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26
Aug
08

New York Lesson No. 332: Boss

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York Lessons and Strangers Observed
Tags: , ,

The way strangers address each other in New York, if at all, follows a high degree of variation, depending on the situation — from the carnival-barker lurings of Italian restauranteurs along Mulberry Street to the colorful and often violent invitations from one fender-bent cabbie to another, the nod of a mail carrier to the blank stare of a neighbor.

What passes for polite forms of address in this town varies from community to community. But one constant I have heard among men time and again is the odd honorific “boss.”

It is at once colloquial and coarsely formal. As a term of address it suggests respect, as one stranger respects another, but it is not as stuffy as “sir.” I feel ridiculous and self-conscious when someone my age or older refers to me as sir.

“Boss” is in another class altogether, at least a full step up from “dude,” and not as juvenile as “mister.” It is friendly, like a light jab on the shoulder. It feels comfortable. The odd thing is, unlike “sir,” being addressed as boss does not carry any indication of social superiority.

From the convenience store clerk: “Do you want a straw with that, boss?”

From the guy at the pizza shop: “Eh, boss. What can I do for you?”

From the friendly-looking old man slowly walking across the street, one hand on his cane, the other raised in a shaking fist, while I was searching for a parking spot last night: “Hey, boss! Lights! Put on your fucking lights!”

29
Feb
08

One Track Mind

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Funny, New York, Strangers Observed and Weather
Tags: , ,

The pet owner is bundled up against the winter elements. His dog, because this is New York City, is teeny-tiny and dressed in an outfit that costs as much as the man’s. The dog scampers along in front, keeping pace, pretending there is no leash connecting them. And then he stops to inspect the base of a retaining wall. The owner passes him and pauses, giving the lead a gentle tug. Come on. Time to go in, boy. The man shifts on his feet and shivers.

The animal stands there with his ass in the air, clearly shivering. He’s one of those little guys that shivers on a warm day. A bitter wind whistles under his tail and across his exposed belly. His single-mindedness and determination is almost inspirational. I’m coming, I’m coming. I just really have to smell this because it’s so … interesting, and I … Oh, wait, what’s this? Oh, now that… that smells awful. Isn’t that awful?

01
May
07

The Quick and the Deed

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York and Strangers Observed
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Walking to work one day not long ago, I had the opportunity to play the Good Samaritan. A man walking toward me on the sidewalk in the opposite direction was holding a plastic grocery bag full of papers and miscellany. I guess it contained one too many things, because the bag split and papers went pouring out onto the sidewalk. The morning spring breeze picked up and sent it all eddying and dancing down the sidewalk — torn-open envelopes and bills and other bits with handwriting on them.

The poor guy barked a PG-13 curse and immediately fell to his knees and threw his hands and feet in every direction, like a Twister champion, trying to stop the papers from getting away and missing several. They didn’t seem to be driven by the wind so much as by a desperate desire to get as far from him, in any direction, and as quickly as possible. One glided under a parked car.

As the bag spilled, three people breezed right past him, offering no help. I was approaching him anyway, so it was no big deal for me to stop and see what I could do.

At first I stopped simply because it would have been ridiculous and conspicuously uncharitable not to. I helped him not necessarily because I wanted to but to avoid shame, setting myself up in my head in opposition to the people who didn’t stop.

I was glad I did. He was embarrassed, the poor guy. He would not look up at my face. As if the papers scattering around us were bits of underwear or nude photographs. But he was also grateful. “Thank you. Thanks, sir. Thanks,” he said.

Our reactions to the situation were so different. He’d been taken by surprise, something of his life exposed briefly and rudely, his independence momentarily stripped away by forces outside of his control, whereas my simple interaction with him, which neither of us was looking for in particular, took me outside of my own head and put me in a position of power. I know it sounds idiotic, but I think I actually felt some dominance over him in that moment. It was brief and a little embarrassing, but it was power. I was doing the one thing he needed most right at that moment.

So I gathered up what I could. I knew we didn’t have all of it. Some papers I had just seen moments prior were gone when I turned around. Oh well. He looked up at me finally and smiled and said one last thank-you.

