Eating With Strangers

Inspector Collector

My mother thinks I’m the biggest pack rat in the universe, and she hates it.  I can’t really blame her.  My peripatetic existence ensures the accumulation of crap from all over the world, and whenever I move, I ship anything I can’t carry in a suitcase to Miami, where it piles up in my childhood bedroom, and, increasingly, into other parts of the house.  Maman is always threatening a massive purge, even though she knows my soul might actually implode if she went through with this.

What do I collect?  Sunglasses.  Playing cards I find on the street.  Dolls from different countries; soaps labeled in foreign languages.  Coins, in particular pennies from every year of my life.  Antique postcards.  Airplane boarding cards and train tickets.  Menus.  Over four hundred cookbooks, particularly on the following subjects: the Savoie, Appalachia and the wider South, self-published cookbooks, community cookbooks, books on English cooking, and domestic economy manuals.  I need a spreadsheet to manage them; they live in caches in France, New York and Miami.  And then there are my Crap Boxes.  Every year, memorabilia I can’t bear to throw out gets stuffed into big boxes labeled Crap Box 1, 2, 3, etc.  My mother really hates those, especially when they start to smell. What can I say?  These things matter.

Harley was waiting outside in the rain for me as I gingerly crossed a puddle-spattered sidewalk in Queens.  He wasn’t waiting, really.  He was scrutinizing the peach tree above his head, which this year has about two buds on it.  “Last year, we got hundreds of peaches,” he said, shaking his head sorrowfully as big gloppy raindrops fell on our upturned cheeks.  “Well, come on in.” 

The foyer to his two-floor townhouse, a slightly grandiose description of the hallway that leads to the apartment upstairs, was plastered with maps, shoes and umbrellas.  Upstairs was an airy space decorated with a comfortable disarray of books, baby toys and artwork.  Harley’s wife Micki, an artist who teaches design at Parsons, was bathing their baby Hiro, the most beautiful, wise-looking nine-month old I’d ever seen.  Micki's pretty, petite with a broad smile and capable hands.  There was a large sign leaned up against a desk advertising five-dollar fortunes with on it a clumsily drawn picture of a gypsy, and, against the wall, a sculpture, made with books, of a building; some of Micki’s other sculpture/book works reside in the Brooklyn Public Library and can actually be checked out. 

When we’d emailed about dinner, Harley had written, “I have created a couple of ‘Chinese’ dishes, including duck liver with yellow chive, and shrimp Jim Beam.”  Interesting, I thought.  I read on.  “I know a handful of authentic recipes from Ding Hey, a small island in the Zhoushan archipelago.  I also have been experimenting with “bagel dumplings” – Chinese style dumplings with cream cheese and lox filling.”  

Who was this guy??

Harley had decided, in the end, to make John Pin’s stewed chicken wings.  “John Pin is our kitchen god,” he said.  “Literally.  See his picture on top of the stove?”  There’s a blurry black-and-white picture of a man tending a barbecue.  Harley went to summer camp with his kids, one of whom calls later that night.  “But I couldn’t get chicken wings, so I bought thighs.” Harley's not a man who flusters easily.  Recipes are for chumps, as far as he's concerned.

He’d bought the makings of dinner at a Chinese market nearby, which serves the local Italian, Irish, Chinese and Hispanic community.  “The Chinese guys all speak Spanish,” said Harley.  “Kinda surreal.”  His ingredients were attractively and meticulously laid out on the table, mostly prepped already, in bowls: chicken thighs, rice, taro root, nubby ‘grey' zucchini, a bunch of glistening watercress, a mound of bean sprouts, a few scapes left over from a last-week jaunt to the Greenmarket, chorizo-like Chinese dried sausages, corn kernels scraped off the cob, carrots, even a few peapods from the garden, and Fu Yi (fermented tofu) in a tub.  “When I got here, those vegetable piles on the street [in Chinatown] were a mystery to me,” said Harley.  “Now I know every one of them.  I can say half of them in Chinese.  I’ve cooked them all.”

Jocular, with a halo of frizzy gray hair that bobbed when he laughed, which was often, Harley popped open a few beers before he touched the food.  He started by peeling taro root and dicing it, then popped the cubes into a rice cooker and poured rice and water on top.  “My mother was a Brooklyn Jew, and Sunday-night Chinese food and a movie was a standby growing up.  Chow mein and a movie, what a classic.”  When he moved to New York, however, he began to frequent Chinatown, the easiest route to good, cheap food and a full stomach, and has gone back several times a week for twenty-five years.  Now, everyone there knows him. (“Haw-lee!  Haaaw-lee!!”)

Harley snipped watercress with scissors and peeled garlic with a spoon.  He chopped garlic and sliced spring onions and mashed Fu Yi, the fermented bean curd, in a bowl.  I was so absorbed by what he was saying that I barely paid attention to his motions.  Until he picked up a pot lid by the champagne cork he’d wedged under its handle, so it was manageable even when hot.  It was a brilliant kitchen trick I’d never seen before.  “Oh, Marcella Hazan taught us that,” said Harley.  “When she came to town, she wanted Chinese food, so Bill Grimes called and asked me to take her around.”  Seriously?  “She scrutinized the dumplings.  I mean, dough is essentially pasta, right?” 

In 1981, Harley, who grew up in Buffalo, moved to New York City to work at the Jewish Museum.  His starting salary was $9,200, but one of the perks was a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side, which for several decades housed his accumulation of odd things, the number of which has since climbed to a precipitous 80 or so individual collections.  “Wow!”  I said.  “You should be in the New Yorker!”  

“Oh, he is,” said Micki.  I was beginning to see why.

Harley’s collections include—follow me closely now—mutilated money, beer bottle caps from beers he’s drunk since the age of twenty, and stickers that come off fruit. The “Heavy” tags put by airlines on overweight suitcases, and the labels you find in your suitcase when some government inspects it.  140 pieces of used professional hockey equipment. Sugar packets from the 1950-70s.  Collectible football cards, particularly from players with funny names.  Pencils, paperclips, thumbtacks.  Safety caps, like the ones that seal milk cartons.  Fortune-teller hand bills.  New York City Metrocards and tokens. Information about water, crabs, mustard and hair.  8,000 graffiti stickers, including one from Justin Pulitzer (“Most graffiti artists are white dudes”).  Toy boats and tape.  Matchbooks with maps on them. Rubber bands and chewing gum.  Toothpicks and keychain bottle openers.  Yarmulkes (46), seeds from unusual fruit (12), and salt.  “Not too many people are salt nerds,” Harley said.  Then he gave me a bag of salt from Saltville, Virginia, to take home. 

There’s more.  Over 300 pieces of Mr. T memorabilia, including a picture of Harley and Mr. T on the Jimmy Kimmel show.  Hundreds of crappy scissors, the kind that hurt your hinds, including one with nine blades for shredding (“I don’t usually spend more than $1 on a crappy scissors, and that one cost $8, but if you calculate by blade, it’s a good deal.  Though it doesn’t cut.”).  2000 shopping lists found in supermarkets.  6,000 keys.  Straws.  Autographs.  Spoons, especially white plastic ones; that collection was once featured in the Smithsonian, next to a Tiffany sterling silver ice cream saw, used for Baked Alaskas.  (Incidentally, a bookstore at which I used to work once also featured Harley’s plastic spoon collection in their window, too, though that has nothing to do with how I met him).

And then there’s Harley’s Chinese menu collection, the most famous of them all, which has grown to over 10,000. The collection, all forty linear feet of it, has gotten him on Geraldo, CNN Headline News, and into the New York Times eight times, as well as, obviously, into the Guinness Book of World Records.  “I once went to Caracas to integrate the menus into the Chinese collection of the art museum there,” he remembers.  “I matched them with colors—blue menus with Ming vases, green ones with the jade.”  He’s got menus from all fifty states, as well as 3 linear feet of menus from other countries.  He also collects the “No Menu” signs that people put on their door to keep the junk mail out.  His favorite says “No Menus – No Nothing – No No No!” Another claims that leaving menus will result in an “Official $50 Fine.”
In essence, Harley’s collections are portable histories, time capsules.  Take his record player tone arm collection.  When Walkmans came into use, New Yorkers threw their record players out.  Harley couldn’t fit too many whole record players into his 280-square-foot apartment, stuffed as it already was with the rest of his collections, so he simply started accumulating tone arms.  “Somewhere in New York, someone who collects record players off the street is really pissed at me.” 

