Public Apology

by Dave Bry

  I’ve been reminded of this a lot in recent springs, whenever I’ve walked past the corner of Clinton and Rivington Streets on the way back from picking my kid up at school, and been seized by a mysterious coughing fit. I have apparently developed an allergic reaction to the trees growing around there. Mulberries or box elders, and likely a preponderance of males of the species. I read an article in the paper about how the city spent all this money a couple years ago cutting down female trees to lessen the number of flowers or berries that were falling onto sidewalks and cars and making a mess for the Department of Sanitation. And so now when the disproportionate numbers of male trees release their spores in spring, there are fewer receptacles ready to suck them out of the air, and they end up floating around in greater density, giving people allergic reactions. I swear I can actually feel the tiny particles of pollen in my nose, going down my throat, catching to the soft tissue there, forcing the involuntary response. It’s miserable.

  There’s an argument you win.

  Dear Emily,

  I’m sorry for wearing sweatpants to our first dinner date and for getting stoned before meeting your parents for the first time.

  This was in 1999. We’d been friends for a couple years at that point, having been introduced by our mutual friend, Jen. We had recently started seeing each other romantically—the result of a particularly drunken night at the WXOU Radio Bar on Hudson Street, near where we all lived in the West Village. I’d asked you out for a first proper dinner date to Hangawi, a fancy Korean restaurant on Thirty-Second Street.

  It’s funny to think about what I was thinking about as I got ready to meet you. It was a Saturday, and I had been wearing a pair of green sweatpants that I used to wear on weekends. They were the kind that George Costanza used to wear on Seinfeld, the kind that Jerry once said announced to the world, “I give up. I can’t compete in normal society.” It occurred to me that I might change into something more presentable, but I stood in my bedroom and thought for a minute and decided against it. I put on a white polo shirt and my Converse All Stars and walked out the door. It wasn’t that I was trying to feign ambivalence, to give the impression that I didn’t care enough to put on pants with buttons and belt loops. I had made it very clear, in fact, that I wanted us to be girlfriend and boyfriend. If anything, you were the one who took some convincing. (Glaringly easy, in hindsight, to see why.) My thinking, as best I can explain it, was more along the lines of take me as I am. I was a guy who wore green sweatpants on a Saturday. I wanted to make a good impression, but changing pants for that reason felt wrong. Like I’d be faking it, presenting myself as someone I was not. This type of thinking makes very little sense to me now and is derailed by an argument as simple as the fact that I certainly didn’t wear those sweatpants exclusively. I had lots of other pants, many of which I often changed into before dinner without much thought at all. But that day, I felt myself in the hands of fate: these were the pants you put on this morning; these are the pants you shall wear tonight. I don’t know. I used to be really superstitious, too. And that’s just a terrible way to live. I was smoking too much pot those days, I suppose.

  Which brings me to the second part of this apology. A couple months later, our relationship having miraculously survived my sweatpants, you’d arranged for us to go to dinner with your parents—my first time meeting them. Bored, sitting around my apartment that afternoon, I came to the same kind of question as before: Here was a situation in which on any other day I would be smoking pot. Should the fact that I was soon to be meeting these important people, the parents of the woman I was falling in love with, should I let that change my routine? I knew that I’d be brighter eyed and clearer in conversation if I refrained, and I definitely wanted your parents to like me. But then I thought, Well, the way things are going, chances are I’ll be spending a lot of time around these people in the future. There would be lots of days like this. I wasn’t planning on making any major changes to my personal lifestyle. They might as well get to know me half lidded and cloudy headed. I packed a bowl.

  Dinner went fine. Your parents turned out to be groovy ’60s types anyway. Toward the end of the evening, after I recognized a reference one of them made to the Steve Martin–Lily Tomlin movie All of Me and mentioned that it was a favorite of mine, your dad said, “Anyone who appreciates All of Me is all right by me,” and my heart felt warm in my chest. I’d lucked out.

