THE BEAUTY OF STRANGERS
I know it seems like a late start, but I was twenty-two my first time. Like many women in New York, I lost it in the back of a cab. Unlike many, I got it back the next day. A man showed up at the address printed on my first business card and asked the receptionist if anyone had lost a wallet. These days, I barely remember to take business cards with me when I leave the house. Then, I was so thrilled by their shape and texture and significance, I’d carry no fewer than ten. I offered to pay the man, but he refused; he mumbled something about being in the neighborhood and took the elevator out of sight. After he left I discovered that he’d already paid himself seventeen dollars and a monthly Metro Card.
The important stuff, however—the wallet itself, the credit cards, the driver’s license—was all there. Which might explain why, two years later, when I left my wallet in a cab again, I made none of the usual motions to erase myself. I canceled no accounts, changed no codes, and threw away no keys. My past thoughtlessness had gone virtually unpunished and thus with my often-inconvenient mix of faith and practicality, I decided to give it a week before I called Visa. A game of financial roulette. And on the seventh day, my wallet showed up in my mailbox. And it was good. Even the cash was still inside.
I tried to feign shock around my roommate, who left his belongings everywhere and always, never to see them again. Once his bike was stolen from our fifth-floor fire escape. I attempted to console him, telling him that if thieves had found a way to take it, they probably deserved it. Plus, they had left his helmet, which I found to be a kind gesture. When my wallet came back to me, he was in the apartment and thus I was appropriately grateful to and awestruck by the universe. But really: this kind of thing happens to me all the time.
It’s not that I think I’m particularly lucky; I’m not. On some level, I’m conscious that it’s a numbers game and the longer I live here, the more likely I am to court small disasters. For example, everyone I know who grew up a true New York City kid has been mugged at least twice. This is logical. But fortunately, the game doesn’t manifest itself only in the negative. The other night, I thought I felt someone sneaking up on me and I knew my time had come. I just knew it. I felt a hand tug at my arm and turned, wide-eyed, to see a very tall woman. She said, “Sorry, but…” and then tucked the label on my collar back inside my shirt. I laughed, touching where the tag had been, and thanked her. It was then that I decided the city is looking out for me. As they say, “Now more than ever.” And perhaps that’s it—perhaps it’s a post-post-post-9/11 humanity that’s trickled down to everyday courtesies like not stealing other people’s wallets. Perhaps it’s simply that niceness has always been New York’s best-kept secret, kept quiet to keep the tourists out, like how it really doesn’t rain all that much in Seattle.
In all likelihood, what’s happening is not as romantic as a shared front against the rest of the country, but rather a basic sympathy for our fellow urban dwellers. It’s a “do unto others”–type selfishness. I probably wouldn’t leap in front of a crosstown bus for anyone only because I wouldn’t expect someone to do that for me. But I would expect them to tell me that my fly is undone and take a certain amount of pride in informing others of this myself. In the past five years alone, I have left my wallet in a cab an astonishing, nay, impressive, 6.7 times. (The .7 is for all the times I would have gone ID-less into a bar had someone not slid across the pleather backseat after me and said, “Forget something?”). With the exception of that first seventeen-dollar idiot’s fee, my wallet gets returned to me fully intact every time. Every. Single. Time.
Am I jinxing this streak by exposing it here? Am I courting a trip to the Herald Square DMV? I did consider that. I also figured this would be the ultimate test of my theory that it’s not me, not just my luck, but something more organic about the way the city works.
I was absentmindedly picking my nails and pondering all of this on the subway platform when a small Korean woman came out from behind the median map barrier and smacked my arm down. “Slun!” She shook her head and held my fingertips in a bunch. “No bite!” People turned to look. Apparently my mother had found a way to morph into this meticulous petite woman in a pink jumpsuit. No, I slowly realized, this was not my mother, but a different woman—one who had painted my nails three weeks prior at a local salon. She turned slowly away from me and sauntered down to the other end of the platform without looking back. After that, the question was no longer whether the city was looking out for me, but whether it was butting in. I like the barely there idea of a guardian angel. I could do without the babysitting police. When does neighborliness become meddling? It’s got to rain in Seattle eventually.
