eighty bucks, and that’s steep.” He pulled back into traffic, heading east, and I took the opportunity to look at his profile, his neck and hairline. “I watch Antiques Road Show,” he went on. “Do you know that show?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well I watch it a lot,” he said, “so I know what’s worth collecting. I really like slot machines and skulls and inkwells. You know what an inkwell is?”

“Uh huh,” I said. I didn’t look at Dan, but I was sure his eyes were rolling.

“I got this skull inkwell on lay away,” Jason went on. “Nine-hundred-dollar skull inkwell. You put the ink in the top of the skull. It’s crazy. I love it.”

By this time, I was sure we were heading in the wrong direction. In a moment, we hit Broadway.

“I think you can just turn left here,” I said.

“Okay, no problem,” Jason said. And for the first forty blocks or so the traffic moved at a decent clip. Just above Houston Street things got hung up and we sat for a long time watching the lights turn green, yellow, red. The rain was streaming down the windshield and Jason flicked the AC on.

“What’s your neck say?” I asked.

He reached a hand up and rubbed the ink embedded just above his collar.

“F.T.W.? It stands for Fuck The World,” he said. “I hate everyone, so this is my message.” He reached around the back of his neck, slipping his fingers beneath the collar, suggesting ink beyond the visible. His arm was as thick as my thigh. “I got a lot of these in jail,” he said.

I could feel Dan’s leg against mine, and it wanted to twitch.

“How long were you in jail?” I asked.

“Two years. On and off,” he said, and of course I was dying to know what for but was too afraid to ask. Luckily, he offered. “This last time,” he said, “I was in there for selling two hundred hits of X to an undercover cop. You know, Ecstasy. But the Tombs, that’s not an easy place to be. I recommend you don’t go there. It ain’t too cute.” Okay, good, I thought—drug-dealing. That’s safe. We’re safe. We’re not going to die between here and Brooklyn. We moved forward a block and a half.

“I just hang around with idiots,” he went on. “Like my friends, Mario and Carmine, they’re retarded. Mario comes up limping the other day, says Carmine stabbed him in the leg. But the next day they’re walking down the street holding hands like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. And mostly I date strippers. I know I should date nicer girls, but that’s just the people I hang around with. I just broke up with this girl. It started off good, and then she got crazy. We used to go dancing at Copacabana. You been there? You like to dance?”

“Yeah, I love to dance,” I said. I hadn’t been in years.

“You guys should come,” he said. “Just don’t go on a Tuesday. Tuesdays is hoodie night. It ain’t too cute.”

I considered his offer. What would I wear? Could my tits compete with the stripper ex-girlfriend’s? Dan didn’t say a word, south along Broadway through Manhattan, over the bridge, through Brooklyn Heights, past Atlantic Street Center, up 4th Avenue to 3rd Street where we pulled up in front of my new place. It was still raining, but not as hard. We all grabbed something and went up to the second floor, a spacious one-bedroom, freshly painted.

“This is nice,” Jason said. “Really nice.” He looked up at the pressed tin ceilings, peered in at the newly-tiled kitchen, and I wondered where he lived, what it looked like there. He unloaded the truck in no time. And then we stood on the sidewalk, me with a wad of cash and him with an empty truck and my painting. Dan was upstairs and I could feel his eyes on us from the window.
I wondered if he was watching to protect me, or to see what I would do.

Jason held the painting out to me. “You should finish this,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think painting is my thing.”

“But if you get famous, this is gonna be worth something,” he said. “I’m no dummy. I seen it all the time on Antiques Roadshow. Somebody gets famous for one thing, like they write a book or something, and then everything they’ve ever done or owned is worth a ton of money. So you’re going to write a book and then this painting is gonna be worth some money. You gotta finish it. Will you finish it and send it to me? I’ll give you my address. You gotta pen?”

I looked him all over, searching for something I still can’t name. I couldn’t imagine how a boy this pretty had survived in the slammer for even a day. He was a mama’s boy, a curious boy. He did his research. He liked collecting things. His eyes were open for opportunity. His eyes were open.

I pulled a yellow legal pad from my bag and gave it to him. I knew I wouldn’t finish the painting, but I thought maybe I could write to him instead. Maybe we could go dancing. He handed the paper back to me with his name and address written in a neat, blue hand.

“You know,” I said, looking at the painting, “I want you to have this one. I really do. If you like it the way it is.”

“Okay,” he said. “But if you paint another one, in blue, you can send it to me. I think it would look good in blue.”

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll see.” We shook hands. And then he got in the truck and drove away.

Upstairs, Dan said, “What the hell was that?”

“He wanted me to finish that painting.”

“What painting?”

“Of the cowboys.”

“Are you kidding?”

“He liked it. He thought it was beautiful. And he thinks it’s going to be worth a million bucks on eBay if I become a famous writer.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. Well,” I said. I ran my key along a seam of tape, opened a box and took some things out. There was no furniture in the place, nothing to sit on, so Dan sat cross-legged on the floor, asked if I wanted help unpacking and, when I declined, stood up and said he was going to go home.

I settled into my new place nicely, commuting every day to my job in Lower Manhattan and returning home to cook dinner for friends who would sit on the couch and balance plates on their laps, drink bottles and bottles of wine and make fun of my Barry-White-inspired bathroom, all black tile and gold fixtures. I worked 12 hours a day in my office with no windows and I got really good at running from one meeting to another in high heels. I had cocktails with the mayor at Gracie Mansion and rode around town in government-issued vehicles, with a driver who wore one of those curlicue wire devices behind his ear. I didn’t touch the draft of my book that sat on my desk for almost two years.

It would be a few months before Dan and I would break up, and years before I realized that at least one box of books and my favorite mug, stolen from the university student center in Reykjavik, were lost along that stretch of MLK in Harlem. Eventually I lost Jason’s address, too. For awhile I’d kept it, thinking I’d show up at Copacabana and try to find him, but of course I never did. I’m no dummy. Where Jason saw potential in my half-finished painting, in my half-formed self, I feared I would be disappointed in him. But who was I, in my suit and my slingbacks with my Blackberry, a nameless engine behind the powers that made the city go, go, go?

Much as I loved my new apartment, it was not who I wanted to be. I decided that after a year, I would move again. If I finished my book and became a famous writer, Jason could sell my painting on eBay and buy himself a cool new skull inkwell. I wondered if he would find the painting beautiful enough to hold onto until then.

