The city had delivered a series of blows, starting with a broken heart. My Greek borough-bred boyfriend, whom I’d clung to like a life-raft for 8 months, had coldly broken off our relationship. I hated my mindless job at a stuffy and perpetually silent publishing house. The bathroom of my new apartment smelled like the overcooked vegetables my neighbor inexplicably prepared every morning. And although I thought there were probably one or two people in a city of 8 million who I might befriend, I hadn’t yet met any of them.

Every day, I contemplated going back to California. It would be so easy to move home. But I’d dreamed of New York since as long as I could remember. It was where people came to be better, brighter versions of themselves. I wanted to live out loud. I wanted to shine. Although I was miserable, the idea of NEW YORK CITY still held me.

One summer day, I walked past Scuba Network, which back then was in the Flatiron Building on Fifth Ave. and 22nd Street. I was struck by the amazingly out of place, festive and carefree beach scene in their window display. When did New Yorkers ever go to the beach? When did they play with plastic blow-up rafts? It was lunacy, as far as I was concerned.

Inside, a charming man who no doubt identified me as a wide-eyed New York transplant who was utterly beaten down by all the concrete, crowds, the subway and the noise, talked me into signing up for lessons. I made only $22,000 a year. I was up to my eyeballs in student loans. I couldn’t foresee affording a tropical vacation for another decade. But I plucked down $300 to fulfill a dream that despite having lived near the ocean in California my whole life, I’d never managed to achieve – to take scuba lessons.

Everyone who wants to get certified in scuba diving must first prove that they can actually swim by doing 10 nonstop laps in a pool. Obviously people who had chosen to learn scuba diving, a sport often done in 100 feet of water, would have no trouble with a few laps. Or would they? On the scheduled day of the swimming test, hoards of former students who’d failed in the past, showed up to give it another go. It was a motley group – they were pasty, unshaven, out of shape New Yorkers who were visibly uncomfortable in swimwear. Their flesh fought against the elastic confines of their suits. Men pulled at their trunks, revealing angry red marks on their skin under the waistbands. The women hid behind cheery beach towels. They all peered dubiously at the heavily chlorinated water in front of us.

Personally, I was thrilled. First, the swimming pool was an “only in New York” experience — it was in the basement of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church across from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue and 50th Street. I loved that, in addition to worship services, St. Bart’s provided a sanctuary for a secret society of scuba enthusiasts two floors underground. Plus, I was an excellent swimmer. Growing up out west, everyone could swim, but I always went out farther into the ocean than my friends, and even had a box full of ribbons I’d won at various swimming competitions stashed in my parents’ garage back home.

Our scuba instructor, Bart, explained that we would swim in groups of ten and have 20 minutes to do the laps. Those who went over the allotted time would be required to come back another day and try again.

“First group, get ready, set, go!” Bart shouted and blew a whistle.

The first ten people dropped into the shallow end gracelessly. They blinked as if surprised by the water dripping in their eyes. The group collectively splashed like toddlers in a kiddie pool. They dog-paddled, clung to the edges in the deep end and stopped to gasp for air once their feet could touch the bottom. I’d never seen people so visibly ill at ease in the water.

Later, when Bart blew the whistle to start my group, I dove in shallow and threw myself into a freestyle sprint, my arms twirling like a windmill. I zipped beyond the pack, kicking hard. At the end of the first lap, I somersaulted into a flipturn underwater, pushed off the wall and sailed by everyone else still struggling midway through their first lap. My strokes were sloppy and unpracticed – I hadn’t swum laps since high school — but I left the other students in my wake.

When I got to the other end of the pool, I was exhausted from the exertion and needed a deep breath, but I didn’t want to lose face now that I’d flaunted my experience. I lifted my head clumsily to take a breath before another flipturn and saw Bart leaning out over the water waving me down.

“Wha…” I gulped, coming to a stop. I thought I’d broken an unwritten rule that even the dog-paddlers managed to abide.

“OK, that’s enough,” Bart laughed, shaking his head. “You can swim. Get out.”

“I’m done?” I asked confused.