Maybe one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but honestly?  Tone arms?  What’s the point of accumulating trash?  Well, there is one.  Harley’s collections are a diary of his life and a short, focused look at particular families of objects, the more specific, the better: football player collectible cards, but only those with funny names (D’Brickashaw Ferguson, Darnell Bing, Plaxico Burres); matchbooks, but only those with maps on them; spoons, if white and made of plastic.  “You’re like a whole Dewey Decimal System,” a friend said once about Harley.  Of his exhibit of Chinese menus at the Franklin Furnace, the New Yorker, in a 1991 ‘Talk of the Town’ wrote, “‘A Million Menus’ may actually shed more light on [Harley’s] unusual energies than on the history of Chinese food in America.”
One wonders where this relentless drive to hoard comes from.  In kindergarten, Harley’s teacher once wrote home, “We always enjoy what Harley brings for Show and Tell.”  Harley’s turned his obsession into a career, but ultimately, it’s about more than the menus.  “It’s not about your stuff,” he said.  “It’s what you KNOW about your stuff.  I do not love the menus proper.  There are some that I have not even read thoroughly.  I continue to save menus because they connect me with people. That’s the heart of the matter.”

Micki collects nothing, but she’s really funny.  Of the taste of the ducks that hang in Chinatown restaurant windows, she said, “They taste like walking across the Manhattan Bridge.”  Oddly, she’s right.  There’s an electricity between them that I love to see, middle-aged people really hot for each other.  They’re kissy, they touch comfortably, and they look at each other with a fondness that could melt steel.  “He’s the sensitive part of this couple,” she clarifies wryly. 

At about ten o’clock, we ate.  As I’d been scribbling and drinking beer, Harley, chatting casually all the while, had managed to churn out a stunning smorgasbord of small, glistening plates: spicy gray zucchini, Brussels sprouts and garlic in peanut oil, watercress soaked in Fu Yi, a bean sprout stir-fry with scapes, sausage, corn, mushrooms, peapods and hot pepper, rice cooked with softened taro root, stir-fried beef with tomatoes, tossed in Harley’s seasoned, twenty-year-old wok, and the pièce de resistance, John Pin’s stewed chicken wings, made with ginger, star anise, peanut oil, Yeo’s hot chili sauce, oyster sauce, and drumsticks.  This dish rocked.  Micki packed me leftovers in little plastic containers, which I ate the next day; they were even better cold.  For dessert, Harley whipped out an apple corer and clove two apples.  They were crisp and refreshing after the syrupy, spicy meal. 

After dinner, Harley took me downstairs to the Museum of Choking Hazards, where his collections live.  Given their scope, they take up a surprisingly small amount of space, organized and laid away in Container Store boxes.  He foraged for the nine-bladed scissors and the picture of him with Mr. T.  There was a “Harley and Micki” piece made by an artist friend as a wedding present, from recycled neon Harley-Davidson and Michelob signs, and X.  But the room left a muted, dusty memory.  The collections had been most alive to me when Harley had been talking impassionedly about them upstairs, elbow-deep in Chinese pickles.

“I haven’t really ‘made it,’” he said, and that’s when he looked sad.  “My career hasn’t taken off in any meaningful way.”  But I looked around at his quirky apartment, his boxes of memorabilia, his cool wife, his beautiful child, the laugh lines around his eyes, and I didn’t really believe him. 

Miss Dance Michigan 2005

The Fordham University dorm on 60th Street and 10th Avenue, a tall, beige brick building with a beveled façade, is known, by those on an inside track, as the cheapest hotel in New York City.  Fordham, a Jesuit school, requires visitors to sign in when they arrive, and guests of the opposite sex must leave their host or hostess by 3 o’clock in the morning.  Flouting this conscription incurs a $15 fee—which apparently fazes very few people.

When I arrived, which was way before 3 a.m., the security guard was giving a pizza delivery boy a hard time.  “Can’t go up,” he said, iguana-faced, imperturbable.  “She must come down.  Call her.”  As the pizza boy rooted around for the number, the security guard sniffed his blue insulated satchel, on the desk.  “What kind of pizza, that?” he asked.  “Personal,” said the pizza boy.  The security guard reached in and opened the box.    A tiny cheese pizza lay inside, cooling rapidly.  “I want one of those,” he said, his nose up close, nostrils cocked, sniffing instinctually.  “Get me one of those paaarcel pizzas.”  He sat back, hands clasped on belly, and cracked a small reptilian smile.

When Lara tripped out of the elevator to meet me, his smile turned into a beam and his eyes turned beady.  “Hel-looo,” he said, his voice a different register.  He made an elaborate show of screening my driver’s license and getting Lara to write my details down.  His eyes followed her all the way back to the elevator. 

What is it about dancers that makes them so immediately recognizable, so easy to peg?  They walk like tall people, even when they’re not.  Their chin line, never less than perpendicular to their neck, acts as a fo’c’sle to which their face is the figurehead.  They veritably sail through life, led by that figurehead, the rest of their bodies streamlined, responding to stimuli by moving like the flaps on the wings of aeroplanes.

So it was with Lara.  Compact, purring, powerful, she was a little Porsche embodied, revving and smooth.  Looking at our reflection in the elevator door made me feel like a Toyota Previa.  From the ‘90s.  Like the kind my mom drove, but with more bumper stickers in the back and maybe some fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror.

Lara, a newly graduated dance major from a suburb of Detroit, lives with Sarah, an aspiring forensic anthropologist, and Ariane, who studies graphic design and TV.  The door to their dorm apartment had handmade paper cutouts of their names pasted on it.  That was it, as far as flair.  The apartment, a temporary living situation, was otherwise marked by an almost total absence of character.  There was a television on as background music, and a few pieces of basic living-room furniture that I recognized as standard dorm fare, built with rounded edges to better protect the heads of falling-down-drunk post-adolescents.  The fabric on the sofa was the color of stains, to better hide them.  So was the color of the carpet.  Everything about it reminded me of my own time in college; the stale-beer-and-doctor’s-office smell of the hallway, the big void of the future, terrifying in its infinite capacity, and slouching on the couch, wearing sweatpants rolled at the waist.

Lara, pulling her hair back into a perky, utilitarian ponytail, perched on one of the short-bus chairs and consulted the internet.  “I’m going to make a herbed summer squash and potato torte,” she declared.  She took a potato and cut the eyes out with a blunt knife, carefully.  Then she cut it into slices, one by one by one.  She sliced a squash, too, and then pirouetted into the kitchen and came back out with a cake tin.  She layered the potato and squash onto the nonstick surface and sprinkled chopped spring onion and thyme leaves, carefully picked off the sprig, on top.  Even though she was using real food, it sort of felt like play-acting.  I think it’s because she’s a dancer.  The food was just another tool for movement.  The scent off the spring onions was incredibly strong.

She popped open a Bluepoint Blueberry Ale and swigged, then mixed flour with grated pecorino from a tub.  She scattered this over the cake tin and drizzled it with oil, then fanned potatoes and squash on top.  Sarah, her face illuminated by the purple Mac on her lap, texted away on her phone, absently watching the flickering television. 

Students on a Fordham meal plan often “shop” in the cafeteria, Lara explained.  The points on their swipe card net them chicken breasts or pints of milk, which they then transform in their dormitory kitchens.  A few months ago, Lara even made yogurt in her dorm room, under a lamp with a hot bulb, using old yogurt.  She was a vegetarian for a year, but has switched back.  Why?  In a word: “Thanksgiving.”