With few exceptions, our actual neighbors who share our addresses are strangers as well. Naturally this does not prevent them from voicing their opinions about how we live. Recently, I came home to find a note pasted on my door with duct tape. Apparently I had been throwing my trash bags in the incorrect bucket outside my brownstone, thus leading to some bad bucket overflow. This deviant behavior had to stop. I felt the note was on the brusque side, but perhaps that was just the duct tape talking. Shaking it off, I plucked said note from my door and threw it out in the trash can under the sink. After about a minute of unrelated activity, I froze. I rushed back into my kitchen, flung open the cabinet, reread the Sharpie scrawl, and realized: this guy was going through my trash. How else could he know it was me? I now pulp my receipts, double knot my trash bags, and leave the occasional crumpled VD pamphlet in there for good measure. But the thing is, in his own inadvertently selfish way, I know he meant well. The man didn’t want trash outside his house. And his casa is my casa, his island is my island.
In the end, it is rare that our random acts of kindness do not achieve their intended effect. It doesn’t take much more than those magic words “hey, you’ve got toilet paper stuck to your shoe” to make me fall in love with this place again. Maybe I’m easy. Maybe it’s all about inverted selfishness. That Cuticle Cop was well-intentioned, but because I would never do what she did, it pissed me off. I’m just not a good enough person to smack a stranger.
Thus, as I stood there waiting for my train, I felt my understanding and empathy for my fellow New Yorkers swell like a big glowing orb of Care Bears and butterfly kisses. I said the absentminded professor’s prayer of gratitude for every glorious time a wallet-shaped envelope appeared in my mailbox. I smiled at people holding my same subway pole, and they smiled back. Because this is the beauty of strangers: we’re all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma but by a natural instinct to aid the greater whole, one stray clothing tag at a time.
Except for the curmudgeonly guy on the corner of Thirteenth and Seventh who saw me smoking a cigarette and told me it would kill me. Asshole.
FUCK YOU, COLUMBUS
Every day in the not-too-distant lands of Westchester or Park Avenue penthouses (any category of “moving up”), people leave their homes to go to new homes, and their belongings go with them. They call movers and they go to brunch and they come back and all their stuff is in a new place. It’s a simple process, really, a matter of physics and packing tape. But for those of us stuck on the ground, for whom penthouses come wrapped in plastic at the corner bodega, moving in Manhattan is a strange and fascinating hell. Anyone who has endeavored to transport themselves from point A to point B on this island has a story about “the worst moving experience ever.” One person’s CD collection goes missing; another tells of a magical moving truck that takes four hours to drive five blocks; yet another mistakenly spackles the dog. We’ve all heard it all. Well, almost all. The very nature of the gripe is to think that your story must be the worst. That said, I have a good feeling about the severity of mine.
Thursday, 2:00 P.M.: Being a New Yorker, I tend to instinctively value my belongings over my own life. I would never, say, liquor up my grandmother’s antique crystal vase and send it by itself down the West Side Highway trying to hail a cab at 3:00 A.M
. Thus, with plans to escort all my worldly possessions from my shared two-bedroom at Seventieth and Columbus to my current studio on Seventy-third and Columbus (I fear change), I call my new landlords and demand they install a new pad lock in addition to the basic one. I am set to pick up the keys to said lock on the following Tuesday. That’s five days. I can wait five days.
Friday, 9:00 A.M.: After a week of stealing empty boxes and bubble wrap from the office, I start moving more fragile and valuable belongings (glass slippers, passports, vodka) on foot down five flights, up three blocks, and to my new place on Seventy-third. It’s technically a studio but with fourteen-foot-high ceilings and windows in the bathroom, I like to think the heart of a one-bedroom beats beneath its floorboards.
Though my excitement about my own space is slightly tempered by what I am giving up for it. My roommate moves out Friday as well, abandoning me not only for a different home but for a different coast. This is a distressing experience for us both. Having had our fair share of certifiable or just plain malodorous roommates in college, we value each other as much for the relationship we have as for the unknown relationships we have narrowly escaped. We lived well together. I also had the bonus of living with someone with a healthy penchant for childish pranks. Into our newly adult lives there crept the occasional short-sheeting of my bed or setting of my alarm clock for an obscure time. And then hiding it. Who would keep me on my toes now? You can’t exactly scare yourself out of the hiccups or glue your own toothbrush to the ceiling.