Margot Kahn left New York City for Seattle where she hikes, bakes cakes and reads with her husband and son. Her book Horses That Buck, the biography of a Wyoming cowboy, was published in 2008. www.margotkahn.com

We had just left Chinatown and were cruising north, along the Hudson River, to sleep-away camp in upstate New York. My fellow 10-year-olds caught up with each other and rapped about last year but I was the rookie. They were all from the gritty NYC boroughs where they attended urban schools with cool prison names like P.S. 52 and P.S. 136. I had just come from Rainbow Vagina Academy in the suburbs.

Less than a week before, I sat in class on my last day of fifth grade and applauded myself. I had gone the entire year without blowing my cover address, which I used to protect the secret location of my apartment, in a nearby, shoddier neighborhood. It was a covert operation in order to keep me in the more expensive and esteemed school district. In our upper middle-class Jewish bubble, I felt like the poor kid. When I asked my Phys Ed partner about the logo on his new designer t-shirt, he heckled, “You don’t even know what O.P. stands for?” I gazed into the stitched California waves on his Ocean Pacific polo and imagined sailing far away from my privileged Elementary school.

My mother found a nonprofit subsidized camp for me to attend in the summer. The admission fees ran on a “sliding scale,” so we paid only what we could afford—about 300 bucks for the entire season. I looked forward to reinventing myself as an equal among a clean batch. Yet these inner-city kids had me pegged for a sheltered rich boy before I ever had a shot.

Upon arrival at our destination, a used up army barracks in the mountains, I found my trunk of clothes and followed the group to our moldy bunk house. I picked out a rusty tetanus trap of a bed and passed out for the rest of the afternoon. I thought I was pretty slick in “calling” a top bed, until it rained later that night and brown sludge speckled my face from the cracked roof above.

The next morning I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I fell onto the floor and got a splinter in my butt. A fruit bat stared me down and chased me all the way up a steep slope to our outhouse latrines. Unable to pee, I taunted myself by imagining home friends gloat about their own camp amenities, like hot showers and flush toilets. When I made the mistake of complaining to my counselor Rob, he told the rest of my bunk-mates, “Aw… Ahron wants to go to Camp Rich.” I would have been satisfied with a roll of toilet paper but I could feel their looks. “What a wuss!”

On Long Island I was too ashamed of my apartment, with its ripped pleather couches and termite outbreaks, to invite anyone over for a play date. If I asked my mom, whether a friend’s family was rich, she always said, “They're comfortable.” I decided that we were uncomfortable. But compared to my new quarters—and the broken metal springs of my bed jabbing me in the back— my mom’s place seemed like a decent resort. I promised myself never to fuss about it again, assuming I could be teleported back there right away.

A few days later, we rounded up for our first Instructional Swim lesson on a crippled dock at the bottom of a hill. I combed the area for a gleaming underground pool—like the ones I was jealous of in my friends’ backyards—but there was none. Our swim instructor led us into a sectioned off area of a polluted lake to demonstrate our skills. I jumped in and heard, “You! Get over there, with the other Advanced Beginners.” I trudged through a foot of slime to join Felix, a soft-boiled egg of a child, who refused to go into the water.

At 9 years of age, Felix moved like a sluggish 60-year-old man who seemed tired from all the years he had put into making sure his children would have a better life. As a rule, his face said, “I'd really prefer to just not do whatever it is you would like me to do." He grimaced about having to find the strength to complain aloud.

The absence of a Beginner swimmer group let everyone know that the staff added “Advanced” to our label in order to save us some embarrassment. And the fact that we all knew this also let everyone know that we were, indeed, “Advanced Rejects.” My swim coach tried to teach me the back float and carried me like an infant bathed in the kitchen sink, along the blue partition rope that quarantined us from the others. Felix shook his head from the sides. I imagined Jason, from Friday the 13th, struggling to break loose beneath. If the killer surfaced, he would see the Intermediates swim the butterfly like dolphins at Sea World, then spot me, the pathetic target, as I tried to back float away to safety. Maybe Felix was onto something.

My head counselor Rob said, “That’s enough,” and granted us refuge back on dry land. Rob was 17, but he might as well have been a seasoned Vietnam veteran to us campers. He had a tattoo of a mangled fist on his shoulder and wore a fleshy scar across his back. I assumed that he was serving a community service sentence for whatever he had done to the person on the other end of his wound. If any of us young punks started to argue with each other, he’d put us in check, jabbing, “Youse wanna’ fight? Then youse are gonna fight. Right now.”

Back at my playgrounds, in the ‘burbs, there weren’t many fist fights. The violence was mental. After winter break, children compared the number of Vermont ski lift tickets on their state of the art snow jackets and mocked each other for missing out on a new addition to Disney World. Adam, who sat next to me in fifth grade, could tell you how much the best Tennis racket in the world sold for and why the leather stripping on my Air Jordan sneakers outed them as obvious knock-offs—“It’s just all wrong.”

When Rob used his “Youse wanna fight?” technique to push me into a scuffle with Boris, a recent Russian transplant who hailed from a Brooklyn project, I laughed off the tension before we made it to the front of our bunk. Rob consoled me, whispering, “Boris’s father was a boxer in Russia you know, his little sister can probably beat you up.” I prayed he wouldn’t make me fight her in the rematch. I was too feeble to rumble with Boris, yet I was too Philistine to dispute name brand clothes with Adam at school. I was stuck in some kind of defenseless limbo, unarmed in all forms of warfare.

Just before dawn broke on our first Saturday, Freddy, who slept underneath me in a bottom bed, shook me up and yelled, “Yo, Get up man. Donut time!” A musty recreational hall hosted 7AM, Saturday morning Shabbat prayers, with a bonus. Anyone willing to get their asses up and off to services earned themselves a free Dunkin’ donut, two or three if they were one of the first few to arrive—Freddy bolted.

Apparently, back in the day, the camp was formally a Jewish institution, but there had been a drastic shift in demographics since its founding. Besides a few Soviet refuges that had recently made their way to the shores of Brooklyn, like Boris, most of the kids weren’t Jewish.

I hadn’t been to Hebrew school, the after-school program, in two years because my parents owed thousands in late dues. To the rest of the student body I was an irreverent dropout. But here, since I was one of the only kids to have ever been to a synagogue, I felt like a learned rabbinical scholar. Without any explanation for the rituals, my Black and Puerto Rican friends had no idea why chanting phlegmy sounds bought them free junk food—but no one asked questions. It was a simple quid pro quo: say the lines and get the goods. The holy prayer words evolved into a camp slang. If someone kicked a home run during kickball, Martel—a Baptist from The Bronx— yelled, “Shema Yisrael…Bitches!”

