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.

A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it.

Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and The Whitney.

Upon seeing Barney's Lady Gaga window display in midtown, Colette takes to the streets in protest to send a clear message to the Gaga camp that Colette is standing outside the door and must be invited in and given proper respect.

What bothers me is when they leave and I see their tip.

Hordes of European and South American tourists come through the restaurant and leave paltry tips or none at all, unless we add it to their bills. Just last week a family of eight from Colombia spent a hundred and twenty dollars on dinner and left a ten dollar tip. They waved at me when they left, thinking we were best friends because I spoke to them in Spanish, have a friend living in their hometown and plan on traveling to their country soon. I felt bad for resenting them, but it was a slow night and I needed all the tips I could get.

It’s not their fault they’re unfamiliar with our tipping system. They don’t know that, as a waitress, my hourly wage is less than the Mexican dishwasher’s. But fortunately it’s not the restaurant that pays most our check—it’s the customers and their tips.

The West Village restaurant I’ve been working at for four months serves Balkan and Mediterranean cuisine. We also have a wine bar, and though we do have wine from Italy, France, and Spain, many of the regulars come here to try our wine from the Balkans—stuff they can’t really find at other restaurants. But the French are different. They come here to drink Bordeaux.

On slow nights we pass out wine coupons. A customer with a coupon gets a free glass of our house wine. Usually when people get free wine, they feel inclined to order food, drink more wine, or at least leave a cash tip. It’s because of the coupons that a young French couple ended up at the bar.

Though they finish their glasses of our house red—a Pinot Noir from Italy, they make it known that it had not met their expectations. It is not my favorite either, but I’ve never complained about a free glass of wine. At least our coupon ploy worked because they decided to buy two more glasses of wine, and because they are French they felt entitled to sample over half our wine list.

Most customers, when they dislike a wine, will politely ask to sample something else, but this French couple made a histrionic show of their disapproval. Their lips, which arched and curved gracefully when speaking to each other in French, puckered grotesquely and they vigorously shook their heads at every wine they tried until they finally settled on two glasses of Bordeaux.

“Eet reminds us of home,” they said, and ordered some meats and cheeses to accompany their wine. Their cheeks got rosy as they imbibed and spoke softly. If they were bitching about our wine selection I would not have been able to tell by their tone since the French language seems to be devoid of hard consonants. They could have been comparing the Tempranillo to horse piss and it would have all sounded like docile cooing to me. There are some moments when I almost thought the French couple was cute, but I always managed to recover my senses.

After sipping the same glasses of Bordeaux for two hours they finally requested the bill twenty minutes after we were supposed to close. The man left a tip of one dollar and twenty cents after spending over twenty dollars. He smiled at me as they grabbed their coats to go, as if the experience had been equally endearing for both parties.

A buck twenty? Oh no, buddy. You can keep your smile.

With that smile he is in the same club as the Colombians and numerous other international visitors. The whole herd of them will have grinned and waved their way through countless New York City restaurants by now, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are a waitress’s worst nightmare. The Colombians were a lost cause, but it was not too late to reach this Frenchman. It was not about the money. It’s not like a bill of twenty-something dollars will ever fetch a large tip. It’s just hard for me to let bygones be bygones.

For my mission to be successful I had to quickly engage the French couple in this small talk before they left, and I had to do it with a smile—though all I really wanted to do is fling a glass of Bordeaux in their faces.

“So, how long have you been here?” I asked, trying to look casual with my elbows on the bar.

“Oh, I hev been here fur a monz,” explains the girl. “I hev an intairnsheep,” she added. “He eez my friend. He eez visiting for a week,” she said of her male companion, who offered another ridiculous smile.

“Okay!” I said, hoping the foreigners would not detect my false enthusiasm. “And how long will you be staying in New York?”

“Fur two more weeks,” replied the guy. I didn’t know about the girl, but estimated that since he was a tourist he would probably eat out every meal, which meant that there were at least forty-two different waitresses he would be shortchanging.

“Hmmm, okay….that’s great!” I gushed, causing the French man to look at me expectantly, perhaps thinking I would tell him some important insider information. Like where all the actors hang out. The girl, on the other hand, had already put her jacket on. That was my cue to hurry up and stop beating around the bush.

For dramatic effect I quickly dropped my smile and peered straight into the Frenchman’s pupils. “Well, since you’ll be here for a while you might as well know that in New York City you are supposed to leave at least a fifteen percent tip.”

I guess my affectations worked because the girl suddenly started to get anxious.

“Ow much did you leave?” She asked her compatriot, her face beet red instead of cute red. In the time that she’d been here she already figured out about gratuity, but it didn’t matter what she knew if she wasn’t paying the bill.

The guy looked at me for an answer. He hadn’t even looked at the bill when he put down his cash.

“You left one dollar and twenty cents,” I said.

Words were exchanged in rapid French. The man blushed. I wish I could have sugar coated this learning experience for him, and perhaps it was bad form to educate him in front of his female companion, but as most Americans know, getting schooled on another country’s dining etiquette while abroad is hardly ever a graceful experience.

