Coming to New York City, I believed it would come to me. In my imagination (no New York newcomer story is complete without some idiotic naiveté, right?), the Manhattanite aura would sweep me from my 100 square-foot room uptown to a ritzy party on the top-floor of a glass-walled skyscraper. We would sip cocktails—Cosmopolitans, probably—and muse how everyone below looked like ants.
But even if the socialite fist came a- knocking, I would not have been there to open the door. Work was all day, every day—so intense that I stopped eating lunch for the extra time. I shed a couple of inches off my waist, but the additional work hour did not put me any closer to that top-floor fête. My work was fantastic, but it was still allconsuming.The one night a week I did venture out, the evening was spent at a shabby local theater or lounging with friends nearby, idling the free time away.
“I feel like we haven’t seen the soul of Manhattan,” one equally busy friend mused over Starbucks coffee. It was around 11:30 at night. Our work schedules kept us busy too late for us to patronize a coffee shop like Oren’s, since it closed too early.
“I know” was all I could say.
A week or two later, Pierre, another friend, and I, took the night off to meander in Greenwich Village. We were fresh off an intense stretch of work and ready to relax.After a dirtcheap night of $5 improv comedy and $5 Falafel from Mamoun’s, we ended up by Washington Square Park.
It was 2 in the morning and teeth-chatteringly cold. A pudgy drunkard was slurring a request for directions to a woman who was just as smashed and stout as he was. Speaking to the sky from her perch on a brownstone stoop, she gave directions that made as much sense as one of Dan Rather’s similes.
“…then you go there, all the way there. Keep going there. Then stay there for a while….”
Standing on the sidewalk below her, the man who had asked her was not paying attention. He leaned in and started sucking on the direction giver’s clothed nipple, an angelic look of satisfaction on his wasted face.
Since he was drunk, it was less a clean suck than a messy gnashing of his mouth against her boob. We didn’t pause to ogle, perhaps afraid for our own teats. The woman, perfectly fine with the public titty-tonguing, kept giving directions.
Still puzzling over what the hell had just happened, we hopped on an uptown train. Around Penn Station, another tubby woman, probably just as wasted as the boob-sucking duo, came into our car and began pole dancing on the vertical handrail while listening to her iPod. Pierre and I were heatedly discussing religion, but, while we tried to work through discrepancies between the gospels of Matthew and Luke, our eyes kept wandering to the jiggling sashays of the wannabe stripper.To her credit, the girl had moves, her spine and hips swiveling in perfect harmony with whatever song she was silently hearing.
Her gyrating ass was swinging in the face of a grizzled old man. The single elderly seem like the most solitary citizens of New York City, their lives too overripe for new relationships and their gait too slow to fit in among the power-walking, anonymous crowd. But, with her behind a few inches from his face, the previously forlorn senior was a kid in a candy store. I’ve never seen anyone look quite so blissful. It was as if her butt cheeks had granted him eternal salvation. She disembarked a few stops later like nothing had happened.
I passed out as soon as my body hit the mattress that night, but in the coming weeks, I started cutting down on work and enjoying the City more. As I assimilated into New York life, the crazy people started popping up everywhere I went. The homeless man who shadowboxed with the air in Riverside Park and the cultic circle of pseudo-Buddhist worshipers that I saw every day during my runs. The crackpot who bellows, “Hallelujah, I love you” to everyone he sees in Morningside Heights.
After those first months of vocational overload, I found the city’s soul—but only when I noticed all the lost minds.
anonymous