During the next few weeks I tiptoed behind my comrades and sponged up some street wisdom. I learned the lyrics to Kool Moe Dee’s Bad Mutha, how to pop lock like a b-boy—sort of, and chimed in on late night Yo Mamma battles— “Yo mamma’s like a bowling ball. She gets picked up, felt up, thrown in the alley. And then she comes back for more!” Just as I started to feel like I was on my way to becoming a made man, Parents Day arrived.

As families began to show up, my father, a mechanic from Israel, cruised into the middle of the parking field in his customer’s shiny white Rolls Royce, blasting Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling. I sprinted over to him, terrified, and whispered, “Whose car is this?!”

He smiled, certain he had just done me a huge favor. His eyes said, “You’re welcome.”

By dinner time, all the parents had left and a lucky few scarfed down treats brought for them from the real world, like Fruity Pebbles and blue Gatorade. I pleaded my case, “It’s not my Rolls Royce. My dad is just the shady repairman!” But no one believed me. I peered into their heads and saw myself escorted past millionaire estates in the Rolls—or maybe it was our Bentley, that we reserved for weekend cruises—until an English chauffeur opened the door with a glass of cold lemonade in hand.

As we changed into our bathing suits for our nightly “twilight” swim session, Danny called our attention away from Parents Day and over to a more important discovery. He pointed under Felix’s mushy belly and yelled, "What is going on down there Felix? It goes in!" Felix then replied with what was, perhaps, the weakest comeback in history: "It comes out sometimes!"

As August trickled by, I played aloof but plotted an escape in my mind. I would trek to the highway, and then hitchhike downstate to the first supermarket I could find. There, I would bask in the icy Air Conditioning and live off the truckload of dried breakfast cereal on Aisle 7.

As my clandestine prison break drew near one shweaty night, our counselors ran into our bunk and woke us up. They yelled, “Surprise trip. We’re all going to see Coming to America with Eddie Murphy!” Everyone gasped. We were Korean War soldiers and Marilyn Monroe was on her way to greet us. On the way into town the driver told us to take deep breaths so we wouldn’t hyperventilate and end up in the Emergency Room—and miss the movie.

During the film, my eyes watered in gratitude for our salvation and Eddie Murphy. When the credits rolled I snuck into another showing. I left to use the marble restrooms and flushed a high pressure toilet. Then I flushed it again just to hear that swoosh of civilization one more time. The doors flew open and Rob dragged me back to our bus, now full of angry youths and staff waiting for someone to find me. A 9 year-old girl yelled, “Dock him from Canteen!” and Rob smiled. “Two weeks." I dropped my head in defeat.

Canteen, the candy store, was our opium den. During our regular meals in the open-air cafeteria, we ate cold oatmeal, stale tuna sandwiches and watered-down, purple Bug juice. But in Canteen, the camp granted us each a credit of $2.65, as our dealer behind a counter—the same guy who played “Rabbi” at Shabbat services, only now in a dirty painter’s smock—served up packets of Fun Dip, tangy Nerds, and Type-2 Diabetes.

As dawn broke, a few days into my sugar withdrawal, I woke up shivering and wet. Then I breathed in a most humbling fragrance, of a blanket—my blanket—soaked in pee. I sprung up like a ninja who had overslept and ran the soiled evidence across our campgrounds into a dumpster. I considered finding a match, and maybe some gasoline, but I had to get back. When I arrived in the bunk, out of breath, everyone had just begun to wake but they were too groggy to notice me.

I deflated on my bed, dog-tired, and staggered from the mental smackdown I had dodged. My scare swept every other concern off the filthy shelf in my head. And I couldn’t care less about passing for a fresh city kid or a country club suburbanite but I continued to hang with both of them from a fitted spot somewhere in between.

Camp ended a few days later. I went home, flushed my toilet and braced myself for the next battle—junior high.

Ahron Yeshaiek lives in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in the anthology One for the Road, New York Press, and The New York Times. His screenplay, Miles in Time, is an official selection at the Kids First Film festival. He is currently writing a comedy set during the dot-com bubble.

When she achieved whatever she’d wanted to achieve, she put the Twinkies in the other bag. She remained motionless for a while. Then, as if she had just remembered something, she opened the first bag again and took out another pack of Twinkies. She rubbed it fervently; then she mumbled something and tossed it in the other bag. She relaxed for a moment, and I relaxed too. Not for long. A third pack of Twinkies was to follow, then a fourth, and after that I stopped counting. When all the Twinkies had been successfully transferred to the second bag, the process was reversed, and it became clear that there was going to be no end to this.

The thought of changing cars did cross my mind, but whenever the train reached the next stop I remained seated. None of the other passengers seemed to mind the rattling cellophane noise. They continued looking straight ahead, at nothing in particular, at anything but the crazy person. So I did the same, following their example, and I was fine with the arrangement until she yelled, “Miss!” and pointed at me.

In those first two weeks in New York I had already come across a surprising number of crazy people, and I’d come to accept them as part of the New York experience—much like the mice in my apartment. They were usually homeless, with the exception of the ones who actually lived in my building. Their madness was of the obvious and not dangerous kind and they mostly kept to themselves, though I couldn’t help but find some of them disturbing—like the old lady who occupied the apartment below mine and would yell profanities at someone in the middle of the night.

I told myself it would just take some getting used to. The places I’d spent time in before—the little town of Princeton, the larger town of Boston, the big cities of London and Athens—did not have that many crazy people, or if they did, they hid them and hid them well. But New York seemed to breed them.

“Miss!” the woman with the Twinkies repeated, and I could feel the discreetly curious eyes of everyone in the car were now on me.

“I think she’s talking to you,” whispered the girl next to me.

“Oh,” I said, and looked at the woman.

“Hold this for me,” she said, lifting one of the two Twinkie bags, in a way that deprived me of the right to refuse her. I looked at the bag but did not move, as if the woman had spoken to me in a language I did not understand. There was something off about what was happening, something extraordinary, so extraordinary in fact, that my mind could not immediately process it.

The mad can coexist with the sane as long as they don’t interact with them. That was the deal. But she had broken that rule and was now asking me to hold the Twinkie bag and I did not know what was right and what was wrong anymore. I was aware of the others around us, watching us, and wondered what they’d think if I did not help her. Would it be rude? Inconsiderate? There was no other obvious reason for not holding the bag for her, other than my prejudice. And then I became aware of the seconds passing, of my not moving, of the bag dangling under the woman’s fingers, waiting for me. So I reached out and grabbed it. Its handles felt greasy under my fingers—Twinkie residue, I told myself.