“A flipturn! I can’t believe you. You’re such a show-off,” he laughed again.

The entire group of wannabe scuba divers stared at me in silent awe. My moment had arrived. I proudly hoisted myself up onto the edge of the pool, squeezed water from my hair and let people stare. My left ass cheek sprang free from my bathing suit, my mascara ran down my face and my side ached from the laps, yet I felt like an Olympian who had just scored a gold medal.

“Eh, how’d you learn that?” asked a burly guy with a Brooklyn accent, who had failed the test a few minutes earlier.

“I’m from California,” I shrugged.

“That was cool,” he smiled.

“Thanks,” I beamed.

Maybe I could handle New York after all.

In my early days, I often took the Staten Island Ferry – which cost .25 cents then and is now free – to spend a peaceful hour on the New York Harbor. I would stand on the bow of the boat letting the wind whip my face and stare at the packed whirl of Manhattan, then amble to the other side and take a deep, relaxed breath while into the hilly greenery of Staten Island. It seemed so peaceful, a lush oasis in the middle of the harbor.

During the summer of 1996, I finally got an opportunity to take a foray onto “The Island.” One of my coworkers was playing Puck in a Staten Island community theater production of “The Tempest.” I wouldn’t normally feel drawn to amateur Shakespeare, but when my friend Lois, the 42-year-old receptionist at my office, invited me to go with her, I jumped at the chance.

Lois said,”It’ll be fun. We’ll make a night of it, You can see a little of Staten Island.”

The idea that Johnny would be there almost stopped me cold. “Johnny will come too,” Lois said. “We’ll pick you up at the ferry.” He was Lois’s husband, who always hugged me a little too hard and stared a little too long. But I wouldn’t let his leers keep me from the final borough.

Lois and I were a strange pairing. While I was 24 and single and well-traveled, she had three teenage kids, was afraid to fly or ride an escalator and had never left New York – but she adored me and vice versa. Once a month, we’d get drunk after work and laugh as she unleashed unfathomable family stories. Her parents lived in a house on Long Island where everything, down to the toilet seats and light bulbs, was pink. Her sister, a former beauty queen, had married an ex-con who burned their house to the ground after they split up – but they were still friends. Lois’s brother was a 35-year-old virgin who looked like Charles Manson, lived with his parents and held casting-calls for homemade porn movies in their living room.

Lois and I talked about everything – except Johnny. Even in our drunkest hours, I couldn’t bring myself to mention that she was married to the most unsettling person I’d ever met. Johnny was as close to being an albino as any non-albino could be. His skin was nearly transparent and revealed a maze of veins pulsing under the surface of his face. But more disturbing was his devilish laugh and piercing pinkish eyes that stared at me unblinking and said: “I see your soul and I’m going to eat it.” I truly suspected Johnny was the Grim Reaper. If he was indeed Death, Johnny’s cover was to be a worker in the Lincoln Tunnel, a job I never fully comprehended, but understood that he had access to the lights, fans and other operational facilities involved with the tunnel. Whether Johnny took a job where he never saw sunlight because of his paleness, or if he got that complexion from working in the tunnel, I wasn’t sure – but he looked like a man who spent all day underground. In addition to his paper-thin skin, he had fine silvery-white hair, which he brushed forward and cut straight several inches above his translucent eyebrows Julius Caesar style. His teeth were sharp stubs browned around the edges, and his body was skeletal and malnourished, exactly the opposite of his wife’s comforting round edges.

The night of the play, I rode the Staten Island Ferry excited to get further than just the terminal. The enormous boat made loud screeching noises as it clumsily slammed into the wooden buffers. Then the walkways were lowered, the chain barrier was lifted and a mass of bodies swelled down the hallway leading out like salmon swimming upstream. I followed the flow until I got outside and saw Lois waving madly and yelling: “Over here!”

In the car, Johnny turned around and locked me in a dead stare. “You look good,” he said. His thin lisps secreted copious saliva.

Staten Island, it turns out, looks like a suburb. There are sidewalks and free-standing houses, trees and yards with garden gnomes. Some of the homes looked like they were made out of tin – and every backyard had an above-ground pool. Manhattan felt eons away, and not in a good way. I was disappointed in the drab homes and rundown waterfront, and felt isolated on The Island.