I want to sidestep any emotional good-byes. While my roommate—okay, ex-roommate—gets ready to leave for the airport, I spend most of the day keeping out of his way and scrubbing the mystery dirt out of my new pre-war (Civil? French? Indian?) apartment with every cleaning solution and Brillo pad I can find. I take fifteen or so “breaks” by walking over to the old place and carrying more things to the new. About thirty trips up and down the stairs later, I go out for the evening and return to the old apartment to sleep. I drift off, feeling overprepared and prematurely homesick for the coziness of a lower ceiling.
Saturday, 8:10 A.M.: I get up to prepare for the movers, who charge by the hour so I’m trying to do as much as I can by myself. I am wearing shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops. Why is this relevant, you might ask. Why is an early-morning outfit description ever relevant? For the first time in my three years of living at my old apartment, I lock myself out.
Saturday, 8:30 A.M.: After pounding on my neighbor Evan’s door to no avail, it occurs to me that I should try to break in through the roof. I manage to unlock the roof door without the alarm sounding (a fact that would have bothered me tremendously if I had not been moving out that day) only to find that for the first time in his years at our apartment, my roommate has locked his window grate. But wait, my window has no grate. So I climb over the fire escape and, upon realizing that my toe barely touches the sill and this is not an action-adventure movie, climb straight back over and go downstairs.
Saturday, 9:00 A.M.: I approach a group of chain-smoking deliverymen hovering outside the Italian restaurant at street level. One of them lends me his cell phone. I call a locksmith. As I sit on my stoop and wait, leering at peppy weekend joggers, I think that maybe the locksmith will be my future husband. Maybe this will be the story we will tell our kids and speeches will be given at our wedding about hearts and the importance of having the key to them.
Saturday, 9:25 A.M.: He pulls up in an ’82 Camry with his ponytail dangling out the window. The trunk is plastered with bumper stickers, the automotive equivalent of having a mullet. He says: So, you locked yourself out, huh? I say: Looks like it.
Saturday, 9:45 A.M.: It’s a total of $280. Like most people who live here, I am prone to the constant suspicion that I’m being ripped off. But it’s too early to process this. There’s all this money, and then there’s the shower and coffee it can open the door to. I hand him the cash. But wait, that’s the money I had reserved for paying the movers. So I go to the ATM and take out as much as I can before the machine informs me with a friendly message: “You’ve reached your daily limit.” I half expect a second window to appear with a helpful list of gambling and drug addiction hotlines.
Saturday, 10:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M.: Moving, cleaning, spackling, packing—a lot of “-ing.” I am happy to be in my new place. I am even perversely thrilled by the dirt ground into the kitchen tile—it is my dirt that belongs to me and only me. Still, my calves are starting to throb. My friend James lives around the corner and he comes over to hang out, keep an eye on the movers for a few hours, and lend me money since everyone needs cash today and I can’t access any more of mine. I’m exhausted and tired and sweaty and feel like I haven’t slept in days.
Saturday, 5:40 P.M.: James leaves and part of me wants to grip his ankle as he does. I know he’s going back to a settled apartment where no shelves have to be reconstructed, no sheets have to be unpacked, and no studs have to be found. I look around my new place and sigh at the clutter. I start to unpack and go to throw away a single box.
Saturday, 5:48 P.M.: I lock myself out again.
Saturday, 6:00 P.M.: I jiggle the lock to my new place, which will not move and which also sits about three feet above my doormat, which reads “Déjà Vu Déjà Vu,” frontward and backward. This can’t be happening. I jiggle some more. It’s like the feeling of leaving your wallet in a taxi and realizing it’s missing only once the cab has turned down the block, escorting your driver’s license off into the ether. Your brain has yet to inform your hands that they can stop digging in your pockets now—it’s over. Resigned to my fate, I knock on my new neighbor’s door and borrow her cell phone. I call the landlord, who is somewhere in Connecticut. He informs me that the Super is on Ninety-sixth Street with a spare key that I can get if I go now.
