Our paths intersect just west of the median. My cellphone is glued to my right ear, and I continue chattering because if I pretend not to notice Tim Gunn, perhaps I will actually be invisible to one of the world’s best-known authorities on fashion and possibly Heidi Klum’s BFF. But I can’t resist; I look up. Our eyes meet. I see his glance flicker to my flip flops and my sincerely unmanicured, unwinterized toes. His examination is similar to that of one who involuntary swivels to check out a roadside accident when the traffic slows and you see the flashing lights of the highway police at the scene - but quickly checks himself. For a second -- do I really see it? -- a scintilla of a shadow of a moue crosses his elegant face, and then it’s gone. I almost expect him to tell me that I’m so deliciously low, so horribly dirty; would that he were the Higgins to my Eliza.

I should have known; looking that unkempt, I was bound to cross paths with Tim Gunn. Ever since he moved to the Upper West Side maybe a year ago, he’s classed up the place just by being here, but I seem to never see him when I look good. I actually spoke to him the first time I saw him; it seemed so unlikely that I would ever see him in person again, having never seen him around before, that I thought it would be ok to gush a bit. He was shlepping a massive laundry bag, which proved to me that (1) despite his godlike looks, he’s human and (2) he looks godlike even shlepping a massive laundry bag. As I confessed my admiration, I remember a voice in my head saying, “Let. Him. Do. His. Laundry.” When I finally, reluctantly, tore myself away, Leo, seven at the time, asked me who the man was. I giggled, “I know who he is because he’s on TV but he doesn’t know who I am.”

“So he’s a stranger?”

“Yes. He’s a stranger. I was talking to a stranger. You still can’t.”

It’s not like I haven’t been cautioned since I was at my mother’s knee to look good when I left the house. The first iteration of the rule was rather obvious: you never knew who would see you outside, which, when I came of marriageable age, emphatically included possible suitors who might somehow apparate onto Main Street, Harry-Potter like, just in time to check me out. That morphed into the more sinister, if slightly unlikely rule that if you left the house looking bad, you would of necessity encounter someone important, like the aforementioned phantom suitor or one of my mother’s friends. This latter rule seemed akin to the one that leaving the house without an umbrella would guarantee rain. I never completely understood the causal relationship at work here, but apparently, leaving the house bare-faced caused the planets to subtly realign so that when the shifting slowed to a stop, there was Mrs. Englehoffer, staring at me disapprovingly.

These thoughts were in part prompted by reports of a recently released study which found that a woman who wears makeup is perceived as more likable, competent and provided she doesn’t overdo it, more trustworthy. Researchers at Harvard were among those who designed the study, which was paid for by Proctor and Gamble, makers of among a billion other things, makeup. Their sponsorship of the study leads me to wonder, perhaps uncharitably, whether the study would have seen the light of day had it concluded that makeup makes no difference in the perception of one’s abilities. But the findings shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Certainly, the idea that makeup can make you look better isn’t new (that’s why you buy it), and studies have found that more attractive people get better jobs and earn higher lifetime salaries (see, for example, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, by the economist Daniel Hamermesh). This study just connects the dots: if (1) makeup makes one more attractive, and (2) attractive people are considered more employable and, implicitly, more competent, then (3) a bit of artful shading and contouring should cause you to be perceived as more competent. I confess that the fact that you can paint on a face and be thought of as actually better than one who doesn't, is kind of mind-spinning to me. I’ve never been completely comfortable wearing makeup. But maybe that’s just a vestige of the child in me who was distinctly unhappy with her looks and believed that brains could combat plainness (as Jane Austen might have called it) and were therefore, somehow incompatible with beauty.

The P&G study does make me wonder if I’m short-changing myself when I walk out of the house without so much as a smear of lipstick. One day last week, on impulse, I tried on some cheapie drugstore makeup I'd recently bought. Then, of course, since a made-up face demands commensurate accoutrements, I put on my black leather jacket and heels, fluffed my hair and walked out of the house. I felt great, if a bit conspicuous. I heard someone call my name. It was my friend Karen, who looked me over quizzically as she walked toward me. Finally she carefully told me that I looked good. Knowing her, I’m pretty sure she tread lightly because to squeal “You’re wearing makeup! You look great!” is to imply, “You know, when you don’t wear makeup you look sooooo awful.” But as we spoke about the usual stuff, in her eyes was the unasked question: Why? And in my own mind, I’m still not sure if the answer is that I’m selling out or being smart enough to accept reality. Maybe I’m just doing my part to spruce up the neighborhood for Tim.

Sharon Silver is a wife, mother, lapsed lawyer and aspiring writer.

Rafael Cruz, the owner and one of Mayfair’s six barbers, doesn’t mind sacrificing his shirt-sleeve as he buffs the barber’s pole between customers. “Look around! There’s no end to it. Everywhere there’s dirt,” Cruz says with a sweeping gesture of his arms. He dodges two garment racks, barely escaping with his life. “I’m not even safe on my own doorstep,” he says.

For Cruz, dirt is a living, breathing entity whose aim is to make his life hell. Out of the corner of his eye he notices that the shop’s name, painted in gold, is starting to flake. He winces and, speaking rapidly to himself in Spanish, moves in for closer inspection.

Cruz’s fastidiousness may once have been a common sight in New York, but these days it’s so rare it’s been known to prompt spontaneous applause from passersby.

When the boss is away visiting family in Puerto Rico or even when he’s outside cleaning fly specks off the window, he counts on his fellow barber, Rocco Battista, to look out after the shop.

Rocco’s body is a testament to 45 years of his wife’s home cooking–he’s all soft edges. His facial features are smooth, sagging a bit, but it’s a kind visage. Hard-earned dark circles hang beneath his eyes. Thick glasses ride low on his nose, making his eyes look bigger and friendlier. He’s bald except for a small patch on the side of his head–barely enough to cut.

He began his career at 15 in his native Naples, Italy, always hoping to come to America, but never expecting it to happen. Now he is part of the bricks and mortar of New York City. His boss, as well as the tonsorial cognoscenti, call him “the best barber in Midtown.”

Fifty years ago, when Mayfair first opened, the difference between success and failure seemed to be the personal touch people invested in their work. The local barber who could boast, “I cut your father’s hair,” is no longer part of our lives. But this is Mayfair’s credo.

Haircuts cost ten bucks at Mayfair–unlike everything else in the world, there’s no catch here. Don’t confuse the bargain price with some inferior, low-budget franchise; no one will ask you if you got a free bowl of soup with a Mayfair haircut.

The shop’s interior is square. The street side has two large windows, with a front entrance dividing them. Two walls are covered by mirrors and fronted by three barber’s chairs; a seventh chair resides in the center of the shop.

Most of the wall-space is taken up with prints of New York as it looked 50 years ago, small posters showing outdated hairstyles, and a couple of expired calendars that haven’t been removed. You won’t find any designer products, just the old-school Clubman brand gel. When asked if he’s heard of Paul Mitchell, Rocco responds, “Didn’t he play for the Mets?”

They still use Pinaud Haircare goodies in their Spartan green canisters–check in your grandpa’s medicine cabinet to see what they look like. Combs are placed in sterile blue liquid, and talcum powder is stored in tin canisters that resemble big salt shakers. On a countertop, an Oster shaving cream dispenser foams out hot lather.

