Many days I walked both ways, and virtually all at least one. I walked in the blustery cold days of winter and the blistering hot days of summer. Time constraints might have forced me to other forms of transportation, but the weather did not. I told myself that if I let the weather dictate, then surely I would give up walking altogether. Spring and Fall last mere days in the city, and the rest are either too hot, too cold, or too something. The weather is like all things in New York City – demanding and inconvenient. Instead I slavishly checked the weather reports and donned or removed layers of clothing and footwear, as appropriate.

In the early years, I would wear comfortable shoes or sneakers to walk in and carry my professional-looking pumps in my bag. In the middle years, I would keep an array of footwear in my office so I wouldn’t have to carry shoes each day. In more recent years, the shoes gathered dust under my desk, as I would change into them only if I had a meeting that required the professional costume.

I walked as a single woman and then with a boyfriend who became my fiancé and later my husband, and whom, in the year before our marriage moved in with me and took a job three blocks away from mine. I walked while pregnant and after miscarriages and post-partum. Most recently, I walked through a herniated disk, when I could hardly walk at all.

The early years took me up and down Broadway, but when my daughter was in our local elementary school, I expanded my territory to include some of the other avenues that line the city North to South.

Growing up, my father owned a Buster Brown shoe store in Brooklyn. As the daughter of a retailer, I know the health of the nation’s economy can be measured by the number of empty storefronts in my neighborhood. While my daughter was at P.S. 166, I could have told you the stores that lined Broadway and Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. For every empty storefront, I could also have told you what used to be there, sometimes through multiple changeovers.

A minute a block was my twenty-minute hedge against whatever awaited me at home or at work – depending on the direction I was headed. And, when I walked with my husband, typically in the mornings to drop our daughter off at school, it became our time to share as a couple. During those years, we were too tired to share much of anything in the evenings except chores and grumbling. The morning was quality time for us, when we were both awake and not yet derailed by everything else that would follow. Yet, even then, I coveted my walks alone.

Everything changed twelve days ago when I got laid off from work. My suspicions turned to certainty a few weeks before I was actually told. After more than two decades at the place, I knew roughly when and how it would happen. Previously, when I thought about leaving my job, it was always as something abstract. Suddenly, I needed to think about it as something real and imminent.

I started packing. I packed up my thick folders of health insurance forms and correspondence with the Committee on Special Education for my son. I packed up my drawer of gym clothes. I packed up the family photos, including favorites of my daughter on the rope spider web at the Central Park Zoo, and my son covered in blue face paint -- both children looking straight at the camera and smiling their brightest.

And of course, I packed up the shoes -- eight pair in all, including a pair of black leather stiletto pumps that turned any outfit, from jeans to the most conservative dress, into an adventure.

When we walk, we look forward not back. And so it was that on the day I was laid off, I packed up my day planner and my Rolodex, said a few goodbyes and walked on home.

Since then, I have walked all over. In the morning, I still walk my husband to work, but now I leave him and go to the gym across the street. After that, my day is my own as I think about my next steps both big and small, both literal and figurative. I am no longer walking the same beat and it feels good. My new life has taken me downtown to the West Village and Chelsea to my son’s school and some business meetings, uptown to a friend’s Pilates class and cross-town to my daughter’s school. I am thinking about the brilliant acupuncturist I met when I hurt my back this summer and how nice it would be to walk through Chinatown this time of year – far less pungent than in July but without the stands selling the dragon fruit I like so much.

In the coming weeks, I expect to be out of familiar neighborhoods and routines even more. The world got a lot bigger when I lost my job; luckily my hometown is still small enough for me to walk it end to end.

Paula Katz is a recovering lawyer. She lives on the upper west side with her husband Rick Mandler, their two children and dog Dreamer.

The door is windowless and made of sheet metal and houses a 20-by-30-by-one-quarter-inch Plexiglas shell. In it at the moment is a geometric print by Christopher Watts, an artist based in Pullman, Washington.

Behind the door is the only firm in New York that delivers fresh-made bento-box lunches. The company, Fuji Catering, (www.fuji-catering.com/) is owned by Toru Furokowa, a thirty-two-year-old Tokyo native who wears black-rimmed glasses and, during working hours, usually has on a Fuji Catering t-shirt, black rubber boots, black leggings under shorts, and a black do-rag. Ten years ago, as an exchange student in Portland, he stayed in Charles’ basement and they got to be close friends.

Back in Tokyo, Toru worked for Azuma, a bento-catering company that had been started by his grandfather in the early 1960s. In Japan, the bento—a boxed meal, comprising many variations—has a tradition stretching back roughly a thousand years and is the predominant form that lunch takes. Azuma is one of dozens of companies that prepare and construct bento and delivery them to the desks of salary men and women throughout the city.

One day about five years ago, Toru was watching a travel documentary on television. It featured the owner of a New York bento company. Toru decided he wanted to work for the company, Fuji Catering, and came to New York with that goal in mind. He made his way to Ludlow Street and met the owner of the company, a Chinese man, who hired him.

“After two or three weeks passed,” Toru says, “the owner told me he wanted to retire and he wanted me to take over the business.” Within months, Toru bought the company, with the help of loans from his family.

He had six competitors at the time, but now he’s got the only bento-delivery game in town. This is mainly because of a drop in demand, he says. The market for delivered bento is made up almost entirely of Japanese expatriates, and when the Japanese economy began to perform poorly, many companies brought their workers back home. Also, he says, “We make a better product.”

Over the years, Charles and Toru maintained contact, visiting each other in their respective cities whenever possible. Last year, Charles says, “I was thinking of how I could expand experiences with art, and have a presence in New York. New York has location. I knew Toru didn’t have customers come to his door, so I asked if I could install a display case. He said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’”

The idea was that Charles would solicit work from artists all over the country. Each month he would select one to display on the door, after which that artist could say he or she had shown in New York.

In August 2010, Charles came to Ludlow Street to mount the housing to the door. “I was drilling at one in the morning,” he says. “An anti-graffiti van came by and the guys said, ‘We’re going to paint over that.’ I said, ‘I’m trying to make some art here.’ They said, ‘OK, we don’t paint over art.’”

At the beginning of each month, Toru unbolts the display, removes the top sheet of Plexiglas, slips the old piece out, puts the new one in, and secures it. Toru tweets an announcement of the new piece; there is a place on the door where the artist can leave business cards. To date, no piece on the door has sold as a result of being on the door. However, early on, one was stolen.

“That was lame,” Charles says. After that, he had a video camera installed to monitor activities near the door. There haven’t been any further incidents.

Despite the lack of competition, the bento business is not where Toru would like it to be. The problem, specifically, is the American market, which he has not been able to penetrate. Every weekday he offers three different bento combinations, descriptions and photos of which are on Fuji Catering’s website. Each contains fish; beef, chicken or pork; rice or noodles; and several side dishes. Customers can place orders, online or by telephone, up until 10 o’clock in the morning. (There is no walk-in trade.)

The bento are fresh, tasty, nutritious, substantial, and affordable: .50 to .00 per box, delivery included. Yet although Toru—who creates all the recipes himself and designs each bento according to both culinary and aesthetic principles—has made accommodations to American tastes, offering, for example, meat loaf and potato salad, the bento, with such sides as “grilled bread Erengi,” “Vinegared seaweed, beansprout,” and “Veg and pork wrapped in tofu skin,” still have an exotic feel.

Then there is the temperature issue. “Americans want either cold or hot,” Charles says. “Not lukewarm.”

