Category Archives: NYC

NYC

Tales of Suspense From Pre-Dawn Running!

I’ve been working out very early in the morning lately. My schedule and my waistline necessitates it. In the past few weeks, as the weather’s warmed up, my cardio workouts have been mostly running. I’ve been running off and on for 13 years now, and I know it’s good for me because I hate it.

Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, it’s usually still pitch black when I go out for my run, which is always unsettling. When you go out to run at dawn, you feel energized and accomplished. When you go out to run pre-dawn, you feel creepy. Especially if you’re doing the routine I currently am, which is to sprint very hard, then jog, then repeat. So to the casual observer, it looks like I’m running from some terrible crime, but I keep getting winded. “I really need to get away from the scene of this jewel heist I just pulled off, but…man, just gimme a second…”

So I get a weird vibe on any given morning I run, but this morning in particular felt more odd than usual. I can’t explain to you why, exactly. It was just a feeling I had, a sense that something was off or something was in the air that things weren’t quite right. I went off on my run regardless, feeling uneasy but knowing I’d feel worse if I didn’t go.

To combat the feeling, I decide to take a route through some more residential streets, thinking this would feel safer than my usual route around a local park. But the feeling persisted, possibly because it was pitch black, and possibly because it feels even weirder to sprint past people’s houses while they’re fast asleep. Especially the quaint little Tudor-esque houses that can can be found in my neighborhood, which look very charming during the day but gnarled and sinister in the dark of night. And when the occasional person did show their head, stumbling toward their car hanging onto a coffee mug for dear life, they looked as nervous and suspicious as I felt.

So I changed my route, heading toward the more industrial parts of my neighborhood, where trucks were already loading and gassing up for the day. This was more familiar to me, and yet I still felt that something was wrong, and I realized there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to get rid of that feeling.

However, it didn’t become much more than a feeling until I neared the end of my run. I was jogging an overpass that fords the LIE, which was already jammed to the gills with traffic in both directions. I reached a sprinting portion of my routine. And as I did, I got the sense that something else was running behind me. Gaining on me. I didn’t hear anything apart from my own footsteps, but I was certain of it.

So I ran faster, but this thing, whatever it was, kept pace with me. I craned my neck to see what it was, and it turned out to be my own shadow, cast by one of the huge lamps that lines the overpass. As I continued to run, it caught up with me, loomed over my head, then overtook me and disappeared as I neared the end of the overpass exit ramp.

This was when I thought to myself, “Wow, this movie about my life is terrible.”

NYC

Rifle Vodka and the Awesomeness Corollary

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I enter the liquor store and immediately see a small boy, maybe eight years old. This does not alarm me in and of itself, nor do I judge his parent(s) for bringing him there. I’ve dragged my kid into a liquor store before while out and about trying to conduct 12 errands at once, cuz hey, daddy needs his medicine. My neighborhood is about equal parts Irish and Polish, so kids in a liquor store = not a big deal, as long as they’re not indulging in samples, and at least 90 percent of the time they’re not.

What does catch my eye is the fact that the boy is enraptured by an elaborate display. It is a large box that looks like an old timey suitcase or a trumpet case, lid open. Inside, a life-size glass Kalashnikov, full of vodka. In the case’s extra space, 10 neatly arranged shot glasses, each sitting in its own little nook.

It looks a lot like the example you see here, except 100 times more opulent. Having lived the last decade-plus of my life in neighborhoods with sizable Eastern European populations, I am very familiar with the firearm-shaped vodka container. Still, this was by far the biggest one I’d ever seen. It even had a strap to sling over your shoulder, in case you decided to take it hiking. And the case it was in, a thing of beauty! It was lined in a faint green vinyl, the color of an old portable turntable. Its exquisite leather straps had shiny brass studs,and the lock was the kind you’d see on a steamer trunk. The inside: crushed red velvet.

And this boy is just staring at it, like Ralphie gaping lovingly through the department store window at his Red Ryder BB gun. I could understand why; hell, I wanted to take this thing home.

It reminded me of my first trip to New Orleans, making an obligatory trip down Bourbon Street, and seeing soused, beaded tourists stumbling down the block carrying enormous “grenades” full of booze, giant plastic containers topped off with a straw. Sometimes they were actually shaped like grenades, sometimes footballs. It struck me as a very childish thing, putting booze into what is essentially a sippy cup.

