by Una LaMarche
Now, the Hot Pocket incident just seems silly to me, since that dude could easily have just gone to the nearest 7-Eleven. But Girl Scout cookies . . . those are precious. In the off season, you’d have an easier time buying crack than getting your hands on a box of Samoas.
That’s not a joke, by the way, it’s a fact.
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER: A HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Seriously, why are Girl Scout cookies harder to procure than illegal drugs? There is something wrong with that lesson. If I sent you on a scavenger hunt right now with a list that included a quart of unpasteurized raw milk, an ounce of marijuana, an eight-ball of cocaine, a whole roasted goat, and a box of Thin Mints, guess which item would be the biggest bitch to find? That is not right.
The main reason for this, of course, is that Girl Scouts are forbidden from selling cookies online.* I’m not really sure why this is—I can only guess it’s to even the playing field and avoid excessive gaming of the system—but it seems pretty archaic. Explain to me, how is forcing preteens in short, pleated skirts to walk the streets soliciting strangers character building? If you go to the Girl Scouts of America website, they explain they don’t currently allow online sales, but that you can “use the Find Cookies! search box to help you find Girl Scouts selling cookies.” Yes, that’s right. Anyone can log onto this website to locate young girls anywhere in the country, and yet I cannot get my Tagalong fix using Amazon Prime shipping.
The yearly experience of trolling for cookies makes me feel like a creep. I find myself breathlessly tweeting sentences that are probably on government Megan’s Law watch lists: Anyone know any Girl Scouts? I NEED one. Anywhere in the country. I’ll pay anything!!!! I stare a little too long at kids on the street, searching their outfits for telltale flashes of green. They’re the world’s tiniest drug dealers and, as with real drugs, I am not cool enough to have a reliable hookup.
I’m just going to have to keep having kids until I get a daughter and can force her into the trade. Maybe I’ll even name her Peanut Butter Patty, for incentive. Or, if she’s bland and homely, Trefoil. But at this point, who am I kidding, I’ll take what I can get.
Blank Canvass
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Talk to Strangers (for a Total of Four Hours)
“Hello, sir! You look like you care about the environment!”
Let me set the scene: I am standing in front of Babies “R” Us in Union Square, making what could be mistaken for a single, spastic jazz hand at a middle-aged man fifteen feet away. He rolls his eyes, takes a drag on his cigarette, and pointedly tosses it, still burning, at my feet. Perhaps he doesn’t care much about the environment after all. It is a beautiful spring day and people are trying to enjoy the sunshine during their lunch break. I am standing in their way. I am a street canvasser. I am the enemy.
I’ve lived in the city for my entire life, and the only time I gave money to a canvasser it was because I thought he was my Thai deliveryman. (Memo to the New York Public Interest Research Group: I am still waiting for my pad see ew.) When I see them on the street I pick up a fake phone call. It’s not that I don’t support their causes (well, except for the poor bastards shilling for salons who ask me where I get my hair cut); it’s that I hate, hate, hate talking to strangers. When I was a kid, I had the most passive lemonade stand ever. It was basically a performance piece: me, sitting silently on my stoop with a sweaty pitcher, terror etched on my face, praying for people to heed the words of Dionne Warwick and walk on by.
Friends who grew up in the suburbs and who are thinking about having kids often ask me about the drawbacks of being a city child, and really the only one I can come up with is the learned misanthropy. Part of this is definitely specific to my father’s side of the family. We vacationed every summer on tiny Block Island, not quite ten square miles in size, for twenty-five years and my dad never made a single friend, a record I deeply respect. Also, my grandmother, after learning that one of her neighbors at the retirement home where she lives had reported her smoking to the management, chased the poor woman down the hallway, shouting, “You’d better run, bitch!” So maybe New York is not entirely to blame.