The train reached a stop and the girl who was sitting next to me jumped out of her seat and out of the car. I thought about doing the same. The Twinkie woman had been trying to reach a plastic bag that was under her seat and contained some thick, liquid substance of questionable nature.

“I’ll just tell her it’s my stop,” I thought, “the moment she rises back up,” but the doors closed and we were on our way again. Her chubby fingers danced only inches away from where the bag lay, but after one last stretch, she gave up.

“You get that bag for me,” she said.

I looked around me and the other passengers immediately looked away.

“Well I can’t get to it!” she said, aggravated. “You have to help me.”

I wanted to cry. By agreeing to hold the bag for her, I had agreed to so much more.

“You have to help me!” she yelled. I panicked. I kneeled before her and I reached between her legs, which she had kindly parted for me.

“Pardon me,” I said.

The air around her had absorbed her smell. It was an old-lady smell but there was something funky about it, something sour. I pinched the bag and raised it to her face.

“Here you go.”

But she didn’t take it. She opened it and looked inside, and as she did, a foul smell rose out of it.

“No, this won’t do,” she said.

She looked lost for a moment; then she took out a pack of Twinkies and started rubbing it.

I left the bag by her feet and returned to my seat. I would get off at the next stop. I’d be home soon.

My apartment in New York was smaller than what I was used to. Both in Boston and in Princeton I had had bigger places. It was still unfurnished, except a cheap red futon and a bulky TV set that rested on one of the empty moving boxes. I’d gotten rid of my queen-size bed when I moved, it was too big for the apartment; the futon was only a temporary solution. I’d sit on it and look at the space around me, imagined what would go where: a coffee table in the middle, maybe a floor lamp, a fat leather armchair by the window where I could read.
At work I spent hours browsing furniture store websites.

I was new at the job and didn’t have much else to do anyway, though I was beginning to suspect that that stagnation would be permanent. I worked as an associate editor at Bloomberg Press, which was a step up from the editorial assistant position I’d left at Princeton University Press, but I now had fewer responsibilities. Bloomberg Press was a very small part of the Bloomberg financial corporation and no one paid attention to our staff of ten. There were no books coming in and no books going out, but when I raised a question about it, I was instructed to keep my mouth shut.

IKEA, Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn—their websites were my new best friends. I’d dive into pictures of rugs and cushions, quilts and coverlets, match them to flowery bed skirts. I’d add things to my virtual shopping basket, save them for later, when I’d be settled.

On my way home I’d always stop for roast chicken. Spiced with rosemary and lemon, it was a simple meal, always warm, and I liked its smell—it reminded me of something, what, I wasn’t sure. I’d go home and sit on the red futon, the roast chicken on my lap, and turn on the TV. And so my first few months in New York passed.

From time to time I would receive a “Happy Hour” email from the younger people in the office. I went out with them once or twice for drinks. They asked me where I was from and how I’d ended up in New York and I gave them the short version. They pretended it was interesting though I knew it was not. I did not care to find out anything about them—they seemed nice, a bit boring, and I was not interested to get to know them better. I could not start over just yet. I had left my friends in Princeton, I had left my friends in Boston, I had left my friends in London, my friends in Athens before that. And I was going to leave New York, too, one day. When they invited me to go out with them again, I told them I was busy. After some time I’d open and read their emails but would never respond.

One day, in the ladies room, I heard the woman in the next stall crying. It was Dru, the copyeditor. She was in her mid-fifties, a stage actress turned copyeditor, who lived alone in an apartment in the East Village that was even smaller than mine.

“My shower is in my kitchen and my couch is also my bed,” she had told me. We had adjacent desks—the Bloomberg office was like a trading floor and we all sat next to each other in rows that looked like human row-crops, and, inevitably, we’d learn things about each other; also, Dru could talk.

She was sobbing and I thought about asking what was wrong—she had seen me walk in with her, so she must’ve known that I was there. I decided not to. I did not have the energy for someone else’s problems. I left the bathroom and when Dru returned to her seat, eyes swollen, nose runny, I pretended not to notice.

New Village Nails was a nail salon I went to every Saturday. I found it a few days after I’d moved into the neighborhood, and I soon realized it was one of the cheapest ones in the Village. Its last renovation had been done sometime in the early ‘90s and the turquoise pedicure chairs looked as tired as the women who worked there: Lucy, Fanny, Vivian, Betty, Rachel, Sharon, all from Tibet. After my first few visits they gave me my own supply box; it had my name printed on it—misspelled—and contained tools that they’d use only on my feet and no one else’s. I’d always pick “Package 2”: manicure, pedicure, 10-minute foot massage, 10-minute shoulder massage. Every Saturday afternoon I soaked my feet in hot water for an hour and a half, inhaling the rising steam—a medley of bath salts and cucumber cream.

“Would you like a magazine, Miss?” the Tibetan women would ask and I’d wave “No.” I’d watch them apply thick layers of red polish to my nails and toenails and it soothed me. Then I’d sit by the window under the green New Village Nails neon sign, bring my hands to the drier and watch all the Saturday people walk by in their coats and scarves.

One December night like all other nights, I was resting on my futon when the phone rang.

“Why don’t you come down this weekend?” my friend Lea asked.

I hadn’t been back to Princeton since I’d moved. It was still too soon I’d tell my friends, though it had been months.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Come, we all miss you! It will be so nice, we’ll build a fire, have some wine, it’ll be like you never left.”

“But I did leave.”

“What?”

“I can’t, I’m busy,” I said louder. I sounded guilty.

“You’re busy doing what?”

“I have to get my nails done.”

“Your nails.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said and as I said it my eyes filled with tears. I thought of red nail polish, of bath salts and cucumber cream.

“Okay, I guess. Let me know if you change your mind.”
I returned to my red futon and lay on it like a dead fly and waited for something to happen—for someone else to call, for someone to knock at my door, but no one did.

“You have to help me!” the Twinkie-woman’s plea turned inside my head like a shark. It was not crazy people that New York was breeding, after all. It was loneliness.

Sophia Efthimiatou is originally from Athens, Greece, and now lives in New York City. She is currently pursuing an MFA degree in creative nonfiction at Columbia University, and working on a collection of humorous essays on the hidden persistence of loneliness in daily life.