“No problem,” I said. He seemed to have everything under control, so I carried on along my way. I wondered what he would do about the missing pieces, but I felt wonderful for at least doing my best to help. Should I have told him he didn’t have all of it? Did he already know? Would I know if it were me?

In that moment, the paper that had gone under the parked car skidded out into view and made its way down the street away from the man. I ignored it and kept walking.

When you commit to a kind gesture, how far must you go? Did I negate my good deed because I didn’t chase that page down the street? My obligation was complete. What was my obligation? Hadn’t I done my best? No, I knew I hadn’t. It wasn’t quite the same thing as walking an old lady halfway across the street and then dashing off when the light changes, leaving her to contend with honking horns and whizzing bicyclists. But it occurred to me that I hadn’t really helped him at all. Those people who had walked past him were rude, but at least they were honest. And, in opposition to them, I was certainly no better.

04
Apr
07

Next Stop, Dreamland

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York and Strangers Observed
Tags: ,

The way her mouth hung open and the way her eyes were just not quite shut, the little girl looked dead. She was obviously sleeping. If it were more serious, I imagine her mother, against whom she was leaning, would have displayed considerably more alarm. Instead, she herself looked half asleep and quite at peace with whatever state her daughter was in.

It was early morning, and the poor thing had clearly not gotten enough sleep and was now sort of just passed out — hard asleep — on her mom. Ordinarily I’d think: “Cute!” But her dull, mannequin eyes peering out into empty space through the slits in her eyelids threw the picture off, like she was only imitating a human and there was just one little detail she couldn’t get right.

I was careful not to let her mother see that I was staring at her face. Those eyes! They were like glass or plastic and did not move. Not even a jitter. They must have been taking in light, and surely they were recording something, but they were essentially switched off, like burned-out lamps.

Every few minutes, a man on the other side of her, her father, I presume, poked her in the side in an evident attempt to wake her just enough to assume a more dignified pose. It wasn’t working, and he wasn’t trying very hard.

A fat braid of hair came down from the side of her head, serving as a sort of cushion, framing her broad, smooth face against the shoulder of her mother’s jacket. She’s probably a nice-looking kid — when animated — I thought.

I love that kind of heavy, total sleep, when your field of vision closes in on itself, the words on the page in front of you begin to say things that aren’t there, your eyes shut off before they are even closed, against your will, and your arms go slack, and your body slips at first, then plunges deep into unconsciousness. And how much sweeter it is to have someone to lean on. You abandon yourself with no care for your destination. Mom will wake me. You sink back until you’re enveloped in grey cotton. The storm of activity in your head dissipates. The last thing you read is carried forward into a sentence of nonsense and transmogrified into something fantastic that makes complete sense, an alternate, other sense, in that moment. When you wake up, you have a bitter taste in your mouth; you’re sweating from your scalp to your shoulders and down your spine; you have to teach yourself to move again, to lift your arm, to close your book, to stand, to step forward and off the train, and to climb the stairs toward home.

19
Jan
07

Busted

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York and Strangers Observed
Tags: ,

On the F train home from work today, I noticed a woman sitting not far from me across the aisle. She was accompanied by two men about her age. There wasn’t enough room in the car for them to sit together, so all three of them were on separate pieces of seating.

I was trying to get a good look at the woman’s teeth, surreptitiously, as one does on the subway, distracted by the jagged and unaligned row in her lower jaw and the horse-like protrusion of the upper row. She was talking and making faces in conversation very freely, unashamed — and why shouldn’t she be? Still, I did have the word “snaggletooth” on my mind. Not a personal judgment, right? Just an observation. Just feeling lucky — or, rather, just being aware of her misfortune.

One of her friends, who was sitting nearer to me on my side of the car, gestured toward her, and she extended her foot toward him. He tied her shoe, and she lowered her foot again.

The old man directly across from me turned his head away from them. He had been watching them interact, smiling at the guy tying her shoe. I looked back at the two, and saw how they were looking at each other, how they spoke. Of course! They were a couple. The old man was on to it. And I was noticing the wrong thing completely all along. There was much more to say about the shoe-tying than about her crooked teeth.

09
Aug
06

Eating. Why?