Tiny scissors, designed for ear and nose hair removal, are arranged in antiseptic-looking trays. Old nylon aprons with snaps at the neck are still used, as well as soft-bristled brushes that whisk your neck clean of hair when the job is done.

The finest pleasures you’ll find at Mayfair are the professional shaves. Wielding meticulously sharpened straight-razors, the barbers’ hands are as steady as a surgeons’.

Mayfair is a cultural melting pot where customers feel at home–unlike the subways and buses where a cross-section of society is thrown together, yet straphangers still tend to insulate themselves from their neighbors. On an average day, a street guy can find himself seated next to an Asian UPS worker, a Wall Street guy in $700 loafers, or a newly arrived immigrant hustling garments on racks. The clientele clearly appreciates the opportunity to ease back and soak up the scene. Even if the People magazine is from last January, it’s fun to wait your turn at Mayfair.

Mayfair is a barbershop, not a beauty salon. Women customers are rare. When the occasional woman does come in, it’s for a masculine haircut or one that demands clippers or a straight-razor.

If you arrive at the right time, you’ll catch the regulars. Next to the door, beneath a faded poster of a Fonzi-lookalike advertising Vitalis, sits a lean black man with a sleek, shaved skull and white chin whiskers. A porkpie hat rests on his knee.

“If you’re looking to meet ladies, don’t come here,” he says. “The boss don’t keep no blue hair dye in stock, dig? Ain’t that right, Rocco?”

Rocco, bending over a customer whose neck he’s shaving, responds in almost a whisper. “I will cut anyone’s hair if they come in on time and pay. They can be ladies, too, or anything in between.”

A young Russian barber, the greenest member of the staff, watches Rocco’s hands, fully absorbed in his wizardry. “Look how smooth he is–like silk,” he says. “When he uses the scissors, it looks like a hummingbird’s wings.”

The black man, half-listening, shrugs, and immediately changes the subject to his “old lady.”

“She gets suspicious about what really goes on in this place,” he tells an Asian man with doughy hands, holding a horse racing form. “She suspects it’s a front for a cat house.”

This elicits raucous laugh from all the guys: “A cat house?”

The barbershop could be the last bastion of the figurative “boys’ club” in New York, one which a woman would not wish to join, even if invited.

An old garmento with a gravelly Brooklyn accent, faintly smelling of cigars and Old Spice, has been going to the barbershop since the Nixon administration. He has an answer for everything. Over the course of an hour, his polemic’s range from “Why we blew it in Vietnam” to “Why we’re blowin’ today.” He blows in like clockwork at 3 p.m. on Thursdays.

“It’s a veritable fountain of youth, ” he says of Mayfair. “Twenty years ago, I thought the Big Guy in the sky had Bernie Gootblatt’s number, I tell you. With two bleeding ulcers and a bad ticker, I wasn’t even gonna see Nixon run outta office! Now I kibitz and laugh. It makes the time pass easier. I don’t look a day over 60, do I? It’s the age I was when I started comin’, so I ain’t gonna stop now.”

“Me too! I been regular eight years now,” the Asian man pipes up. He habitually tries to join conversations with the words “me too”–so much so that it’s become his nickname. He works as a stockboy at his uncle’s grocery store up the street. “Everybody know my face here, everybody say, ‘Hi!’ Everybody listen, right, Rocco?”

Without looking up, Rocco, who is concentrating on his client’s sideburns, confirms Me-Too’s statement with a slow nod.

“The city can be a lonely place,” the old black man says, looking down at his shoes. “Most of the good joints closed down.”

Downtown billiard halls and late-night diners were where many of Mayfair’s customers used to hang out.

“It is the Yuppster wiped out all the class in the city, isn’t it, Rocco?” says the young Russian. “They call it sanitation, huh?”

“Sanitization,” Rocco corrects him, his eyes on his client. “People don’t change, only the words.” “Yuppsters! I don’t know from Yuppsters,” the garmento interrupts. “All’s I know is I’m a pastrami on rye with a malt. I think Cagney was the best damn actor ever was, I like a bourbon at night. See my point? That’s what gets me through the day.” He cranes his neck to see if his pals agree.

The regulars nod their heads, as if no finer truth has ever been spoken.

Suddenly, there’s a commotion outside. Three large bodies collide at full-speed into the storefront window, like NBA players chasing a loose ball into the stands. WHACK! The barbershop window quakes but doesn’t shatter; everyone in the barbershop recoils from the shock.

The guy on the bottom, a black man in standard-issue baggy clothes, takes the wallop of a forearm to the jaw. It sends him scurrying for shelter. He tries Mayfair’s front door. The other two men, white with bristly goatees and buzz cuts, charge him. They’re inside now.

Rafael Cruz drops his scissors and heads for the doorway. The two attackers drag their victim outside and bang the man’s forehead on the cement as if it was a sandbag. They pull him to his knees. He struggles back, gets loose. A blur of legs and arms fly. Everything is motion. They’re pushing him against the storefront window, trying to subdue him.

No bigger than a bantamweight but fighting like a heavyweight, Cruz jumps into the fray, easing them off his window, over to the adjacent concrete wall. The black man has nothing left. The two men lock his hands with plastic tie cuffs. It all happens in a matter of seconds. It’s clear to everyone in Mayfair these guys are two undercover cops and a suspect. The black man’s blood has streaked the window.

“Fuck! He’s bleeding!” says one cop to the other. “Did he bite you?”

The same cop sees the suspect is choking. He had the “rock” in his mouth the whole time, trying to get it down. The cop grabs his throat, to stop him from swallowing the drugs and destroying his bust.

Everyone at the barbershop has an opinion to voice about the scene they’ve just witnessed–about the insanity and unpredictability of everyday life. As usual, Rocco has the last word.

“Outside, you never know what to expect. But nothing ever changes at the Mayfair.”

It is a beautiful boot, though—Marc Jacobs, in black pebble leather with pinstriped suede trim and a small heel—and for a second or two I wonder what it would feel like to go into credit card debt for the sake of fashion. I glance around at the well-heeled women in the shoe department and try to conjure up a feeling of righteousness to ward off the sense of shame that kicked in as soon as soon as I passed through the revolving door downstairs. Shame over being trespasser, a class tourist in a rich-person’s department store. Shame over caring what rich people thought of me. And shame at what my mother would think about the whole episode.

When I was growing up in New York City, my mother never took me into stores like Bergdorf’s. We went shopping for shoes and nice dresses to wear to synagogue on the Lower East Side. That was where Jews went for shoes and nice dresses, even as late as the 1980s and even though the shoe store was next door to an empty lot piled with bricks and dirty needles.

The rest of my clothes came from Conway or other discount stores in Herald Square, or Macy’s, if they were having a sale. My mother would go shopping on her lunch break and come home with bagloads of outfits for me to try on at home, returning what I didn’t want the next day. I would model them for her in the living room and agonize over the prospect of offending the manufacturers of the items I had rejected. I must have known, through the fog of child-logic, that my feelings of guilt were completely misplaced, that what I was really afraid of was hurting my mother. That is how I ended up with a pair of pleated acid-washed jeans in the style of A.C. Slater from “Saved by the Bell,” worn once and then stuffed into the back of my closet.