Most people react by getting defensive or repeating the obvious. “Well, it’s not like that in my country,” they say before expounding on the virtues of their way of doing things. I waited for the Frenchman’s rebuttal, but never got one.

“I’m sorry, I deed not know,” he said, which surprised me.

The man seemed so genuinely remorseful I felt obliged to dish out some good old American optimism. “Well, it’s okay, because now you know!”

He put two more dollars on the bar, which I did not expect him to do. Now it was my turn to feel remorseful. I decided to appeal to the French’s sense of patriotism in an attempt to uplift his spirits and quell an impending sense of guilt.

“Yeah, things are different in France. In France your waitresses get a wage …and….and…gratuity is included in the bill…” My discourse devolved into babble about living wages, vacation time and health care, until eventually the Frenchman’s smile crept back onto his face before the couple left.

“Good bye! Come back again!” I said out of habit, knowing they wouldn’t.

Robin Kilmer graduated from Bard College in 2007 and worked for three years at a public school in the Bronx. She hopes to one day successfully converge two diametrically opposing forces: writing and making a living. Until that day she is working as a nanny (and a waitress).

When we were growing up, she knew everything about me. In our grandmother’s Brooklyn three family house Bets and I lived downstairs with our parents and grandmother, and my mother’s two sisters and their families were in the smaller upstairs apartments. The family was close, if not always peaceful, and the house was always filled with drama, feuding sisters, loud card playing uncles and arguing cousins passing through. There were no secrets in those close quarters. Everyone knew everybody’s business and if someone upstairs farted, someone downstairs said, “Excuse me!”

When Bets started junior high we even had to share a room. Our parents divided their bigger bedroom in half for us and moved into the smaller one. Bets was more like another mother than a sister then. She caught me doing things my real mother, my grandmother and my aunts didn’t. When I was six, Bets caught me in the hall closet under the stairway comparing body parts with Susie Solomon, the girl from up the block. She sent Susie home and me to my half of our bedroom, but she never told our mother. When I was eleven Bets married John, her childhood sweetheart from across the street, and they moved into an apartment just three blocks away. Shortly after that my parents promptly tore down the partition, moved me out and moved themselves back into their old room.

Over the years the time gap between us narrowed as I started catching up with Bets. There were some who said I overtook her somewhere around fifty. I started jokingly to introduce myself as Bets’s older brother, and there were people didn’t get the joke.

“I think we left the city just in time,” my sister says.

I look through the gritty windshield at the cars that are already crawling in the building rush. By four o’clock they will be at a stand still and the expressway will be locked up tight. “Remember when ‘rush hour’ used to be a couple of actual hours and not the whole day? This HOV lane is the only way to fly, Bets. I think I just may invest in one of those Safety Man dummies and keep him in the car. That way I can live the rest of my life in the HOV lane even when I’m alone.”

About six months ago Betty let her hair go gray and cut it short out of necessity. It looks good on her. “I like your hair that way,” I tell her. “It’s natural and soft. And I love the waves. I hope you aren’t going to color it again.”

“I really haven’t decided.”

In the transition Bets has become a kinder, gentler version of our mother, an unnatural blonde until well into her 90s. She was a woman whose social calendar until she died at 96 consisted of regular beauty parlor appointments and doctor visits.

“Live long enough,” she said, verbalizing my thoughts, “and eventually we become our parents.”

In that respect in the past few years we both have become our mother, taking our turn doing the medical thing. The proof was that we were returning from our different doctors in different offices in different hospitals in Manhattan. Usually we didn’t overlap. She had her appointments and I had mine. But this time we did, so I was able to drop her off and pick her up for the return trip home.

Mine was the third follow up appointment, nine months out from a July surgery at the robotic hands of Dr. Ash, which left me prostateless on Long Island. It also left me with damp underwear, a definite improvement, I suppose, over the adult diapers and feminine sanitary pads I had worn for months, and a small price to pay not to die of cancer!

“These aren’t for me,” I assured the check out girl in Rite-Aid. But she was more interested in the cell phone conversation that was going on in her ear, and she just rang up the sale.

Another post-operative advantage was that without a prostate I no longer peed in stuttering fits and starts. “Now I pee like a race horse,” I announced proudly at my first follow up meeting with Dr. Ash. “Of course, sometimes I start before I am in the gate and continue until the race is over.”

Dr. Ash laughed politely at my comment. When I met him I discovered he was not a robot, and Ash was the shortened form of his unpronounceable first name. After my cancer diagnosis, while I was deciding on a course of action and researching doctors, before I had actually met him, I thought his last name, filled with a bunch of vowels, might be Italian. But one look at Dr. Ash removed all thoughts that our grandparents knew one another in Sicily. Dr. Ash was dark as a nut, a little man who looked like he would be more at home driving a cab in New York City than operating a Da Vinci robotic machine. He had the mandatory mustache that would put him on the “No Fly” list, or at least insure that he’d get to know Homeland Security intimately whenever he flew the friendly skies over the U.S.A. He also had little hands, an asset, I imagine, piloting the Da Vinci into the sides of a cancer-filled prostates.