Still, it’s hard not to grow to hate strangers when you live in a crush of so many. There are so many people pushing and bumping and crowding you at all times that they can sometimes amass into one anonymous blob that you just try to tune out as a whole. Often, as an adult, I’ll find myself sitting on the subway and realize that I don’t look at my fellow riders as real people but more like loud, annoyingly placed props. And yes, I understand this makes me sound like a sociopath, but try riding the New York transit system on a daily basis and see if you don’t start to turn a little dark. It’s just part of the deal of living here, like accepting that you can never wear white jeans or find parking. On the plus side, we have great bagels.
I generally avoid contact with strangers in any geographic location at all costs, but if I had to choose my two least favorite kinds of strangers to encounter (not including the obviously mentally ill, which weeds out a lot of New Yorkers) I would pick: People Who Obliviously Stand in Your Way and People Who Try to Sell You Things on the Street.
PWOSIYW are, at best, confused tourists and, at worst, d-bags who don’t budge from what is apparently their permanent home address aggressively leaning against the subway doors, even when said doors open onto a packed platform. PWTTSYTOTS almost always deserve your sympathy (person in costume handing out flyers for going-out-of-business electronics store; Scientologists hawking Dianetics) but almost never deserve your money. (The only exception to this rule is in the case of mobile food carts. Sell me any kind of food out of a steaming vat of questionable cleanliness and I will eat it. In fact, I will take two.) And then there is the dreaded canvasser, who wins the title of my least, least, least favorite stranger of all time. Being people who purposefully stand in your way while they try to sell you things, they are more powerful, wily, and annoying than each previously mentioned species could ever be alone. And they are everywhere.
On an ethical level, I realize, street canvassers are hard to hate. They stand outside all day trying to raise money for charitable organizations with admirable mission statements or for scrappy, underdog political candidates they’d willingly follow off a cliff or into a sex dungeon. But I still hate them. And then, in the guise of a shamefully self-promoting stunt, I became one.
I was trying to expand my writing portfolio at the time and had met the new editor of a weekly tabloid newspaper at a party. He suggested I pitch him some story ideas for a first-person account of some quirky New York experience. I’ll join the Rockettes for a day! I thought gleefully. I’ll try out for the roller derby! But then, almost as an aside, I tacked on one last idea:
I personally loathe street lobbyists. They make me uncomfortable; they ask me about my hair, then try to shame me into taking a moment for something I actually support, like gay rights. I think most NYers feel the way I do, so it would be fun (well, not fun, as I would want to kill myself) to shadow and/or become one and write about the experience.
It was my own fault, and so I tried to approach the assignment as character building. I would be facing my fear—sort of like what I did multiple times a day when I peered into the toilet bowl looking for rats. And maybe, just maybe, it would help me to humanize the poor saps I normally passed without so much as a side-eye.
It took a few phone calls and e-mails, but within a week I had convinced the ACLU—my dad is a former employee and board member, so I jacked open that door using nepotism like a crowbar!—and Greenpeace to let me tag along with them for one afternoon. One. I insisted that brevity was key, knowing that I would never come back for a second day, even if I promised to, and I spent the week prior to my mission in the Dominican Republic with a group of friends, sucking down rum and Cokes in an attempt to quell my growing sense of unease. My fear was so out of control that I act
ually considered faking it at one point, just standing outside my apartment building pretending to be a canvasser.
“I’m sure I can get the gist in a few minutes, right?” I asked my husband.
“Hey,” he said, “it worked for Jayson Blair.”
My first gig was with the ACLU, and I arrived at the streamer-festooned office in Herald Square trying hard not to cry.
David, the lanky and charismatic regional canvassing director, greeted me at the door and ushered me in to meet his team, a band of fresh-scrubbed twentysomethings, at least three of whom seemed to be named Alex. They seemed suspiciously devoid of any signs that they, too, might have downed an entire bottle of tempranillo the previous night while catching up on Sixteen and Pregnant. I felt immediately at a disadvantage.