A common refrain in my family, at least one spoken by me and my father, was, “We’re not going to the poorhouse!” This was usually met with indignation by my mother, who would snap back, “You don’t understand how little we live on. You don’t pay the bills!” And both my dad and I would have to let it go since she was right—certainly about the bill-paying part.

Still, I was resentful, and felt downright deprived, when in the fifth grade she refused me a pair of metallic spandex leggings, which were deemed too expensive. As a consolation prize, I got some ribbed pseudo-leggings from Conway that were barely tight enough to fit into my slouch socks. (The socks were not quite right either.)

I should say here that we lived in a comfortable pre-war apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I grew up in relative privilege. We had a car, a dog, and went on the occasional family vacation. I went to private school, which was paid for by my grandmother. But money was always tight, and spending it was fraught with anxiety.

The department stores on the east side—Saks, Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, even Bloomingdale’s—were off-limits. They were the bastions of the rich and insouciant, with snooty salespeople and spoiled customers, easier to scorn than to risk their rejection. My parents, liberal stalwarts in a time of Reagan-era excess, wore their fashion cluelessness like a badge of honor. They rooted for the downfall of junk bond king Michael Milken, and cheered when Barney’s was tarred by charges of racial discrimination.

I had expensive taste, my mother liked to tell me, and not without a hint of admonition. The daughter of a rabbi, her wardrobe as a teenager consisted of hand-me-downs from her father’s congregants. When owning a cashmere sweater was all the rage in 1950s Baltimore, she had to wait until some other girl got tired of hers. My mother didn’t have many stories about growing up, but this was one of them. Somehow, I sensed that the sweater trauma was somehow connected to the other iconic story of her childhood, in which my mother spent most daylight hours after school alone, in the public library.

My father had not known such want as a teenager. His disdain for fashionable clothes was less an embrace of frugality than it was a rejection of his WASP upbringing. One summer during high school his parents had sent him to a tailor for a custom-made suit to wear to all the Louisville debutante parties and he came back with a jacket and pants made of mattress ticking. He dismissed my material longings with the casualness of someone who had never coveted a cashmere sweater.

In the ninth grade, when I transferred to a fancy private school on the Upper East Side, my own fashion sense went a little haywire. Realizing there was no way I could keep up with my wealthier peers, I turned to buying all my clothes at the Salvation Army. I thought I had special skills when it came to spotting the best T-shirts—soft and worn, with some sort of ironic slogan or nonsensical text on the front— from among the rows of musty closet detritus. This, to my mother, was more economical and thus better than shopping retail, even though I went through most of high school wearing a hot-pink ski jacket as an overcoat.

That all changed once I had my own place in New York and a small, but independently earned sum of money in my bank account. Shopping in New York is like a drug: the more money you spend, the more you want to spend. And once you pass your limit of what is an appropriate price for, say, a perfect black cotton top or a really, really great pair of flip flops, it is hard to go back. Instead, I justify any extravagances with the argument that, for people like me, with no innate style, expensive clothes make us look better.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t immediately call my mother to confess when I spend too much money on a pair of shoes and then refuse to tell her how much they cost. When she asks me, with an innocence that verges on poignant, “Were they more than $75?,” I realize that if she knew just how much more she might think less of me.

This is a woman whose own mother, two generations out of the shtetl, washed and reused tin foil—and not because she was an environmentalist. I am pretty certain my mother, who has lived in New York for four decades, has never seen the inside of Bergdorf’s, the ultimate gatekeeper of the upper caste lifestyle. Bergdorf’s radiates posh. It has soft, flattering lighting, and etched mirrors in the escalator shafts. It lacks the crushing din of manic shoppers looking for the sale rack. Even the shopping bags—lavender with indigo text in deco font and a graphic of figures who look like they’re on their way to a Jay Gatsby party—are a paradigm of high-class understatement. And although many of the customers are teenagers and women in their twenties wearing oversized sunglasses and skinny jeans, the whiff of old money in Bergdorf’s is pungent.

Walking through the ground floor, past rows of jewels that cost as much as a car, I can’t help but feel that being here is a small act of betrayal. This is a place where it is acceptable, in fact encouraged, to spend $900 on a pair of boots. Not that I ever have spent $900 on a pair of boots. But I plan to someday. Then I will call my mom.

You walk into one (anyone will do) and they all are pretty much the same: seven to ten mostly Asian women sitting assembly-line-style; bent over sudsy feet and chipped fingernails, toiling together in unison: not unlike ants in an ant farm. Many of them have varying degrees of red-, burgundy- and orange-highlighted hair and you hear that slipper-on-bare-floor walk-scuffle. Calves are slapped in varying shades of pallor and depth, form and transparency; knuckles are popped into place while their owners’ eyes gaze into unthoughtful space, fixated upon misspelled advertisements on cramped walls. Upon entry, the chorus greets you: “Pick-uh-culla! Pick-uh-culla!” as the hum of efficiency drones within this well-oiled machine. Gossip and chatter ensues among the manicurists, often in Korean or Chinese, with a sidelong glance here and there at a strange or difficult customer, or at the odd-woman-out Chinese among Korean staff, or vice-versa.

But, then there is me and I am neither strange nor difficult. “Spa pedicure today?”

How much?

“Fitty Dolla.”

I politely shake my head no. “Okay, next time, you do.” The nail shop chatter builds momentum as I sit on my footbath throne; I get a couple of sidelong glances and the “Lalalala-oh” or “Num-ni-ya-ya”. As I flip through the pages of US Weekly, I wonder with amused paranoia, “Is it the Chanel Black Satin nail polish? A little Goth, but hey: it’s everywhere!” Yeah, so what? I am cheap: I never get the spa pedicure. The $20 manicure/pedicure combo suits me just fine. The bottoms of my feet are filthy, but that’s what wearing flip-flops in a damp subway station will do for you. Alas, none of these things are chatter-worthy.

The fact is that I am Korean, but really, a fake one. Being adopted at the wee age of four months, with a Midwestern German-Catholic mom, I speak no Korean, except for “Hello”, “How are you”, “Thank you” and “fart”: the little I retained in a pamphlet (“fart” was learned from a twelve year old) on a chance journey to Seoul.

Twelve years later, the pamphlet learning is a bit rusty and I can count to ten in German: I am neither immersed (nor embraced) in either Nature’s or Nurture’s worlds. I must say, I do feel some relief if the manicurists are Chinese, as then I am not expected to converse in my “native” tongue and we all leave well enough alone. But even that has a caveat: the adoption agency speculated my birthfather may have been Chinese, but, that’s a different story and all too vague to even talk about.

Most of the time, I just happen to pick those darn Korean nail shops and when I perform the uncouth non-reaction to their friendly inquiries and banter (all in Korean, of course), I get the whole quizzical pity routine. In resigned embarrassment, I slump further in my seat and disappear into the latest Lindsay-Paris-Britney disaster.