At my second follow up appointment Dr. Ash asked, “And how is the other thing?” referring to the other minor side effect of prostate surgery, erections, or more specifically, the lack of them.

“Well,” I said, “the little soldier isn’t standing at attention yet, but he is leaning against the wall.” Of course I could have told him that the he had been hugging the wall for years.

“You are a funny man,” he said. “Are you using the pills?”

“Oh, the blue pills. Yes.”

“And do they help?”

“A little,” I said. “But only if I duct tape them onto two tongue depressors on each side of my penis.”
“Ah,” Dr. Ash nodded his head, “then next time instead of seeing me, we make your appointment with Adam, my assistant. That way you can explore other alternatives to duct tape and tongue depressors.”

“It’s amazing how far we have come, Bets.” She is quiet and I think she is napping with her eyes open. “So there I was,” I say, “with my pants and underwear around my ankles and young Adam holding my frightened little wee wee in one blue-gloved hand.”

She laughs. I wonder if she is thinking of that day she caught me and Susie in the closet as I described in detail the trauma of seeing the hypodermic needle drawing closer to Little Joe. “And just before impact he actually said, ‘You’re going to feel a little prick.’ The little prick! And then he told me he would go out for about ten minutes while I tried to stimulate myself. Right there in the office! ‘What,’ I called after him, ‘no mood lighting? No Barry White?’”

“And?” Bets asks.

“So, in about ten minutes I felt the earth move. Well, maybe not the earth, and it wasn’t like the big one that hit Japan, but there was a stirring in my lower regions. Not anything to hang my hat on, but a definite improvement. When Adam came back I had to show him and rate it on a zero to ten scale. I told him I gave it a five because I liked the words, but it was hard to dance to. Since he’s about eleven he never heard of ‘American Bandstand.’ He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. And thought Dick Clark was that old guy with a stroke who tries to count down the New Year every year.” I pause for the dramatic effect. “And how did you spend your day, Bets?”

But I knew. Not to be out done, my sister pre-trumped my puny prostate cancer by a little more than a year when she was diagnosed with cancer in her liver. Cholangioma. How bad could it be? It sounded musical, like a Caribbean dance with those shakey things or that instrument you scrape with a stick, or like an exotic drink made with tequila, Triple Sec and coconut cream. “I’ll take two cholangiomas, one frozen and one on the rocks.”

Actually it was a “little spot,” according to the surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian who removed it with about half of Bets’s liver more than a year ago. He then pronounced her “cancer free,” which she was, for about six months, until her liver grew back. It is an interesting fact that the liver is the only human internal organ that does grow back. And with it, her damned Spot, that very persistent cholangeoma, reappeared. Because of its location so close to the hepatic vein another surgery was out of the question, so Bets found an oncologist who put her through a year of intense chemo alternating with radiation. Five days a week for months the family took turns driving Bets into the city for daily radiation and weekly blasts of chemo. And even after a CAT scan showed Spot was dead, the doctor ordered a second round of chemo stronger than the first, to be sure he just wasn’t playing dead.

“Oh, the usual. Two bags of poison, one bag of flush with nausea and vomiting to follow.” She hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

“Who’d a thought, Bets? How far we’ve come since that day you caught me and Susie Solomon in the closet. Do you remember that?”

She laughs into her hand. “Yes, I do. You were so cute holding your little winky in one hand and a flashlight in the other shining it on Susie Solomon. Well, now you’re out of the closet and telling everybody who’ll listen about your winky.” She laughs again remembering. “The surprised look on your face. And that cute little winky.”
I can feel me face getting red from my sister’s good memory. “Sweet Susie Solomon. Hers was the first vagina I ever saw and that started me down the road to Perdition. I wonder what happened to her.”

Bets is lost in her own memories. “If you think you came a long way, imagine how far I’ve come since my junior high school days.”

As far as I knew Bets had only two men in her life. She married John who lived across the street when he came back from Korea. He was her childhood sweetheart.

That wasn’t so unusual where we grew up. The young people in the neighborhood didn’t travel very far for romance and they tended to date and marry one another. There were many couples on the Brooklyn block, many marriages, some that even lasted. Cousin Maryanne married Pat from across the street, cousin Joann married Tommy from 56th Street, John’s sister Chickie married Frank who lived in the same two family house, Nancy married Donald, John’s brother, and I married Jenny, my first wife, the girl next door. Then after John, Bets met Nels, the quiet Norwegian, at the Arthur Murray Studios the night she went there with people from her bereavement group. Nels, a widower, had just dropped in on a whim. He became the second great love of my sister’s life until his death from an unsuccessful battle with cancer. Both of Bets’s men were gone, but not the way my two wives were gone. Hers died; mine left me for dead after two costly divorces. And in my book that made her the winner.

“We sure have come a long way,” Bets says again. “I remember when I thought masturbation was the worst sin in the world.”