  Still, thinking back, it seems pretty stupid. There’s a reason most people would choose not to get stoned before meeting their girlfriend’s parents. Just like there’s a reason to change out of sweatpants before going on a date to a fancy restaurant. Making decisions based on principle rather than pragmatism is a prescription for failure. Even more so when the principle is so confused and self-defeating.

  Was all this a test for you? I guess in a way it was, odd as that sounds. Not that I’d meant it that way. But I remember the expression on your face when we met at the restaurant for that first dinner date. You looked down at my sweatpants, and then back up to me, and gave a bemused little sigh. “So this is how it’s going to be, huh?” You thought for a second more and said, “All right.”

  Again, I lucked out.

  Dear Guy in a Brown Corduroy Jacket,

  I’m sorry for stealing forty dollars from your checking account at the ATM in the HSBC Bank on Union Square East.

  This was more than ten years ago. Late winter, early spring. It happened around nine p.m. I was meeting some friends to play pool at Corner Billiards on Fourth Avenue, stopping to take out cash on my way. You were coming out of the foyer when I was going in. You looked to be in your late twenties, early thirties, around my age. You were wearing a brown corduroy jacket and green army fatigue pants, and you had a beard. You might very well have been on your way to meet some friends to play pool, too.

  I stepped up to the ATM nearest to the door, the one you’d just left, and saw that the screen was asking if you wanted to end the session or make another transaction? I turned around. The door had closed. I saw you through the glass, walking away. I was alone there. Of course, I had found ATM screens left like that before. It’s a common mistake—someone has their money, they’re done, they walk away. I’d always just pressed End Session and started my own new one. I’d always wondered, though, as I did it, whether or not it would be possible in such a situation to take money out of the open account. That night, unluckily for you, my curiosity got the better of me. Without giving it much thought, I pressed Make Another Transaction. The machine asked if I’d like to make a withdrawal or check the account’s balances. I chose withdrawal and was very surprised when the choice of dollar amounts appeared on the screen: How much would I like to steal? Forty dollars? Sixty dollars? A hundred? Two hundred? More? A nervous giggle fluttered in my throat. The thought of two thousand dollars flashed in my mind. But no, this was just an experiment. I was still half expecting to be asked for your pin number when I pressed $40.00. Then the cash came out, just like that, just like it does when I get money from my own account. It all happened very fast.

  I don’t make a habit of stuff like this. Besides a stretch in high school, when my friends and I would stumble into 7-Eleven four times a weekend and see who could make and eat the most frozen burritos at the serve-yourself microwave station while a designated one of us distracted the counter clerk and purchased a single candy bar, I haven’t stolen much in my life. When I was in third grade, my friend Ted Trainor’s parents took five of us to the Ground Round on a Friday night for Ted’s ninth birthday. I was addicted to video games. Ms. Pac-Man had just come out, and I’d quickly played out my allotment of the quarters Ted’s father had given us to take to the arcade after dinner. Crowding around one of the machines with a bunch of kids I didn’t know, overwhelmed by desire, I snatched one of the quarters off the waiting line atop the joystick panel and slipped it into my pocket. As soon as I stepped away, though, my hair got hot and my stomach seized up in guilt. I don’t think I even played the quarter. Tr
ying to seem tough, I told my friends what I’d done. But in the car on the way home, when Peter Arbour blurted it out, and Mr. Trainor said, in a voice I’ll never forget, “Not too cool, Dave,” I burst into tears. I confessed to my parents when I got home and spent the rest of the weekend in bed, under the covers, wishing I could die.

  It wasn’t like that that night when I got to Corner Billiards. But in telling my friends the story of my successful withdrawal of your funds, I started by saying that I didn’t feel particularly good about it, that it was done out of curiosity rather than avarice. And sure enough, my friend Josh echoed Mr. Trainor’s reaction. “Dude,” he said with a surprised laugh. “That’s not cool!”