Sometimes I am not let off so easily and become the victim of some friendly interrogation: “Lalalalalala-oh?” (Huh?) “Lalalalalala-oh!” (I don’t understand.) “You Korean, yes?” (Yes.) Again, “Lalalalala-oh?” (I’m sorry…) I am a nice shade of pink now; a few curious eyes look up from the tabloid pages: Is she rude? Is she stupid? “Ahhh, you no uh-speak-eh Kah-lee-en.” Then she has an epiphany and triumphantly exclaims even louder: “You born here!” This offers her and all of the others a suitable excuse for my Eastern cultural ineptitude: I’m an ignorant, americanized brat of privilege. (Actually, I was born in Seoul. I came here at four months of age.) At this point, my answers become so low and quiet, they are almost inaudible. Hers however, boom in annunciation and contrast to my discomfort: A not-so-funny comedy of errors. “Where your parent at – they in Korea?” (Uh, yeah…I think so…) She misses the subtlety of the last part: “When you go visit them?” My feeble attempts to be polite enough to answer her inquiries, while retaining a sense of anonymity are failing miserably…(I went to Seoul about thirteen years ago.)

“You see your parent thirteen year ago!” Scowls and gasps ripple down the line. I hear low decibel gossip rumbling. Sweat beads are on my nose, now. My relaxation is melting in the foot tub along with my heel calluses.

Here comes the climax and the end, as I hiss through gritted teeth: “I. Am. Adopted.”

By now, the entire salon knows about me and my angst about being a “banana” – a Chinese friend summed the phrase up to me one night over cocktails: I’m “yellow on the outside, white on the inside.” My pedicurist pityingly pats my leg and just smiles a curious little smile. I am irritated and slightly angry now and cannot enjoy the calf massage. Why don’t they ask the hard-ass black woman with the size eleven feet next to me if she speaks African, and then chastise her if she does not? Why doesn’t the blonde girl with the iPod and yoga mat get the third degree about when she last saw her parents? For them and everyone else (including Koreans who speak Korean and Chinese who speak Chinese) a pedicure is simply, a pedicure. There is minimal conversation, minimal interest. For me, perhaps it’s their opportunity for a first-hand view into an more-American-than-Asian American’s life: accent-free and void of cultural resonance and richness; having the audacity (and inward guilt) of having “your own people” massage your tired and dirty, roughened feet. I can’t help but notice the running trend within Asian culture of willingly abandoning one’s own: blonde Pamela Anderson-esque girls in Tokyo, Ghetto-fabulous Filipino rapper girls with “booty.” These are two extreme, but existing examples of Asians not really into being Asians and fascinating parodies of popular culture. I am the polarity of this: longing for that ability to communicate and identify with the obvious of who I am.

The latex exam gloves snap off, literally: I guess these days, you can never be too careful. She helps me down from my footbath throne and carries my shoes and handbag to the manicure table. No more questions now, we are in our own comfortable worlds of real-Asian/fake-Asian, manicurist/customer.

Now I come armed and prepared for these encounters. I really work the coy and enigmatic “I speak a little bit” now, when I am asked, “If I speak-eh any Kah-lee-en?” THEN I quickly slump into my seat and dive into the magazine, giving un-averted attention to nonsense, while hiding my sheepish little smile…it works brilliantly for me. The chatter and laughter usually stops. (Yeah, yeah…good idea: let them think I am antisocial, as opposed to ignorant.) The leg pat comes only when it is supposed to, when the lotion gets slathered on my legs at the end of the pedicure. There is no illicit gossip and commentary: “What if she…UNDERSTANDS us?”

This parachute has holes in it, as the Asian-affinity-thing often extracts intimate and public details about if I am married (yes) who is my hubby and what does he do (he’s a sometimes-irritating-mostly-nice guy and a lawyer), what is his race (white), how are our economics (fine, but could always be better in NYC), do we have any children (twin two-year-olds), why am I so thin (good luck). And of course, those issues of my background and its voids always are a factor in the equation. Nonetheless, in the end, the strategy is sound enough.

The plain truth is that you don’t have to maneuver the mechanics of language, to understand universal logic. The rude woman yelling into her cell phone, smudging her nails carelessly only to have them repainted twice, while holding up the five-person wait when there are not enough chairs and outdated magazines to go around doesn’t require an interpreter. It’s understood in all of our minds:

“Move along, crazy bitch…”

And so do we all.

I based my particular incarnation of Murray Hill Girl on the judgments that I feared others made of me. She lived close enough to the stretch of Third Avenue bars to be able to totter home in platform shoes, and wore artifacts from various fixtures of her habitat. Her outfit included an empty Tasti-De-Lite frozen yogurt cup as a wrist cuff in honor of the three such shops in quick walking distance from her apartment. The sixteen faintly flavored, low-calorie varieties of the stuff available each day often taste as vapid as the neighborhood feels.

A turquoise embroidered skirt purchased from the clearance rack of one of the many boutiques in the area with names like “Pookie & Sebastian” and “Coup de Coeur.” A shiny $5 purse like the metallic bags residents carry to hit the town or pick up a quart of milk. A large ring, though more on the plastic than diamond end of the spectrum. A small stuffed dog to stand in for the squirrel-sized pups many a Murray Hill girl owns. And for the piece de resistance, a custom-designed magenta t-shirt with a gold bat and gothic turquoise letters spelling out my inspiration’s title “Murray Hell.” I did not get around to the fake tan or highlights, and to be truly authentic, I also would have had a frat boy in flip flops and a button down collared shirt by my side, or anxiously text messaging me. With a nonprofit job instead of something in finance or consulting, I would need an imposter’s resume as well.

Admittedly, the costume was a mix of things that I or any other woman might normally wear, but I like to think that the combination made a striking impact of visual, intellectual and sociopolitical significance. Like my own style, my costume may have been a little too smart and a little too subtle, and scary only to me.

At a party downtown that Halloween night when asked, “What’re you dressed up as?” my friend got to answer “farmer” and continue chatting, but I had a harder time explaining my wardrobe representation of my neighborhood and personal aesthetic. All night, people asked me the stock New Yorker question—“Where do you live?” My trendy peers probably expected an answer of Brooklyn, most likely in or around Williamsburg, so when I told people Murray Hill (or “midtown east” to be vague), some looked surprised or even disgusted. Recently over gelatos, a Williamsburger date in a faded rock band t-shirt even rolled his eyes from across the water at my neighborhood’s mention. We did not have a second date.

Unlike Williamsburg, Murray Hill does not have a live music scene beyond occasional karaoke nights, its inhabitants are as white as the stiff vanilla cupcakes at the local pastry cafe, and it has a generic sports bar for every resident. However, Williamsburg is becoming un-hip as quickly as it became hip. Drawn to the once reasonable rents of this rapidly gentrifying industrial shell and working class neighborhood, vegetarian hipsters now reside across the street from former slaughterhouses and shop for organic peanut butter at the corner bodegas. In recent years, Murray Hill has certainly attracted more bankers than artists, but now both locales have about the same number of luxury apartment complexes in development. With Murray Hill girls and Williamsburg hipsters pricing out families, immigrants and artists, perhaps the two areas won’t be different for long.

Besides rental trends, these neighborhoods have experienced ideological shifts as well, at least according to the lore. In 1827, Williamsburg was fiercely independent, existing as its own city until 1855 when the Burg joined Brooklyn. Well before the rambunctious Williamsburg was born, Murray Hill was a scene for British sympathizers and saboteurs. Murray Hill takes its name from a prominent eighteenth century Quaker merchant family, the Murrays. The family patriarch Robert Murray was a fierce loyalist during the American Revolution who was exiled after the war.