I snort and grab the steering wheel. “I didn’t think my old sister even knew that word. Do you really want to go there, Bets?”

“You’d be surprised what your ‘old sister knows. And besides, I just listened to you go on and on about your penis the whole ride. Now it’s your turn to listen.”
We both laugh.

There we were, bruised and battered, still alive in the HOV lane of the LIE, both of us much too old even to be thinking about erection injections or masturbating. But we were thinking about it, and we were talking about it too. The best thing about Bets and me is that we could talk about anything.

That is what I am thinking, what I say is, “Bets, remember that time that you cleaned out my toy closet and threw everything away?”

“I sure do. You were so mad at me.”

“Well, Bets,” I turn to look at her wrapped in her blanket, “I just want you to know that I finally forgive you for throwing out all my Brooklyn Dodger baseball cards.”

Brooklyn born and raised, Joseph E. Scalia taught English and Creative Writing to reluctant junior and senior high school kids on Long Island for 33 years. He started his "real life" as a writer in 1997. He began writing as a child in elementary school, what he calls "terrible rhyming poems" on bathroom walls. Over the years he made the move to paper and has written and published five books, including a young adult novel, FREAKs, Pearl, a novel inspired by his years of teaching Steinbeck, No Strings Attached, an eclectic collection of his short stories, Brooklyn Family Scenes, a collection of family inspired stories and poems, and Scalia vs. The Universe Or: My Life And Hard Times, a collection of humor.Presently he 1s looking for a publisher for his collected poems, Poetry In Alphabetical Order. In addition to writing he also paints watercolors.

© 2011 Joseph E. Scalia

I got a beer, walked into a corner and rested against a broken office chair. The Lower East Side looked like a bunch of moving lights from the opaque glass in the windows. The ceiling used to be white at some point but had now turned brownish grey. Words and shapes were drawn all over it. It looked like a used piece of paper that had been flying out in the wind for too long, from one garbage heap to the other. Behind the bartender, the wall was filled with all sorts of stickers and tags: some ironic, some radical and some obscene. The bar was packed. Every stool around the bar table was taken. Those standing made a parallel line near the glass windows, leaving hardly a foot’s space to walk between them and the people sitting. But no one was doing too much walking that night. Everyone just drank and talked to their companions. Every once in a while, someone started talking to the group next to them and formed another group.

A middle-aged woman sat across from me and sipped her drink. Someone came from behind her and spanked her hard on her large buttocks. The slap made her rise up a little from her stool. She looked at the person behind her, recognized him and gave him an affectionate hug. They must have held each other for at least a minute, after which he spanked her again a few times and then went across the bar to meet other people. A few minutes later an older man walked in and caressed the woman’s hair. She kissed him. They sat together and made out for the next hour or so.

A few skateboarders stood against the wall next to me. Their group kept changing as new people came in and some people left. A beautiful black woman with a mohawk sat on a windowsill, her arms wrapped around a girlfriend, as she chatted with the skateboarders.

I sipped my beer and talked to the woman standing on the other side of me. She was a music journalist from San Francisco and told me that it was hard for her believe New York had legalized gay marriage before California. She was at Mars Bar because she wanted to sit somewhere and think things through. She didn’t want to say which things. As we talked more she told me about finding a broken flip phone in the middle of road. Who uses a flip phone these days?, she asked me. And how would a phone be in the middle of the road like that? “Maybe some stupid hipster thought it was ironic to still use a flip phone and dropped it while speeding on his fixie?” I said. “I have a fixie.” she said. A few minutes later she left and I got my second beer.

Seven years ago, my first year in New York, I tried to go to CBGB one Friday night. It was the last sign of the edgy punk days of the Lower East Side, I had heard. When I got to the door they asked me for a twenty-five-buck cover. The neighborhood had gentrified so much, apparently, that even the temple of un-gentrified times was charging heavy money. I didn’t pay it. CBGB closed down and was replaced by a John Varvatos store, where you can pay a lot of money to buy clothes that remind you of artists that didn’t have a lot of money. A very fitting tribute, I feel.

East Village and Lower East Side dive bars weren’t like that. They remained cheap and they remained dirty even as the neighborhood around them cleaned up. Mars Bar had been one of those places. But instead of being dirty, relaxed, and lazy like some others, say Holiday Cocktail Lounge, it was dirty, edgy and alive.

On a New Year’s Eve, six years ago, I sat there and sipped my last whiskey of the night. It was about 3:30 in the morning. The man in the next seat had flopped down on the bar table and was snoring. He woke up, grabbed my shoulder and said, “You think this is cold? Vermont is cold.” I wished him a Happy New Year and he went back to sleep.