She had a comfortable sense of hygge, a word I came across in Denmark that refers to the creation of a cozy, warm and stress-free environment (similar to the German Gemütlichkeit).  Instead of turning on the soul-sucking fluorescent light in the common room, she went into her room and fetched a three-headed lamp with warm yellow light that she angled strategically, to everyone’s advantage.  I like when people make that kind of effort.  “I’m serving you a small piece,” she said as she cut the torte, “but you can have more if you want."  We all did.  The potatoes, yielding softly, were perfectly cooked, and the grated cheese offered a piquant contrast. 

Lara, a dance major and women’s studies minor with a predilection for math, recently presented her senior thesis, a 30-minute choreographed piece on hysteria that involved ten dancers in unisex, institutional-looking costumes, spoken verse, and music from a 19th-century female composer as well as a guy from the University of Michigan.  The promotional postcard, beautifully typographed, had on it an Antonin Artaud quote and an etched image from the archives of the Salpetrière, a notorious Parisian hospital/asylum through which thousands of hysterics streamed at the height of the craze.  “Women weren’t allowed to express themselves in the 19th century, when hysteria was at its peak,” Lara explained.  “The advent of modern dance coincided with the drop-off in hysteria, and I wanted to explore the potential connection.”  The background on her laptop was a close-up of a buxom pin-up, and she wove past it into Facebook to show me a clip of the piece, performed in a huge open studio on 55th and 9th, with offices and apartment windows visible behind the dancers.  To consult the computer, she bent at the waist, a first position cambré, instead of slouching.

She stayed in the same position, bent at a 90° angle as if this was the most natural thing in the world, while she drew me a map of the contemporary dance world.  I could see the map take shape in her brain as she scribbled it into my notebook with a decisive, neat hand.  Concert on one side, commercial on the other, with subcategories like “contemporary/avant-garde/emerging” and “music videos” branching out underneath. 

“I came to New York because I wanted to”—her eyes narrowed—“make it?”  Most of Lara’s sentences end with a question mark.   This summer, she’s working in a yoga studio and for a dance company in exchange for classes.  She’ll be living at the dorm, where she’s an R.A. and has, for New York, lots of space.  But she knows where she wants to be and what she needs to do to get there.

Miss Dance Michigan 2005 looks innocent, but she seemed to me rather wise beyond her years.  Her insouciance is just a mannerism; underlaid with a depth that’s subtle, calm and elegant.  She popped ice cubes out of a tray and dropped them in some water.  It was then that she was at her loveliest. 

Hep You Help Me

It’s been said that everything in the world exists at least once in New York City.  And as any resourceful New Yorker knows, those looking for the world will find it on Craigslist.  So after an extremely dispiriting first day in the city, during which I scoured bike shops from the Upper West to the Lower East and found nothing decent for less than $600, I knew what to do.  Within hours, a sketchball from New Jersey showed up at my door with a perfectly functional twelve-gear drop-bar black Raleigh and sold it to me for $200 cash.  He told me I was pretty and threw a padlock into the deal.  That’s it, I thought.  I’m never doing any other kind of shopping. 

What else is on Craigslist?  Well, this week, a posting for a missing Siberian Husky, a job offer directed at Laundromat attendants, an ad for a $25 poker table and a Joana Leunis Latin Dance DVD, someone willing to trade an Australian lobster farm for property in Florida, someone else seeking Goth models, a man interested in meeting lactating women, and 40 million other titillating propositions.
And last week, the following:

Hep you help me

Life has been nothing but surviving the big city - 10 hours a day 9-to-5 job and Chinese takeouts.

It is good, but certainly nothing I would have said, "this is what I want to be when I grow up" when I was 10.

So, here I am, trying to see if there is anything I can do for this world.

I don't have special skills or much time, but I'd like to see if there is anything I can help - one good deed a week.

Please drop me a note if you have anything needed a hand.  I will do my best if I can help.

I'd like to be part of the solutio and hope this will also make a difference to my own life.

Location: manhattan
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

I liked the unaffectedness of the language and the whimsy and optimism of the writer.  So I invited myself to dinner.  “Call me when you get out of there,” ordered my sister.  “They caught the latest Craigslist killer, but who knows?” 

“I don’t cook much,” said Dana, the tiny Taiwanese woman who opened the door to a one-bedroom on Lexington and 65th lined with small homemade abstract paintings and a six-foot television.  Despite this statement, she’d planned on making pork dumplings from scratch.  She opened the spice cupboard and the door came off the hinge with a crack.  “Whoops.  See?”   She pulled a chair into the hallway off the tiny galley and I sat on it, blocking the front door.  I watched her coarsely chop cabbage, which she then fed into a small food processor and spun until it was the size of pencil shavings.  She used a plastic knife to scoop it out. 

A tomato-red rice cooker perched on top of the fridge, which was plastered with a postcard from the Costa Brava, magnets representing Pittsburgh, Montana and southern California, and a letter from an Ecuadorian kid Dana sponsors thanking her for a recent donation.  On the counter were grapes, reduced-fat Pringles and Tostitos Chunky Salsa; on the wall, a Kandinsky calendar.  I caught a glimpse of a few cookbooks behind a cupboard door: one from the Sivanada Yoga Vedanta Center, InStyle Parties, Betty Crocker’s Good and Easy, and Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals 2. 

Dumplings are one of the only things that Dana knows to make.  Every Chinese New Year, her 99-year-old grandmother gathers her six children and their families around to make dumplings into silver dollar shapes all night in Taipei.   Dumplings, then, are the one dish for which Dana needs no recipe.  Otherwise, well…“My takeout menus used to be organized by nationality.”

She’d gone down to Chinatown on her lunch break for supplies. Usually, pork dumplings, the fairly involved dish she had decided to cook, require Napa cabbage, but in the interest of time, Dana grabbed the first cabbage she saw.  Before and after lunch, she works in information technology at Crédit Suisse in midtown.  Before the job at Crédit Suisse, Dana worked at IBM, lived in upstate New York, Pittsburgh and Taipei, where she studied English literature.  “Big cities are home to me,” she said. “I grew up in one.  But I don’t like the person I become when I go back to Taiwan.  I like myself better in New York City.” 

New York allows Dana to be herself: inquisitive, creative, independent.  The day I met her, she was wearing head-to-toe denim and a braided leather belt.  No jewelry, other than a silver watch, her mesmerizing hands and a really honest expression on her face.  It said: “A complete stranger, over to dinner?  Well, why not?!”

We talked about her Craigslist posting as she eviscerated the cabbage.  The first person to respond thanked her for it and said they’d be in touch when they next needed a favor.  The second person to write was me.  The third asked for sex.  The fourth asked for money.  The fifth wanted a job…and a Social Security number. 

Craigslist has treated Dana better in the past.  She met a study buddy at Starbucks for over two years; he pored over medical textbooks while she caught up on novels and biographies. “I love to read, but I never make the time,” she said.  She’s thinking about posting for a subway buddy, someone with whom to ride on the subway and read.  She’s also had a tea buddy, a drinking buddy, a walking buddy, various email buddies, and a buddy who exposed himself to her soon after they met.  They didn’t meet again. “I’m not crazy!” she said.  But she generally believes in people’s good nature, the infinite possibilities of the world-at-large to provide her with amusement, and counts some of the people she’s met as real friends. 
Soon afterwards, Dana’s real friend Vickie arrived.  Vickie’s even tinier than Dana, also Taiwanese, and works in risk assessment for American Express. 