The resistance is especially frustrating because glitzier, generally less authentic, versions of bento are hard to escape these days. Sister, a new place on lower Madison, features the “Lunch Box”—basically an Americanized take on the form. One variety has crab cake, fried calamari salad, and seared tuna for . Sylvan Mishima Brackett, the former creative director of Chez Panisse, offers seasonal bento at his Bay Area caterer Peko-Peko, delivered in bamboo husk boxes; currently on offer is “Fall Chestnut Rice and Minced Cutlet,” at .50 a box. The minimum order is $75.

Even Starbucks has gotten into the act. Since the summer, a lunchtime feature at the chain has been “Bistro Boxes,” and you don’t need the alliteration to figure out which ancient Japanese tradition is being coopted. I asked Toru, by e-mail, what he thought of this innovation. “It has same concept of Bento but much worse than our bento!” he replied. He concluded—and I could almost see him raising his eyebrows over the information superhighway—“That was just salad combo meal.”

About 8:30 on a Monday morning recently, there was steady activity inside 27 Ludlow Street. A couple of dozen dishes, for three separate bento, had already been prepared in the kitchen, which is in the basement. Bento were being put together, on the ground floor, by twelve employees stationed at a twenty-six-foot conveyor belt, which was custom-built last year to Toru’s specification by a company in Texas. Its pace allowed for the assembly of ten bento per minute.

Toru stood at the end of the belt, inspecting each box, adding additional toasted sesame seed if he deemed it necessary, then putting a clear top on each black plastic container and securing it with a red rubber band.

“Human robot,” said a deliveryman who was standing nearby. All of Fuji’s employees are either Japanese expatriates, like the deliverymen, or Hispanic.

At one point, noting that the potato salad portions had become slightly too big, Toru directed a comment toward one of the workers in the middle of the line: “Pancho, pocito menos.”

Toru piled the completed bento on a big table. Deliverymen claimed them, loaded them into giant blue Ikea bags, and over the course of the morning conveyed them, by bicycle, pushcart, subway and car, to 940 customers, most in Manhattan, but also in the outer boroughs, New Jersey, and Long Island.

Presumably, Fuji has fully cornered the Japanese market for bento delivery in New York. But the indifference of the American consumer gnaws at Toru. He lives three doors down from Fuji, with his wife and young child, and spends nearly all his waking hours on bento. One day in September, he went to midtown and handed out brochures. This did not yield dramatic results, but he presses on. Through a venture with a charitable organization called Table for Two, he supplies bento to a restaurant and bakery called Café Zaiya, which has three locations in Manhattan; for each one sold, twenty-five cents go toward feeding children in underdeveloped countries. Today, for the first time, Toru was providing six Table for Two bento to a Columbia University cafeteria.

The educational market is capacious, but six bento are six bento. New inroads are required and Toru is intent on carving them out. “I’ve been trying to contact Michelle Obama,” he said. “The new ‘My Plate’ icon looks like a bento box. Do you know how to reach her?”

Ben Yagoda (www.benyagoda.com) is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of Memoir: A History, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, and other books. He blogs at britishisms.wordpress.com.

And I always tell them, “I am an elevator operator.” I say that I drive an elevator in downtown Manhattan.
The reaction to my announcement varies. Some people smile politely and then move on to more interesting people. Some ask questions about the art of piloting an elevator in a skyscraper, if I ever forget the route, if I ever get lost. Almost everyone quips, “I bet that job has its ups and downs.”

Generally, when that happens, I’m the one to smile politely. And then I respond with some variation of the retort I learned my first day on the job and have repeated many times over the years: “It sure does have its ups and downs, but it’s the jerks in the middle that cause the most trouble.”

Operating an elevator was not my career choice. I actually taught English for 33 years to reluctant high school kids who preferred drinking beer and getting laid to learning English grammar. Teaching I discovered, like the operation of elevators, is also a job where “the jerks in the middle” can be the most difficult.

The reason I tell strangers who ask that I operate elevators is because of first impressions. I figure that people won’t expect much of some “mobile doorman” who also drives them up and down before opening and closing the door. That way if I say or do anything stupid, their reaction will likely be: “Well what can you expect? He operates elevators for a living.” And conversely, if I am witty, charming and brilliant, their after-conversation will go something like this: “He’s so cultured for an elevator operator. He reads books. He appreciates fine wine and he is a great conversationalist!” For me it is a win/win situation.

I did, in fact, operate an elevator at The Equitable Building, a 38-story office in New York City, located at 120 Broadway across from Trinity Church in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The building is a landmark engineering achievement designed by Ernest R. Graham and completed in 1915. Originally it was supposed to be 40 stories high, but it was reduced on the advice of consulting engineer Charles Knox. He determined the lower height as being optimal for its elevators, the very ones I operated for one summer, the year I graduated college and before I started teaching. My friend John’s father worked in the Maintenance Department at the building and he got the job for me, and for Sal, a high school/college friend who was also going to teach in September. After our interview, Sal and I in civilian clothes took the elevators for a spin in the middle of the mid-day rush under the watchful eyes of veteran uniformed operators. We both passed our driver’s test, and reported for duty the following Monday.

The boss, a man named Andy Rattazzo that everyone called “The Rat,” but not to his face, had a glass eye that glittered under the overhead florescent lights and a jutting jaw. He looked like Benito Mussolini, and like Mussolini, The Rat prided himself on keeping his elevators running on time. He had risen from the ranks of elevator operator to become the “boss of all bosses,” the final boss of temporaries and hangers-on in a dying industry, at a time when all the elevators in the building were slowly being automated. Progress meant forced retirement or unemployment for the many who had spent their lives and logged millions of miles going up and down the insides of skyscrapers. It was summer employment for a select few.

That fact that he was on a sinking ship didn’t deter The Rat from running a taut ship. So every day, before every shift, he conducted mandatory inspections of the crews, checking the cleanliness of uniforms, the starch in the collared brown shirts, the shine on shoes and the condition of fingernails. If someone didn’t pass muster, he was banished, with instructions to stick his shoes under the electric polisher or put on a clean shirt, to the Break Room, a dingy sub-basement filled with discarded office furniture and a leaky toilet the operators shared with the rats. It was where we spent time between our shifts, where the old timers griped about their changing lives, complained about the bosses and played practical jokes on the temps.

Spencer Something-son was a particularly favorite target. A big, beefy kid from Utah, he looked like a gorilla with his blond hair and glasses in his brown starched shirt and uniform pants with the satin stripe. Although he had started weeks before Sal and me, Spencer was eager to please and still so naïve he believed all their war stories from the “glory elevator operating days.”

“We used to have these contests in the old days, to shoot up the fastest to the Penthouse without getting caught, or to see who could pack the most people into one elevator.”

“But isn’t that dangerous?” Spencer asked.

“Only if the cable breaks.” They all laughed. “And then there was that contest to see who could wait until the very last minute before putting on the brakes and stopping the levelest at the Main Floor without crashing into The Pit. I think Rattazzo won most of them contests, before he became The Rat, of course. He won a lot of money and he still holds the building record for getting twenty-six people into a car designed for twenty.”

The elevators at 120 Broadway were organized in banks. The Local cars patrolled the ground floor up, stopping at each of the 35 floors of the 38-story building. They were the most difficult to operate because they involved the most stops, the most people and had the highest margin for error. The Express banks left the ground floor and traveled through a dark, enclosed shaft like a vertical tunnel that opened at the floors they serviced. The three Express banks were floors 11 to 20, 21-30, 31-35. There was also a separate, private elevator that went directly to the top three floors where the exclusive Bankers Club was located. Only the most senior operators ever got to drive that one.