During my first four years in the city I went to Mars Bar quite often for their four-buck shots of Jack Daniels. It reminded me of another time: not of New York City — I didn’t live here in that another time — but of bars, when bars were simply places you went to meet people you knew and drink or to hide away from people you knew and drink. No big-screen TVs, no bouncers. There was also the beauty of my own hypocrisy; I loved to be around a rough-edged group of young semi-punks and older crusties, drink cheap drinks, and then take a cab back to my luxury apartment 10 minutes away. As time passed, Mars Bar got into more tourist guidebooks, blogs and best-of lists. Slowly more people like me started showing up. They were happy to be in a seedy dive bar like they would have been in a zoo. I stopped going.

When I heard it was closing, I wanted to go there at least once more. So there I was. There was a constant flow of people coming in. Some stayed- but most came in, took a look, and left. A couple wearing small backpacks walked in. The woman had a New York tourist guidebook in her hand. They discussed, deliberated for a moment and decided to stay. He went to the bar to get drinks and she put their backpacks in a corner.

A few minutes later, a man from the other side of the bar decided to walk on the bar table. People cheered and clapped. He put his hands up and touched the ceiling and walked a couple of times back and forth while pushing up against the ceiling. The crowd shook their beer bottles and sprayed them on him as he strutted past them. He looked around the crowd as if for a signal. The crowd cheered. He unzipped his trousers and shook his penis around. Then he proceeded to do a few pushups on the bar table before zipping himself back up and going back to the corner he had come from. People went back to their conversation. I looked for the couple with the guidebook. They had left.

I left after one more drink. That stretch of Second Avenue was bustling. Beefed-up gay dudes in yuppie clothes stood outside Urge Bar, and a few guys in tight undies and wife-beaters stood outside Cock Bar. A flock of pretty girls in short black dresses shuffled around on the road and tried to flag down cabs that were off duty or taken. I walked towards the Pak Punjab deli for a samosa chaat, got it to go, and jumped in a livery cab.

Mars Bar closed down this week, for good.
 

Though I’d lived in New York for almost a year, I was still getting accustomed to the city’s unique rites of passage. Kevin, who had arrived only a couple of months before, was still in shock. We’d both moved from Boston, a place where people have cars and backyards and relatively few homicidal thoughts per capita. In New York, you must relearn all the simple, quotidian skills you’ve taken for granted since becoming an adult—grocery shopping, laundry, parking, sleeping. Daily life is a blur of small battles—squeezing up and down the stairs to the subway, bobbing and weaving around slow walkers on the sidewalk, and vying for park-bench space so you can eat your takeout lunch in relative peace. To some degree, these are all expected, reasonable challenges in a city of more than eight million. But every once in a while you’re faced with something unexpected, a question you can’t just ask the guy on the corner. A question like, “Where am I supposed to bury my cat?”

Kevin and I stood outside the vet’s office squinting in the sun. We had lied and told the vet we had a backyard where we could bury Jed. The other two options were to pay for his cremation with a credit card, or to give the vet’s office permission to “dispose of the body.” Kevin was more upset than I’d ever seen him. He had rescued Jed from an abusive owner more than a decade ago, and he wasn’t about to leave him now. A proper burial seemed the only fitting thing, but where? We started walking down 7th Avenue toward True Value Hardware, taking turns carrying the house-shaped cardboard carrier. It was heavy with a weight unlike any other I’d ever felt. It was a lifelike weight, but oddly quiet and still, somewhere between asleep and inanimate. When I tripped on a chunk of broken sidewalk, I worried that the shake had disturbed him. No, I had to remind myself. Jed was already gone.

I waited outside while Kevin went into the store and bought a red-handled metal shovel. By the time he came out, we had both arrived at the same idea: Prospect Park. We guessed we could get in some kind of trouble for it, but we decided it was worth the risk. The park was our mutual favorite place in New York. Its vast, sea-like lawn is Brooklyn’s backyard; its meandering woods the borough’s best hiding place. On a warm day you can see dozens of picnic tables decorated with crepe paper and balloons for kids’ birthdays, their parents sipping beers and manning grills nearby. People of all ages play catch and softball and soccer, and dogs chase tennis balls as far as their owners can chuck them. In the woods you can pretend you’re completely alone, with the chirping of birds and the swell of the breeze to keep you company. Though we doubted he’d ever gotten that far in his nocturnal wanderings, Kevin and I agreed: The park would’ve satisfied Jed’s wanderlust for an eternity.

We entered through a break in the stone wall along Prospect Park West and followed a path that ultimately dove off into the woods. We climbed a hill to what we hoped was the highest point in the park and chose a spot next to a thick oak tree with tangled, partially exposed roots. Kevin dug the hole while I stared down passersby who gave us condemning looks. What was the penalty for burying a pet in a public park? Would anyone actually go to the trouble of reporting us? For all they knew, we could be stashing a murder weapon or human remains, but we knew our cause was pure. When the hole was deep enough, Kevin lifted Jed’s body, wrapped in an old towel, out of the carrier. He held it for a moment before placing it in the hole and then immediately started filling it in. It had rained recently, and the dirt was heavy and dark like wet sand. Kevin tamped it down with his feet and then smoothed it out with the back of the shovel. We wanted to mark the grave without making it too conspicuous, so we pressed fist-sized rocks into the packed earth in the shape of a capital J. When it was done, we sat on the ground for a while, watching the sunlight move through the trees.