Dana salted the shredded cabbage and piled it high on a tea-towel, then balled up the towel and wrung it to squeeze out excess liquid.  Meanwhile, Vickie whizzed ginger very finely, until it was the size of sawdust, and strained it of liquid too.  Then she chopped a few spring onions.  The ground pork went into a Teflon pan, the biggest receptacle in the kitchen, and Dana poured soy sauce, sesame oil, and, once the sesame oil ran out, olive oil on top.  She stirred the pork with chopsticks.  “You do it 200 times until the meat gets stringy,” she said.  “I put black pepper in there too.  It’s not traditional, but even my parents do it.” 
Her mother’s a primary school teacher and her father manages a textile factory, or rather, a factory that produces thread.  “So for them, life’s fairly black and white.”  Her parents are purists when it comes to dumplings.  Her father always microwaves a chunk of the meat mixture to test the seasoning before the dumplings are formed, and there’s no question of adding raw egg to the raw pork, as Vickie does; the two are separately cooked. 

For Dana, nothing’s black and white about life.   She seeks, she hopes, she doubts and seeks further.  She asked me as many questions as I asked her.  She walks around, she volunteers.  Once a week she heads to Brooklyn to walk homeless dogs, and on Tuesdays she spends time at a computer center helping senior citizens with new technology.  When she bought the colossal television overwhelming her living room, she threw a Come-See-My-Big-Ass-TV-Party and the seniors all came over to play on the Wii.  For someone so fascinated by things and people, New York is a limitless playground.  Living in a city has plenty of downsides, but Dana maximizes her use of its resources, makes its infinity fun.   It’s easy to mistake her unfazeable smileyness as naïveté, but Dana’s curiosity about the world’s warts is underpinned by a willingness to accept them.  And she is always thinking.

The ginger, spring onions and cabbage went in with the ground meat and we carried the Teflon pan into the living room to make the dumplings.   Vickie dumped a spoonful of flour into a fingerbowl of water.  “What are you doing?” Dana said, incredulous.  “My parents always add flour to the water,” Vickie said.  “I have no idea why.”  We mounded little piles of meat onto Twin Marquis dumpling wrappers (“We should’ve made the dough from scratch, it has a better texture that way, but if you’re going to buy wrappers, I recommend Twin Marquis”), dipped our fingers into the fingerbowl, and traced a wet circle around the edges of the wrapper.  At this point their skillful fingers left me in the dust as they pinched and crimped and expertly folded the dumplings into little purses that sat upright in a self-contented dusting of flour and taut sides.  I made one dumpling to their every four and mine looked like excess wet drywall ornamented by unappetizing boogers of raw pork.

Dana boiled water while Vickie, the faster of the two, finished forming the last forty dumplings in the length of time it took to heat the water.  Once it bubbled, Dana added dumplings in vast handfuls.  Dana’s hands were amazing—expressive, gentle, vibrating with warmth and capability.  I couldn’t stop watching them move.  Her mouth, too, was irrepressible and charming.  She waited until the water came back up to the boil and added a cupful in cold water.  “Once the water’s boiled three times, the dumplings are cooked,” she said. 

Dana piled the steaming dumplings into a bowl and sat it in the middle of the dining room table.  We each had two bowls before us, one for the dumpling and a smaller one for dipping sauce, which we each made by mixing soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil and a slightly hot Chinese barbecue sauce.  Slippery skin yielded to tender, well-seasoned pork moist with boiling liquid.  With this we drank cava the color (and flavor) of pink lemonade.  

I ate about thirty dumplings, even though my dubious sleight of hand with chopsticks made it difficult not to wear the dipping sauce.  Once cooked, it was hard to tell which had been the pretty ones, but I suspect the ones that exploded in the pot had been mine.  “Don’t worry,” said Dana.  “They still taste good.” 

Later, when the cava had mostly been drunk, Dana disappeared back into the kitchen.  She came out a few minutes later with bowls of the dumpling boiling liquid, to which two sachets of Knorr hot and sour soup mixes had been added.  She’d also cracked in two raw beaten eggs, which dissolved immediately into Silly String.  I couldn’t finish my soup.  The dumplings I had eaten had reassembled into one Giant Dumpling in my stomach, which refused to allow the penetration of anything else. 

I headed home on my Craigslist bike, dodging potholes as the Major Dumpling sloshed around, thinking about how honest and easy conversation had been.  Cities are funny.  People value their private space, and boy do I understand that, but over a year of my living in a rural place renowned for friendliness hadn’t managed to pierce a veneer that shattered as soon as I walked into Dana’s apartment my first week back in the city.

Next I want to try the dish that Vickie brings to office potlucks, the one with chicken wings, soy sauce, sugar, hot chilli and Classic Coke.  I’m not a stranger anymore, right?

Late Nights in Hell's Kitchen

New York’s world of night owls is dark and habitually drunken.  From Battery Park to Harlem, from Bed-Stuy to Hell’s Kitchen, those who dock their togs after two a.m. or later don’t have bed on the mind, at least not immediately.  It’s not our fault that the B train stops running at nine o’clock, and if that’s how the MTA’s going to be, well, why not just stop for a nightcap on the way home? 

If midtown Manhattan is one of the world’s power centers, the Time Warner Center is surely one of its most commanding foci.  Yes, it’s a mall.  Get over it already.  Betwixt Hugo Boss and Barnes & Noble live three of the best restaurants in the world.  Southampton Sarah mans the line at one of them. 

On a night when we both clock out reasonably early, just after midnight, I meet her at a bar in upper midtown.  She’s already enjoying her second Stella with an international posse of equally battle-battered colleagues, who are busy vehemently drinking their own pints.  The restaurant staff where Sarah works is probably as global as its business clientele—the line hears snatches of French, German, British, Hebrew and that funny Swiss accent, at once clipped and barbaric; the plongeurs mostly speak Spanish.  The waiters, as they are all over New York, are from small towns in Ohio, military towns in Virginia, farm towns in east Washington State—places where having moved to New York means having made it, no matter what you end up doing there. 

Autobiogeography

Now that I'm in Ireland with nothing but time and inborn nerdiness on my hands, I've made up my AUTO-BIO-GEOGRAPHY: a Google Maps mashup of the restaurants, cheese shops and bookstores I've visited and loved over the years.

Now, whenever anyone asks me where to find the best taco in El Paso, a comfortable hotel in the Hindu Kush, or antique postcards on the west coast of Wales, I can point them to my map. 

Would love to hear what you think?

p.s. Welcome New York Times readers!  Thanks for visiting Eating With Strangers!!

New York the Chimeric

New York, we’ll agree, is one of the world’s great cities with the least amount of obvious ties to its physical past—holding company with, say, Dubai and Nagasaki.  Who’d ever have guessed that the word Manhattan might once have meant “island of hills”? 

Look around at the soaring buildings.  The gothic spire of 40 Wall Street, a seventy-story skyscraper completed in 1930 that was very briefly the tallest building in the world, now belongs to Donald Trump, who bought it in 1995 for a mere $8 million.  Consider 23 Wall Street, for years the headquarters for JP Morgan, bombed to bits in 1920 by a horse-drawn carriage filled with 500 pounds of dynamite.  It’s currently under construction by Philippe Starck, who plans on turning its roof into a garden and pool accessible to inhabitants of the new Downtown by Philippe Starck buildings right next door, themselves equipped with a basketball court, bowling alley and ballet studio.  Or how about the Deutsche Bank building?  It was condemned after the 9/11 attacks tore a twenty-four-story gash in the façade.  Inside, human remains from the attack are still being recovered, along with asbestos, dioxin, lead, silica, quartz, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chromium, manganese, and other toxins directly related to the attack.  Next year, who knows?  I’m hedging my bets over its conversion into a new Balazs palace or hotel.

Looking at Lower-Lower Manhattan means staring change right in the face, but it takes real imagination to rewind.  The birth of New York City took place at the juncture of the East and North Rivers with the construction of Fort Amsterdam in 1625 and the smelting of the cannons at Battery Park.  Today, looking upwards at the vertiginous gray arrows spearing the sky, and across the water at the jagged skyline of smokestacks and blocky buildings limning Staten Island and New Jersey, those days seem more than a measly 350 years of constant evolution away.  It takes a real squint of the eyes to imagine the fort changing times eight hands in battle, including the comically named “Battle of Long Island,” during which volleys were exchanged between the fort and British emplacements on Governor’s Island.  (Can you imagine?)