A woman named Amanda, with blue eyes, blond ringlets, and a cheery camp counselor disposition, was given the task of training me. Amanda told me she’d been canvassing for various organizations since 2007, and when I asked, sincerely, why she did it, she practically beamed. “It’s so fun! And rewarding!” I asked if New York was the toughest city she had canvassed and she shook her head. “New Yorkers are very socially conscious,” she said brightly, and then, her eyebrows crinkling in a thrilling flash of pain, she added, “It’s getting them to stop that’s hard.” I wanted to press her on whether constantly being ignored or sneered at had any effect on her drinking habits or prescription medications, but as I was trying to formulate a non-judgy-sounding question she moved on. “My biggest tip is to maintain a perma-grin,” she confided. “People are like babies; if you smile at them, they’ll smile.” I smiled; she smiled. Then she gave me my “rap” to memorize. (It’s too bad real rap wouldn’t have helped, because I know all the lyrics to “The Humpty Dance.” Talking to strangers on the street in broad daylight? Pass. Make a fool of myself in front of strangers at a karaoke bar? Don’t mind if I do!) Nearby, the group of Alexes was working on what they called “positive leaves,” otherwise known as telling people to have a good day even if they are flipping you off.
I was hoping that Amanda and David might just let me shadow them, but no—when we arrived at our Lincoln Center location, I was given an extra-large blue ACLU vest, which gave me the appearance of a portly, progressive Smurf. Before we started on real people, we practiced “grabbing” each other (again, sadly not literal; “making a grab” means stopping someone), and then one of the Alexes gave me a pep talk.
“I want you to make six stops before lunch and raise two hundred dollars,” he said.
“Couldn’t I have more modest goals?” I asked. “Like ‘Don’t vomit on yourself’ or ‘Try not to say “fuck”’?” Alex laughed and held up his fist. I had no choice but to bump it.
I assumed my position, stationed next to Amanda and facing David, thirty feet away, thus forming a triangle designed to trap almost everyone who tried to avoid us.
“Hello there!” I called unconvincingly to passersby. “Do you have a moment for gay rights?” I was barely even looking at the people I was talking to, regressing to my tried-and-true total avoidance sales tactics, but still, within five minutes I got a stop. The man, a Kris Kringle doppelgänger, slowed as he approached.
“I think I have the civil right to walk down the street without being ambushed!” he said angrily, his face growing red.
I know, right? I wanted to shout, but instead I just chirped, “Thanks,” smiling so hard my cheeks hurt.
“You get one of those every so often,” Amanda said once Santa had stomped out of earshot. “But most people are nice.” Turned out, she was right—to my surprise, I was not verbally abused again for the remainder of my shift, and I got to observe some interesting patterns. People generally fell into one of three categories: they ignored me completely, politely declined (my personal favorite demurrals—“Not today” or “I’m good”—both suggested that the person in question had recently overindulged in gay rights), or stopped because they didn’t speak English well enough to know what I was saying. I performed my “rap” for at least a half dozen kindly, confused foreigners. Amanda insisted that statistically, one out of every five people who stop make a donation, but at the end of two hours I had ten stops and nothing to show for it, like I’d been unsuccessfully speed dating with all of New York. David and Amanda, meanwhile, seemed to convince people effortlessly to hand over their credit cards. I don’t know what bothered me more, standing in the West Sixties dressed in my Smurf village best and soliciting money, or the fact that I sucked at it so much.
I set out to improve my track record during my second outing a few days later. This time I was with Greenpeace, and whereas the ACLU trained me for less than an hour before sending me out, Greenpeace made me attend a day-long orientation.
Its office in Williamsburg was unmarked but for a series of stickers on the street entrance; upstairs, the office door bore a sign reading “Welcome to the Revolution.” I had to command my eyes not to roll out of their sockets. Amy, one of the New York City coordinators, who had a bored, suspicious demeanor that I immediately respected, introduced me to four other novice canvassers and then sized me up while she took a cigarette break (American Spirits, like you even had to ask). As she spoke, revealing a sardonic sense of humor, I realized that if the ACLU was camp counselors, then Greenpeace was the camper sneaking peyote in the woods. When I asked if there would be a rap to memorize, Amy snorted at the outdated word and then smiled. “We’re not robots,” she said.