Lois, Johnny and I had planned to buy tickets to the play then grab a bite before the show started. When we arrived at the playhouse, however, the box office window was shut tight with a sign saying it would open in half an hour.

“This is what we’ll do,” said Lois. “You and Johnny go pick up some sandwiches. I’ll stay behind to get tickets when they come on sale.”

“Oh. Well, but, but…I’m sure it won’t sell out. We should all get food together,” I stumbled.

“Nah. We gotta cover both bases,” she insisted.

“Then I’ll buy our tickets,” I said desperately.

“Don’t be silly. It’s our treat,” said Lois. “Right, Johnny?”

“Sure,” he answered. “Come on, keep me company.”

I had been alone with Johnny once before when he joined Lois and I for drinks. While his wife was in the restroom, he confessed: “I still do stuff even though Lois don’t like it. I just don’t tell her,” and looked at me like we were in on a mutual joke. I wracked my brain while he grinned and I wondered, “Does he have affairs, sleep with hookers, shoot heroin, kill small children?” When I failed to respond, finally he said, “I smoke out sometimes.”

“Ohhh, Pot!” I shouted and laughed so hard I almost cried. “Cool.”

By the night of the play, I’d encountered Johnny half a dozen other times, but was no more comfortable with him than during our first meeting. Yet there I was on the foreign soil of Staten Island, a boat ride from Manhattan (i.e. civilization), about to be trapped in a car with him. I cursed my own curiosity. Why was I obsessed with seeing new places? Staten Island, now that I saw it, wasn’t Oz. It was instead a borough from an alternate universe where I could very well perish.

“I’ll have tuna or turkey, depending on what looks fresh,” said Lois, snapping me back to the moment. She opened the car door and I slid into their old boat of a vehicle, the front seat just one long expanse shared by the driver and passenger. Two feet of slippery vinyl was all that stood between Johnny and me.

As we pulled out, I lobbed a benign question hoping to keep control of our conversation. “So, Lois mentioned you two are thinking about moving from Brooklyn to Staten Island,” I said. “Seems like you’d be at home here.”

Johnny, however, was not a man influenced by social norms. There was a great pause before he responded with a throaty Vincent Price, horror movie laugh.

“What?” I asked shocked.

“It’s just that I always wanted to be alone with you, ” he said slowly. “But now that I am, I don’t know how to tell you all the things I want to tell you.”

Oh my god! What could be so intimate that Johnny wouldn’t discuss it in front of his wife? Earlier that very evening he told both Lois and I how he and his coworkers at the tunnel regularly drank whiskey and invited the receptionist to the control booth because she “likes it when a few different guys are doing stuff to her.” Johnny told the story as if he wasn’t part of “the action” but I had my doubts. Even if he’d kept his distance from the underground orgy, just being party to it seemed like a scenario he would want to keep from his spouse. What could he have to tell me in private?

“Lois and I were talking the other day about what would happen if we ever split up, and I told her the first thing I’d do is ask for your phone number.”

Though my heart was ready to leap out of my body, I decided the only way to deal with Johnny was to put on a ‘been there, done that’ persona. “You two are a great couple. You’ll never split up.” for Lois and Johnny’s enduring happiness, I prayed for the first time in a long time.

After a moment, Johnny looked at me deflated. “Nah, nothin’ ever happens. Life is filled with nothin’ happening,” he said.

I felt sort of sorry for him, for that middle-aged malaise that comes over many people after years in the same house with the same job and the same spouse. But I wasn’t about to pull him out of his rut.

“It might not work out anyway between you and me,” he finally said as if he’d been really thinking over the logistics of our potential pairing for the first time. “I might be too old for you.”

I wanted to tell him that our twenty-five year age difference was at least reason number 740 it wouldn’t work out, but instead said: “Yeah, that might be tough. I once dated a 39-year-old and even that was too much.”