I haven’t even finished apologizing for my lateness before Robert Lavalva launches into the history of lower Manhattan.  Did I know that Peck Slip, where we’re having lunch, didn’t exist before ballast discharged by arriving ships filled the water in with land?  I did not.  In fact, I realize, I know nothing about the history of lower Manhattan. 

Peter Pan, Unhinged and Hungover

I’ve had a cappuccino and a half by the time Phil Oh, forty minutes late, finally locates my favorite little brunch joint in a labyrinth of alleys on the Lower East Side, but his level of energy still kicks the shit out of mine.  Rosy-cheeked, with a tousle of precisely mussed hair, a gravelly layer of party-boy stubble, and slick geek-chic glasses, he explodes into the restaurant, sheds layers of beautifully made, artistic clothes that anyone less confident would look like a total arse wearing, and apologizes profusely.  Don’t sweat it, I tell him; I’m perpetually late, and rather needed to bond with my cappuccini. 

“I just got back from Fashion Week in Paris,” he breathes, breathlessly.  “And Berlin.  It was crazy.  This was the first time I had a press pass, too, so I didn’t have to be all” (here he slits his eyes, preens his voice, and hams it up) “Ah, hel-lo!  I am ah-ssistant to fehmous Japanese phot-hoh-grapher!  We leave pass at hoh-tel!  Ai-yah!” 

The man has clearly resorted to such tricks before, and has his schtick down.  I like him already. 

Don Quijote's Windmills Were Prescient

image courtesy of wikiality.com.  Colin Beavan looks nothing like he does in this game-show picture taken from his appearance on the Colbert Report.  He actually looks more like a melancholic, broody  Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, but I forgot to bring my camera the day we spoke. 

The rain today shot down like gun pellets all the way from the subway at West 4th to the Dean & Deluca on University St, a light and airy room with an extraordinarily baroque scalloped and beribboned plaster ceiling.  Before I bought my cup of tea, Colin Beavan was not sitting on one of the high stools set against the north-facing wall, but when I came around the corner, there he was, perched upon it like an albatross.  He was wearing sneakers (Nike?  I don’t remember), jeans, and assorted jackets and hoodies layered one on top of the another, and held in his perpetually moving hands a strand of worry beads, which he fingered one by one, pausing only to shake my hand.

Colin Beavan is known in some circles as the No Impact Man, which is also how he’s listed in my cell phone, making calls from him feel like a superhero’s on the other line.  He and his wife Michelle (plus their two-year-old, Isabella, and dog Frankie), have plucked a year out of their lives to live in a “no-impact way,” which involves giving up trash, transportation, and, in the next few weeks, electricity.  They live in what is by all accounts—if the New York Times, which recently wrote him up, is anything to be trusted—a chicly furnished prewar apartment on Lower Fifth Avenue. 

Think about what is circumscribed within the above list of what many would consider necessities.  Dishwasher.  Elevator.  Dunkin’ Donuts.  Espresso.  Toothpaste.  Toilet paper.  None of those are coming anywhere close to the Beavans this year.  It is their experiment in the art of gracious living à la mode de 2007. 

“We inherit a lot of customs from our previous lives and the generations that come before us,” intones Colin so quietly that I draw my head close to hear.  “We have shucked our lives of all these things we’ve inherited.  It’s…a complete life redesign.”

Salt-Tipped Hero of the Revolution

Damn it, I still can't figure out how to turn these pictures ninety degrees.  Does anyone know? 

Not to humiliate an extremely responsible, respectable, humane, dedicated husband and father who spends the daylight being an important human-rights activist, but the first time I met Graeme was his birthday, and he was unutterably drunk.  “Shooollmeetyouflunch,” he said, which, roughly translated, was “Sure, I’ll meet you for lunch.”  Thankfully, at the time I was speaking the same language.

It didn't stop our first meeting from getting canceled.  Graeme, mysteriously, was under quarantine for smallpox.  It was such an improbable excuse that I believed it—how could anyone ever get away with making that up?  Happily, he never succumbed, and we met, finally, at a tavern on Wall Street that’s supposedly existed since 1656.  It looked like what the interior decorator of Cheesecake Factory would come up with, given a snifter of brandy and a bottle of Valium: damask banquettes, a plaster ceiling meant to simulate pressed tin, and a plastified menu offering Maryland crab cakes, Cuban sandwiches, penne pomodoro, and tuna melts.  The service was straight Cheesecake: a big glass of ice water, ridged for easy stacking, arrived immediately and never went empty.  The table of suits lunching at the next table was having a spirited discussion about immigration.  From one particularly eloquent fatass: “I’m thinking about crossing Mexico and coming back illegal so that I can collect checks too.”   

Graeme showed up, the color of metal.  He wore a lucent white cambric shirt with a flat, Nehru-style collar, close-cropped curls colored pepper with a hint of salt, a plain, flat silver men’s watch and a wedding ring.  Even his face had a hint of silver to it, like salmon skin.

Between Ribs: Living at the Heart of New York City

If this were possible, if you possessed some infernal apparatus that could somehow X-ray the vital stats of someone’s present—minus the backstory, mind—if it could spirograph the hypotrochoids of someone’s life in pink and blue ballpoint neatly onto graph paper, if such a thing materialized, well, Smokey and Sally’s chart would read Yuppie Arrivistes, for sure. 

Let’s look at the facts, shall we?  They live in a vast, exposed-brick-and-sanded-parquet apartment in the lower East Village.  They open Sunday mornings with champagne mimosas and goat-cheese omelettes.  They’re documentary film-makers who shop at the Union Square Greenmarket.  The sprightly rose nosegay that serves as the centerpiece of their wooden breakfast table comes from a young and pretty “flower artisan” that sells her tussie-mussies at Brooklyn street fairs.  They go to jazz concerts on Y rooftops.  The reading material in the bathroom includes Wired magazine and The Adventures of Sindbad, by fin-de-siècle Hungarian sensualist Gyula Krúdy.

Listen here, my friend.  Your machine would be dead wrong.  In lacking a Context Button, it erroneates on paper what in 3-D takes a whole different shape.  If you rewind back and add that essential fourth dimension, time, the nebulous contours of a story far more quintessential to New York than the hipster or yuppie narrative will appear, velvety as a brass rubbing.  It’s the story of millions, and it begins in a small town in the middle of the country, winding its way—by instinct, smell, luck or fate—to the big city. 

Sounds Like A New Yorker

    *

The man who’s looking at me circumspectly from under a black ‘Subway Q&A’ baseball cap has, it seems, lived in every single apartment in New York City.  “I moved to the YMCA in 1989,” he remembers, touching the tips of his fingers together.  “I lived there for a few weeks.  Then I lived on—” and here he starts to enumerate, using his fingers to count—“15th Street, 16th Street, 2nd Avenue in a huuuge place, West Broadway, Avenue A, I was paying less than $500 a month then, and two different apartments on Mott Street.  Every time I heard about a better apartment, I’d move.  Then I found a place on Perry Street.  I’ve been there for years now, it’s got two fireplaces and I look south across the city.”  He smiles.  “But I’m thinking about moving to Park Slope.” 

I know how Todd feels.  In the six months I’ve been here, my suitcases have worn themselves out migrating from Carroll Gardens to Chinatown and the Upper West Side to Red Hook.  Because New York looks different from every angle, it actually feels like I’ve lived in four different cities.  “No matter how big a city,” Todd corroborates, “you only live in a small part of it.  You make your own small town.” 

New York has been letting him down lately, though—according to Todd, the Big Apple ain’t as good as it used to be.  “When young people can’t afford to move to an area…” he grumbles.  I kind of agree.  Pathetic as it makes me sound, I came here looking for la vie bohème, and unless it’s really hiding, its closest relations are Williamsburg hipsters, which are in fact not close relations at all. 