It was a legitimate question, not least because Connie and Martin were due to be married within a few weeks. But the fairness of the question didn’t make it easier to answer, especially for somebody Martin had asked to be his best man. The movie contained satire, of course; that much I could say. What kind of black-and-white short running less than a half-hour didn’t have satire? And since the film was being financed by family loans, sound was out. It would be a silent satire, with traffic noises and slammed doors supplied by a friend with access to a sound effects library. Light would be of the natural kind --- what you got from the sky during the day.

That didn’t really answer Martin’s question. He was stuck on the content of a satire that required his bride-to-be to play a prostitute. Since there was no script outside a few jottings in a notebook, it wasn’t possible to hand him something to read. With little alternative, he had to be told that the satire was based on foreign films and shorts that had recently caught my fancy. For instance, there was this Swede named Bergman who had a proclivity for austere characters dressed in black who represented Death; that was why one of our characters was going to be dressed up in a black overcoat and homburg and drive a milk truck down the street (with the connivance of the regular route driver who was willing to jeopardize his livelihood for a few minutes and for fewer bucks). Then there was this Frenchman named Godard who had one of his heroines wearing an International Herald-Tribune T-shirt while she peddled the paper in the streets of Paris. But no, no, not to worry. The budget didn’t allow us to whisk Connie off to France; our heroine, played by my wife, would sell her papers from the rooftops of the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Why from rooftops? Because that’s what made it satire!

Martin’s scowl might have been despair at understanding or it might have been self-criticism for not having seen more Swedish and French films. On the assumption that it was more the former than the latter, I told him about our hero --- a Twenty-Something innocent who wandered through the streets of New York in an overcoat and bedroom slippers carrying a red balloon. How could anybody tell the balloon was red in a black-and-white movie? I reminded Martin that wasn’t the point, and he had to agree, at bottom still preferring to know why Connie --- already his Connie according to his cultural and religious lights --- had to play a hooker. I broke down the answers in reverse order of importance. First, there was the fact that the script (such as it might have been) called for Balloon Man to meander through the dingier areas of the West Side, and who could deny that in that neighborhood he was far likelier to encounter a hooker than a Good Humor man? Then there was Connie herself: A brisk brunette who carried herself without expecting nurses to guide her by the elbows. With the right raincoat and heels, with her lipstick applied with a trowel and her mascara channeling a raccoon………..well, better leave that answer unsaid. But that still left the most significant reason: Connie insisted on doing it! Or as she interrupted our conversation: “It’ll be fun, Martin. We’re not married yet, you know.”

Since this sounded like an allusion to more than calendar appointments in a church, Martin took a moment to review his doubts. There was definitely a calculation of losing the battle but winning the war on his tight face. He might have savored that reflection longer if Connie hadn’t added the reassurance that her hooker would acquit her part only in the street, not in a tenement lobby or fleabag hotel. Since these images apparently hadn’t occurred to him previously, Martin took another ponderous look at the imminent Mrs. Martin, wondering how they had occurred to her. It was from behind this expression that he said he was happy for her show biz career.

We all were because it was the last casting problem in the way of shooting. Over the next several days, Balloon Man slapped along the street in search of what he could not quite identify as adventure, unaware that Death was trying to run him down in the milk truck or that there were more convenient places than rooftops to buy the International Herald-Tribune. When it came to Connie, he stared back at her blankly when she batted her eyelashes, puckered her lips, and swung her hips in his direction, then continued on down the street, balloon wafting in the air. Standing behind the camera, Martin looked satisfied, doubly so when Connie also did and he could congratulate himself for having it on the record that he had encouraged her acting ambitions.

As nimble as Balloon Man was in other scenes about walking up to people and then getting away from them again before somebody had to talk, his performance reached its zenith in Times Square one night when he was supposedly overwhelmed by the surrounding neon and collapsed on the street. For the first and only time on the production, the prop master was called into play for the scene, first securing hundreds of dead subway car bulbs from the Transit Authority and then strewing them all over the Crossroads of the World for the intended laugh. As with other special effects on the short that might not have been short enough, however, the bigger laugh took place off-screen. This owed to the inspiration of the cameraman to shoot the scene of Balloon Man lying in the middle of all the dead bulbs from the third-floor window of a building across Seventh Avenue, leaving no sign whatsoever at ground level of a major shoot being in progress. By the scores, New Yorkers out for the night walked over and around Balloon Man and his bulbs but without a second glance back that something might be amiss. As the cameraman said, it was “a proud New York moment.”

The cutting of the picture coincided with looser editing between Balloon Man and Connie. As fellow performers, they realized they had more in common than walking down a West Side street. Scotch, for example --- they both seemed to like that. And they also both seemed to have similar questions about rushing into church marriages --- a topic my wife and I preferred not hearing from them with Martin sitting at the table with us and beginning to look suspicious. To his credit, though, Martin also liked scotch, and endeavored to keep up with everybody else around the festive table. Being methodical about all things, he also knew when he had liked scotch too much, so that he was able to clear all the glasses and ashtrays away from his place to make a neat little circle, remove his own glasses, and then plop his head in the space and go immediately to sleep. Balloon Man and Connie kept talking about the right age to consider marriage.

Editing on the picture went well. At some sessions it was possible to make as many as two jump cuts to cover up missing footage before jumping back to thoughts of Balloon Man and Connie. My wife argued it was none of our business, to which the logical reply was what wasn’t our business. Exactly, she said. People got butterflies before they went through with a wedding and wanted to hear their fluttering with a second person, just to get it all out there and put it to rest. Had she had those doubts? Who had been her Balloon Man? Never mind, that wasn’t important. Oh, really? Was it that guy from the bookstore who was always keen to talk to her about Norman Mailer while checking out if she was wearing a white bra or black bra? She didn’t want to talk about my visions of the naked and the dead. How far along had I gotten with the editing?

Just as she had been resolute about launching her film career, Connie put her doubts about getting married firmly to sleep. How could anyone have ever thought otherwise? So between bouts with the footage that seemed to have been directed by someone who didn’t want satire even to open, let alone close, on Saturday night, there were the traditional rituals of wedding rehearsals, family dinners, and worries about a marriage gift that wouldn’t look too much like it had come from a store on our budget, say Cheap Sam’s. What there wasn’t was a bachelor party, and that relieved everybody since too many of the people expected to show up would have been Balloon Man. Instead, there was a quiet evening in a restaurant with the couple-to-be where their conversation was all about moving to California after the wedding.