As a safety precaution, a large red #3 bull’s eye was painted on the walls of each Express shaft to alert the operator that he was approaching the ground floor. It served as a warning to apply the brakes, which meant returning the control handle to the center position, so the car would glide to a smooth stop that was also level if the operator timed it right. None of the cars had automatic leveling devices, and each elevator had different accelerating and stopping characteristics, so stopping level at any floor depended on the car, the weight inside the car, the speed of the elevator as it approached the floor and the experience of the operator. In the event of an uneven landing, which was not unusual when there were too many people on board, or the driver was new, “leveling off” required slowly taking the car well above the desired floor and letting the weight pull it down again. Sometimes the maneuver had to be done more than once. The hope was that it would eventually settle relatively level with the floor. Failing that, the customary warning to passengers was: “Please watch your step. Jump up! Jump down!”

Stopping level at the ground floor with a full elevator hurtling down the shaft from above required great skill and a greater amount of luck. Seeing that red #3 bull’s eye was crucial to brake the elevator in time and avoid disaster. Of course the people who designed elevators had taken into consideration the possibility that a distracted elevator operator might occasionally overshoot a landing, so they built catchers in each shaft, at the bottom, called The Pit, and top, The Claw, with heavy springs to cushion the impact and steel hooks to hold the car in place until Maintenance was able to free the car and its contents.

What happened to Spencer the day he was fired was the topic of discussion in the Break Room for weeks after the event. Some speculated that he was trying to earn elevator history glory and outdo The Rat by setting two new building records – for most people in an elevator. They later counted twenty-seven. And for waiting until the last instant, which he seriously miscalculated, before applying his breaks. Others said that Spencer likely missed the red #3 bull’s eye and crash landed in the basement at full speed. Whatever the truth, neither the twenty-seven people trying to get out of the building for lunch, nor Andy Rattazzo were amused. The instant my friend John’s father and the maintenance crew freed everyone from The Pit, a shaken and dazed Spencer was stripped of his uniform and sent walking.

The building operated twenty-four hour schedule, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Work shifts and elevator bank assignments were a matter of seniority or favoritism. The career guys, soon to be searching for new careers, mostly opted for Express elevators on weekdays from 9 to 5. The temps got what was left. Daytimes were busy and nighttimes were lonely. Some old timers preferred working the graveyard shift so they could nap, drink or pull pranks on the unsuspecting. A favorite was pressing the call button on every floor to get a new guy in motion, and then scaring him by jumping out of the shadows when he opened the elevator door.

If the Local elevators were the most difficult, the freight elevator was the most peaceful, but only after hours when there wasn’t much freight to move. Temps never got the assignment during the day because the freight operators often got tips. Whenever I got the opportunity in the middle of the night, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was no roof on the freight elevator, so it afforded an unobstructed view of the entire shaft, all 38 floors, and piloting it was like taking a slow rocket ship into the dark heavens.

During my brief tenure at 120 Broadway, I tried to be a good elevator operator. I showed up for my shifts on time. I worked over-nights. I passed inspection. My shoes were shined and I smiled whenever I interacted with the public. I was even relatively consistent whenever I had to “level off,” accomplishing it with a minimal number of tries. But still there was a part of me that was curious, distracted, a part of me wanted to test the limits, to see just how far I might go up without getting hooked, how low without ending up in The Pit. Of course I didn’t want to kill anybody or myself in the process. Perhaps that was that wonder that caused the problem on my last day of work. Or maybe it was the image of a smiling Spencer climbing the maintenance ladder through the escape hatch in the elevator, wondering how it felt riding full tilt into the springs below. In any event, I missed the red #3 bull’s eye and kamikazed my elevator filled with Japanese office workers from Mitsubishi on the 28th floor into the The Pit. I don’t remember much, but I am sure it wasn’t me who shouted, “Remember Pearl Harbor!” as somebody reported hearing on the descent.
Of course I was fired in full view of everyone.

My friend Sal later told me The Rat gathered everyone in the Break Room and announced that my crash landing made a bigger impact on the building than the one he had witnessed in March 1942. That was when a seven-inch artillery shell fired by an anti-aircraft battery near the East River by mistake struck the 37th floor.
“It was one of eight,” The Rat told them. “The only one to hit. And I was right there when it happened. The other rounds all fell harmlessly into the river. That shell caused less damage, and no injuries.”
So my career came to an abrupt and crashing end. But I did make it into elevator operator lore, and in September I started on a new career path, teaching high school.

© 2011 Joseph E. Scalia

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.

“I’m just returning the key to the supply closet,” I said, heading over to the corkboard to hang it back up. I did not want to get drawn into whatever they were talking about. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows, and I felt like fainting. Karen squinted at me over the top of her glasses and smiled: “Ah, I wondered who’d been rooting around in there.”

“Bobby’s been in the closet for a long time,” Marco said, in a low, mischievous growl. He rubbed his short grey beard. The tattoos on his upper arms leered out from underneath his skintight T-shirt.

I laughed but didn’t take the bait. Marco and I were friends on Facebook and his status updates showed a remarkable propensity for gay innuendo. And in person, if you let him get started, he was even more relentless .

But Karen wasn’t feeling so discreet either. “Yes, Bobby would be a bear, right?” She looked over at Marco with a conspiratorial smirk.

With my thick, luscious brown beard and hairy chest, I would be a bear, I thought proudly—if I were gay, of course.

“Oh no,” Marco said with exaggerated surprise. He was looking at me very sternly, suppressing a smile. “Bobby is no bear. He’s more of an … otter.”

I was a bit offended. I’d always kind of thought of myself as a bear. A few years ago, during the dark time after college but before the even darker time after after-college, I’d worked at an independent video store in the West Village. The neighborhood was teeming with homosexuals (or so it seemed to me), and gay pornography was one of our specialties. Titles like Bear Patrol and Free Fur All lined the walls of the seedy little porno room in the back of the store, so I knew what bears looked like: hairy, muscular, dressed in leather, and carrying a nightstick. I’d also seen plenty of pictures of bears on Marco’s own Facebook page. Hardly a week went by without him posting a dozen or so pictures of a weekend “Bear Picnic” or “Bear Hiking Trip” (not surprisingly, bears enjoy the outdoors) or “Bear-E-Okee,” all full of hairy thirtysomethings that, frankly, looked a lot like me. Perhaps I wasn’t old enough? Or burly enough? Gay subcultures seemed so nuanced, I was surprised they could even keep track.

I’d been finding myself embroiled in a lot of these awkward little gay scenarios lately. I’m a bit of a loner, so my day-to-day routine didn’t involve going to that many different places, and it seemed like more and more of these daily stops were becoming tricky due to the presence of gay, or potentially gay, men that I was convinced had crushes on me. But perhaps I was just being paranoid. I mean flattering myself. When I tried out this theory on a friend of mine (that gay men were constantly ogling me and that my awareness of this was adding unnecessary stress to my otherwise banal errands), she said that I have “difficulty” in most scenarios that involve casual interaction with strangers and was likely blowing it way out of proportion.

Nevertheless, I’d started avoiding the bodega near my apartment in Park Slope because of a gay clerk’s overzealous greetings and small talk. And the way he stared at me! It started out innocently enough, with him paying extra-special attention to my bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich orders on Sunday mornings. I was usually hungover, worn out from a long night of drinking alone, or a shorter but somehow more abusive night of drinking with others and feeling alone, so perhaps my defenses were lowered, but I liked the way he smiled at me and said, “Helloooo … bacon, egg, and cheese, right?” before I even had a chance to speak. I’d stand off in the wings pretending to read the newspaper, as he lovingly laid a slice of cheese over the egg and called out, “Salt and pepper?” I’d wait a moment, so as to dampen any impression that I might be at his beck and call, then I’d rush forward saying, “Yes, yes, thank you.”