Though I found him nerve-wracking, I didn’t want to alienate Johnny. I’d come to New York to experience a life and set of circumstances different from my own. Growing up in California I’d never encountered anyone like him, and I cherished the window into his world. I just preferred to observe Johnny from a reasonable distance — and with a chaperone.

We sat for a while in uncomfortable silence and I began to I process our conversation. I’m sure Johnny had hoped for a definitive reaction to the phone number comment: Either I was to fork it over or tell him to stay the hell away from me. I’d decided though to take his confession as a harmless crush, and gently brush him off. As I looked out the window with streets of Staten Island zooming by, it did cross my mind, however, that in 20 minutes Johnny could be tossing my lifeless body into Staten Island’s horrifyingly named Fresh Kills Dump. Suddenly the trees and parks and wide swaths of undeveloped spaces seemed daunting. Never had I felt a stronger desire for the cramped Avenues of Manhattan where the crowds surrounded me like a security blanket.

“You know for me, sex is sex is sex,” said Johnny jarringly. “I don’t care if sex is with two guys, or a guy and a girl, or a dog or whatever. You know, sex is just what it is,” he continued.

I remained still for a moment, weighing how to respond, then saw my answer just up the road. “There’s a deli!” I shouted, and moments later was bounding out of the car before Johnny brought it to a full stop. I waited outside while he got the snacks, and shook off his comments. He was lonely. It was no big deal, I told myself.

Indeed, on the way back Johnny seemed to backtrack from his come-on: “I hope I’m not scaring you or nothing,” he said.

“Of course not,” I lied. “It’s really hard to shock me.”

“You won’t say nothin’ to Lois will you?” Johnny asked.

“No, don’t worry about it.” I smiled, and decided never to tell Lois. It was partly a righteous vow to spare my friend pain – but mostly it came from a selfish desire to help Lois and Johnny avoid any marital strife that could eventually lead to him calling me.

“It’s just that it gets more difficult as a man gets older, being with the same woman,” Johnny continued, and I nodded.

“You think about a lot of stuff. But you know I’d never do anything,” he said then took a breath. “I mean, you could do something to me and I would take it, but I wouldn’t be able to do anything back.”

Johnny winked at me. Was he suggesting something obscene? No, he couldn’t be. Or was he? It took a moment, but then I understood Johnny wanted me to give him a blow-job right there in the car. He was hoping I’d lean over, unzip his jeans and pleasure him as we drove back to meet his wife who was waiting with tickets to see a community theater production about fairies. I turned to look at him. He gave me his Grim Reaper stare, a look like was reading my mind. For once, those chilling eyes didn’t faze me. It was just Johnny’s shtick, I realized. He had no idea what I was thinking. He was so off-base it was ridiculous. I was, in fact, checking to see if the car door was unlocked and weighing whether it was safer to jump out of a moving vehicle or stay in the car with him.

Just then, Johnny began to cackle a higher pitched version of his horror movie laugh, and said, “See, nothin’ happens.”

“That’s right,” I said.

When we swung into the parking lot, Lois was sitting demurely on the bench in front of the playhouse holding three tickets. I yelped for joy and rushed out of the car like a child long separated from her mother.

“Hi. So you got to see some of the Island,” she said. “What’d ya think?”

“I’ll take Manhattan,” I said.

“So anything exciting happen on the ride?” she asked.

I panicked for a moment. “Ummm…” I stumbled holding up the bag of sandwiches dumbly. But Johnny wasn’t bothered. He laughed a little too hard.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothin’ ever happens.”

That night I strayed from my usual modus operandi on the subway, which is to bury my nose in a copy of the latest the New Yorker, a perfect distraction since it helps me avoid eye contact and soak up some culture at the same time. But that Wednesday night, the magazine stayed put in my purse. I was exhausted from reading what seemed like hundreds of Seymour Hersh articles about Iraq. Instead, I felt compelled to contemplate the city where I had chosen to live, on the other side of the country from my family, my roots and my history. Basically, I was in a ‘What the hell am I doing here’ mood. It’s a question I’ve asked myself periodically since moving here.

