Try not giving a pregnant woman, or an elderly or physically challenged person a seat. First come the glares and the throat clearing. If you still haven’t received the message, a confrontation will follow, often laced with sarcasm. “Excuse me” is almost always meant as a threat rather than an apology. Similarly, “Thanks a lot” means a particular behavior should not be repeated or else. I’ve watched riders gang up on a bus driver who tried to keep people from boarding when the passengers insisted there was more room. I’ve seen young parents stopped and told their baby is facing the wrong way in a Baby Bjorn, and on cold days admonished that their youngster should be wearing a hat. Then there was the prosecution of couple who left their child bundled up outside a restaurant on a winter day. The mother is Danish, and the practice is common in Scandinavia. First a waiter said it was too cold outside for the baby and too loud inside for them to be able to hear the baby. Next, a patron called 911 after seeing the unattended child. The parents were arrested (though the charges were eventually dropped) and the child was briefly put into foster care. The mother became an honorary New Yorker when she turned around and sued the police for false arrest (but lost).
New Yorkers will also tolerate a great deal of local color. You can do gymnastics, breathe fire, sing, shout, preach, beg, bang a washtub
and they’ll keep reading their newspapers. Radioman is the nom de New York of an eccentric homeless man with a boom box around his neck who has appeared in more than 100 films and TV shows. Then there was the guy who went by the name Adam Purple in the East Village and wore purple from head to toe, created gardens in empty lots, and subsisted on money earned from redeeming cans. Self-taught architect Arthur Wood built what is best described as a “Dr. Seuss house” in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn.
But New Yorkers do not ignore small injustices. They are strong, dedicated, and theatrical self-policers. It’s like the Wild West where we’ve all been deputized to keep the peace in our own backyards. Just try not picking up after your dog – you will immediately hear the passive-aggressive, “Do you need a Baggie?” or the accusatory “You forgot to clean up after your dog.” An order for a sidewalk vendor such as “Can I have a pretzel?” has been known to elicit, “Can I have a please?” Finding yourself stuck in traffic and complaining to the cabbie “I should’ve walked” may very well prompt him to say, “I should’ve been a lawyer.” If you drop money or a scarf, it’s true that there’s a chance you won’t get it back, but try dropping a cigarette butt and there’s an excellent chance you will. If there are women around and you spit on the ground you may not get it back, but after they’ve finished tsking and scowling you’ll wish you could.
I’ve met organ donors who want to be able to designate whether their parts go to Democrats or Republicans. (Independents could give one kidney and one lung to each.) So New Yorkers care. A lot.
That said, this sense of civic responsibility rarely carries over to jury duty. Few New Yorkers want to sit on a jury. And it’s a shame because you meet the most fascinating people and hear dialogue better than anything on Law & Order. Jury duty should be mandatory for method actors and crime writers. It also falls under the category of patriotic duty. If young people are putting their lives on the line to defend this country, then the rest of us should be able to get to the jury bullpen by nine a.m. The orientation video reminds us that it took the better part of two centuries for blacks and then women to be allowed to serve on juries. But the cost of living in the metropolis is high, the
trip to the courthouse inconvenient, going through security a pain, and starry-eyed wannabes didn’t move here to decide whether the pothole was really that dangerous or the pedestrian was more likely staring at her phone. Most New Yorkers are trying to create a career, build a business, or get their “name in electric lights” as the hero says to his mother in The Jazz Singer.
Unfortunately, there aren’t enough idle retirees and people who want to take time off from their salaried positions to fill the demand for jurors, so popular water cooler conversation in New York is about how to escape jury duty. On Wall Street, where missing a single day can mean losing out on the opportunity of a lifetime, employees had it down to a science.
1. Don’t tell them you can’t afford to go, show up dressed like an Austrian archduke, carry a hemorrhoid pillow, or make an incendiary statement such as you hate cops. They’ve heard all 8 million. You can give all the schedule conflicts in the world but they’ll just ask for a date that works. They don’t care since they have forever.