  Not that it occupied more than two minutes of conversation, not that I’ve been beating myself up about it since. But if it makes you feel any better, later that night, after I made what is perhaps the greatest pool shot of my life—jumping an opponent’s ball with the cue on the way to sinking the eight ball and winning the game—with onlookers whooping and applauding, I slapped five with Josh, who was my partner (we were playing doubles) and felt a sharp twinge shoot up to my elbow. I’d sprained my wrist.

  I swear it hurt for like six months.

  Dear Residents of Hudson Street between Morton and Barrow Streets,

  I’m sorry for shouting out my window at that old lady who used to tie her dog up outside Famiglia’s pizza shop. And for my embarrassing lack of creativity.

  It was early 2001, shortly before we would all have far more to be worrying about than the nuisance of noise pollution. But back in those comparatively carefree days, I was very much bothered by the loud, raspy barking of a dog that was routinely left leashed to a lamppost on Hudson Street, three stories below my bedroom window. It would happen every day at various times: long, long sessions of barking, forty-five minutes, an hour sometimes. After a while, when I’d hear it start up, I would look out my window and see the dog, a medium-sized mutt with dingy, matted fur, looking plaintively in the direction of the deli mart across the alley from Famiglia’s pizza shop and barking and barking and barking.

  It drove me crazy. I’d been working from home for a couple years at that point. I was used to the sounds of the city, able to tune most of them out. But something about this particular dog’s bark—how sad it sounded, along with its incessancy—got to me in a different way. There was a cruel and inconsiderate dog owner out there, making the lives of at least two living beings worse. I complained a lot about the situation to my girlfriend with whom I shared the apartment and who I would soon marry. But she worked in an office and so heard the barking only on weekends or the rare nighttime episode. And she is generally less bothered by things than I am anyway. Other than her, I didn’t know who to appeal to. I’d never actually seen anyone out there tying up the dog.

  One day I wrote a note on a piece of yellow legal-pad paper and taped it to the lamppost while the dog was there barking. “Please don’t leave this dog tied up here,” it said. “It is obviously unhappy and it barks and barks. This is unfair to the neighborhood and unfair to the dog.” I felt pretty stupid, seeing it there in my handwriting. I looked down at the dog, who wasn’t paying attention to me, and then just walked away.

  Nothing changed. Weeks passed.

  I was at the end of my rope the night I finally saw her. It was a weeknight and later than usual, ten o’clock or so. Quiet out on Hudson Street, other than the dog’s barking, which had been going on for a half an hour. Quiet inside our apartment, too, other than my ranting about the social contract, etc., which had been going on for about as long. Emily was sitting in bed, trying to read. I’d staked out a position at the window, watching the dog, waiting for the owner. When she appeared, sort of waddling out of the deli mart, a short, heavyset woman with gray hair, and stepped to the lamppost and began untying the leash, I jumped up and ran into the bathroom, where the window in the shower provided a more direct angle from which to shout.

  I stepped into the tub, the crinkly plastic shower curtain cold and dry as I pushed it aside, and opened the window and stuck out my head. “Hey, lady!” I said and heard Emily questioning my actions from the bedroom. “Don’t tie your dog up there anymore! It barks too loud!”

  My voice echoed off the buildings, louder than the dog’s barking. The old lady didn’t even really look up to see where I was. She dismissed me with a sort of “feh”-style wave of her hand and said, in a voice made of cigarettes, “Don’t tell me how to care for my animals.”

  It was like she’d heard it all before—she had, I suppose—but simply did not care. She was super New York; she had bigger problems to worry about.

  “Come on, lady…,” I started, but she cut me off.

  “Ahh, shut up!”

  I was stunned. The gall of this person! But standing in my bathtub at ten o’clock at night, craning my neck out the window, all hot in my ears, I didn’t know what to say. I thought for a moment before answering.

  “No, you shut up!” I shouted back.

  I shook my head to myself in the pause that followed. I am not very good at shouting at people.

  Then the phone rang. I told Emily I’d get it and pushed back the shower curtain and stepped out of the tub and walked into the kitchen where the phone was.

  “Hello?”