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food, Strangers Observed and TV
Tags: ,

Eating is bizarre.

Earlier today I couldn’t take my eyes off a guy with a Baskin Robbins sundae sitting across from me on the bus. Over and over I watched him cut his pink plastic spoon through the whipped cream into the stubborn hard-pack chocolate ice cream below, hack out a small nugget (testing the limits of the flimsy spoon) and carry it to his mouth. He’d close his lips around the spoon, pull it out and start again. Maybe the next time a tendril of strawberry would hang over the edge of the spoon, and he’d have to open wider or give it a bit more action with the tongue. As the sundae melted, the whole process got messier. But he attacked that sundae with determination and rhythm, pausing for breath and to check the street signs — rarely, because he was transfixed by the ice cream.

Here was a grown, fit man, eating a sundae. Totally ordinary. But, briefly, utterly captivating. It wasn’t sexy or funny like food can sometimes be. It was just a guy eating ice cream. But it struck me how silly the whole thing was — this process of carrying food to our stomachs — junk food especially — only to have it passed through, digested and dropped back out again hours later. The whole fact of eating seemed to me in that moment to be just a weird waste of time.

Why chew? Why break it up into small pieces? Why put it in a cup or bowl? On a plate? With matching utensils and napkins? Why cook and prepare it? Why transport it great distances? I wonder why we don’t simply take the raw ingredients and put them directly into our bodies. Why this activity called eating?

I guess, it’s because we absolutely need to fill our minutes with sensation.

People so often invest so much attention in what they are eating. How often have I watched someone stare at a bagel with cream cheese, lift it to her wide-open mouth, clamp down, smear her cheeks with goo, chew madly while wiping her face, then stare at the bagel again? Or blow across the rim of a polystyrene cup, gazing into space as the waves of coffee lap the far edge? What are we looking at?

Maybe we’re watching the steam rise. Maybe we’re looking at the shapes our teeth make or the layers of colors in a sandwich. Maybe we’re looking at the ice cream melt against the spoon or the saliva freeze to the stainless steel. Maybe we’re watching the butter glisten in a bowl of peas or the oil dribble from a slice of pizza. Maybe we’re looking at the holes in the bread or wondering about what grows from a sesame seed.

Who knows. But whatever we’re doing, it seems to me to be an extremely introverted and self-indulgent practice.

Eating is a function of the body no more glamorous than sleeping, crying, sweating, farting, burping, bleeding. Truth be told, chewing is only a few steps away from shitting.

There’s a scene in My So-Called Life, in which Angela says in one of her voice-over monologues, “I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother. It just means too much to her. I mean, if you start to think about, like, chewing, what it really is, how people just do it, like, in public.”

She seems not to complete the thought, but even then I knew exactly what she meant.

And she’s right: We — sensible, boring people, that is — don’t have sex in public. We don’t pee in public. Eating is kind of gross. It’s kind of personal. What in the world are we doing with a sundae on a bus?

08
Aug
06

Go On Ahead, Baby

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York, People We Like and Strangers Observed
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On a caffeine run one day last week, I was once again charmed by a stranger. It was during the heat wave, and coffee was not an option, so I headed to a bodega near my office, in search of a Coke Zero, my carbonated beverage of choice. Standing like a zombie in front of the refrigerator case, I overheard a woman buying lottery tickets say something about a younger woman who had just left the store. The two had been chatting like people do in line at a bodega.

“‘Cuz it’s hot outside,” the girl had said.

“I know. That’s why you ain’t hardly wearing anything on your body,” the woman said.

The girl left, and the older woman continued a previous conversation with the clerk. I didn’t hear what she said, but I knew it was a reaction to how little the girl had been wearing.

“Some people just like to show their bodies,” he suggested.

“Uh-huh. Well, I like to show my body too,” said the woman, laughing saucily. “But you got to have some sense about it. You can’t go around wearing nothing.”

The clerk agreed.

“I show my body too,” she continued, “but at the right time, you know what I’m saying?” She paused for effect. “Leave something to the imagination. That’s what I say.”

The clerk laughed a little. I imagined he didn’t know what to say in response.