All of a sudden, at 23rd Street a stunning man stepped into my train car carrying four Whole Foods grocery bags and my heart leapt into my throat. He looked like Guy Pearce, the angular Australian movie star, with a sharp chin, a five o’clock shadow and smoldering intense eyes — and he was wearing a jaunty red Elmer Fudd hunting cap. The hat, made of starched itchy-looking wool, was lipstick red and not at all in vogue. His white sneakers too had streaks of brilliant red on the sides. He wore two tiny ponytails tied tightly in matching red rubber bands. The hair stuck out from the back of his hat so fiercely straight it looked dangerous. The pigtails were like an animation signifying forward motion, like this Red Hat Man was being propelled into life by jets of hair.

For a full minute, my eyes roved over him. His high cheekbones, pointed nose and intelligent eyes all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. I thought, This is what human faces are supposed to look like. But he wasn’t classically handsome. He’d never be an Abercrombie & Fitch model or pictured in the pages of J. Crew. Yet, he was magnetic. Not just because of his face, but because of the whole package. The hat. The ponytails. The grocery bags on the subway. Nothing about him said, “I give up. I’ve seen it all. I conform.” That was what got me. After all these years in the city seeing millions of characters, this was a man I couldn’t slat into a pre-made category in my mind. So I continued to stare.

Of course, on the New York City subway looking directly at someone is usually an indication of hostility or mental illness. The code among the sane is that if you are caught staring, you must at least pretend that you’re not doing it. So, when his eyebrows crinkled and he turned toward me, I politely looked away and struck a pose with my chin pointing slightly up, which I hoped was a flattering angle. We were in the middle of a rare warm winter night so I’d shed my usual trousers and heavy sweater and replaced them with a long denim skirt with a slit up the front, no tights and calf-high boots. My hair was in a high playful ponytail. I felt sexy and stylish and I wanted him to appreciate me.

Even while I pretended not to gaze at Red Hat Man, I became more deeply enamoured as his Whole Foods grocery bags came into focus. He went out of his way to shop at a healthy food store. I could tell a million things about him by this single detail. He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t cheap. He didn’t subsist on Chinese takeout. He could be vegetarian. He might do yoga. He definitely watched his weight. Of course, he could very well be gay. But if he wasn’t, I could be in love forever. I felt a surge of life through my limbs. My heart had long been involved with a man whom I deeply loved and was committed to, but who didn’t give me flutters. He gave me instead the steady, warm cocoon of caring that comes with a longterm relationship. He was also addicted to Mu Shu Pork and Dominos pizza and would have gouged out his eyes with chopsticks before lugging four bags of organic food on the subway.

While actively pretending not to stare at my new crush, I noticed that he was actually looking at me. Yes, I thought, don’t I look cute? I turned to shyly eye him again and his stare darted to the side. Red Hat Man and I played a flirtatious game of ‘I’ll look at you then look away when you look at me’ for the all too short time that remained of my subway ride. I wasn’t sure if he was staring because he was amused by my obvious adoration or if he’d seen something in me too. But there was some palpable connection between us.

When we neared my stop, I scooted to the edge of the plastic seat and hooked my purse over my shoulder, a signal that I would be leaving. He glanced up then looked shyly down. When he looked up again, I did something that I had never done in 10 years of living in the city: I looked directly and deliberately at the stranger across from me, and he looked at me. Together, wide, friendly smiles spread across our faces as we gazed into each other’s eyes like long lost lovers in a movie. We were two people falling in love on the New York City subway. The feeling could have pushed me over.

The car came to a slow, halting stop. “Christopher Street,” the conductor announced my stop. I stood up, still looking at my newfound love and said, “I like your hat.”

“Thanks,” he replied, his voice more deep and masculine than I expected, so unlike his refined features.

“No one wears a hat like that,” I smiled.

“Soon all the kids’ll be wearing them” he joked.

“It’s like you’re out in the woods. It’s cute,” I laughed as the doors threatened to close. I looked him over from top to bottom. “Really cute.” I said stepping out of the subway car, my chest bursting with renewed life.

Then I walked out into the unusually balmy night feeling awake for the first time in what seemed liked years, beaming and in love with my life and with the city all over again. A moment like that was exactly what the hell I was doing here.