It wasn’t long before he started complimenting me on my beard, which was lovely, I realized, and apparently impossible for gay men to resist, so I took it gracefully. I’m very susceptible to flattery. And in fact, I was sort of fascinated by his appearance as well. His perfectly round bald head glistened, and his huge blue eyes were always popping with curiosity, the way I imagined mine might, if I didn’t always feel so fatigued. I was simultaneously impressed and appalled by how friendly he always seemed, and he was almost charming, in an exceedingly goofy way.

But being friendly is exhausting for me (this is one of the few drawbacks of being such a stalwart introvert), and sometimes I want to order a bacon, egg, and cheese without being flirted with. I began to dread going in there, and I realized I could only humor this kind of thing for so long. I’d wake up on a Sunday morning with a pounding headache and sit on the couch miserably thinking to myself, “All I want right now is coffee and a bacon, egg, and cheese, but if I go down there, I’ll have to talk to him.” Some days, the dread was so severe I wouldn’t even leave the house, subsisting instead on a box of Rice-a-Roni or Lipton Noodles and dark, milkless coffee brewed in my own coffeemaker. The fact that I’d also have had to go to the bodega if I wanted milk was a bitter pill to swallow that always sent me into a small rage.

Finally, one day when I was feeling brave enough to venture out to the store, he looked up at me expecting the friendly greeting we’d established over the last few months, I snubbed him. I ignored him completely and walked past as if we’d never exchanged hellos before. He was stocking the orange juice refrigerator, kneeling on the dirty floor, and I was overwhelmed by the smallness and sadness of our lives. I was able to collect my meager purchases (toilet paper, soup, milk, cheese) without interacting with him directly. It was obvious to both of us that I had ignored him on purpose, and now the spell was broken. Our little romance was over. I thought that would make it easier to go back in there in the future, but in fact it only made it harder.

Simultaneously, there was also a similar situation going on at Cosi in Midtown, near the magazine publisher where I worked. Once a week, I had a powerful need to consume a turkey and cheddar melt, so I left the hermetically sealed little room where they kept the copy editors and headed out into the midtown Manhattan lunch-hour feeding frenzy.

At Cosi, the prudent first move was always to steel myself with a warm little scrap of bread from the communal bowl they had stationed at the beginning of the line. With my grizzly-man beard, unwashed jeans, and sweater, I always felt out of place in the sea of pant-suited and humorless career women, jocular post-frat boys in light-blue button-downs, and cranky European tourists. “I might look at one of these women and smile,” I’d think, “if this were another life,” but actually I couldn’t bring myself to look at any of them. I was too blinded by their chatter and perceived hostility.

Here, my gay interlocutor was not the person taking the lunch orders, or even one of the half-dozen folks in the sandwich-and-salad assembly line, but the slight, feminine boy at the cash register. His mop of dark hair was mostly hidden under a flaccid Cosi cap, and the faint shadow of a mustache on his upper lip did nothing to diminish the girlish aspect of his face. If Marco were with me, he’d probably dismissively call the fellow a “twink.” (They had plenty of that genre at the video store as well, perhaps even some involving twinks and bears, though based on my cursory scans of the boxes, it seemed like kind was usually paired with kind.)

Cosi was packed during lunch hours, so my attitude was always get in and get out as quickly as possible. This meant, of course, that my interactions with the boy were more hurried and subtle than those with my bald friend at the deli, but again I got the strong and very definite impression that he liked me. His eyes seemed to be looking at me, rather than through me, past me, past everyone, onto the street and into oblivion, like the other wretches with his job. I imagined his whole world snapped into focus a bit more when he saw me approaching, a lovely bearded stranger here to rescue him from the doldrums of another day spent ringing up sandwiches. In any case, he certainly became more attentive, smiling at me slightly, with almost imperceptible amusement—or so it seemed to me, for in the world of midtown Manhattan lunch lines there can be no overt displays of affection.

A few times our hands touched as he was handing me my change, and he didn’t draw away quickly in alarm; perhaps he even let his hand linger on mine for a split second longer than necessary. When I worked at the video store, I tried that trick on a few of the pretty female customers, but I seemed to remember them recoiling in disgust. However, perhaps my slightly warped and impoverished sense of self was overruling reality. In my mind, I am like a bearded god in the eyes of homosexual men, but like some pathetic hairy troll in the eyes of beautiful women. So whenever his hand grazed mine, I smiled and tried to act naturally. I didn’t want to appear rude, but I also didn’t want to lead him on.

Once again, I felt the situation was becoming too familiar. One of the things I like most about living in New York is the absolute anonymity. As soon as I feel obligated to exchange familiar greetings with a person—the chatty doorman at a friend’s apartment building, the brisk Mexican woman who sells me coffee in the morning, the obese and obviously lonely neighbor in the laundromat on a Saturday afternoon—I begin to dread seeing them. And if those interactions are laced with unspoken gay romantic undertones, then they really become too much to bear. So I quickly found myself withdrawing my affection and natural friendliness, which, again, was becoming strained. And in fact, he seemed to be withdrawing as well, perhaps slightly ashamed to have been subtly flirting with a bearded stranger to begin with. I sensed that he was not nearly as self-assured as his goofy bald counterpart at the bodega in Brooklyn.

Incredibly, a similar but even more disruptive situation like this had also developed at my local gym. This one caused me the most consternation, as avoidance was not really an option. At that time in my life, I felt like I had to continue to sculpt and maintain my body, plus the gym seemed vital to my mental health.

I’m not exactly sure how it started, but one particularly muscle-bound jock and I somehow became trapped in a pattern of exchanging the most intense and awkward man-on-man eye contact I have ever experienced in my life. As most gym-goers know, making eye contact is something that is generally not done. In fact, most people at the gym tend to act a bit scared of each other (the women especially seemed skittish toward me); there is a lot of forced politeness, and whatever exchanges do occur are brief and tense. No one wants to “invade each other’s space,” so to speak. Plus, the fact that nearly everyone is wearing headphones further prevents conversation. Before I’d joined the gym, I had imagined (and hoped) that the atmosphere would be more sexually charged somehow, but it wasn’t. Except, unfortunately, between me and this … dude.

It never failed: I’d go dashing up the stairs after doing some bench presses, ready to grab a towel and mount the stair-climbing machine, and I’d look to my left and there he’d be, staring at me. I’d round the corner, heading toward the free weights, glance up, and there he’d be, barreling toward me, staring at me. I’d head into the locker room, drenched in sweat, eager to strip off my headphones and T-shirt, and there he’d be, suddenly, clad in nothing but a tiny white towel, staring at me.

His body was phenomenal. I could admit that. It was no wonder it seemed like he was always at the gym (I tried going at different times of day and night in an effort to avoid him, to no avail). In order to build and maintain a body of such absurdly statuesque proportions, you’d have to be there all the time. He was several inches taller than me, his chest and arms were chiseled, and his stomach was flat and defined, but it was his legs that were really impressive. His buttocks, thighs, and calves were all ripping with muscle that was perfectly in proportion to his heaving upper body. In contrast, my own legs were a source of constant shame. They looked and felt (both physically and psychologically) too skinny, but I found leg exercises to be too tedious to really correct this problem. I’d look down at my legs, at my sneakers really, as I hurried past this Adonis in a skimpy white towel. My face felt hot and, absurdly, my heart was racing, the way it did in middle school whenever I saw a girl I liked.

He had an interesting face. I suppose that was the original problem; he caught me looking at him. He had a strong chin, which was angular and smooth and always immaculately shaved, dark eyes and dark, spiky hair, which he wore very closely cropped on the sides. This combination of features made him look a bit like a Japanese anime character, although if I had to guess, I bet he was from New Jersey.