My training began with an overview of Greenpeace’s history and mission, which included a YouTube video in which a man opened a Kit Kat bar to reveal an orangutan finger, which he then proceeded to eat, blood streaming down his face. This ad was meant to put pressure on Nestlé to stop buying palm oil produced by deforestation in Indonesia. I was later relieved to learn that the United States is the only country in which Kit Kats are produced under license by Hershey, which makes biting down on a dismembered digit far less likely.
Amy walked us through the basics of canvassing, mapping out the lesson on a wall-size chalkboard. Unlike the ACLU, Greenpeace discouraged its canvassers from using yes or no questions as opening lines. Amy suggested something more impassioned (“Let’s fight global warming today!”) or assumptive (“I know you care about whales!”). Apparently one Greenpeace staffer, who went by the code name “Crawdaddy,” liked to open with the zinger, “What does a burning orangutan smell like?”
Once we got someone to stop, using either Crawdaddy’s method or something less fucking insane, our job was to outline a specific problem, the solution, and past Greenpeace victories that would make potential members want to give us money. Amy asked us to choose either deforestation or whaling for our pitch, and since the two people before me chose deforestation, I chose whales just to be different. I also choose wine based on the label. That’s just the seat-of-the-pants lifestyle I lead.
Despite having already lost my canvassing virginity, I was nervous the following morning as I arrived in Union Square with Amy and the Greenpeace team. We huddled on the steps at Fourteenth Street, put on baby blue T-shirts, and got our assignments. I was dispatched to the Babies “R” Us with two seasoned staffers, Matthias and Ben, big, handsome guys who comfortably used their charm as a hook. “What are you texting about, trees?” Matthias called to a woman standing at a bus stop, absorbed in her BlackBerry. She looked up, smiled, and blushed. His battle was half-won.
I was failing miserably. Again. After a few attempts, I couldn’t bring myself to tell one more person that they looked like they loved whales, so I reverted to the forbidden yes or no questions. I tried flirting, and a few men stopped for me, their eyes glazing over as I began eagerly educating them about the lifting of a commercial whaling ban, but I couldn’t close a single deal. “You have to believe they’re going to sign up,” Ben told me. “They can see it in your eyes if you don’t.”
“Can I wear sunglasses?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” he barked, and went back to work. “Clean, renewable energy!” he bellowed to anyone in earshot. “Let’s! Make! It! Happen!”
At the end of my shift I was shamefully empty-handed, and it is to their credit that the Greenpeacers were sympathetic. “A lot of people don’t come back after their first day,” Ben said earnestly. “It’s a hard job, but if you love doing it, it’s incredible.” I felt like hugging him, but instead I took out my wallet, and as I dictated my credit card number, mentally calculating the dent that twenty dollars a month would make in my unsustainably farmed sushi budget, I knew in my heart of hearts that I was only doing it to make them like me. But I wanted to seem less selfish, so I tried to look at it differently. After all, I had canvassed for a few measly hours and couldn’t hack it, while the people I’d met—and countless more—were on the streets every day with smiles on their faces and clipboards at the ready, trying to raise money for causes they believed in. The least I could give them to make up for ten years of fake phone calls was a small donation.
A few months later, I quietly canceled the credit card. I’m sure I could have called and ended my membership, but that would have involved voice-on-voice contact, and I just hate talking to people I don’t know.
I’m Not a Girl . . . Not Yet a Golden Girl
I started thinking about the portrayal of moms in pop culture, ironically, while watching an episode of Girls. Specifically, it was the first-season scene in which two of the series’ (platonic, female) twentysomething protagonists bond by way of a shared bath. My first thought was, I have never casually bathed with a friend while discussing my sex life. My second was, I would literally pay someone if they could guarantee me a bath that no one else would try to climb into.
You see, I have a toddler. He is there when I bathe. He is there when I pee. He is always there, like another limb that just happens to move around independently of the rest of my body. And he has changed everything.