Eating With Strangers

Turned Tables: Dinner at Mine

When I first moved to New York in December 2007, the crush of the city overwhelmed me.  The smell of Chinese greens stewing followed me all six flights up to the tiny walk-up I shared with a surly hipster.  My bedroom was so small that I couldn’t be in it and not on the (single) bed.  Anyone long-legged had to sit sideways on the toilet or else their knees knocked against the wall.  When the air was particularly heavy, I could hear the asthmatic hipster wheeze his discontent through the plasterboard divider, all night long.  The chaos in the air made me neurotic and depressed, and New York in January is not a kind place.  I wanted out immediately.

I had lived in cities before—London, Brussels, Miami—but human nature revealed itself more rawly in New York, the cold, cruel facets of it as well as, occasionally, the transcendent.  What most affected me was the unrelenting crush of people living on top of each other.  The Indian matron proudly astride her stool behind the register at the bodega on Houston, surrounded by condoms, cigarettes and disposable toothbrushes.  The rich, sad and damaged ladies of the Upper East Side, so heavily made up they looked like porcelain dolls salvaged from a landfill.  The delivery boys riding kamikaze, monstrous bike chains slung across their backs.   These people, their textured, invisible lives. 

I had come to New York because, like a million other people who move there with futile dreams, I wanted to be a writer.  This was not working out for me.  I got fired from the only writing job I got and nobody else wanted to publish me or even respond to my grasping, overwrought queries.  When I did get gigs, they were puerile and superficial.  I had moved to New York to write, and the only writing I was doing was teensy bits of dumb stuff I had to unattractively claw my way into.

Even though I knew tons of people in the city, making plans took a month’s notice—New York had turned them into people too busy to hang, self-obsessed, stressed.  It was incredible that I could live in a city at once so dense and so lonely.  I wondered more and more about the strangers I saw everywhere.  How were their days going?  What was going through their minds? 

Ask Me About Free Rides To Whole Foods

Pete G., Manhattan pedicab driver, accepts the following as sacraments: Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, marijuana, West African music, cheap Chinese food, long bike rides, not having any money, and inviting total strangers over for dinner.  

A few weeks ago, Pete gave me a free ride to Whole Foods in a pedicab that said “Ask me about free rides to Whole Foods.”  I had just left the Chase bank on 2nd Ave and 10th Street and Pete was leaning against his pedicab, slurping up a take-out container of borscht from Veselka.  It was about 100 degrees outside, too hot to walk to Whole Foods, not to mention bike there, not to mention eat borscht before biking there.  I collapsed, hot and discombobulated, into the back of the pedicab, and Pete wheeled us down 2nd Ave, keeping up an enthusiastic chatter of conversation the whole time.  If his grin were any less mellow I might’ve suspected amphetamines.  He credited calories for his energy.  “That borscht is great.” 

When he called me a few weeks later to set up a date for dinner, he was on the Williamsburg Bridge, fixing someone’s busted bike.  “So, I was thinking….[crunching noises]….sorry, I’m trying to fix this guy’s chain—what’s your name?  Abdul—sorry Abdul, I’m not a very good mechanic.” 

And when I met him below his Hell’s Kitchen apartment a few days later, he spirited me up the few flights to his place and had me sit by the bathtub in the kitchen, apologizing.  “I just have to finish my afternoon meditation,” he said.  “You don’t mind, do you?  It’ll only be a minute.”

Rainy Nights in Washington Heights

There was nothing but a muffled thump of music when I knocked on Cara’s door for the third time, but the door was unlocked, so hesitantly, I let myself in.  “Cara?” I ventured.  No response.  (Really going to get myself killed one of these days.)  Then the black and yellow-striped ballet flats in the hallway caught my eye.  I was washing my hands in the kitchen sink when Cara walked in.  “Oh, you found it!” she said jubilantly.  “I was on the street looking for you.” 

I met Cara at the Bee Ball a few weeks ago, where I was selling honeyed popsicles for a gala fundraiser meant to support the legalization of beekeeping in New York City.  I’m writing an article about beekeeping in New York City, so I’ve been going to lots of bee-related events; plus, it was an opportunity to sell popsicles and to support a nonprofit I like.  Cara, in the adorable bee costume above, came up for a popsicle, wearing the distinctive homespun shoes that allowed me to recognize her apartment when I trespassed there a few weeks later.  I watched her from behind my booth as she danced all night.  She was irresistible, flowing from moue to caprice to shimmy with ease.  She was having a blast out there. 

Given my article, it seemed legit to probe into her reasons for becoming a beekeeper.  They spilled out like marbles from a pitcher, slow at first and then a flood, and before I knew it, I’d been invited to dinner.

Everyone complains about The Gentrifiers (even the Gentrifiers).  They swan in, raising rents.  They call the cops when the “atmosphere” that once made the neighborhood so appealing gets too loud.  Eventually, they push the locals out to pastures farther away and much less hip.  And Starbucks moves in.

People complain about The Corporations, too.  Soulless and bloodletting, they cut corners, screw their staff, extort their suppliers, destroy the environment, all in the name of profit. 

And then there’s The Government.  Stupid rules devoid of any common sense, insensitive officials, mired in bureaucracy.  Corrupt.  Disinterested.  Stagnant.

Thing is, the argument breaks down when you’re confronted with one of the actual people in these groups.  Frustratingly, they’re often really nice.  Well-intentioned.  Un-evil.  Ultimately, difficult to dismiss in such simplistic ways. 

And I’m not just saying this because I’m a Gentrifier.

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.” 

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.

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?” 

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.