Actually, now I do remember how this all started. The gym was about two blocks downhill from my apartment; and Prospect Park, where I went running during the warmer months, was about four or so blocks uphill from my apartment. Sometimes on my way downhill to the gym, or on my way uphill to the park, I would pass this spiky-haired gym bunny as he was also either coming from or going to the gym. (I don’t think either of us lived very busy lives.) The first one or two times this happened, I may not have even recognized him. Most likely, I just noticed that he looked familiar, if I noticed him at all. But then, perhaps the third time this happened, I had a simultaneous flash of recognition and fit of friendliness, and I did something unthinkable: I nodded in recognition at him, breaking the invisible plane that usually exists between strangers and establishing actual, furtive human contact. (How I wished I could take that back later!) He nodded back. And so our new nodding-in-recognition rapport was established. Then, for a while, it actually seemed like I didn’t see him at the gym anymore, just in the outside world, in the vicinity of the gym, and so we would nod hello, each thinking, in a very masculine, non-gay way, I presumed, “Oh, there’s that dude from the gym.”

Strangely, while I was OK with this dynamic of nodding hello to a guy in the real world that I recognized from the context of the gym, when I started seeing him again at the gym and he wanted to continue (or even, I feared, escalate) this nodding relationship in that context, I wanted no part of it. It was absurd to have to nod hello at this guy every time I saw him at the gym, which started to feel like every time I went in there. And even more unsettling, he seemed to want more than that. It was almost as if he wanted to talk to me. For what reason though, I couldn’t fathom—at first. Perhaps he was just a lonely straight guy. Maybe he just wanted to have a beer or something, make a new friend. But, no, I thought … that is madness.

Back in the office one afternoon, as I was scrutinizing some proofs, Marco came in and said, “Hey Bobby, you claim to be straight, you should know this: How many players on a hockey team?”

I didn’t really look up. I could imagine the smirk on Marco’s face well enough. “I don’t watch hockey,” I said. “And what do you mean ‘claim’ to be straight? Is there some debate about this?”

Marco laughed. He was standing by the window looking down at the city, perhaps evaluating its relative hetero or homosexuality as well.

Then, as if to cast further doubt on the matter, I said, “So I looked up ‘otter’ and you were right, an otter is just a skinnier bear.”

“Mmmhmm,” Marco said, glancing back at me and drawing the sound out—as if he found otters delicious.

It would be kind of nice to be an otter, I thought to myself, or a bear, to have a cozy little niche clearly designated like that; to be eagerly accepted by a group based on the way I look. I’ve never had that. In fact, I’ve never really been a part of any group, not even any of the ones that are based on the feeling of not fitting in.

I looked up to say something to Marco, something witty about otters and bears perhaps, or maybe even something serious and sincere about people, but he had already wandered out of the room.

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

Photo by Mike Baird 

We also had a pretty colorful crew of creative people at work, almost all of us in our early or mid-thirties. So many of us had played in rock bands that we once, just for the hell of it, had a rock band of our own. One of our statisticians had dropped out of Yale Medical School. At the other end of the spectrum, two of our reporters had previously been a truck driver and a security guard, respectively. One guy, who didn’t work too hard but was always cracking everybody up, later became a well-known TV comedy writer. The magazine’s founding editor, who left a few months after I came, was just beginning to write a series of best-selling novels about his Vietnam War experiences.

The work was pretty dull – “such and such hospital in Tempe, Arizona saved $30,000 a year by installing new Trane chillers” – but we felt good about the fact that we were encouraging people to save energy and help the environment. And during lulls in the work, we had a great time playing word games in the office.

Because there were so many different magazines in the same building with their own staff (including many attractive women), you felt like you were part of the same family – well, sometimes. I remember one of the few times we tried to cooperate with one of the other Fairchild magazines. Our editor, Robbie, went upstairs to the Supermarket Times editor, told her that we had a great story about energy conservation in supermarkets, and asked if she would like to print it, too. She just looked at him and said, “Well, we only print stories about supermarkets!”

The magazine had been founded in the 1970s at the height of the energy crisis, but by the time I came, the energy crisis was over. The first sign of trouble came about four years after I started working there. We always had several reporters in “bureaus” – one person in Washington, D.C.; one in Houston, one in San Francisco, one in Pittsburgh and one in Chicago. One day, after rumors about less and less advertising, the head of our publishing group, whom we rarely saw, gave us an ultimatum: Cut the staff in half! The bureau reporters, except for the one in Washington who followed government legislation, had to go. “I told them not to do any work for these last two weeks,” our editor, Robbie, confided in me.

About a year later, the group publisher retired. Fairchild, which was busy cultivating a high-fashion image with Women’s Wear Daily, W, and Home Furnishings, didn’t know what to do with us and the other technical magazines. So they arranged that we would get transferred to another publishing group within the Capital Cities-ABC group, Milltown Publishing, located in Newton, Mass. Milltown was best known for its automotive publications, and our new publisher, Harry Cuddy, was a hard-drinking, tough-talking, rugby-playing guy whose main claim to fame was having once been a successful used car dealer. They also took us out of the Fairchild Building and gave us a cramped space in an anonymous, soul-less building in the Midtown business district.

The first sign of change came over a minor matter – Harry, who traveled back and forth from New York to Newton, decided that all our folios at the top of the pages would have to be the same color, rather than red for heating and air conditioning, yellow for lighting, blue for oil and gas pricing, and so forth. Then he started having arguments with Bob DiGerolimo, our longtime ad manager, and we heard Harry calling Bob a “fucking moron.” Soon, Harry was out of there. But the most alarming trend was that whenever one of the editorial staff left, he was replaced by a new employee – but in Newton. Harry even talked about “getting a new core group together in Newton.” Larry, our equally tough-talking technology editor, confided in me, “You know, this newspaper does a lot to help the environment, but Milltown couldn’t give a rat’s ass!”

Then, one day, I heard Robbie yelling from Harry’s office, “Do you mean you’re firing me?” Harry brought the Washington, D.C. staffer to Newton to make her the editor. Larry went back to the Midwest, and I was alone in the New York office. It was just a matter of time before they laid me off and shut down the office completely. When Harry came into my room with a personnel official, I knew why. Harry was polite, for a change, and explained that this had nothing to do with my work, which he actually thought was good. Because I had been at Energy Saver’s News for so long, Milltown gave me 18 months severance pay, which was nice. Maybe they should have given me the opportunity to work in Newton, but the whole thing happened so fast, I couldn’t think that quickly. I called Robbie. “Kick Harry for me!” he said.

Milltown had the magazine for two or three years, then sold it to another publishing group, which changed its name and moved it to another part of the country. That magazine was sold twice more after that, moved offices at least one more time, and changed its named yet again.

I looked at it recently on the Web – there’s no trace of the old Energy Saver’s News. Even the type of news they cover is different. If I called them and told them about all the fun we had in Greenwich Village, they would probably be at a loss for words.

Raanan Geberer lives with his wife, Rhea, and cat, Celeste, in Chelsea. He grew up in the Bronx and works as the managing editor of the revived Brooklyn Daily Eagle. His hobbies are growing vegetables in his community garden, cooking, reading about whatever subject he's obsessed with at the moment, working out at the gym, and playing music with his rock band.
 