I was a little annoyed by her. She seemed to be trying too hard to impress her audience. She is not someone about whose body I would typically spend much time thinking. It’s not a body one would expect or want to see uncovered, and I was surprised to hear her say something suggestive about it. The sentiment was old-fashioned, but the images it provoked were more than I wanted to consider at the moment.

She was sort of sausage-shaped and she wore a modest dress generously cut from an immodest print of big orange and green flowers that swayed on a white background with every move she made. She was not an invalid, but I could see she didn’t have an easy time getting around. She stood as if her legs were always stiff and sore. Her swollen ankles bulged around the edges of her shoes. She was not a beauty, but she was clearly full of life. She’s what I would call robust.

There was something holding up the lottery ticket machine, and it was occupying the clerk’s attention. She noticed me standing there, patiently holding a bottle of soda and two dollar bills.

“Go on ahead, baby,” she said warmly, and motioned to the clerk to take care of me.

I was struck by the aunt-like quality of the gesture. Baby seemed a strange word to use. It could mean everything or nothing. You could say it to a lover or you could say it to a stranger at a bodega. It underscored a generational difference. A cultural difference.

Her sauciness made more sense to me. Or rather, it was easier to imagine her in other situations. Jolly, yet formidable. A talker at a family barbecue. Good with a story. But if I were one of her grandbabies, I would not want to cross her. I left the store admiring her vitality.

06
Jul
06

Random Observations

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York and Strangers Observed

Just some random observations today from the Lower East Side on my lunch break.

One.
“Yo, do me a favor,” I heard a woman say into her cell phone as I walked down the sidewalk in her general direction. She was leaning over a guard rail around a subway entrance, causing her shirt to ride up slightly, exposing a hanging gut that she probably didn’t want to expose. “Don’t nobody slap me in the face. Not my mother. Not you. Not nobody. You touch me and I will stab you in the neck.”

She was using her outdoor voice, despite having a private conversation. As I passed her and walked further away from her, her voice got fainter and fainter. I noted that, despite the threat of mortal violence, her part of the conversation took place entirely without profanity.

Two.
Waiting at a cross walk for the light to change, I noticed a small figure to my left out of the edge of my field of vision. He was an old man, and he was standing next to a garbage can, fussing with a green umbrella. He opened and closed it, running the folding mechanism up and down the shaft a couple of times, shaking it, twisting at it.

I checked the light and turned back to the old man. He was stabbing the umbrella down into the garbage can. Judging by its missing handle and broken spines, I guessed he had taken it from the garbage can originally. He had in his hand a spring, evidently taken from the shaft of the umbrella. He fingered it and wiggled it slightly and then turned and walked away down the sidewalk.

The light turned, and I crossed the street.

Three.
On the other side of the street I encountered a sidewalk sweeper. He wore a heavy-looking green Lower East Side Business Improvement District jacket #8212; better suited for November than early July — and rode on a machine that resembled a zamboni with two large wheels in front, one small wheel in back, and two rotating circular brushes meant to sweep debris under the vehicle and toward an intake fan.

The single wheel in back left a winding ribbon of motor oil wherever he went, betraying the erratic course he took swerving through and among the pedestrians. No one seemed to feel they were in any particular danger as he deftly avoided sweeping them up or knocking them over.

I was puzzled by such eforts at lunch time on a weekday. I’m no city manager, but surely there’s a better time to sweep the sidewalks, I thought. And what was he cleaning up anyway? A cigarette butt or gum wrapper here and there, leaving a larger mess behind him than what he encountered in front of him.

Maybe he just wanted to get somewhere without walking. I have a friend who, when she was 15 and had no driver’s license, rode through her home town on a riding lawnmower to buy a pack of smokes from the only place that would sell them to her. That makes sense, in its desperate, adolescent way. But this guy… where was he going?

I wonder if there really is such a thing as a random observation. The events around us are random in that they are unpredictable and outside of our control, but the very second we begin to pay attention to them, the act of observing becomes deliberate. With all the activity around us in New York City, we could be distracted in any direction at any time of the day. It’s something in us that draws an occurrence into our sphere of attention. Something led me to notice the woman on her phone, the man with the spring, and the guy on the sidewalk-sweeping machine. I wonder what about those three incidents is the common link to my attention.