When he first moved to New York from Chicago (to which he’d moved from a part of Louisville that’s “like a Jewish Westchester with a Southern drawl”), Todd worked as an outreach worker with the junkies on Bowery.  “Bowery was the last stop,” he says.  “By that time, they’d cut all ties, they lived in flop houses in beds separated only by chicken wire.  My efforts mostly failed.  Junkies are self-absorbed and selfish; that’s the nature of addiction.”  The Bowery wore him out, so he studied international affairs at NYU and did archival research on architects, artists and designer furniture.  He worked as a stockbroker for a while, then wrote for men’s magazines about cool things like free shit, survivors of tiger shark attacks, absinthe, Funkmaster Flex, and what happens when you go to New Jersey and put plastic explosives inside a pair of hiking boots.  In short, he was a real New Yorker.  “I like going to buffets,” he says.  “Eating a little of this, a little of that.”  But it was the advent of September 11th, the retelling of which still makes him tear up, that really turned him into a New Yorker.  It galvanized him into becoming a paramedic. 

Todd would rather I not write about that, so I won’t, except to say that I learned three things from our conversation: 1.) Starbucks locations in New York are tremendous junkie hotspots, due to the individual bathrooms; 2.) there actually is a drug out there that can turn you instantaneously sober if you’re extremely fucked up—where was that when I was in college?—and 3.) damn, I promised not to write about it.  Oh yeah, here’s one: 3.) “skell” is another word for bum.

Bon Chic Bon Genre Bleeds All Over

When I meet the artist known formally as ninerevolutions, it is in the butt of a darkened bar on one of the first warmish evenings of this year’s hard-begotten spring.  We have a friend in common, one of those effortlessly beautiful sprites living in an art-filled apartment in an edgy part of town, the type whose acquaintance makes me, for no justifiable reason, feel hip by association.  Offhand references to an Argentine mum, Italian dad, Indian nanny, and Bahraini childhood ensconce nine rather suitably within the spritely creature’s crowd.  What in dogs makes a mutt ends up being quite the pedigree for a person. 

She’s droll and relaxed, in her element, amongst her peers.  They are all finely bred, globally marketable products created by an assortment of influential families, elite boarding schools and multinational corporations.  Understand: they are not twats, I like them, but when a thought is difficult to express in English, it comes out in French, or Arabic, and everyone understands.  Plates are insouciantly ordered from the kitchen, dabbed at with forks, then pushed vaguely away.  Cell phones thin as five business cards are flicked open and shut, trilled into in Spanish.  Their mild, staccatoed accents are hybrids, instantly recognizable to those familiar with the inflection—from nowhere in particular, they are nevertheless telltale and revealing.  ‘I come from everywhere,’ they say. 

Another day and age would have seen our witty repartee over brandy and cigars and under a fantastic pair of antlers (or tusks, perhaps), but it’s 2007, so we are in a dim East Village dive vehemently drinking Stella, and eventually I have to head west, but not before I hand nine a card, explain the project, and invite her to lunch the next day. 

O the distrust then!  O the paranoia! 

Let’s be clear, I say.  I’m not hitting on you; I’m not a muckracking journalist.  You seem interesting and you like to talk, right?  If you’re up for it, call me tomorrow. 

She calls me a few minutes later, up for it.  “It’s not like I’ll ever read it or anything.”

Expectations

Look, I promise I can explain why I ended up alone at the bar in the St. Regis Hotel at one o'clock on Tuesday morning  My computer had experienced that night the kind of contagious meltdown that incites a parallel electrical fire to the brain and, after bidding the comatose plastic carcass adieu at the 24-hour Apple store on Fifth Avenue, a drink was in order.  A big one. 

The last time I'd been at the St. Regis, two blocks away, was the day I'd bought that laptop.  It seemed only fitting to grieve it with a colossal Manhattan.  So I did.  Joan Didion's After Henry and my crispy bowl of wasabi peanuts were plenty company, but the older man nursing a glass of Bordeaux to my right started talking, and the only polite thing to do was put the book down and listen.

Kenny seemed like he'd been waiting all evening for somebody at whom to speak.  For the first half of my cocktail, he'd manhandled three ultra-tan Teutonic blonds who dressed their English with cute krautie accents.  "Ach, Kenny," they giggled.  "You ah so silly!  Ach, du lieber mann."  Their cleavage was pneumatic.  They wore shoes so spikily unstable that when they finally strutted away, gold-chained handbags slung over shoulders, pinning down their blow-dried platinum hair, they walked like foals, knock-kneed and tentative. 

He took a few sips of wine, staring glumly at the Maxwell Parrish painting of Old King Cole that makes the bar so famous.  He sighed.  He sagged.  I kept reading.  The silence was painful.  At this point, we were nearly the only ones left in the bar.  We could only blame the vagaries of space and fate that had placed us on neighboring barstools.

"Crazy German girls, huh?"  Kenny'd been up to Calgary and back since the morning.  He owns a luxury mall up there, and others, elsewhere.  Canada, apparently, has more oil than anywhere else, and Calgary, apparently, is the center of the money the oil mints.  This was news to me, but the facts check out.  A Canadian journalist describes Kenny's mall as a "bank of po-mo, stucco storefronts, jutting up from the blacktopped prairie, bathed in halogen backlight."  He describes Kenny as "Saskatchewan-born, California-based."  It was easy to find him online.  I googled "Ken, mall, Calgary, luxury."  122,000 results popped up.  122,001 now.

Kenny has about six homes, five degrees, and has taught at Harvard and Yale.  Or so he says.  He was recently on a private plane with Oscar de la Renta and "the Dolce & Gabbana people."  Or so he says.  He refers to Bill Clinton as "Bill," as in, "When Bill and I last did business," and to Al Gore as "an idiot," insisting that George W. has an IQ one point higher than Al Gore.  I look this up later.  Al Gore's IQ shakes out at 133.  No data is available on George W.'s IQ. But maybe Kenny knows something I don't.  He implies as much. "Name-dropper," I taunt him.  A defensive volley erupts. 

We are getting increasingly drunk, and increasingly candid.  At one point I actually ask if he likes being rich.  "Sure," he says.  "It's pretty nice. But there's a lot of responsibility.  You're in charge of a lot, and a lot of people besides.  There are a lot of expectations."  He sags ever so slightly more.  Is the suit what makes him sag, or has the suit just evolved to sag along?  He coughs, an eruption of phlegm.  "There's a lot of horseshit.  A lot.  Of horseshit." 

The bar closes, and we get up to leave.  "I'm staying at the Ritz," he says.  "You're welcome to come.  It's nice up there.  No expectations."

Sometimes Living in New York Is Like Taking Part In A Massive Art Installation

Amy J. makes me feel antediluvian.  Petite, nattily dressed, hysterically blond and strictly business, she’s come from college in Cincinnati to New York on a three-month internship at a Union Square design firm.  Somehow she manages to cover both ends of the spectrum of reactions I receive when I ask strangers to lunch; she’s at once the most delighted and the most scared.  But that’s the thing about Amy J.: she covers the ends of nearly every spectrum with which she engages.  I’ve never seen anyone spread themselves so thinly.  In Amy’s world, this is both the safest and most daring way to be.

“I’m kinda into everything,” she says in a voice that sounds like a machine gun shooting out rapid-fire piccolo notes, with shades of Joan Cusack.  “I don’t ever want to be one thing.  I never want to be branded in just one way.”  She speaks in tongues that way, peppers her speech with as many grown-up words (Networking, Holistic, Niche, Watchword, Product-Driven) as she does teenage ones, especially Awesome!, the exclamation mark evoked aloud at every utterance.  She is eager to please in an almost frantic way.