Burying Jed was one of the last things Kevin and I did together. Our relationship had always been a volatile one, and by the time Jed died, we were already in our decline. I don’t know if Kevin still lives in New York or if he’s moved back to Boston, a place he always loved and seemed reluctant to leave. Nor do I know if Jed’s grave is still on that hill in Prospect Park where we made it that bright spring day two years ago. I could probably find it if I looked; I remember that wonderful tree with its rippling roots, the way the sunlight split a thousand ways and dotted the spot we marked with a J. But I’d hate to find it ravaged somehow, dug up by a dog or eroded by rain. Instead I’ll just imagine Jed the way he might’ve looked if he’d gotten to enjoy Prospect Park during his life. His lean, gray body bounding through the woods, or curled up in a patch of sunlight, warm and dreaming.

“Damn it,” Mother says still watching the blinking sign, “we’re never going to find the Mennonite Church before dark.”

I remind mother that the lady who handed out the flyers on Fifth Avenue said it is on 15th Street. Mother doesn’t hear me. Instead she walks into the street. A truck slams on its brakes and barely misses her.

“Come on girls. Cross the street,” mother says.

I grab Heidi’s hand and feel the man on stilts looking down at us. Way down. Mother then hits the truck a few times with her hand and yells words we are not allowed to say. The men in the truck ignore her but I can’t. Her blue eyes shine against her high cheekbones and platinum blond hair which is down to her waist, and tied in a braid. Steam comes out of the manhole and Mother stands in the center of it all like an angel, rising out of the mist. My family and I cross to the sidewalk and the druggie girl peeks an eye open. I bet she sees a blur of us. Mother tells us to keep walking. Inside a gate, there is a garden trying to survive in the winter wind. Piles of trash rest next to bag of unopened fertilizer. Religious statuary, a Raggedy Anne doll, stuffed animals, scraps of electronics, are piled onto a rectangular wooden base form. It’s like a forty foot toy tower.

“Think the Swiss Family Robinson lives there?” Heidi says.

“It looks like the Tower of Babel from the Bible.” Mother says.

Through the barren trees, a skinny man builds the sculpture. He looks at me for a moment. Then he climbs up on the structure like an acrobat. Picking up a piece of rock with silver flecks, I tuck my new found treasure inside my jeans. This is the first time I have done something meaningful for a long time. As we walk to the end of the block, I look back and promise to return to my secret city garden.

Before writing for Glamour, Huffington Post, Narrative, New York Press, St. Petersburg Times, Smith, and Slate, Heather Kristin was home-schooled with her twin sister in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. Her unpublished novel BROOKLYN TO BOMBAY was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. An essay she wrote appears in the anthology LIVE AND LET LOVE which was featured on Good Morning America and The Chelsea Lately Show. Recently she was honored by the State of New Jersey General Assembly for her dedication on women’s issues and is thrilled to be returning for her fourth year as a mentor for an at-risk teen at Girls Write Now. Heather is currently writing a memoir.
 

I think Jesse’s fascination might be something genetic, something hard-wired into his psyche. His grandfather on his mother’s side spent years in the South Pacific fighting World War II. And for a while, Ian, Jesse’s older brother from another mother, also dabbled in the exotic when he was dating, before he got married. Ian’s girlfriend Anita wasn’t Asian, but Columbian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, or one of those other -ians from one of those South American or Central American places. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either.

I always liked Anita, an intense and passionate little brown girl with white teeth, dark flashing eyes and a good sense of humor, who didn’t seem to mind that I put all the knives away and kept checking the hubcaps on my car whenever they came to visit. But Anita, by last account, moved back to Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, or one of those other places, got married and has had several kids, none of them his, Ian assured me.

Then came Siu Lan who was definitely Asian. She was Chinese, in fact, and I am pretty sure she still is. We called her “Siu Who?” though her last name was actually Wing or Wang or Wong. We did that to differentiate Siu from Sue, my niece who isn’t Asian and spells her name differently but pronounces it the same way. I first met Siu at a party, a family gathering of the Italians at my daughter Janine’s house on Staten Island. Weeks in advance of the event, a nervous Ian had prepared everyone for the meeting of East and West in an attempt to head off any potential problems. But on the appointed day, his grandmother, my mother, made it evident by the expression on her face that she wasn’t very pleased when Ian led a foreigner into the thick of twenty-five screaming Italians all talking at the same time.

I watched the girl, head high, black hair radiating the light of Janine’s Italian crystal chandelier, as she walked fearlessly or foolishly into the middle of things. The conversations dropped to a low murmur and stopped, and in the intervening silence you could hear a steamed wonton drop.

It was my mother-in-law who barreled in and attempted to break the ice with some Asian small talk. “So tell me,” she said with an innocent smile of simplicity on her face, “how come they took Kung Fu off the air? It was one of my favorite shows.”
Siu Who blinked. She shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said without a trace of sarcasm after barely a pause. “But let me get back to my people and I’ll tell you what I find out.”