Moving from New York to California is a big step. It can be measured not only in miles, but in the number of drinks that have to be consumed while talking about it. My wife and I realized this the following morning --- the morning of the wedding --- when we woke up in our Manhattan apartment with two headaches to see that we had little more than an hour to share the aspirin bottle, shower, get dressed, and grab a cab for a church in Brooklyn. The aspirin and showering parts went fine. The dressing part got only a passable grade since I was still carrying my tie running down the stairs and she was still cursing the resistance of her hair to her comb. The cab part was an absolute debacle since the only two drivers who bothered to stop thought of Brooklyn as Hiroshima as the Enola Gay was approaching. Once they had sped off, there was little choice but the subway and its two transfers.

The subway’s noise was relaxing --- a clatter of supersonic progress seeding thoughts that Balloon Man II should be with sound. Too bad the train made up for its speed through the tunnels with stops long enough to board a capacity crowd from Madison Square Garden and rival thoughts that Balloon Man I would never get off the editing table. But all things considered, and these included the transfers and ongoing views about the compatibility of combs and shampoos, it was almost reasonable to arrive at our elevated station destination a mere 15 minutes after the scheduled start of the ceremony. And even this wasn’t as bad as it might have been since, as I had buoyed myself going from one train to another, I had the wedding ring in my pocket. Nothing could begin before I had arrived anyway.

Since I wasn’t wearing heels and was the only best man, I was told to run ahead to the church. I shot down the El staircase without a clue that I was probably the inspiration for Gene Hackman’s chase after Marcel Bozzuffi in The French Connection. It wasn’t the only thing I didn’t have a clue about getting to the bottom of the staircase and tearing down the street to the church. A block away, I could hear the organist hitting the same chord on his way into Mendelssohn, then backing off again, as though Connie and her father kept faking him out at the top of the aisle. I couldn’t see any of that game being played in the right spirit.

The church’s side door was a mixed blessing. While it allowed me to avoid glares from Connie and her father in the back and to cross directly over to the altar, it trumpeted my arrival to the hundred or so people in the pews eager for action upfront. In the fourth or fifth pew back, Balloon Man seemed to think I was funny. Martin didn’t. Apparently long in place at the altar rail, he gave me the same kind of scowl he had when asking me about the movie. Happily, though, whatever he muttered was drowned out by the organist finally getting to his second chord and Connie starting down the aisle.

Everything proceeded the way it should have, for about a minute and a half. But just as Connie’s father was turning her hand over to Martin, I made the mistake of putting my own hand into my jacket pocket to have the ring ready. I definitely felt a handkerchief and my keys. I also definitely felt nothing else. Since jackets come with more than one pocket, I was able to squander the next second or two digging into them for the modest diamond that would have financed another short, at least as long as the labs were also agreeable to being paid on time. The priest chattered away amiably. Martin and Connie tried to look solemn about what they weren’t sure should have been altogether solemn. Her bridesmaid seemed on the verge of tears. Her I identified with. Certainly, there was nothing else in my pockets that could have stood in symbolically for the symbolic ring. The closest I came was my keychain, and it was twice the size of my middle finger. There was no way Connie could have worn it without jangling all the way back up the aisle.

As the priest moved on to sacramental things, I tried to reconstruct what had happened since slipping the ring into my pocket back at the apartment. I didn’t know what good it would do, but it seemed more practical than counting off every nano-second up to the exchange of vows. Having eliminated all other possibilities, I was sure the disaster had occurred while I had been ripping down the steps from the train. There had been a moment around the tenth or eleventh step when I had realized the flap on my pocket had been inside rather than outside and I had adjusted it --- evidently ten or eleven steps too late.

The Requiem dragged on. Had there been weddings when couples hadn’t exchanged rings with their vows? Surely, there was some culture in the world that didn’t believe in such nonsense. Maybe one of those in the South Seas that Martin was always reading about and said he admired. Wouldn’t this be his opportunity to show how sincere he had been? And as for Connie, what kind of a hypocrite would she be if she accepted some representation of being bound to somebody like a harem slave girl? She should have stood up for her independence. She had done it with Balloon Man, so why couldn’t she do the same with her own life? That was the trouble with formal weddings: In the name of feeling respectable about going all the way, people were afraid of going all the way.

It was the priest who nodded for me to clean out my ears. For a few seconds there had been a cat-like hiss behind me. The guests warming up their opinion of a best man who had lost the wedding ring? Who needed to know sooner than later? But the priest insisted I check it out so he could get on with his benedictions. When I looked back, I was dismayed to see my wife kneeling at the altar rail by herself and looking like a religious fanatic who couldn’t ever get close enough to sacred rites. I didn’t know what that had to do with the balled up Kleenex in her hand or the way she kept staring down at it as though I had to blow my nose, and right away. Then I hoped I did know. When she shoved the balled up Kleenex into my hand, I knew why I had entrusted her with selling the International Herald-Tribune on the rooftops. “You dropped the damn thing on the stairs,” she whispered, trying to sound nonchalant about having recovered the loose ball that had won the NBA championship for the Knicks.

Since there were too many eyes on me, I palmed the ring behind blowing my nose. Balloon Man looked curious, but I knew he hadn’t caught on any more than anyone else. The priest, Martin, and Connie all looked at me for permission to resume their ceremony. I gave it to them.

For the sake of symmetry, I entered the reception at the hotel determined to have ten or eleven drinks. The atmosphere helped. Too many people, starting with Martin and Connie, looked too happy that, minus the delayed start, everything at the church had gone swimmingly. The only thing they seemed less entitled to than their satisfaction was their disapproval if they heard about the ring misadventure. Was it simply a coincidence that I had a similar problem cutting Balloon Man --- that I had been left with too much of the essential material only in my head? I didn’t think so. Even when Death didn’t get you from a milk truck, it had irritating ways of running you over with a thousand small deaths.

There was another part of the wedding ritual I’d forgotten. About an hour into the eating and drinking and more drinking, the banquet manager intruded to ask everybody to quiet down for a second. According to this interloper, it was time for the best man to offer a toast to the married couple. He wasn’t in the minority, either. All the people who could only stare at your back in a church could stare you in the face when you were sitting on a dais.

What was there to say? Congratulations to Martin and Connie covered it, didn’t it? So okay, that would have been like just tossing a queen-sized sheet on a king-sized bed, so maybe a little more pulling here and tugging there. After all, they had been through a lot, more than even they knew. So just to make sure, “let’s wish them happiness again, and if they don’t want it, let’s all promise to jam it down their throats.”