2. Don’t fill out the paperwork in an illegible scrawl the way my coworker did. They’ll just offer you an interpreter.
3. Do throw away jury summonses for as long as possible. They don’t arrive via registered mail so there’s no way to prove you received it. Once the correspondence reaches an uncomfortably high threat level the best thing to do is produce a doctor’s note saying that you’re mentally ill, have to pee a lot, or have a back injury. They attempt to fine the duckers and dodgers, but no one has ever gone to jail. Once you sit in a courtroom you’ll realize they have bigger problems to prosecute than errant jurors.
I’ve heard of only one person who was punished (with community service), and that was because he sent a substitute in his place. Apparently he thought the Civil War was still going on. However, if you have a graduate degree in anything you may just as well go and wait since few
people with advanced degrees ever get selected to sit on a Manhattan jury. My father, who was a state supreme court reporter for thirty years, liked to say, “A lawyer’s worst nightmare is to have someone on the jury who is capable of thinking.”
Although they say there’s no age limit, if you’re over sixty-four then just write in large, shaky letters, “I’m too damn old,” and send it back. But be sure to spell “too” correctly so they’ll think you have a graduate degree. Jury clerks have a reputation for being tough, which is why when one woman’s husband received a summons, she put a sprinkling of his cremated ashes in a Baggie and sent them on down to the courthouse.
To be fair, jury duty has improved tremendously over the past thirty years. The jury rustlers are now nice to you, a stipend is paid that actually covers your costs for transportation and a modest lunch, and the bullpen is wired for the Internet, well lit, and climate controlled. If you live in a crowded apartment or have houseguests, it’s not a bad place to spend the week. I sat next to a guy who finished an entire screenplay (in which zombies take over New York, what else?), while another woman completed her tax returns (which were “messy after the divorce”). They were both pleased to have been forced to finish the tasks by direct order of the Constitution.
Recently, New Yorkers have become excited by a decision in California to include noncitizens who are permanent legal residents in the jury pool. That would be perfect since we have plenty of immigrants, it’s an automatic problem solver and truly patriotic – getting others to do the jobs we don’t want is the American Way.
Chapter 16
Urban Dictionary
When I was growing up in Buffalo it was incredibly exciting if a president came to visit. Older folks proudly regaled us with having once met JFK (my uncle Jim), Eisenhower (Dad), or even FDR (Mom). A presidential stopover infused the air with a holiday atmosphere – shops closed, welcome signs were made, people took off from work and school to line the streets hoping for a glimpse of the great man himself. My relatives were not subject to background checks beforehand or tackled by Secret Service during these casual encounters.
New York City is not like that. The five worst words you can hear on the news in the morning are “The president is in town.” This means traffic will be backed up for hours. Fail to the chief. Despite the fact that New Yorkers are Democrats by about five to one, they have no desire to see the president, even a Democratic one. The next worst gridlock inducer is when the United Nations convenes. It isn’t just a matter of all the delegates and their entourages arriving in the city, but also escorts, rent
boys, and dominatrices from up and down the East Coast. If you think it’s hard to get a hotel room when the UN is in town, just try getting into a strip club.
That’s why they call it The City That Never Sleeps. I once got in a taxi where the driver stopped at a corner and swapped with another driver. It turns out that the two were brothers-in-law, both wore turbans, and they shared a single cab and cab license. The taxi was on the road 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and they changed shifts on street
corners. I also had a fruit and vegetable vendor on my block who lived underneath his stand (and was surely taking cash under the table). If you had an apricot emergency or a sudden craving for Vidalia onions, it was possible to go out and buy some from him at four in the morning.