It was love at first sight, and from that second I knew Siu Who was special!

But their relationship didn’t work out because there were other problems beyond the East/West thing. And eventually Siu Lan went the way of Anita, though I don’t think she moved to South or Central America, and I assume she still lives in Brooklyn somewhere.

Soon after, Ian reconnected with Amy, his college girlfriend, the polar opposite of his previous choices, both geographically and physically. Amy was born in up-state New York, in Syracuse or Schenectady or one of those other “S” cities. She is smart, beautiful, flaxen blonde and so white she might be mistaken for alabaster. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love Amy, and that is a good thing because she is now my daughter-in-law and the mother of Hailey, who for the first three months of her life was the first blue-eyed grandchild born into this brown-eyed Italian/Sicilian family, until her eyes changed to beautiful black Sicilian olives.

The Asian bug bit Jesse somewhere around seventh grade when he met Jessica, a petite Korean with great lips, who was in the horn section of the middle school orchestra. Jesse played the same instrument. Well, they didn’t actually play the same one, but they both played trumpets. Their pairing had such possibilities. Jesse and Jessie. Two trumpets. No waiting. However, they were both so shy that neither one said a word to the other until high school graduation day, just before they went off to different colleges. And by that time it was too late.

Then along came Amy. Not Ian’s “Caucasian Amy,” but one of the Asian persuasion, a Japanese violinist Jesse met in college. When he brought her around, the family, including my mother, had grown accustomed to Asians at the gates, although they still had trouble separating them according a specific -ese. Just as the family had reduced everything from ravioli to linguini and lasagna, into generic “macaroni,” there was a tendency to lump all of Asia together - Chinese, Japanese – Portuguese? It didn’t seem to matter. And there were some who had problems telling the family’s Asians apart and thought that Asian Amy and Siu Who were the actually the same person, dating first Ian and then Jesse. Not that they looked alike, or that there was anything wrong with it if they did. But some of the confusion was mainly because Siu and Asian Amy had never been seen together. No one ever had problems telling the two Amys apart. My mother-in-law never asked Asian Amy her Kung Fu question. “Because,” she said, “I already asked her once at Janine’s and I don’t want to be a pest. Besides, I don’t want her to think that I am being rude.”

So for as long as Asian Amy was on the scene, the matter of Kung Fu’s disappearance remained a mystery.

We didn’t talk much, Asian Amy and I, when she and Jesse visited. She was shy and quiet, the very definition of inscrutable, the silent, brooding type, a person of many moods, most of them dark, like a rain cloud that she seemed to carry with her. Their breakup was a protracted and painful affair for both of them. Asian Amy was Jesse’s first real love, but in the end, after many fits and starts, they went their separate ways.

After the pain of Asian Amy subsided, it didn’t take Jesse long to hook up, first with Kat, a tattooed Filipina, and then with Kit, a cute little Chinese girl. They make a cute couple. Kit is barely five feet tall and Jesse measures in at a towering six feet four. They have a lot in common. They are both shy and quiet and have a strong affinity for sushi. But if they ever get married I know there is no hope of the union ever producing a blue-eyed baby.

Jesse has other plans after graduation. He has been studying Japanese for about a year. In June he hopes to go to Japan for a year or more to teach English there. He has submitted his JET application, one of the few things he has completed on time without coaxing from his mother or me. He is already there in Japan in his head.

“I hope you get your wish,” I told him. “It is a wonderful opportunity. But what,” I asked him while we were watching Lost In Translation for the third time, “will you do if you are not accepted?”

He looked as though he had never considered that possibility.

“And what will you and Kit do if you are accepted?”

He shrugged as he sat there with his legs crossed looking very inscrutable.

So I am making plans too, to take a trip to Japan when Jesse is there. I am fortifying myself in Asian culture by ordering lots of Chinese take out, and I am desperately trying to develop a taste for raw fish and octopus flavored ice cream.

Joseph E. Scalia grew up a shabbos goy in Boro Park, Brooklyn, turning on lights and lighting cooking stoves. He has published two novels FREAKs and Pearl, two short story collections, No Strings Attached and Brooklyn Family Scenes. He is looking for a publisher for his latest collection of humor, Scalia vs.The Universe.
 

Viva Pancho is a Mexican restaurant in Times Square, on West 44th Street, just off Broadway. It’s verde awning reads, “Viva Pancho”/“Home Of the Sizzling Fajitas,” in chili pepper script. Neither quaint holdover from the old Times Square, nor modern day restaurant group vision, it could very well be situated in a New Jersey strip mall. I suspect most of their business comes from Red State tourists who are relieved by the unassuming nature of the exterior, and reasonable prices on the menu in the window.

The entrance takes you into the bar, which features a rectangular counter that’s pushed into the corner, and seems too big for the small room, like an unfortunate sectional in a Manhattan studio apartment. The walls are mirrored, I suppose, to give the illusion that the space is bigger than it actually is, while having the consequence of forcing you to see yourself sitting there. The other, better option is to look up at the muted soccer game on the TV hanging overhead. A single strand of colored lights dangles above the dining room archway, as though someone forgot to take it down after the party. During the day, the room is awash in anemic sunlight.