By contrast, his wife Mary Lindley Murray is said to have stalled British troops by entertaining them with tea, conversation and perhaps even a little seduction, allowing George Washington and company enough time to retreat from New York. So, whenever some hipster gasps at a Murray Hill girl’s address, she can simply point out that her neighborhood’s heritage was full of rebellion, revolution and sex, all to make America independent. Meanwhile, after just 28 years of independence—likely the same age as the hipster rolling his eyes at a Murray Hiller—Williamsburg sold out. Whether homogenization of the city continues or neighborhood identities shift as easily as putting on different t-shirts, the address-based judgments continue.

Walking around my scrutinized neighborhood is pretty pleasant, even though the Quaker Murrays probably wouldn’t play on the buck hunting videogames with fake guns and simulated carnage that dot every dive bar. Now that the ladies of the night haven’t wandered the sidewalks for years, in costume I could rival the tartiest-dressed pedestrians around, though I hear they might still operate on Lexington Ave and 28th Street between a 24-hour McDonalds and the “Ascot” apartment building.

The only ones prancing around the neighborhood are the petite Murray Hill girl-size dogs, practical though possibly doubling as accessories. Regardless of the size of her dog, a Murray Hill Girl must commit to walking it several times a day, whether she has to wear flip flops, rain boots or winter gear. One can only be so bourgeois if she has to pick up an animal’s poop. Meanwhile, despite the fact that I just killed another houseplant, I still have more greenery inside my apartment than outside where I have never seen two trees standing next to each other. Though we lack natural flora, I do like the lavender flowers hanging over the restaurant below the townhouse across the street, just a few strides away from the pink and green painted benches outside of the toy shop.

That Halloween night with my low maintenance stuffed dog in tow, I was walking up Second Avenue just south of the closest Tasti-De-Lite, when I saw the final piece of my costume—tall, wearing a black shirt tucked into grey slacks outside a bar—Murray Hell Guy. As I got closer, I saw him unzip his pants with one hand and hold a cell phone with the other, urinating and chatting comfortably in his domain. He gestured towards me as if he were about to say something, but I did not stop to listen. Certainly, public urination isn’t new to the city, but in my neighborhood it’s from the bankers instead of the bums. Like so many of the dogs walking around, perhaps Murray Hell Guy was just marking his territory, but he was defiling our surroundings. I rolled my eyes.

While Williamsburg residents may also urinate on the street—just last month I saw a gray-haired woman smile and squat down to relieve herself between two cars on the sidewalk by the park—Murray Hell Guy, regardless of his class or profession, should be accountable. Much like Robert Murray and the Brits, he may have felt entitled to pouring his pomp and privilege onto my street. Revolt ousted them and he could be excised from the neighborhood too, though more likely because of rent than revolution.

My costume may fit reasonably well, but Murray Hill Girl’s counterpart exuded the traits that make this wave of gentrification imperious. Frozen yogurt, cute dogs and shiny purses are relatively benign, but that Halloween night, I rejected his presumptuous piss, and with it, the faults of these new neighborhood archetypes and the implication that by living here I am one of them.

With a nod to Mary Lindley Murray, this Murray Hill Girl impersonator acquiesces to the neighborhood wardrobe, customs and domesticated animals, but with an eye towards revolution, she rebuffs judgmental hipsters and colonizing pissers alike, searching for an identity that transcends her address and enhances the city. Now, the old orange t-shirt and Murray Hell top hang side by side in the closet; their function to clothe rather than define.

“Nice Coat.”

I would expect a reaction like this, with say, a wrap of scarlet or shocking pink or a low-cut number. I would expect to stop men in their tracks with some jungle-cat animal print. But I have a leopard print coat and even with its showy and iconic allure, it inspires virtually no reaction. My new find, however, with its demure charm, I realized on its first outing, turns heads. As the blustery days wore on, men of all sizes, races and ages admired it. Hair up or down, Manolo Blahnik’s or Minnetonka moccasins, the coat worked its magic on all of them. This masculine admiration, it should be noted, was not of the unwelcome, lascivious sort, epitomized by the Ruth Orkin photo of the young American girl walking down the street in Italy while men ogle, leer and make cat calls with their eyes. This admiration is understated, complicit and above all respectful, as if these men were maybe complimenting an elegant ’67 Jaguar or Citroën DS 21 M Cabriolet.

I stopped by Legacy and told Rita, the owner, about the coat’s power. “I know,” she said. “It’s vintage. Vintage coats do that. It’s like magic.” She had a point. They don’t make coats like this anymore.

Empowered by my vintage ammunition, I marched on to Kate’s Paperie to buy wrapping paper. My color scheme involved silver, gold and copper but I spied the last roll of silver in the shopping basket of a chiseled, well-groomed man. He appeared to be staring at me. I found him near me where ever I wandered. I mused, could my coat get me that silver paper?

I ended up in line behind him. He stepped out of line and approached me.

“That is an amazing coat.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“The maitre d’ of my restaurant would love this coat.” PAUSE. “She loves clothing like this.” PAUSE (This was my cue to say, Oh, which restaurant? Oh, stop by for dinner? I’d love to…But I was staring at the silver wrapping paper.) “Are you a designer?” he continued.

My chance for the paper had never been better but I decided not to use the coat’s power for such lowly material gain, to wait for something bigger. Whatever that might be.

Walking west on Prince Street I paused by a jewelry table. Heather Graham, or someone who looked like her, was perusing the earrings, her tall imposing escort in tow. I saw something on the table I liked. I was asking the price when the imposing escort sidled up to me. “That’s a nice coat,” he said. I looked up. Way up. It was a guy in a Peruvian knit cap and sunglasses. Michael Richards, you know, Kramer, from Seinfeld. The day before my husband had been too shy to ask Bill Clinton in Barneys to autograph a copy of Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents. I would not be shy. I would get Michael’s autograph for my husband…but on what? An organic chocolate candy bar I’d just gotten for him at Dean & Deluca. He’d approached me after all. I held out the bar.

“Oh, I can’t autograph that,” he said. “Then he won’t be able to eat it. Here, get him one of these.” He pointed to the script table, right next to the jewelry table. He had autographed several Seinfeld scripts and the vendor proudly held them up and declared he’d get $75 to $100.

“I only have $20,” I said.

“Oh, he’ll sell it to you for $20,” said Michael. He loomed over the guy.

“Won’t you.”

“I guess so,” said the script vendor.

“Which one?” I asked.

Michael looked through them all with a serious expression. “They’re all good. But I’d get “The Yada Yada.” And don’t look across the street at the paparazzi.”

I did look. There were paparazzi. Would the coat appear in some tabloid? The Star? The National Enquirer? The Weekly World News?

Good-bye lovely chalcedony earrings, hello “YadaYada.”

But not a speck of ink was given to this cute, generous, gentle moment with Michael Richards, the actor who stumbled charmingly into Seinfeld’s apartment over the years, who strutted down the street in the Technicolor pimp coat episode. (My coat encounter occurred before his off-the-deep-end fiasco.) If only I could run into him again on Prince Street, and ask him just what it was about the coat that so charmed him. I decided I would ask the next man who complimented the coat. I would ask why and I soon had my chance at 57th and Seventh.

My cabdriver, Jean-Luc Kabre, veered toward me before I’d even lifted my hand.

“I like that coat.”

“Why? Why do you like it?”

He squinted in the rear view mirror. “It looks like a lion.”

“A lion?”