23
May
06

Religion in the Copy Center

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Religion and Strangers Observed
Tags: ,

I was in Staples at 34th and Broadway today, waiting for some copies to be made, and I overheard a conversation between a man in his early 20s and a woman in her late 40s about God and biblical literalism. It had been going on for some time by the time I got there.

He was standing at the paper cutter cutting 8.5 x 11 copies into eighths. Some kind of cards to hand out advertising an event of some sort. He wore a too-long moustache, an oily ponytail and rollerblades.

She stood next to him at the counter doing something with lamination. She had unbound salt and pepper hair down past her shoulders, she wore too much eye makeup, and loose, shabby clothing.

I couldn’t tell if they knew each other before this episode at Staples. At first I thought they were arguing. They were disagreeing slightly. That I could tell for sure. But it was cordial enough. Essentially, his point of view was ecumenical and secular and logical, but ultimately respectful and deferrential. He didn’t want ana rgument; he was just curious. Her point of view was very rigid and literal and of strong conviction. He was being heroically fair to her with statements like, “I really appreciate your point of view. I’m just saying …”and “I’m not a scholar, so I can’t be absolutely certain, but …”

At one point he explained that he always had a problem with the Book of Leviticus and its harsh prescriptions against immoral heterosexual behavior and homosexuality.

She leaned in. “Well, you know why homosexuality is bad,” she said, lowering her voice to a discreet whisper. “It’s because it’s unclean. It spreads disease. It’s unholy.” She went on, though I had lost interest in the particulars.

He gamely pointed out that plenty of heterosexual behavior also spreads disease. They discussed it a bit further. He also drew a distinction between the conviction that adultery being bad because it’s against God’s word and the opinion that adultery being bad because it breaks down bonds of human trust, his opinion being the latter. Eventually they agreed that it was ultimately best to live a life of peace and forgiveness.

Then she closed her part of the discussion with a neat and tidy “Listen, I don’t judge. That’s not my job. Only god can judge us.”

Bravo. I agreed with her — partially — on something: It was not her place to judge people. But what caught my attention was her hypocrisy. She was passing judgment.

I can accept that whoever wrote what is in the Bible is passing judgment. Or, rather, if the words in the Bible are to be taken as the word of God, then what is in the Bible is a representation of God passing judgment. We’re taught that only God can do so and that we must not. OK. I can take that as an axiom of Christianity.

But if she says something like “Homosexuality is unclean,” instead of “The Bible says homosexuality is unclean” or “We are taught that homosexuality is unclean” — if she is stating the biblical fact with her own conviction and not attributing the judgment to God, then she’s not expressing an original thought at all — she’s just taking credit for someone else’s work. She’s plagiarising God. And how do you think he would fancy that?

23
May
06

Phantom Limbs

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Strangers Observed
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My vigilance has paid off: I saw another man with an arm missing today.

He was wearing a long-sleeve sweater (it was rather chilly and windy today), and the cuff of the empty left sleeve was stuffed into his left-hand hip pocket. (Can I even say “left-hand hip pocket” in his case?) First I thought he wanted people to think he just had his hand in his pocket. But on closer examination, I think it’s more likely because he didn’t want a swinging empty sleeve to get snagged on sharp or rough surfaces. Or to be tugged on by small children.

So, that’s two right arms and one left arm I’ve seen — or rather, not seen — missing in the last couple of days.

Why do I never see armless women?

Severed limbs are so bizarre. The moment a body part is separated from the body, it becomes something else. The body is still the body. It just weighs slightly less. But the body part becomes a dead object. Useless refuse. Something to bury. Somethign to preserve. It could even be art. We make pictures with crayons by what the crayon leaves behind on the paper. Can we make art with what we leave behind of our bodies?

Is it even ours when it is removed? We always talk about “my hand” or “my leg,” but if that hand or leg is lopped off, is it mine anymore? I can’t do anything with a severed arm it except maybe beat someone over the head with it or use it as a door stop. Whether I want to keep that arm or not, it’s sort of given back to the earth at that point, in a way, isn’t it? Relinquished to the cycle of decay and creation and everything that is outside of our bodies.

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