I was paid $.50 per delivery plus tips, when there were any, which was about half the time, and often from those who had the least money. I learned something nearly every time I worked—just by getting inside the doors of apartments I would not have otherwise. And the work wasn’t hard. The metal ice-box above the front wheel could hold as many as five deliveries if they weren’t too large. But sometimes, the box could barely hold everything a single family ordered. Then the two bags full of whole chickens, a couple of “stock bones,” ribs, roasts and things the butcher referred to mysteriously as “variety meats,” weighed more than was comfortable, especially if I had to walk up stairs in those buildings without elevators.

On one of my first deliveries, I went to Turner Towers, a large and somewhat famous apartment building across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. My father used to call it The Gilded Ghetto because he said mostly Jewish people lived there, as was true of Eastern Parkway as well. But the first person I met in Turner Towers was a black woman working for a couple my boss called “The Brits.” He wrinkled his nose as he said it.

I’d walked by Turner Towers many times, but I’d never been inside. There was a long, deep awning flanked by the two large wings of the building. A uniformed doorman instructed me to move the bike closer to the service entrance. This was 1964—bikes did not yet need to be locked, at least not outside Turner Towers. I rode up in the service elevator to the tenth floor. The door I entered opened right onto the kitchen, which was the only room of the apartment I saw. The black cook saw me peering over at the window behind her and smiled. I could see the top of the Brooklyn Museum and across the entire length of the Botanical Gardens. In a haze in the distance, I made out the Parachute Jump at Coney Island.

She wore a blindingly white, starched apron and a cap, perched towards the back of her head, that made me think of a nurse. She spoke with an Island accent.

“So you the new delivery boy?” she asked. “What happen to Tony?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that someone else had the job before me and this was the first I was hearing of Tony. I’m not generally shy, but I didn’t know how to answer her.

“I don’t know.” I stood dumbly holding the roast, afraid it was going to start dripping through the brown paper bag onto the terra cotta tiled floor.

She chuckled.

“You put that down here,” she said, pointing to a butcher-block table not much different than the one on which my boss hacked chops from a side of pork—I had never thought about where the chops I loved so much came from and it had never occurred to me to connect them with an actual pig, but while I couldn’t clearly picture just where on the pig the chops had been, there was no mistaking that the meat he was carefully cutting had once been an animal. I placed the package on a table just a bit smaller than his, but much neater and cleaner, almost new looking. His had a deep depression in the middle and the sides were stained with dark blotches. I often saw blood dripping down the side and into the sawdust. I was astonished that “the Brits” had such a professional looking table, but even more so at the size of their kitchen. I lived only a block away, around the corner on Lincoln Place. Our own kitchen was narrow and although we had an equally narrow dining room, we saved that for ceremonial meals on holidays or when we had company—most of the time we ate at the Formica and metal table right next to the stove. When all five of us were seated, someone would have to get up and step back into the living room if anyone needed to get to the bathroom. The kitchen in Turner Towers had a large black oven with six burners and an awning; hanging above the butcher-block table was an oval rack—saucepans and skillets in various sizes hung from large hooks. There were heavy looking pots stacked on shelves next to the oven. The glass-fronted cupboards were filled with more bowls and plates than I’d ever seen outside of a restaurant. The whole room was larger then our kitchen, dining room and living room combined. It was nearly as large as our entire apartment.

As the cook unwrapped the paper to inspect the delivery, her employer entered through a swinging door. She was a thin, sharp-featured woman with shiny brown hair that framed her face and was held in place by a barrett.

“Let me see that roast,” she said to the cook, glancing angrily at me. I was surprised that her accent wasn’t stronger. She didn’t sound as British as I’d expected.

“It’s fine,” the cook reassured her. “Is good meat.”

She wanted me to tell my boss that she was “Bloody angry!” at the quality of the meat he sent her the last time. I’d just begun working for him and knew nothing about it. But I didn’t say that. I was already speechless at the way she was wagging her finger at me and making sure I knew exactly what I was supposed to go back and tell my boss.

“And,” she said turning to the cook, “there will be no tips until the meat improves.”

The cook smiled at me the whole time the woman was berating my boss, I think to keep me from freaking out. I had never before been spoken to like that by anyone who was not a teacher, a relative or a close enough friend of my parents to know that they could get away with scolding me and my parents would side with them, not me. I left without saying a word to her, only nodding when she asked if I understood.

My boss laughed when I repeated what I’d been ordered to tell him. He didn’t explain or criticize her, just said “So that’s what took you so long!” and sent me out on my next delivery. Later, at dinner at our Formica table, my father was indignant on my behalf, but my mother enjoyed the story and wanted details about the kitchen. She was disappointed that I hadn’t gotten to see the rest of the apartment. But her real pleasure was in explaining to me the implications of “bloody.”

“Oh, that means she was really angry. They don’t say ‘bloody’ unless they’re furious. It’s the same as us saying . . . well, it’s like a curse word to them. Don’t ever say that to a British person.” There was an English secretary at the law firm she worked for and my mother said she’d never heard the woman use the word. The worst thing my mother ever said was “sonsabitches” and she seemed awkward about it. My father was a bit of a prude and could hardly bring himself to say ‘fart’ in front of us children.

I didn’t need to be told what the American equivalent was. Before the end of my first day at the butcher’s, I’d heard him screaming about the “fucking cocksucker” whose car was in the spot where he usually parked the store truck. It wasn’t the first time I heard those words, but the intonation was different, unselfconscious and genuinely angry. I was thrilled to have a new model for how to curse to my friends. I looked forward to dropping in a few “motherfuckers” and “cocksuckers” when I complained about the brothers or the nuns at school and started mentally rehearsing. It was important to get it right. Nothing would be more humiliating than saying, “Sister Agatha, man! What a motherfucker! Know what she did to my sister?” and having my friends stare silently at me, unsure of how to respond. Cursing with assurance, with authority, was a test I was determined to pass. I knew it would sound best if I could do it with a cigarette dangling from my mouth, wincing against the smoke rising into my eyes, the very image of the “surly teenager” my mother always complained about. But I was determined that I would not smoke.

Steve Turtell is a poet who lives in New York City. His first book, Heroes and Householders was published in 2009 by Orchard House Press. His 2001 chapbook, Letter to Frank O'Hara is the 2010 winner of the Rebound Chapbook Prize given by Seven Kitchens Press and will be reissued with an introduction by Joan Larkin in 2011. He is currently at work on Peter Hujar: A Portrait in Life and Death, a memoir of his friendship with the photographer Peter Hujar.

There. I’d gotten it out.

The language of Descartes, Voltaire, and Balzac had clearly vacated my cortex. Despite those years of French classes and one brief visit to Paris, “Je m’appelle” was the best I could come up with. And even that was a struggle. Pushed aside by the overwhelming necessity for Spanish in our clinic, further dilapidated by decades of disuse, I could not conjure up a single word in French beyond stating my name. I was appalled at my brain’s porosity.

Mr. Mezondes smiled politely. No doubt he was accustomed, and perhaps resigned, to the challenges of communication here in America. I gestured for him to sit down, and tried to signal a polite, “just a moment,” as I started down the list of options. First was calling the office of our volunteer interpreters.

“Sorry,” the person answered, “our French interpreter is no longer with us.” I hoped he had merely quit his job and not reached an untimely end.

I asked around in the waiting room, but nobody spoke French. I surveyed the clinic staff—only Spanish and Chinese to be found. Back at my office, I resorted to the final option and called AT&T. When a French-accented voice graced my ear, I exhaled a sigh of relief.

Mr. Mezondes and I took turns on the phone, and I learned that he was a 24 year-old man from Braazaville in Congo. He spent an extra cycle of translation ensuring that I understood that this was the Congo that used to be French Congo, not the Congo that used to be Zaire. He was generally healthy, but his main concern was a burning in his stomach, especially after he ate.