“The colors.”

“Just the colors?”

“And it is fuzzy.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“West Africa.”

Was an elegant, ladylike coat in a sea of utilitarian parkas like a majestic, endangered species? I felt like a rarity. Lions in West Africa, I’d recently read, number fewer that 1,500.

Jean-Luc dropped me off at Your Neighborhood Office in the West Village and I soon had a chance to do more “market research.” No sooner had the compliment been uttered by Jason, the mail guy, when I asked, “Why?”

“I love those buttons,” he said. He leaned in closer. “They’re so big and shiny. I can see myself in them.”

Is that it? Maybe men are like crows, attracted to shiny objects. Or do men simply project and see what they want to?

Over lunch at Petite Abeille I told my friend Jennifer Belle about the coat’s power to engage men.

“Where did you get it? Can I get one?” she said. “What does it look like?” I described it. She looked thoughtful.

“Maybe it’s not just the coat. Maybe it’s only activated when you put it on.”

“I think,” I said, “that the coat activates men’s fantasies.”

But when I got home I called Rita at Legacy. “What is it with this coat. Why are men so attracted it to it?”

“It’s one of-a-kind,” said Rita. Then, as if she was having an epiphany, she confided, “And I know what it is. A vintage coat like this reminds men of their mothers.”

There was only one catch: I had to work naked.

The friend who told me about the job – and who had incidentally declined because of the nude factor – said the host needed an answer that evening. It was December 27th.

I went to the gym before I gave a final answer.

I thought about the ramifications of working in the buff. What if I see someone I know? Or some hottie I’ve seen around but never met. I work out, jog and ride my bike everywhere, but would my body pass muster? At 38 I’m hardly ready to be put out to pasture, but also I’m no spring chicken (or is that spring cock?). And what about my … twig and berries? Being nervous while busy working is not conducive to sexy, distended genitalia.

Then I recalled the few sex parties I’d attended when I first moved to New York in 1993 before Giuliani’s Disneylandization of New York closed down most everything seedy. Those parties were very dark and most of the men were naked. That would be a good thing for my modesty: party goers would hardly be able to see my birthday suit. It would, however, also be a bad thing. How would I be tipped if the customers weren’t wearing any clothes and their wallets were in the coat check?

“Tell that guy I’ll do it,” I notified my friend when I got back home. Damn the torpedoes and go for it! I told myself. It’ll be a priceless New York experience! I told myself. It’ll be fun! I told myself.

•••

I was in high spirits when I arrived at the loft at 9:10 PM. I’d worked out each of the previous five days and that evening my beard and hair looked OK. On my bike, while passing downtown Manhattanites walking the streets in their New Year’s Eve finery, I relished the fact that I was going to a place where clothes would be dispensed with.

I rang a buzzer that said “HQ.” A guy with messy, russet-colored hair came down the stairs as I opened the door.

“You Ken?” asked this guy who was wearing a baggy T-shirt and looked to be about 40. I nodded my head looking up the steps at him. “You’re late. You know what happens to employees when they’re late, don’t you?” He proceeded to stick his middle finger in his mouth then pull it out and act like he was thrusting it as he grabbed my ass. I apologized, laughed and followed him upstairs. The guy turned out to be Daniel, the organizer.

I jumped in to help Jeremy, the other bartender, set up the bar on two glass-topped tables. At six feet with dark hair and intellectual rectangular glasses he was a looker.

“So what’s your day job,” I asked.

“I just got my PhD from Oxford in International Relations,” he said arranging the mish-mash of vodka, gin and whiskey bottles. “I’m trying to get a professor position at a university in England or here.”

Thane, the barback, turned out to be an Afrikaner from Welkom, South Africa, who works at a Williamsburg advertising agency. I later found out that Daniel, the organizer, had lived in Berlin for five years as an operatic singer.

So much for preconceived notions that people who work in the sex industry are seamy.

So far, so good. I had lived in Cape Town and Germany and I myself have an M.A. in International Relations so I clicked with all these guys. I was batting 1000. But on every parade it seems some rain must fall. The name of this downpour was Aaron.

“You two have to wear these,” Aaron proclaimed dangling in front of us two gold lamé thongs with little bow ties and buttons. He then turned on his heel and flitted off to do something with the stereo system.

“I don’t even know how to put this on,” Jeremy said, examining the odd-shaped, golden contraption. “I’d rather go naked.”

“Me too,” I concurred. “These are just plain embarrassing; and God knows where those things have been?” Getting crabs was not on my New Year’s Eve agenda. We placed our gold lamé lingerie in a corner behind the bottled water and politely forgot about them.

Then Aaron returned.

“Here you guys, we want you to wear these too! They’re so festive!” Aaron gushed. He proceeded to hand us two plastic top hats: one black, the other gold with glitter on it. Jeremy and I mutually decided that under no circumstance were we going to wear those tacky top hats. Since we needed bigger tip jars Jeremy and I placed our top hats upside down on the tables and put a dollar bill on each rim.

“I’ve got some extra glitter if anybody needs some,” Thane the barback mentioned after noticing gold top hat specks above Jeremy’s eyebrow.

Aaron rushed by us, stopped, then darted toward our makeshift bar. “You’re supposed to wear these, not use them for tips!” he said appalled, snatching up his plastic top hats.

“God, Aaron’s really into those hats!” Jeremy said out of the side of his mouth after Aaron disappeared.

“I know,” I said, shaking my head. “So are these guys going to have sex in front of us?” I asked. Jeremy had done a few of these parties before and even danced sometimes so he knew the m.o..

“If there’s full-on fucking, it’s back there,” he replied, pointing to an area that was covered by a curtain of dangling silver shreds. (Surely Aaron’s decorating idea).

“I hope they cleaned their asses,” I said.

“No shit.”

The doors opened at 10 PM.

Since the loft space was chilly, Jeremy and I were initially allowed to wear our clothes.

Things began smoothly. We made pitchers of mixed vodka drinks, were fully stocked and customer flow was good.

At 11:00 Daniel told us to strip to our underwear. As I passed the coat check to undress I noticed that partygoers were handed white trash bags to check in their clothes if they so opted. Most men remained clothed. Good for tips. Bad for trying to blend in while naked.

I had on my sexiest pair of underwear – blue H&M square-cut shorts. I felt foxy, liberated even. As customers began to swarm the open bar, wanting to get drunk ASAP and get their money’s worth, it felt great just wearing underwear.

Midnight turned out to be a mere blip in the evening. Auld Lang Syne was played. Gogo boys poured champagne from atop their boxes around the loft space. And Jeremy and I did what two gay bartenders do in their underwear: gave the customers a deep-kiss-Happy-New-Year’s-Eve show then returned to slinging drinks. Shortly thereafter came the word.

“Daniel says lose the underwear,” Jeremy informed me.

Damn.

So far things had gone so well. We ended up not having to wear the gold lamé bowtie g-strings or the tacky plastic top hats, and the customers seemed satisfied with our drinks, but now I had to pay the ferryman.

Just like it’s better to jump in the cold ocean quickly rather than go slowly in stages, I pulled off my shorts, stuffed them in my bag and acted like everything was normal. Stare at the customer’s face and he won’t look down towards my crotch, I told myself.