Though I’ve waited tables at Virgil’s, the barbecue restaurant next door, for a decade, I’ve only been to Viva Pancho three times. The first was shortly after being hired. Several of us, who had all started at around the same time, and were destined to become the next senior staff, went there as a group following a shift. Everything was new, and we’d yet to discover ourselves, or our regular spots, Jimmy’s Corner and St. Andrew’s, the other direction down the block. Though no one complained, it didn’t feel right. And we never went back. It was kind of like Freshman Orientation Weekend, and making out with the girl in your dorm, who would eventually ostracize herself for the stuffed animal collection overcrowding her bed. The memory is slightly fuzzy, and somewhat embarrassing, but mostly just weird.

On another occasion, while leaving work, I happened to glance in the window and notice a coworker and friend, sitting alone at the bar, smoking, and sipping a slushy red margarita. Impulsively, I reached for the door. He seemed uncomfortable with the encounter, like I’d caught him waiting on a tryst. I begged off when the bartender approached, and made a hasty exit, purposely avoiding looking back in the window as I hurried past. Maybe he was meeting someone. Or maybe he was embarrassed to be discovered alone in Viva Pancho. Or maybe, after a particularly trying shift, he didn’t want to be bothered; which was why he was there in the first place.

The last time was when a new-hire waitress, whose drink was margarita, felt like a margarita after a lunch shift, and convinced me, as we happened to be getting off at the same time, to join her. Said waitress always felt like a margarita after a lunch shift. Viva Pancho was her hangout. She headed a regular Viva Pancho clique. So I had no expectations. But what the hell, I figured. After an hour of our venting about dealing with the public, and two or three margaritas, or maybe it was two hours and four margaritas, I looked in the mirror and saw our miserable faces at that sad bar in the middle of the afternoon and knew that wasn’t going to work out.

Everyday, I walked past Viva Pancho without giving it a thought. On my way to work. And on my way home. Five days a week. For ten years. If I ever did consider it, it was in regard to how it had remained in business for so long. Restaurants come and go in this city. New Yorkers swarm a new place, like wolves on a fresh carcass, then abandon it to the vulture Bridge and Tunnel and tourists who pick over the bones until there’s nothing left. Yet, Viva Pancho had survived the revitalization of Times Square without so much as a facelift.

When the economy slumped, Viva Pancho took to marketing in order to foster business, in the form of an ancient Mexican man in traditional sombrero and sarape -- or, at least, a kitsch version thereof. He didn’t call out to you with a deal, in the manner of the Little Italy barkers. Or shove a menu at you, like they did on Theater Row. He simply stood there, the embodiment of Viva Pancho. For months, I passed without acknowledging him, and without receiving acknowledgement. Then one day, while on my way to work, we looked at each other.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied.

It was not a casual hello. This was a friendly greeting. One that recognized a relationship. He knew me, and I knew him, even though we’d never so much as exchanged a glance. The next day, it was back to our agreed upon anonymity, even if the dynamic was altered, a level of self-consciousness added. Everyday, I passed. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

How many of these stealth friendships was I involved in? There was the thin security guard who walked with a transistor radio tuned to NPR, seemingly always just ahead of me on the ramp to the Staten Island Ferry in the afternoon. There was the older lady with hair like Marie Antoinette, and a penchant for paperback thrillers, who sat across from me on the ferry on Tuesday mornings. There was the middle-aged African American man in the skullcap from the 1 Train, who was quick to give up his seat for a lady. On the corner of Broadway and 44th, there was the man with the kabob food cart, and the man who sold New York street scenes and celebrity 8x10s, and the caricature artist, and the Chinese calligraphy artist, and the fortune teller, and the guys that hawked knockoff designer handbags from a sheet unfurled on the sidewalk, that they snatched up when the police approached. And the kids that asked, “Do you like comedy?” -- which counts, because they didn’t ask me. And Batman, and Spiderman, and Elmo and Cookie Monster. And, of course, there was the man in front of Viva Pancho who, one time, broke the fourth wall and said “hello.”

Sometime ago, while passing Viva Pancho, I realized the ancient Mexican in the theatrical Pancho Villa costume was gone. Maybe he ran into immigration problems. Or finally had enough of that oversized sombrero and gold lame sarape. Hopefully, he didn’t meet a worse fate. Most likely, since he wasn’t replaced with another Pancho, he’d been given the pink-slip. I guess the economy had recovered sufficiently, or the summer tourists invaded, or gone back to work, as the case may be. Or, perhaps, it was determined, in a Viva Pancho departmental meeting, that it was no longer cost effective (re: someone’s bonus was on the line) to employ a living, breathing Pancho. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll suddenly reappear. Viva Pancho.

Tom Diriwachter's new full-length play, "Age Out," runs to the end of January at Theater for the New City