Saturday, 6:30 P.M.: What do I really need now after two straight days of physical activity? A sprint! By God, yes, a sprint! So I book it up to Ninety-sixth and meet the Super. The Super will save me! Beautiful little man, I think I’ve never been so excited to see another human being in my life. I say: Are you the key master? He says: What? I say: Nothing. He hands me the key and my heart sinks. It’s actually a copy of the old key to the bottom lock. My landlord was wrong. This person does not have the key I need. He is, in fact, the devil disguised as a smiling Puerto Rican man. The disappointment fuels my run back to Seventy-third.
Saturday, 7:15 P.M.: This is not good. I sit on my stoop and breathe. My landlord won’t be back from Connecticut until Tuesday. I can ring James’s buzzer but I feel I’ve already asked enough of him. I would call a friend or a coworker or the ASPCA except that all my numbers and my phone for that matter are locked behind a big oak board. What’s particularly annoying about locking yourself out or leaving a wallet somewhere or any mistake without prior escalation is that it could so easily have not happened. But it did. And twice in one day. And even if I could access my wallet, the ATM is determined to save me from myself and so I couldn’t get cash until after midnight anyway.
Saturday, 7:45 P.M.: I do it. I call my parents collect from a pay phone. I think they think I’m in jail. I worry for a moment that this is their immediate assumption. Then again, something about the boxed pay phones in New York feels like TV prison anyway. This is around the time I unravel and start to cry. My lungs feel small. I tell them that I’m going to go back to my old building to read the same locksmith number off the same sticker and hope my old neighbors are home so I can borrow their cell phone.
Saturday, 8:15 P.M.: I tell the locksmith dispatcher that he should either give me a break or charge me double for being an idiot. Up to him. I laugh. He says he’ll give me a twenty-dollar discount. I stop laughing. Meanwhile, my father drives into the city to bail me into my apartment: $260. He also brings with him a crowbar, a box of drill bits, and some wire hangers, which he uses in an attempt to crack the lock himself. This doesn’t work, which surprises neither of us. It’s getting late and my father goes home. I wait for the locksmit
h, sniffling and knowing all the lights are on.
Saturday, 9:30 P.M.: The locksmith pulls up. He is the same locksmith as the one from this morning. Hi again, he says. I tell him that he knows my life better than any of my friends or family because he is one of the few to have seen both my old place and my new one. He takes out his drill. I tell him that he has a very urban job, what with all the drunks and deviants and idiots in this city. I wonder aloud about all the strange people and places he sees. He peers into the lock and takes out a different drill. I tell him that I am not normally this irresponsible of a person. Or maybe I am but surely there are people more spastic than I. I guess this is lesson number one of living on one’s own: make spare keys. I tell him I have very high ceilings and this will all be worth it. He changes the lock and fills out the receipt and points down with his pen. He says: That’s a funny doormat.
ONE-NIGHT BOUNCE
The second I was old enough to know what sex was, I knew I wanted to have a one-night stand. To me, it seemed the most deviant, cool, subversive, and flat-out dirty thing there was. I wanted to do it immediately. Largely because I had no idea what it entailed. I figured a one-night stand happened when two people, one of whom was a woman, went to a man’s apartment for martinis and stood on the bed the entire time, trying not to spill them. Sometimes they bounced on the bed until they hit their heads on the ceiling, and that’s how the girl (a) passed out or (b) knew it was time to go home. This accounted for the sound of mattress springs creaking as well as any exhaustion the next morning. It was how hair became tousled. It also accounted for a very specific image I had, one of a woman in a silk teddy seen from behind. She’s facing a window and it’s probably nighttime. We zoom in on her hip, where she is resting her expensively manicured hand, with a pair of red sling-back stilettos hooked on her pinkie. Like a few notes of a song stuck in my head, that’s all I got. I don’t know who or where this woman is, only that between all the drinking and the bed bouncing and the near-concussion getting, the heels had come off. That explained why there was a lot of morning-after tiptoeing in movies and why no one ever had sex with their shoes on—it would puncture the mattress and twist the ankle.
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