It wasn’t quite like “We’ll always have Paris,” but it caused the same gargled emotions in a sea of throats. What greater proof that I was better off working without sound? Plus everybody could get right to more action by lifting their glasses, taking a drink, and joining me in shutting up.

“Jam it down their throats?”, Martin asked quizzically after everybody had sat down again and got second opinions on their hearing.

“It’s a way of saying.”

“Whose way?”

Since he had been sitting next to me through the toast, I didn’t take his question literally. Instead, I took comfort from the sight of Connie trying not to burst out laughing.

A few weeks later, after Martin and Connie had long been settled in Los Angeles, we showed Balloon Man in a Lower East Side festival of shorts. Surprisingly, just about every major situation --- the first appearance of Death in the milk truck, selling the Herald-Tribune on the rooftop, Balloon Man himself flattened out on the sidewalk in Times Square --- received loud laughter from the audience. About the only interlude that didn’t was the one with the hooker. As great as Connie was, it should have been left on the editing room floor.
 

The pigeon shit on me that afternoon, as I trudged back to the office with a wrinkled bag of Wendy’s clutched in one hand, over puddles and around those maddening rolling suitcases everyone in midtown seems to drag behind them, salivating at the thought of my double cheeseburger and new sea-salt fries, but slightly nauseated as well by the faint whiff of bird shit in the air, and oh, let’s just admit it, verging on despair.

"Enough of this charade, I’m leaving early today." I resolved to go downtown to my barber, to get a beard trim and perhaps a haircut as well, try to regain some semblance of my humanity. With all this wild growth, I was like a homeless man, or the ghost of a homeless man, stalking the hallways of an office where I was no longer wanted.

An hour or so later, at the bus stop on Second Avenue and 45th Street, I purchased a “select” bus ticket at one of the new outdoor kiosks and boarded near the back of the bus when it arrived. “Select” buses are a new feature in New York City, designed to speed up the excruciatingly slow process of taking a city bus anywhere. You buy the ticket beforehand and hold onto it for the duration of the ride, ready to present it to any transit cops that might materialize and give you a hard time (and, of course, there are many). Then you board through any of the three bus doors, which does indeed speed things up, and the bus makes far fewer stops, which also speeds things up, so that when all goes well, you can cruise to your destination with exciting efficiency.

I slid into a seat near the back of the bus—plucking nervously at my unruly beard—next to a middle-aged and exhausted-looking Latino guy with a long scar on his face, which he was letting bump against the window, as if he’d already been utterly defeated by the ride, life … everything. I could smell booze seeping out of him into the air around us, but I didn’t mind. It smelled sweet, and I was happy to have such a miserable-looking seatmate. And what a scar! The other people, I didn’t really look at—I was preoccupied with an increasingly tense series of text messages I was sending to a friend about the reduced income I was suddenly going to be facing in the coming months.

“What percentage of your income comes from that job?” she wanted to know. “Ninety-five percent,” I said, dramatically, then tempered that down to “About 80 percent,” which was probably closer to the real number, but still far too much.

A few stops later, the doors opened and a rowdy, unruly group of about 20 Chinese children boarded the bus in unison—screaming, milling around in a confused frenzy, punching each other, gnawing on fistfuls of candy—and I thought that perhaps I should just get off the bus then and there. I surveyed their faces as they crowded around me—they were about 10 years old, or 12, most of them, happy, arrogant-looking, very self-assured in their youth. Were they definitely Chinese? Perhaps Japanese? "No, I can tell these groups apart, and these children are definitely Chinese." I often wonder if I can “tell” what kind of person someone is just by looking at him—it’s fun, to try to guess ethnicities, sexual orientations, those kinds of things. And I like to think that I’m rarely wrong.

As engrossing as this was, I was painfully aware that the bus wasn’t moving. The bus driver was on the intercom now, peevishly telling everyone to “move away from the doors.” Apparently the bus cannot start if people are standing in the door wells—a good safety measure in theory, but ridiculous in practice, the way people cram onto a New York City bus at rush hour.

It made me wish I was back in India, where there were no safety measures on buses at all. People just packed in as tightly as they could, and then hung on to the doors from the outside if there was no more room inside, or climbed up on the roof as a last resort. That’s something I’d love to see in New York—a bus ripping down Second Avenue with a bunch of people on top, hanging on for dear life. Not on Bloomberg’s watch, but maybe I’ll be mayor someday.

“This bus is going out of service if you all can’t clear out of the door wells,” the bus driver hollered into her microphone. The mob of children paid absolutely no attention, except one boy who mimicked, “This bus is going out of service!” to the delight of his friends. The bus driver had had enough. “OK, this bus is out of service,” she thundered, “I’m going to have to call someone to do a mechanical check on these doors. Everyone off the bus.” The doors swung open again, and people started streaming off, back onto the street. For the most part, they seemed blithe, unconcerned, as if the absurdity of this was not registering with them. Several staunch, angry riders, including myself, stayed put.

It seemed clear to me that once a few people had gotten off the bus, the driver could shut the doors again and we could be on our way. But this was not what she had in mind. “Everyone off the bus,” she yelled again, “and I mean everyone.”

I glanced at my seatmate, whose scarred, alcohol-soaked face was still mashed into the widow beside us, blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding around us. My tension levels, on the other hand, which had been rising throughout the day, were now unbearably high. I pushed my way to the front of the bus, stepping on a few straggling children, and planted myself in front of the bus driver—a round-faced black woman with bright-red lipstick and a weary expression.

“This is ridiculous,” I said at her, trying to be calm, but almost screaming: “You know very well this bus still works. You should have just had a few people get off and then started the bus back up. I can’t believe this is the system you guys have—to tell everyone to get off the bus and then act like there’s something wrong with the bus itself.”

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step off and catch the next bus. This bus is no longer in service. I have to call someone to check all the doors for mechanical errors.”

“You know that’s not what it is!” I said, “There were just too many people on the bus; you could start it back up right now!”

“Sir, are you really going to let three buses go past”—she glanced outside at the other buses nearby—“while arguing this invalid point.”

“An invalid point?” I sputtered. “Oh no, the point is valid. The point is very valid, and you know it.” I was wagging my finger in her face now, and she shifted her weight on her massive bus-driver’s chair and fixed me with a defiant glare. I was choking now, too angry to speak—so I fled that bus and got on another one just outside, a local bus, also packed with people.