I was relieved that Jeremy’s family jewels were smaller than mine. (I’m a firm believer in double standards: I don’t want anybody looking at my wiener but I love to study those of other men.) While Jeremy was at full bush, I had decided to mow beforehand. I also opted not to take Viagra lest I not be able to control my manhood. Jeremy though had no qualms about it and swallowed a pill just before we went full monty.

I strategically placed large juice jugs in front of me to conceal my privates but as things got more hectic that ploy was soon ruined. Luckily, for customer distraction, the eight well-endowed dick dancers were now gyrating their Viagra-stiffened poles all around the room. A customer could stuff some money down the sock of the dancer of his choice then suck his shaft.

The dick dancers really got the party started.

Customers ordered drinks in a very normal manner, hard-ons turned away from the table so they wouldn’t knock over any plastic cups. I was really enjoying this odd normalcy. Only a few guys glanced at my polish sausage — or rather pig without a blanket — so I got more comfortable with being sans vêtements.

There was even one girl in attendance. She was was Asian and hanging out with some Indian dudes. I couldn’t tell if she was a lesbian or not, but I wondered how it must feel as a woman to pay $60 to see a bunch of homos running around with hard-ons.

As the evening proceeded I became more and more frustrated. I wanted to chat a little with the few cute customers in attendance or gaze at the sexy dick dancers, but it wasn’t possible.

The same trolls kept returning for refills. Then there were the customers with thick European accents who I struggled to understand over the loud music. And there were the ones who had to pause and think hard what they wanted. (Couldn’t you have thought about that while you were waiting in line you jackass?)

Some men were very generous. A few tipped us $20 bills. Jeremy diligently sifted those $20s and even a $50 bill out of our tip paint can and stuffed them in his bulging socks. If a customer asked us to break a $20 bill, he usually told us to just give him $15 back.

Other customers were cheapskates, waiting patiently for their 20 one-dollar bills in change then dropping a single GW in the paint can.

I tried not to think about being naked. I had felt much sexier wearing my underwear. I had hoped that Jeremy and I would’ve had more time to talk and drink but we were slammed most of the night. I had no time to even think of getting aroused, although I did have one customer who insisted I stir his drink with my love stick.

By 4 am the bulk of the cuties had left and the dick dancers had disappeared. Those who remained were either old, desperate, or unlucky. Many were all of the above.

I began talking to one of the dancers and it was just getting good when some old-timer stepped up to the bar and held out his cup for a refill. It was a guy who had already downed two dozen plastic cups of hard liquor. I got to the point where I began filling the glasses with pure liquor adding only a splash of mixer so they would pass out.

It was to no avail. These desperados were juggernauts.

After a pee break I did have an opportunity to check out the backroom. Guys were clumped in sweaty sucking, licking, groveling groups. It all looked pretty sloppy to me. I didn’t want to leave Jeremy tending bar alone so I made a beeline back to our work station.

By 5 am things were winding down. There were some guys sitting on the couches in the lounge trying to jerk off. They were too drunk to get hard and I thought a few would succumb to heart attacks as they struggled to bring their limp peters back to life.

The only way we finally got rid of the indestructible drunks was by breaking down the bar.

As I put my jeans and T-shirt on, my quads ached from squatting up and down a million times to scoop ice from under the table for drinks. I was sticky from spilled Coke, tonic, and liquor. Jeremy, Thane and I were beat, but when the tip money was counted out in the coat check room our pain turned out to be well worth it. In fact, despite the fact of working naked for most of the night and Aaron’s initial insistence that we dress like gay retards, this New Year’s Eve turned out to be one of the best I ever had.

Outside the streets were quiet. It was 6 am and raining. A lone taxi passed me as I biked to my apartment. My clothes were getting wet but it felt good to have them on again.

Later on, when we had the stroke of luck we expected four and a half years earlier, we moved to a place three times bigger, overlooking the Queensboro Bridge. We could finally get our long-lost things from storage. We splurged on movers. They carried everything down five flights of steps, made a stop at Chelsea Storage, then carried it all up four more flights to our new place.

We were ecstatic. We spent the weekend dusting furniture and unpacking boxes of books that hadn’t seen daylight in five years.

But there was a problem. There was still a bunch of stuff left in storage that had to be disposed of. We’d discovered that some of the things we’d done without for five years we actually preferred to do without. But rent for the unit—$134.60—was due Tuesday unless we emptied it and left it broom-clean. I worked from home. My hours were flexible. I’d take care of things.

I was a model of ruthless efficiency. I arranged to have a furniture dealer who rented out props to movies come meet me at the facility. I had a 1915 maple dresser with a swivel mirror that I’d refinished myself in the backyard in 11th grade. No sentimentality. No prisoners. The dealer only offered me $40, but I ran a quick cost-benefit analysis and took it on the condition that he’d cart away the folding chairs and broken washstand too.

Now came the tricky part. Big, heavy stuff to throw away. There was the 1920s battleship of a typewriter my mother had bought in the 60s when her office upgraded to electric. It was a hunk of cast iron weighing a good thirty pounds (the dealer refused to take it), black, with beautiful white keys and the name L.C. Smith in worn, gold paint. And there were a couple of big, bulky computer monitors too. I bought them cheap when my old office upgraded.

I put everything on the trolley Chelsea Storage provided, and wheeled it to the glassed-in office downstairs. "Is there somewhere I can get rid of this?" "Nowhere here," said the guy on duty, "But there’s a dumpster around the corner on 22nd. Trolleys have to stay here, though."

Well, I paid to lift weights at the gym, so why not do this for free? I hoisted the L.C. Smith off the trolley, and put it on the edge of the loading dock. I hopped down to sidewalk level and reached up, easing it into my arms. I shuffled along 23rd with the monster braced against my belly.

I finally reached the dumpster around the corner. There were a couple of guys from the warehouse there, taking out the trash. When they caught sight of my L.C. Smith, they said they’d take it. Somewhere deep inside the warehouse they were keeping a "museum."

One down, two to go. I grabbed the first monitor, a bulky whale of a thing. I was tired from my last trip and my arms were trembling. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. After about half a block, though, a man from the garage across the street shouted out to me, "Does that still work?" Yes, thank God. "I have another one too," I told him. I’d be back in a few minutes’ time.

I walked back to Chelsea Storage. Sweat was trickling down my back. I brushed the dust off the front of my shirt and off my black cotton pants. I stretched my arms and shook out my hands. Almost there. After this was done, I’d go home and lie down in the bath.

The last monitor was sitting on the edge of the trolley. OK, almost there. I did a deep knee bend and reached forward. Rrriiiip. I stopped short, frozen. A roar of laughter came from the office. I felt a cold breeze at the seat of my pants. I remembered I was wearing a thong.

I shuffled to the ladies room to check out the damage. The guys in the office all turned away. It was worse than I thought. A tear in the fabric along the seat seam, a good six inches. I rifled through my purse. Safety pin? Bandaid? Paper clip? Nothing. I was screwed.

I went back to the loading dock. Maybe nobody noticed. Maybe they were just laughing at something else. I didn’t have enough time to go home and change, then come back again before closing. I’d just walk, you know, carefully.

A man in coveralls came up to me. I acted casual. "Do you need help?" He was a tall Jamaican with a lilting accent. I tried to act like everything was normal. "You mean carrying stuff?" "No." His face was serious. "Your pants broke." I started to laugh manically. "It’s not funny," he said. "Look, I have a t-shirt underneath. You can tie it around your waist." "OK," I said. My eyes were tearing up.