It also struck me as a very American thing to do. I love Thing A. I love Thing B. If I put them together to make Uber-Thing A-B, it can only be better! Hence, turducken and cheese-injected pretzels.

Of course, when I first saw a rifle-shaped glass vodka delivery system, I realized that maybe this is more of a universal impulse than I first suspected. Perhaps all of us, regardless of origin, want all the things we love in one place. It is, after all, a very infantile, pure-id imperative. How else to explain the sight of an eight year old, staring lovingly at an impeccable designed, marvelously appointed Kalashnikov filled with vodka?

NYC

Documenting the Unworthy

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Yesterday, while walking up Sixth Avenue near 8th Street, I chanced upon a specimen I thought had been left behind in the 1990s: Summer Homeless. It was a girl who appeared to be in her early 20s, with crunchy hair, slumped on a sidewalk elevator door while playing the accordion. A helpful sign scribbled on a piece of corrugated cardboard told passers-by what she was most in need of. (Sharpies were high on the list, for some reason.) On her wrist, a leash attached to the neck of a very large dog.

Once upon a time, these youngsters could be found everywhere from May to September, almost exclusively in the Village (East and West) and the Lower East Side. Ranging in age from mid-teens to mid-20s, they’d beg for change near Tompkins Square Park or Union Square, usually handing you an elaborate BS backstory that assured you the money would go no further than some dealer’s pocket. You could tell they were Summer Homeless and not For-Real Homeless by the large amount of sidewalk real estate they’d take up when begging, and the plaintive whine they’d adopt while giving their sales pitch. (For-Real Homeless folk are generally compact and subdued; at least the non-performing kind are.) If that didn’t tip you off, the fact that they were white and no older than 27 might.

If you ever went to a hardcore matinee at ABC No Rio, you probably bumped into a few of them on your way in as they indiscreetly chugged the cheapest, grossest tallboys imaginable (Crazy Horse or Laser, usually). Or if you took summer courses at/near NYU, you may have had to negotiate around their pleading carcasses on your way to class. You’d often see the same kids day after day, although occasionally one would admit defeat and tell you they needed dough to catch the next train back home to Long Island/Westchester/Connecticut. Once the autumn arrived, they’d all be gone, drifting back to the big plastic hassles of moms and schools.

I’m not sure if these folks ever truly disappeared. I may have just found myself in their favored haunts less and less over the last 10 years. I do know that until yesterday, it had been quite a long time since I’d seen someone begging on the street and immediately said to myself You live in Trumbull, don’t you?

Even so, I thought little of seeing this Summer Homeless once I’d seen her and recognized her for what she was, no more so than seeing an unusual car on the street (“Hey, a Citroen!”), before I reached my destination. But when I left said destination a short while later, I saw the same Summer Homeless girl being earnestly interviewed by a film crew of two, a cameraperson and a man with a mike.

To be fair, I didn’t hear their line of questioning. For all I know, they could have been asking her why she just didn’t go back Bryn Mawr like her parents wanted. Even so, I found this scene infuriating. After all, this city has thousands of legitimately homeless people in it–more so every day, I fear, given the economy. But rather than get the stories of any people experiencing actual hardship, these filmmakers decided to document the struggles of someone who can opt out of privation any time she wants to.

Do I know everything about this Summer Homeless person’s background, her story, what brought her to this corner? Of course not. But since she’s white and young and in America, she has it better than 99.9% of the planet right off the bat. Is it possible she has issues of some kind? Certainly. But in all likelihood, these issues pale in comparison to the actual problems of people who’ve been out on the street for years, who are genuinely mentally ill, and for whom hope is in short supply.

Having said all this, if someone decides she’s gonna spend a summer begging for change with her accordion and dog, fine. This doesn’t negatively impact my life in any way. But I do find it rage-inducing that some film crew is raptly capturing her every word while there was a real homeless man desperately looking for shade from a brutal summer sun at the Gray’s Papaya across the street. I mean, literally across the street. They could have seen this poor soul in their peripheral vision, if they had any.

If getting mad about this makes me a crabby old man, well…I became a crabby old man a long time ago, so screw it. Get off my lawn, Summer Homeless.