After living for two months in one of the vest-pocket rooms of a Canal Street art gallery, Amy has moved into a doorman apartment on Avenue B that she shares with three cute Southern boys, including a Goldman Sachs banker.  The rent is the same, but in this apartment, she can actually stand up straight in her bedroom without hitting the ceiling with her head.  “The other place had a bunch of French kids living there and a bunch of bad installation art, but it had no kitchen and you had to step over a homeless guy in the stairwell,” she reminisces.  My own rent in Brooklyn costs about a third less, but I get the discount available to New Yorkers who acquiesce to being unhip.  Were Amy and the French kids part of the installation? I wonder aloud.  “Maybe,” she says uncertainly.  “I thought that for a while.”  Either way, it was pretty cool.  “It’s like, I’m 21, I’m living in the city, everything’s a little craaazy!  No, it was cool!” 

Pluralities of Reyad Farraj

Given that I’d seen him around, I was expecting Reyad Farraj to look about thirty years old and slightly gangsta, with a shuffling step punctuated by the clip of gigantic Timberlands and shoulders steeled under a heavy parka.  I’d noticed him on the stoop of John and Judy’s apartment, smoking a cigarette as he mulled a plumbing problem with a tenant over in his mind.

The Reyad Farraj who showed up for breakfast wore a navy blue cable-knit sweater.  He’s thirty-six and gently jowly with fluffy coiffed hair, soft kind eyes and a lot more common sense than the boy described above.  Reyad remembered meeting me too, except I had glasses then.  I don’t wear glasses, so this is unusual, but, you know, maybe he met my niece or something.  Stranger things have happened in New York City.

We met at the Carroll Gardens Classic Diner, which looks, both inside and out, like it was built long before the fever of gentrification now whipping up both its Smith Street flanks.  A waitress handed us twelve-page laminated menus that telescoped vertiginously from the simple to complex: first fried eggs, then fried eggs with bacon, then fried eggs with a bonanza of bacon, links and country ham; pancakes with maple syrup; then blueberry pancakes with fruit compote; then chocolate-chip pancakes with yogurt, walnuts and summer fruit.  Both of us ordered something mid-level: Rey a Greek frittata, I a waffle with yogurt and blueberries.  A platoon of Mexicans with very short forearms refilled our coffees as soon as they fell below half full.  This they communicated via an elaborate system of hand signals.  Behind us, the television blared Dr. Chipper infomercials.  It was a very sunny day.

“The producer is the guy nobody knows,” Reyad tells me.  “Currently my role is limited to that, but I hope to expand my company so it encompasses finance, production, management, and distribution.”  After his transactional law business folded, for reasons described below and to which he refers in verbalized capital letters as The Eleventh, Rey began producing independent films.  “I was repping writers and directors pro bono, and going to these film festivals, and I met this gentleman by the name of Mad Mathews,” he recalls, “who, by the way, has just been named one of the top 25 to watch by Filmmaker magazine.  He did, oh, he did Groupie, Lush Life, Planet Brooklyn—formerly Men Without Jobs—and we worked together on Jellysmoke, an urban drama, which just won the L.A. film festival!”  This last fact makes him very happy, and his lips curl slightly upon hearing it aloud.

Rey is a classic American businessman in the mold of a Frank Sinatra song, only more of a lateral thinker and buoyant about what potential the future holds.  The son of Palestinians who ran two clothing stores in Brazil for fifteen years until the country’s economic collapse in the fifties, he was born and bred in Brooklyn, a word he expels from the back of his throat as “Bruh-k-lyn.”  Rey’s parents settled on Flatbush Ave in the early 60s, and Rey spent his prepubescence fist-fighting the ten-year-olds who grew up in Carroll Gardens households that blamed the neighborhood’s Arab-Americans for any ills committed by men with moustaches: Iran-Contra, the Pope being shot by Turkish Muslims.  “Nothing actually bad ever happened,” he reminisces.  “It was just, oh, ok, we’re gonna have to fight today.  What’s the big deal?  Things were nice.  And then the Eleventh happened.” 

Oh, we’ll get to it, okay?  Calm down.

Rey started with a premed degree at NYU, and then studied political science.  He followed this with a master’s in molecular biology, and, noting emerging opportunities in licensing law, finished with law school in Long Island.  “I’ve always been interested in intellectual property,” he tells me, his hands at folded rest on the Formica, his gaze earnest and composed.  “Do you know what that is?” I nod; he follows: “I became an international business transaction attorney.  We’d take the biotech firm technologies and license them out to Saudi and Gulf companies.  You know—power systems, petrochemicals, circuit breaker factories, sand blasters.”  He was an American who spoke Arabic and at the same time an Arab fully fluent in American, capable of easy straddles.  “The foreign market, that’s where the money is.”  He had an office in Abu Dhabi and another on Broadway and Broome.  (“You know Silicon Alley?” he says.  “Alley, not Valley.”)

Nearly the whole sentient world has a September 11th story.  Mine’s not very exciting; it takes place in Providence, overhearing scandalized librarians at the checkout desk of the science library, and huddled around televisions with friends, frozen, for much of the week.  But one of the startling things about moving to New York, even five years into the aftermath, is noticing how fresh wounds still are, how much was lost even by New Yorkers unconnected to dead people.  My roommate, for instance, lost his girlfriend to the September-11th-prompted realization that she wanted to be with someone else.  Restaurants folded; weddings were canceled; hotels stayed empty for months. 

Rey’s business effectively imploded.  Oil and gas continued trading, but all other deals were stuck in a holding pattern.  The Saudis started doing business with Malaysians and Indonesians instead.  “They still call on the holidays,” he says, grinning wanly.

The ‘tudinal waitress who’s made the same loud wisecracks to every table in the room brings us our food, which is much better than I’d expected, having prematurely judged the coffee.  Rey’s frittata is meaty in the middle and lacy on the edges, and the fruit on my waffle is surprisingly ripe for February, crackling with flavor.  The waffle is seared crunchy on the outside and captures the maple syrup in limpid pools that sink in at an imperceptible pace.

So Rey removed his intellectual-property expertise from industry and applied it to show-biz.  He now says things like “Mary Harran, just iconic to the New York independent film scene.  You know her?” and harrumphs, a cigar and potbelly about four years away, about what “a wonderful, wonderful woman” she is.

“I’ll stay in Brooklyn for ever and ever,” he says at one point.  “There’s tolerance and diversity here you don’t see anywhere else.”  This is a surprising statement coming from someone who got beaten up on the way to school every day, but he’s an optimistic guy and the conversation’s on an upswing. 

Reyad, who (in his spare time, evidently) is currently advising a foundation helping to form a dual-language Arab-English academy named after Khalil Gibran, hopes to run for Brooklyn Borough President one day.  I tell him I’d vote for him, and I would—his intelligence veritably crackles and he talks to people in a level, mellow, Bill Clinton kind of way.  “You can trust me,” say his eyes.  Clumsily, I spill coffee all over my crotch, and it burns briefly, then makes me feel like I both need to and have just peed my pants. 

On our way back to his apartment, the snow crunches and glints under our feet and he tells me landlord horror stories about appalling tenants, like the ones who didn’t pay for a year and still refused to leave.  The spilt coffee is now frozen and makes me feel I’m walking around in a parka top and wet bikini bottom.  “Being a New York landlord, well, it’s a wonderful asset class to have, but it means you meet a lot of weird people,” Rey says, shaking his head.  One might expect a writer who interviews strangers to meet a lot of weird people too. 

Sometimes, though, they’re just normal and nice.  Back at John’s I wonder aloud whether the guy we see smoking on their stoop is Reyad Farraj.  No, John says, that’s his nephew, then after a beat, follows: Oooh, but he’d make a great interview!

What Happens When You Cross Nancy Drew With Dita von Teese?

Polly Patria (I still don’t know her last name) entered my life late one night, inserting first one leg, then the other, and finally the rest of her long body, bent in paper-clip fashion, through my friend Lincoln’s fifth-floor window.  She surveyed us levelly, the perfect arch of her eyebrows unperturbed, parked her designer-denimed ass down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette with long, elegant fingers.  It must have been three o’clock in the morning.