I had expected a 20-minute ride downtown to the barber, where I could reclaim at least some small part of my identity, or dignity, or whatever it was I’d been gradually losing over these last few years—or at least alter my appearance enough to look in the mirror and know that things had changed, and might continue to change. Instead, the ride was turning into an hour-long ordeal.

As my new local bus approached 14th Street, something shocking happened. I looked out the window and saw the “select” bus I’d originally been on go speeding past, once again full of people. "I knew it! She lied to me—the bus worked the whole time. She could have just told me to stay put!"

The select bus pulled into the 14th Street stop just a few moments ahead of my local bus, and I frantically pushed my way to the front, cursing at strangers—and especially children—desperate to get off and catch back up with my original bus.

Slipping in the slush left over from last week’s blizzard, I broke into a sprint and was just able to board the select bus, right up front near the driver, before the doors closed. The driver’s jaw dropped when she saw me. There were about half a dozen transit cops on the front of the bus checking tickets, and I knew my beard looked long and wild, and my eyes wide and wilder, but I didn’t care.

“This bus does work!” I screamed. “I knew this bus worked the whole time.” The driver looked at the nearest transit cop with disgust and dismay.

“This man was on my bus before,” she said, “giving me a hard time, acting all crazy.”

“All I said was that the bus worked and you knew it, you didn’t need to kick everyone off,” I said. “I knew the bus worked. You knew it worked. And, see, it does work.”

The transit cop, who seemed fairly friendly, less of a meathead than some of the other guys I’ve seen with his job, stared at us both, obviously confused. I had to get out of there before a thought materialized in his still vacant skull.

“I knew it worked. I knew it,” I said again, as if this one simple truth were the crux of all that was wrong in the world, then I scrambled down the length of the bus, looking for an empty seat.

As soon as I found one, I took out my phone and started scrolling through the various screens, as if to give the impression that I was about to fire off some very damning missives about the embarrassing chaos that ensues on these new “select” buses, as if maybe I was about the bring the whole MTA down with a few choice words. "One hundred and four dollars for a Metrocard and this is what you get. They know they’re all crooks!"

Any moment, this cop was going to swoop down on me and arrest me, I could feel it. Then I would have been laid off, shit on by a pigeon, and arrested all in the same day. But that moment didn’t come. The cop stepped off into the snow, the doors swung shut, and we were back on our way.

When the bus stopped at Allen and Houston streets, where I was getting off, I suppressed my desire to harangue the bus driver one more time, and instead left quietly through one of the rear doors and hurried along to my barber, without looking back. "I am an insane person, but soon, at least, I’ll have a beard that’s trimmed enough to disguise it."

I searched for Van in the back of the barbershop, but couldn’t find him. "I’ve come all this way for nothing." I glanced down at my boots, defeated. Then, when I looked up again, there he was. His eyes contained both warmth and interesting complexities, and I relaxed, knowing that soon my beard would be in his capable hands.

“Just put your head back,” he said, once I was comfortable in the barber’s chair. “My beard is looking way too long and crazy right now,” I said, “we need to scale it back.” He nodded with appreciation, as if we’ve all been there, then said, “You’re lucky you caught me, I was just about to leave. My wife’s not going to be home tonight, and neither is the baby—it’s literally going to be the first night in two years that I have the house to myself, completely alone. I figured I’d go home and take advantage of it, just stare at the walls for a while or something.”

“That’s incredible,” I said, amazed, “how can you do that—never have any time to yourself? I’d go nuts.”

“It’s easy,” Van said, “I love my wife, and I love my daughter even more. My daughter saved my life.” He paused, and reflected further. “Plus, I’m a twin,” he said, “so my whole life I’ve never really been alone.”

Then silence—and the sound of his scissors, bringing my beard back under control, bringing me back to reality.

Rob Williams is a mercenary copywriter and copy editor who currently lives above a meat market in the East Village.

I love riding my scooter. I’m thrilled with the feeling of freedom it gives me and I’m crazy about not having to strategize parking solutions. What I’m far less crazy about is the way a lot of cars don’t treat me as an equal vehicle. How they see the lane I’m driving in as rightfully theirs. I’ve made so many gestures to these drivers that I feel like I’m channeling Marcel Marceau. I often try to turn around in my seat to point to my license plate…to indicate that I’ve paid a fee to use the roads, in particular the lane that I’m in. This has proven to be both ineffective and dangerous. I’ve ached to call the jerks over, to explain how efficient my scooter is, how I’m saving the planet; futilely hoping that they will either revere or take pity on me.

The bike is a heap, barely making it over 30mph. This is partly why I’m a marked man. No one in NYC drives that slowly, especially on the bridges from Brooklyn to Manhattan. This trip over the East River is usually white knuckle time for me. If I’m lucky, cars just buzz by me; more often they bear down on me as if I’m a jockey who could get a whip out to get the thing to go faster. As I’m having visions of being hit and tossed over the side of the bridge, I make mental notes of what clothing to remove, and in what order so I’ll be able to swim to safety. I have a gnawing feeling that this stress is not good for me.

Occasionally, when I’m riding, I’ll catch a glimpse of a reflection of myself in one of the storefront windows on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. The image I see does not coincide with the one I carry in my head. Instead of a cool, dare devilish looking dude, I see a middle aged man with white hair peeking out from under his helmet; looking way too tall for the small bike he’s on. I’m feeling like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider but looking like Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond. This is disappointing beyond words.

Last week I brought my motor scooter in for a tune-up. I bring it to a shop nearby that is mostly a motorcycle shop but also does work on scooters. I’m reluctant to go there because I feel so out of place. The people who work there, their customers and the hanger-outers are mostly “bikers.” Everyone is very nice. And also very BIG. So there I am, surrounded by these huge Harleys and motorcyclists in their “leathers.” And then there’s me–with my little Yamaha, feeling like some amalgam of Woody Allen and Felix Unger. To overcome this feeling of prissiness, when it’s necessary for me to go to the repair shop, I wear old jeans and don’t shave. I usually try not to shower for a while, as well. But as I’m thinking about it , I realize that there aren’t enough days in the week for me not to shower to create the ‘bad boy’ image I’m looking for. So, now…I’m thinking tattoo. A tasteful one on my bicep. “Scooter (boy) Man”

Neil Stein lives in Park Slope where he is a real estate broker. He took up writing a few years ago and has been publishing the blog, http://ironicman.wordpress.com/ for about a year and a half.