Being a twenty-four-hour city, New York requires several shifts of workers, so at any given time of day or night people are heading to and from work on subways and buses or taking care of errands and visiting the gym while off work. I’ve heard that in Chinatown beds are rented not by the month or week or even the day, but by the shift – you can hire a pallet to sleep on for eight hours. When I first moved here from a community where everyone aside from hospital workers and snowplow operators worked from eight to four, I couldn’t figure out who all these non-homeless people were hanging around diners and parks during regular work hours. It was before cell phones and laptops and the only people who worked from home were envelope sealers and phone sex operators. Most were clearly not stay-at-home parents picking the kids up from school. I finally determined that aside from the tourists, swing-shift zombies, drug dealers, and trust fund recipients, the rest had to be farmers – paid by the government not to grow corn and soybeans or raise cattle.
New York has had various nicknames over the years, some more famous than others: Goats’ Town, The Golden Door, Gotham, The Big Apple, the Empire City, A Town So Nice They Named it Twice, City of Critics. New York City is sometimes called the Capital of the World, despite the fact that it’s not the capital of the country or even of New York State. However, New York served as the U.S. capital from 1785 to 1790 (which is why George Washington slept and ate basically everywhere), and most New Yorkers are under the impression this is still the case.
Manhattan is an island, but just like Madagascar, Hilton Head, Bermuda, and Alcatraz, you don’t say, “I’m going to Manhattan Island.” However, the rest of the local islands, including Long, Staten, City, Ellis, Governors, Roosevelt, Shelter, Coney, Fire, Block, and Rikers do require the “Island” designation. You wouldn’t tell people you’re off to visit friends on Long, Shelter, or Fire. Don’t worry if this sounds confusing, since a recent survey showed that 90 percent of New
Yorkers couldn’t identify Staten Island on a map. However, any Manhattan schoolchild can tell you that the sun rises on the Upper East Side and sets on the Lower West Side, the North Star floats above Yankee Stadium, and the quickest way to get to Antarctica is from the South Ferry subway station.
People often refer to Manhattan, the smallest of the five boroughs, as “New York” or “New York City” or simply “The City.” Technically these terms aren’t correct because New York is a state and New York City is composed of four other boroughs, sometimes called the “outer boroughs” – Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Which brings us to the fact that the Bronx is never just “Bronx,” just like you would never say, “I’m taking Thruway.” To further complicate matters, Brooklyn and Queens are technically on the whale-shaped Long Island. Meantime, all the boroughs have their own counties. However, Manhattanites are the only people who cannot tell you the name of their county (New York). Or how big an acre is. Or the speed limit. They know blocks. They can give you the size of any distance in city blocks. There is a famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg that depicts a map with a westward view from Ninth Avenue in which the world recedes from the city as if it’s all insignificant exurbia. Perhaps this explains why when New Yorkers say “The City” no matter where in the world they are, they expect people to know they’re talking about Manhattan.
Which brings us to “The Country.” When people in New York say they are going to “The Country,” they’re not talking about the scent of manure drifting in from the west and crop dusters buzzing overhead. From the first day of spring through Labor Day, well-to-do New Yorkers can be overheard in elevators saying they are coming from or on their way to “The Country.” What country are they talking about you may well ask – Canada? No, these folks are going to Long Island – Mattituck or Quogue or Hampton Bays – an exit on the Long Island Expressway approximately two hours east with no traffic (which has never happened).
When my grandfather moved to Huntington in 1939 the population of 1,401-square-mile Long Island was about 4 million, and the
eastern half was indeed almost entirely cranberry bogs, backwoods and farmland. Fast-forward seventy-five years and the population has doubled to practically 8 million people, making it one of the most crowded islands in the world, ahead of Ireland, Singapore, and Sicily. So nowadays you’re basically five minutes from a Lululemon, SoulCycle, TCBY, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. The streets are fully paved, the mailing addresses don’t say Rural Route, and there’s plow service in winter. There are no cows, horses, or pigs in their yards. These lots aren’t even zoned for turkeys. People don’t awake to the arrival of the hay truck, get scraped in the eyeball while milking cows, or find a rattlesnake curled up in the barn. They just can’t bring themselves to say the word suburbs. The “country folk” who live there year-round refer to these interlopers as “cidiots” (city + idiots). Oddly, it turns out that one of the main reasons for moving to New York is to make enough money to move out of New York.