I was at standing at the stove, having decided to make pancakes.  A raid on Lincoln’s shelves had uncovered, besides pancake mix, some wasabi, chard, honey, onion, and a bag of crunchy-chewy Honduran fried peanuts the likes of which none of us had ever seen before.  The intrepid combination of ingredients tasted surprisingly good, possibly more attributable to our blitzed states than my cooking. 

Lincoln went to bed, and Wilson and I stayed up watching Patria wrap her fuchsia scarf around her head, fashioning a sort of swollen headband that bandaged back her explosion of bleached-blond hair.  This condensed her peaked, thin features so they seemed to radiate from the inside out, framed by her hot-pink punk’s gloriole.  And over the course of a great many more cigarettes, which she kept close to her face at all times, drawing in little breaths, her motions birdlike, she told us a story whose veracity we spent some time deliberating once she left, so implausible it seemed.

I met her again a few weeks later, for brunch, and asked her to tell it again.  She did, and it matched.  I now believe her.

-------------------

 

It begins, unlike most of ours, in Wyoming and Alaska, the two American states with the lowest population densities.  (Wyoming plays host to an average of 5.25 people per mile, Alaska to 1.16—New Jersey, the most densely populated state, squeezes in 1,175 bodies per mile.)  Polly’s dad wore a carpenter’s hat in Wyoming and a crab fisherman’s in Alaska.  “It’s the world’s most dangerous profession,” she tells me, chewing on her lower lip.  “Everybody does a bunch of speed and pulls up these ice-encrusted crab pots that are liable to flip the boats.  They’ve done whole shows on it for the Discovery Channel.”  Polly’s mom floats around the world on Peace Corps projects; Mauritania, Morocco, Ukraine.  They divorced shortly after Polly moved to Seattle, the day she turned seventeen.

Life had already interrupted, had started interrupting several years before, when she went to Quito as an exchange student.  The ‘wrong crowd’ had something to do with it.  “We were doing coke between classes and stuff.  Chalk powder would make me start fiending.  It was kind of extreme.”  The school kicked her out, but no one seemed to care, so she and new boyfriend Ivan (“quite the cokehead”) spent their weekdays in the Mushroom Valley, where Quechuas led them to hallucinogenics.  “We’d have to take a bus for half an hour, hitchhike another half hour, and walk for an hour, but still we went three, four times a week.”  Eventually, they headed north to Calí and snuck across the Colombian border.  “I wasn’t in very good touch with my family then,” she says, tossing her head, insouciant.  “I kept taking money out, so they knew I was alive, but my mom was on the point of filling out a missing persons report.  Eventually someone from the embassy found me and told me to call her.”  She was about to board a plane to Colombia.

Our food arrives: eggs benedict, crab and salmon; home fries; fruit salad.  Fawn-like and skittish as Patria is, she packs away most of her teeming plate and drinks cheerfully, taking dainty swallows frequently enough to outdrink me.  “Cheers to a good story,” we clink. 

After Colómbia, Wyoming hardly cut the mustard.  So Polly headed for Seattle, where she found work at the youth hostel.  In December 1996, she flew to Las Vegas to see Phish perform.  Coincidentally, one of the band members was on the same flight.  “I didn’t look like a Phishhead,” she remembers.  “I was wearing, like, a blazer or something.  I looked like an English writer.”  Her shirt on the day we brunch depicts a silhouette of a woman with a star for a crotch, and she’s wearing a Suicide Girls hoodie.  Hardly a look associated with jodhpurs, but she’s the kind of girl who survives by on strength of cutting cheekbones, slim thighs and her wry, sly smile; whatever the apparel, she looks at once capable of freezing and warmth. 

“He just swooped me up,” she says.  “I was like a deer in headlights.  I’d never been to Vegas before, and my plan was to take the bus to the hostel.  Instead, I was suddenly in a limo on my way to Caesar’s Palace.”  She’s quiet for a second.  “It was a crazy few days—I remember a mother-daughter yodeling duo, Malachi from Children of the Corn was there, I mean, some crazy shit!—and when they left, I went back to the hostel.  All I could think was…what just happened?” 

The musician had her number, but she didn’t hear from him again until March, when he called from Dublin to say he was on his way to Seattle.  She went to the show.  “Everyone’s dancing and doing their drugs, and I’m there, stone-cold sober.  He’d just gotten engaged.  And he came up and said, so…how about a dip in the hot tub?”  The band and various groupies all lounged, stylized, within the swirling chlorine.  Later that night, Polly, the guy, and a woman named Lindy had sex in practice room under the stage.  It was the first time, she thinks, he’d ever cheated on his girlfriend.  At this moment Patria moves the fuchsia scarf from her neck back up to her head, which nimbus makes her look at once vivacious and consumptive, like an L.M. Montgomery character destined for a blowsy life and tragic end, volatile and vulnerable, but potent, heady.

Polly’s brother was living in Prague, so she moved there shortly after, and hung out for a couple of years.  Then she moved to Japan and spent six months pouring sake, singing karaoke and making polite conversation with Japanese businessmen.  “I liked being there.  The money was good, like $40-50 an hour, although they taxed the shit out of us.”  I ask her, is that like being a prostitute?  “No.”  She laughs.  “Only the girls who did the meth did the sexy dance.”

Patria’s next stop: Gloucester, Massachusetts.  Her best friend from the Phishing days was there, engaged to an Oxycontin-doing, beer-drinking fisherman, and invited her to stay awhile (the fisherman, meanwhile, died; the friend is now an elected Green Party official).  Polly got a job at a restaurant called The Studio.  “It was me and all these salty Gloucester girls—‘Eh, got a coupla kids, getting my real estate license,’ but good people.” They drank next door at this place called the Rudder, where, one night, she met the owner’s son Mark. 

“He was that whole New England WASPy thing: Exeter, Brown, an architect.  He lived in Boston.  I was on my way home and was wearing my bike helmet.  All these blinking lights around my face.  He’d never seen anything quite like it.”  Her large earrings jangle dance spastically to much the same effect.  Polly’s saving grace: despite her ice-princess looks and self-involvement, she possesses an appealing goofiness, a genuine ability to poke fun at herself that is really endearing.

Once the season ended, she thought about going back to Japan, but Mark said he’d miss her.  “It’s funny to say, but the harder thing for me to do was stay and see if it’d work between the two of us.  It was a novelty to me, this new adult life, like playing dress-up.”  They dated for two years, and one day he told her they were going away for the weekend and that she should wear something nice.  Drinking a ginger ale, he proposed.  “The ring was beautiful: a square princess cut, a striking diamond, really clean.  He did a good job.”  And like that, the most unlikely couple in Gloucester, Mass, got married.

A call interrupts our conversation.  “Girl, what’s the haps, the haps?” she yelps into the phone, a sleek little number.  She clicks off.  “That’s my pot dealer.  I gotta little pickup this afternoon—“ and, slipping the phone back into her pocket, picks up right back where she left off—“What were we talking about?  Japan--meth--money---oh, my husband.”

If in the beginning, Mark and Patria complemented each other, before long, she starved him as much as he suffocated her.  “He’d go to bed, I’d go into the bathroom and get stoned and talk on the phone.”  Mark had wanted children by the time he was forty (he was 36, she was 26), and she’d assumed that “that maternal thing” would kick in by the time she was twenty-seven.  It didn’t. 

I ask her how she knew it was over.  “I’d been telling him for years that all I wanted to do was go dancing.  And for my birthday, he takes me to the SYMPHONY?”

So Polly Patria, single, moved to New York.  Gone was the car payment, the mortgage.  All she had was a cell phone bill to pay.  She found a Craigslist roommate and an Australian surfer.

A year later, she’s still here.  Managing a shoe store in Soho, bursting in spectacularly through fifth-floor windows, finding Sunday mornings perfect for downing mimosas, wearing that scarf wrapped around her head like a furry fuchsia mane.  A modern-day Gibson Girl who wouldn’t say no to a crack pipe, if it came from the hands of someone intriguing enough.

I think she’s rad.