When I was five, I learned poker. At seven, blackjack. But one of the most useful skills that I learned in my youth, which happened during school trips into the city, was how to tell the fake watches from the stolen real ones in a suitcase on the sidewalk.
Maybe it’s a New York thing.
You look. You lift. You feel.
It looks like gold. It has the shine. The stones catch the light. But when you pick it up—too light. There’s the lie.
The fake ones are always cleaner. Sharper edges. More perfect than anything real ever is.
The real ones are dinged at the bezel. Cold in the hand. Weight that you don’t forget.
“Twenty bucks, kid.”
I pointed at the shiny one more than once. The glued-on compass snapped clean off the first time I turned it. I learned.
Years later, a student hands me a paper. After reading it, I speak with him.
“Mister Carney, this is my work,” he insists.
“Dwayne,” I say, “what does ‘her ephemeral posture stood clandestine toward the sun’ mean?”
He taps the page. “It means that…”
Too clean. Too smooth. No weight.
Different suitcase. Different street.
You don’t need software to spot the fake ones.
Help! I’m a New York Yankee in a Connecticut Court
I’m a New Yorker, despite my wife saying I’ve lived in Connecticut longer than in New York. She’s almost right. But twenty-two years in New York, and now being almost thirty-nine years old, still means I lived in New York longer.
I’ll be upfront with you city dwellers, my New York was Upper Westchester, not NYC. To most of you, that probably means I am not a true New Yorker at all, despite having a lineage to the Bronx like it’s the Old Country. And more than a lineage, I have that abrasive New York attitude, that bluntness, that direct approach, that rejection of “sugar and spice and everything nice,” that cynicism, that sarcasm, that lack of respect for profession or station—all of that is a part of me and intentionally so.
It’s also my problem. The lack of filter makes people up here uncomfortable. The emphasis on authenticity—being too genuine—makes “pinky-in-the-air” types shudder.
My writing, often misunderstood, focuses on miscommunication between people. For example, a character might say, “You shouldn’t smoke! Smoking is bad for you!” in response to, “We should smoke his ass!” Stubbornness, misunderstanding, sarcasm, and humor drive these moments.
These types of jokes aren’t told for the sake of being crude—they reflect street talk. The subtleties of which are often lost in my part of Connecticut, where locals debate New York versus Boston like it’s a matter of life and death.
It is such a lovely thing when I come across “one of us,” someone possessing a language and attitude who can understand me. Finally, someone gets it.
But most of the time, I feel like an outsider up here, despite finally learning how to spell Connect-i-cut.
***
T.S. Carney is a special education teacher. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Good Men Project, Your Impossible Voice, Eunoia Review, Neon Origami, Discretionary Love, The Gotham Guillotine, tongue etc, Maudlin House, Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts, Once Upon a Crocodile, FLARE, Robot Butt, miniMAG, Philosophy Now, Philosophy and Literature, The Educator’s Workroom, and elsewhere.