The aforementioned Long Island Expressway is also known as the World’s Longest Parking Lot or the Home of the Thirty-Five Car Pileup, and where thousands have died, including singer Harry Chapin and director Alan J. Pakula. As a child being driven to Huntington to visit my grandfather, I was fascinated by the daredevil skid marks that went straight up the median. In Western New York the only place you could find those was at the Lancaster Speedway, which featured a racing oval in addition to a drag strip.
When I moved to New York City from the Chicken Wing Belt and everyone asked where I was from (the accent was a giveaway, though the locals didn’t seem to be aware that they all sounded like Mel Blanc’s cartoon characters) and I said New York, I was quickly corrected. It turns out that rubes from Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, and Albany aren’t allowed to say “I’m from New York” or “I’m a New Yorker” to five-borough New Yorkers. The term Upstate New York had to be invented to keep northerners paying low rent from gaining any prestige. New York is the only state with an official “upstate” to delineate the cool people from the merely cold people. Manhattanites who are part of the downtown club or art scene can be even more discerning – they don’t distinguish between upstate and uptown.
Above 14th Street is strictly nosebleed territory to them, and they only go to the Upper East Side to be hospitalized.
New Yorkers who live in the outer boroughs, along with those who visit the city from Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Westchester, and come to the city to work, shop, or see a show are often called B&T or BNT (“bridge and tunnel”) people or BBQs (Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens). Growing up, I knew only one New York family – the Bunkers, who starred in the politically and socially provocative sitcom All in the Family from 1971 to 1979. Archie said “tirlit” instead of “toilet” and called a person who had a sex change operation a “transtesticle.”
Chapter 17
I Saw Mommy Kissing the Tree Man
Here is the New York calendar from when I first moved to the city. Fall meant a teachers’ strike. December meant a transit strike. Spring meant a baseball strike. Summer meant a garbage strike, usually during a heat wave. Christmas meant that Jews went to a double feature followed by a Chinese restaurant.
No place can do the holiday season like New York. You tu
rn the corner to your apartment, the same corner you round several times a day all year-round and are suddenly hit with the scent of fresh pine along with the sight of two guys in snowsuits relaxing in lawn chairs, looking as if they’re inside a living room rather than outside in the cold.
The day the Christmas tree men arrive is officially the first day of the holiday season, like the first time you see the tulips on Park Avenue it’s spring and the first time the UPS drivers don their shorts it’s the start of summer. The tree men come down from the north, mostly Maine and Canada, and for a month they live on their corner lot, a few sleeping in their vans at night, but most have linked up with locals after visiting the same blocks year after year and believe it or not, are invited to live for free on couches and futons in apartments. For New York women, it’s the equivalent of a citywide Victoria’s Secret parade. These rugged, gainfully employed frostbacks often make themselves available for hot cocoa and conversation, with more than a few extending their
stays into the new year after cozying up to a particularly discerning customer.
Many people also celebrate Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, and Hanukkah. Like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Hanukkah is always described as early or late. The Jewish holidays, it seems, are never on time. A tree and a menorah are assembled in most lobbies just to make sure that residents enjoying the tippling season don’t overlook the tipping season.
At holiday time New York beckons to out-of-towners from the tristate area, across the nation, and around the world with its gaily decorated store windows, Nutcracker performances, manger at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, toy selection at FAO Schwarz, and aroma of roasting chestnuts wafting from street carts. Then there’s Rockefeller Center, aglow with its skyscraper-high tree, while featuring ice-skaters, shoppers, and the Radio City Christmas show. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen thirty-six racially and ethnically (though not height and weight) diverse women dancing around in red suits and white whiskers pretending to be an imaginary fat man. All the mayhem is finally capped off by a ball dropping in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. For therapists as well as local chapters of AA and Weight Watchers, December is known as “the busy season.” Stores put up signs saying “Happy Holidays” and in small letters underneath write, “Some restrictions may apply.”
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