  “Dave?” It was Nick, my old roommate, who now lived in the building next door. On the sixth floor with his girlfriend Eva.

  “Hey, Nick.” I said.

  “Did I just hear you shouting out your window?”

  “Oh, man…”

  Nick started laughing. “Did you just tell someone, ‘No, you shut up?’”

  Dear Neighbor Who Lived at 67 Morton Street, #3B,

  I’m sorry you found me asleep in the hallway outside my apartment.

  Asleep is a polite term, of course. I was passed out drunk. This was not as many years ago as I wish it was. I was thirty-one years old. Far too old to be found in such a state by someone whose name I didn’t know. We were not fraternity brothers at San Diego State University. We were neighbors. Grown men, the both of us, with jobs, who paid rent. I lived with a woman, Emily. She was inside the apartment at the time, sleeping where adults usually sleep, in a bed. I had made it to our door and managed to fit the key in the lock before lying down and curling up on our welcome mat. This she read on the note you wrote, after you opened the door and dragged me inside to our living room couch, where she found me in the morning. You took my shoes off and left the keys and the note on the table in the foyer. Needless to say, this was all very kind of you. Thank you for not drawing on me or emptying my wallet.

  I had been out at a bachelor party earlier that evening and vastly overserved by a string of irresponsible bartenders at a number of different establishments. The last thing I remember, and vaguely, is being at WXOU on Hudson Street a few blocks north of our building. I knew I was very drunk, apparently, as I’ve been told I turned to a friend and said, “I’m in big trouble,” before stumbling to the door.

  Sort of miraculous that I was able to make it as far as I did, I guess. The homing-pigeon autopilot part of the human brain is strong. But I can’t imagine you were very impressed with me when you found me there. In fact, it was probably a bummer. Besides being an eyesore and a fire hazard, I became a situation to handle, heavy lifting to do upon coming home late yourself. I had food all over my clothes, too—there’d been a food fight over dinner. It’s probably safe to assume we were not the most popular crew at the strip club.

  We bumped into each other recently, you and I. Earlier this year at the Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. I was there with Emily and our four-year-old son. You were pushing your own kid in a stroller. I walked up and said hello and reintroduced myself. We hadn’t seen each other in the seven years since I moved out of the building on Morton Street. You were friendly and we compared the ages of our children and laughed about how different life was now. Then your wife walked up, and you said, “Hey, honey. This is Dave; he used to live next to
me in the apartment on Morton Street.”

  “Ohh,” she said, shaking my hand and breaking into a smile. “You’re the guy we found in the hallway that night!”

  I didn’t even know she was there that night. I didn’t know we’d ever met. She seemed lovely.

  Dear Robert Sean Leonard,

  I’m sorry if I freaked you out that morning you were walking your dog in front of the building where we lived in the West Village.

  Our relationship had been fraught from the outset, I realize. When I first met you in the stairwell, the day I was moving in, and you were so friendly and welcoming, and I asked if we knew each other because you looked so familiar, and you said you didn’t think so, I persisted, wondering if we’d perhaps gone to the same summer camp when we were kids, which forced you into the uncomfortable disclosure of the fact that you were a professional actor and “in some movies and on TV sometimes.” A few days later, I saw you by the deli outside and greeted you by announcing that I’d remembered where I’d recognized you from. “Dead Poets Society, right?” You smiled graciously before I added, not being able to think of anything else, “You were good.”

  Still, you were always nice whenever we bumped into each other. So I feel even worse about that time that I corralled you by the front door to our building as the sun was coming up and you were taking your Chihuahua out for a walk. This was a few months before I got married. Emily—she’s the woman I shared my apartment with; you might remember her giant head of curly blonde hair—and I were busy planning our wedding. The invitations were to go out that week, in fact. Planning a wedding is stressful, and I’d overrewarded myself for the previous day’s work of finalizing the guest list, confirming mailing addresses, and was thus coming home at that time on a Wednesday morning, still full of the cocaine I’d been out all night doing.