Even though we smiled gamely at each other as we handed the phone back and forth, it was hard to say that we were really having a conversation together. It was more like we were each having a conversation with the polite but business-like interpreter. And that’s what our conversation was: polite and business-like. I asked the questions, he supplied the answers. I kept my utterances brief, not wishing to overload the operator and I sensed Mr. Mezondes doing the same. I was also cognizant of the cost of the services, so I tried to be as efficient as possible. I even ventured to tell my patient his diagnosis and treatment during this initial conversation, something I normally would never do before the physical exam. But I didn’t want to have to call the operator back again, so I explained that he most likely had acid reflux, and—barring any information to the contrary that I might glean from the physical exam—that I would give him a medicine for acid and see him again in my clinic in one month.

We said goodbye to our AT&T friend and I gestured him up onto the exam table. As I palpated his abdomen and listened to his heart, Mr. Mezondes asked in halting English, “You speak little français?”

"No.” I shook my head, regretting the years of study that had never succeeded in cementing my French. “Solamente español.”

“Español?” he said with a broad grin. “Yo hablo español.”

Spanish? He spoke Spanish?!?

For the rest of our visit, we chatted happily, if a bit awkwardly, in our mutual non-native languages. I learned that he’d studied Spanish at his university in Congo, and I told him that I’d studied on trips to Latin America.

He told me how he had emigrated from Africa two years ago, but first lived in Canada, and how different Canada was from America. I told him that I had once lived in Montreal, and how I’d struggled with the Québécois French. We laughed over our common difficulties with the slang street-Spanish in New York. And then we were able to review his medical issues and treatment, and I could be confidant that he understood.

It had never dawned on me that Mr. Mezondes would speak Spanish. I had assumed that, like most West Africans, Mr. Mezondes would only speak French in addition to his native language in Congo. It never dawned on Mr. Mezondes that I might speak Spanish. I guess he assumed that most white Americans didn’t speak anything but English.

“Hasta luego,” he said, shaking my hand.

“Ojalá que pasa un buen día,” I replied, with a small surge of pride that I’d nailed the subjunctive. I knew that Mr. Mezondes could appreciate the linguistic leap that grammatical construct entailed.

Mr. Mezondes left my office to make his appointment with the front-desk staff. Most of the Bellevue clerks were Hispanic, bilingual in Spanish and English. Mr. Mezondes—a native Congolese who spoke scant English—would have no trouble at all arranging his health care.

Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients. This essay is an excerpt from Medicine in Translation, (©Beacon Press, 2010, Reprinted with permission.)

I was still a graduate student in the late 1980s when I arrived at City Opera via an audition notice in Backstage. After waiting in a long line that snaked around the New York State Theater, I was ushered through the stage entrance, two sets of glass doors set several steps down from street level.

Inside the theater, my fellow hopefuls and I were divided into groups of twenty-five and sent to a rehearsal hall, where we were instructed to step forward and state our name, age, and suit and shoe sizes. I was so inexperienced that I actually found this process thrilling. Age 22, suit 40 regular, shoe 9 1/2, I was hired on the spot, an accomplishment not lessened by a director later clarifying the job requirements. Just be on time, he told me, and don’t make trouble.

That I could do!

While my acting ambitions were to subsequently wax and wane, I never relinquished my part-time job at fine arts central. From Day One I grasped that the stage door was a charmed portal, one separating not just backstage from outsiders, but also real life from grand fantasy. There was life outside that door, and life inside that door. I preferred the latter, a place where even death was accompanied by jewels, gowns, and an aria, generally followed by rapturous applause.

In La bohème, I served in the banda, a military band entering just as Mimi and Rodolfo proclaimed their love for each other. The other banda members and I wore red jackets with gold braid and red hats, making us look like we had wandered in from The Music Man. All twelve of us were dressed alike, except for the drum major who had a white feather in his hat instead of a red one like the rest of us.

One evening, the drum major called in sick and I was told that I was going to be wearing the white-feathered hat. I found this promotion terrifying. Having long employed a follow-the-guy-in-front-of-me routine, I was frightened at the prospect of being the guy in front of everyone else.

Before my entrance, I gripped my baton tightly and tried to compose myself. My consternation must have shown on my face because an assistant director gave me a shake and a wide smile. “Relax,” she whispered. “Remember, it’s Christmas!” She was right; the scene indeed took place on Christmas Eve. Something about this was immensely comforting, and my heart soared that night as I led the banda.

Later City Opera introduced another production of Bohème, one in which I enjoyed more stage time. In my new role, listed on the backstage callboard as Handsome Soldier, I had a flirtatious moment with Mimi until Rodolfo called her away. I extrapolated my bit part to the hilt, so much so that the singer playing Rodolfo took to physically shoving me aside because otherwise the opera would have ground to a halt.

Once, a friend of mine was visiting from Japan and I brought her to the show to watch from the wings. Although I worried that she might be bored, she was enthralled. As we exited the stage door, she stopped and looked back at the building wistfully. “You come here every night?” she asked.

Two or three times a week, I replied diffidently.

“You are so lucky,” she exclaimed, “it’s like a carnival in there!”

This season, City Opera has suspended operations so that renovations could be made at the theater. In other words, there have been no performances, no carnival.

I suppose I’ve missed working at the opera factory, because recently I was passing by the State Theater and decided to peek inside. A heavy tarp draped on the building reminded me that, thanks to a generous donor, it’s now the David H. Koch Theater. I walked down familiar steps and through the first set of glass doors at the stage entrance.

The smell of freshly-microwaved chicken greeted me as I caught the eye of the security guard on duty. He was an older black gentleman who, like me, had worked in this building for years. I hesitated before him, suddenly conscious of the fact that I had no legitimate reason to be in here.

Perhaps sensing my trepidation, the guard looked at me expectantly.

“Hi,” I said. “So, how are those renovations going? Have they done much work?”

Mostly in the orchestra pit, the guard responded.
I felt awkward. “Oh. Well, I just stopped by…”

I wanted the guard to wave me through like usual, or to smile and say Go on in, take a look. He didn’t. He seemed to be waiting to see whether I’d push through the doors.

Yet I just stood there uncertainly, like someone who had showed up for a party on the wrong night. When a UPS guy appeared behind me with a stack of boxes, I decided to leave. I mumbled something to the effect that I would come back next time.

Yeah, come back next time, the guard agreed.

I can’t say that he turned me away, since I hadn’t attempted to enter, but I still felt deflated. I walked up to street level as a wave of longing came over me. Just then, I missed my Boheme Christmases, my banda, and Mimi. Sighing, I moved off into the chilly air. A light snow had started, and I noticed that the flakes were swirling down, upwards, sideways, and on weird diagonals.

RAUL A. REYES has written for the New York Times and USA Today.
 

The job had us scheduled to shadow a businessman in midtown for two weeks to try to determine if he was sleeping with another woman. At first he seemed innocent of any wrongdoing. He just went to work, to long lunches and then back home. It was a lax schedule that allowed for Ray and me to spend most of our time in the bakery across the street from his office.

“This guy loves eating, but not cheating,” Ray said on the fifth day. “If he was a cheater I would know.” Ray cared a great deal about screwing around on his girlfriend and since he had spent a lot of time concealing his cheating ways he seemed to be somewhat of an expert on the matter.

“If you mess around you must carry this.” He told me, revealing a small canister of Febreeze and several bottles of cologne in his satchel. “The girl that I’m with now, she’s like forty, her face is ‘eh’ but her body is great. No, her face is ugly.” He frowned, humbled by his honesty.

“But she never catches you?”