With Winston’s t-shirt on, I hauled away the last monitor, then hailed a cab. Once I got home I washed the shirt, and mailed it back to Chelsea Storage with a thank-you note. The pants weren’t salvageable, so I threw them away—along with all my thongs. I’m sorry now about the typewriter, but I’m glad it’s in a museum.

The jeans cost $65.00, a considerable sum for 1978, and they were only available at Henri Bendel and everyone knew Henri Bendel’s dirty little secret: Nothing larger than an eight. They couldn’t weigh you at the door, however, which was why I was allowed to accompany Day, who was size two, off W. 57th Street and into the series of small boutiques that the larger store comprised. You weren’t chic if you wore larger than an eight, and even an eight was pushing things in some circles. There were monkey-fur jackets and mysterious veiled cloches, the last perhaps more democratic in assuming you also did not possess a fat head. Bianca Jagger shopped at Bendel’s. Girls from Parsippany with New Jersey thighs did not.

Day was infuriated that her mother wouldn’t give her the money for the jeans. Her mother gave her money for nursing school, for taxis, for methadone clinics, for out-of-season crab legs and large tufted ottomans, but not for shiny lilac pants and overdoses. We took her mother to see the jeans as though they were some kind of touring art exhibit that required an advance ticket. Her mother was a Bergdorf’s gal and had been since before the Korean war; she, like my own mother, dreamed of the day her daughter would open her own Bergdorf’s charge in anticipation of purchasing an elegant trousseau. This would follow a nice semi-career in international banking and would precede what mothers annoyingly referred to as a “successful” marriage. Instead, these mothers were given daughters with boyfriends who resembled gnats and daughters who didn’t know that 21 was anything other than a legal drinking age. Not that the musicians who made up the bug collection would have been given entrée to the mothers’ domains; they did, after all, reject suits, personal hygiene, and regular meals. Everyone remembered the drummer who considered wooden toothpicks part of the food pyramid.

The mothers tried to discourage these anemic boyfriends, proclaiming they were “not our sort, dear” and asking sarcastically if the young men had matriculated at Yale or Princeton, all the while knowing the true horror; the daughter was not only shooting dope with the wastrel, but was paying for his portion as well. The hologram jeans were merely confirmation of that pathetic truth. There would be no chiffon party frocks for this daughter, no Cub Room, no press party at Elaine’s. No Ferragamo pumps or Vuitton purses or titular status at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. No future, just like Johnny Rotten predicted.

“Absolutely not,” Mrs. Lewis decreed, when confronted with this obvious sign of imminent catastrophe. “Horrible things. Why do you girls insist on wearing everything so tight?” Moreover, it was understood that Henri Bendel was a bit–to put it nicely–arriviste, all things considered. Despite dating back to the turn of the century, the store did seem to consider spandex proper material for streetwear, and no amount of protestation from Day would change Mrs. Lewis’s mind. “Now, if you told me you needed a blond mink to wear to Pamela Chaldecott’s charity event, that would be a different story.”

“Shit,” Day protested, “It’s the Dead Boys tonight. For fuck’s sake, Mother!”

In a fit of kindness, we had decided to spare Mrs. Lewis the rest of our afternoon waypoints. Instead of biology class, we spent several hours calling the disconnected phones of itinerant songwriters and economically distressed poets. After attempting to score a joint from an unemployed neighbor, we’d head off to the Fiorucci boutique, where the clothes were louder than the New York Dolls. If I wanted to get a thigh into a pair of gold lame jeans, I’d have to give up the later afternoons we spent in a ménage a trois with our shared boyfriend Jack Daniels.

For whatever reason, Day and I never fought over Jack. We fought over junkie artists and English drummers, but not over Jack. We didn’t even mind that Jack’s own idea of fashion was that jocular standby, the brown paper bag. We’d just go and publicly do our thing in the middle of Washington Square Park. The mothers thought, incorrectly, that we were part of the large throng of students going about the business of education and future, and not part of a seedy fringe display that the students smartly ignored.

“I’ll go back on methadone. Tomorrow. Please! I have to have those jeans.” She wanted the pants more than she wanted a fix, at least at that moment.

Mrs. Lewis considered the situation and offered alternatives. She thought we might call Andre at Bonwit’s and do something about that awful orange hair. There were darling winter coats at Saks, some with coordinating scarves. Beige coats were time-honored maternal anodynes, as sure to soothe a mother’s concern as sensible loafers and degrees from Columbia. Anything but leather or these terrible purple pants.

“What about a nice Halston sarong?” she offered. “He did some lovely tropical prints this year.” She held up a length of sheer blue material printed with tropical lilies and knotted it around Day’s waist. “Girls, isn’t this terribly chic?”

The poor mother didn’t realize that her daughter was going to pass out and die on the curb outside a nightclub after tying on something quite different. She didn’t know that people would shrug and walk away when confronted with this commonplace occurrence, or that her daughter had in the past considered overdoses–her own included–to be special badges of honor and the golden key to a chic, perverted club. All of Day’s friends had gotten used to these preterite emergencies being casually interjected into conversations and hoped that she’d stop equating heroin with heroism.

Mrs. Lewis struggled to keep up with these sudden changes in fashion. Town and Country certainly couldn’t be counted on to report these disturbing styles, and while Vogue made certain arch references, at the moment it too seemed to think the trend was best avoided. The New Yorker, on the other hand, recommended that its readership patronize the establishments where the fad had its genesis. Furthermore, there seemed to be an accompanying soundtrack, which the New Yorker also recommended. Highly.

“Absolutely not,” she said, not realizing that repudiating the hologram jeans also meant repudiating her daughter with an ad hominem indictment that would cause Day to seek out not only those skeletal downtown musicians who couldn’t afford underwear or penicillin but also that outer element who supplied the musicians with the roughest, cheapest palliatives.

Mrs. Lewis had missed that the jeans represented an important step away from the black spandex that we had formerly considered le dernier cri of punk fashion. We had intended to take the purple denim out to Studio 54, not that Studio 54 was much of an improvement, drug-wise. Still, it was a place that Mrs. Lewis had at least heard about, and Vogue felt safe covering it as both a social and a fashion phenomenon. And since there was such a clamor outside the door Mrs. Lewis could feel the safety of numbers, unlike the sparse and criminal headcount Mrs. Lewis supposed would people the dingy downtown punk clubs. She didn’t apprehend that black spandex was outer borough now, and hardly likely to get you admitted to much more than a Brooklyn disco. The hologram jeans, on the other hand, were new and eye-catching, especially when lit from a certain angle. Those jeans spelled upward social mobility, but this was just too difficult to explain. They were a metaphor, the unvoiced difference between uptown and downtown. We might even have struggled to explain it ourselves, had anyone cared to ask. That’s what music was for, and Mrs. Lewis had the driver put on a classical station.

Later on, when Day went blue, Mrs. Lewis wondered about those jeans and asked herself if they really would have made that much of a difference. Yeah, I thought. They would have. Maybe. Maybe there would have been better quality control, better quality dope. Uptown, they used baby laxative; it was so much chicer than rat poison. You couldn’t tell, though. It wasn’t that often that fabric was the difference between life and death.