“No, I met her at the bus stop. She is Haitian so you know, they are always suspicious, and she can do the voodoo curses, so I have to be real careful.”

“What do you mean, what has she done?” People had begun to leave the office building across the street for lunch.

“You know, I can’t leave any of my stuff lying around her house or she’ll use it to curse me, like my underwears and stuff, I have to make sure none of my hair is ever left on the bed and I always take the used condoms with me when we are done or she can use the sperms against me. She asks me to give her the condoms to throw away but I don’t let her. Also I won’t take any food from her if it is opened. She brought me a can of Sprite to drink, but it was open so I threw it away when she didn’t look.”
“So you take the used condoms away? Like in your pocket? She can get you when you’re asleep.” This idea bothered Ray, he must have thought about it before but to have someone else say it really drove it home. Across the street our guy came outside, looked to his watch and walked up Sixth Avenue.

“That’s him right, so many people in that building look the same.” I stalled for a moment because I wanted to finish my cake.

“Yeah, let’s go.” Ray hopped up. There was enough of a cake piece left that I didn’t want to throw it away, but I also didn’t want to carry it outside in the drizzle. The only option that I felt was reasonable was to shove the remaining amount into my mouth. It wouldn’t be enjoyable but I knew I would be unhappy either way so I went for it. Frosting skidded to a halt at the corners of my mouth as I choked down the slab but at least I hadn’t wasted anything. We followed behind our guy for several blocks before he turned left on 54th. He was average height with graying hair and a suit which made him pretty similar looking to many other businessmen so we had to stay close. Ray crossed the street and ran ahead of the guy so he could get video footage of his face. After a few more minutes the guy entered a bar and grill on the corner of 8th.

“Did you tape his face?” I asked Ray outside of the restaurant, I giggled to myself imagining Ray putting duct tape over the man’s eyes and mouth.

“Yeah, but he looked at the camera, so you go inside and see if he is alone.”

The inside of the restaurant was much more dimly lit than the outside even though it was an overcast day. I had trouble making out different people.

“Just you sir?” The greeter asked. I told the girl that I was trying to locate a friend and she let me go free to roam about. Our guy was nowhere to be found on the first floor so I climbed the stairs to the second level. There, in the farthest corner from me, he was seated at a booth. He was facing my direction and speaking to someone on the opposite side of the table. The other person was obscured from my view by a high backrest. It was the perfect seating scenario for a secret rendezvous. There was no veiled way that I could see the other person since their table was the only one in the corner. If I got too close then my face might be noticed and possibly remembered. It was unlikely since my face isn’t really memorable but I was still reticent to get near the table.

“This guy is damn good.” I told Ray when I got outside.

“Look at this.” He held his cell phone screen up to show a digital photo of a woman’s naked ass. “That’s my girl.”

“Ooh, that’s nice. Do you think we should call and give this guy’s wife an update?”

“Yes, you call.”

The wife was a wealthy woman. She was told by Arty that we would keep her aware of any developments. When she answered the phone I said, “This is Granger, with the Silver Agency.”

“Yes, hello, what is he doing?”

“He’s at a restaurant. He’s with someone but I can’t see who it is yet.”

“Oh, I bet I know who it is, is it a woman from Jersey?”

“I don’t know.” Ray held another phone picture in front of my face, this time it was breasts. “We’re gonna wait and see who the person is though.” There was silence on the other end. I wished I had more explicit details to report.

“Okay.” She sighed, “Let me know.” She hung up. I sighed loudly but Ray didn’t ask what had happened.

“Hmm.” I hummed, “I used to be better at this job, in Connecticut.”

“Really,” Ray glanced up for a moment from his phone “not me.”

“Yeah…me neither.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw what I thought was our guy exit the restaurant. I grabbed Ray’s shoulder and turned us both to face a brick wall. There we stood for about ten seconds.

“What’s up?” Ray whispered, “Is it him?”

“It’s him.” I mumbled. We turned around and saw a man who slightly resembled our guy walking away. “It’s not him.”

“There he is.” Ray grabbed me and turned us toward the wall again. When we turned back around our guy was walking away, hand in hand with a skinny, blonde haired woman. The two of them walked to the end of the block before the woman kissed our guy lightly on the cheek and they parted ways.

“I’ll take the girl, you get the guy.” Ray said. We split up and I followed the guy north on Eighth Avenue. He was headed in the direction of his apartment. A couple of times during the walk he stopped and looked down at his phone or looked around the street but I was always able to duck behind something or someone larger than me. It was a short trip from the restaurant and after about twelve minutes the guy entered his building. I pulled my notepad out to document the time, when I looked up I was surprised to see the blonde woman, followed by Ray, walking toward the building. Once she got inside the door Ray dropped back and we regrouped across the street.

“They’re gonna do it.” I surmised.

“Yep, but we need to get a shot of her face.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.”

“Huh, oh yeah, right, the sex.”

One of the doormen stared at us through the large plate glass. He had begun to notice us skulking around each morning and now again in the afternoon.

“That guy is gonna make trouble for us.” I pointed at the doorman. Ray looked at the door and then around the street like he was bored with the idea of trouble. I wished I had pictures of naked girls on my phone to show him, but I didn’t so I called the wife.

“Hello.” She answered.

“Your husband is in the apartment with another woman.”

She gasped at the news, “Who is it?”

“She’s blonde, and thin.”

“I knew it, I knew it, I’m coming there now.”

“No, no.” I wanted to drag the job out as long as possible, “Wait, don’t come, wait until we get some more video.”

She considered for a moment before agreeing that more evidence would be best, “Okay, follow them today and tomorrow, then I’ll confront them.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say so I said ‘okay’ again, and then hung up. The doorman was still watching us and pointing us out to another doorman. “Ray, let’s go across the street where that guy can’t see us.” We walked to a subway entrance next to the building and crouched down in the steps.

“How much longer do you think you’ll do this job?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I been with John and Arty now for like twelve years.”

“Have they given you a lot of raises?”

“It’s okay, I do alright, I did a case once for fifty hours straight, lots of overtime.”

“Daaaamn!” I tried to sound jealous.

“Yeah, I got a Playstation 2 and I’m probably gonna get a Playstation 3.”

“So you’re gonna do this forever huh? That’s cool, to know what you want.”

He shrugged, “I remember my first case, I was ducking down in the bushes, trying to take pictures of people in a canoe, and a bird, a water bird, kept coming up to me.”

“Can I help you gentlemen?” The doorman had come over and was standing at the top of the steps.”

“No” I said, “We’re waiting for the train.”

“Okay, on the stairs?”

“No.” Ray stood up and started talking to the man in Spanish. The doorman understood what was being said and nodded. I reached into my bag, pulled out some mints and ate them while they spoke. My mouth began to sting with freshness. There were too many mints but I wanted to look busy while they talked to each other in their language. A disheveled man staggered up the steps and bulged his eyes, not just at me but also in general. After him came a fat child. The boy’s face looked like that of a CPR dummy, mouth slightly agape, lifeless eyes. At first glance the boy appeared to be holding a golden fried funnel cake, poised to take a bite. On second look the cake revealed itself to actually be the boy’s chubby, segmented hand with the index finger extended upwards and at me. Taken off guard by his insulting gesture I laughed, but he held his hand position the entire way up the steps, never lowering his eyes. As he passed by me I threw a mint at his load-burdened knees. The candy struck its target and bounced down the stairs and out of sight.

“…And him too?” The doorman pointed the reception antenna of his walkie-talkie at me.

“Si, el sabe lo que esta haciendo.” Ray said.

Granger Greenbaum lives in Brooklyn, owns a small business, and writes he can. Some work he’s made can be seen at goldenboynatural.com.