This morning, I ran into the man with the spitting toothbrush from a previous post in the same restroom. He was stripped down to his pants and had his office shirt and tank top stretched out on the two available radiators. "Hey, ya gotta keep warm, right?" He told me though I hadn't asked.
I enjoy access to a rather large men's room near City Hall, comprising 8 stalls and an equal number of urinals. If the stalls still have doors, the locks have been removed. The urinals themselves don't do much to inspire any privacy either, as there are no dividers or splash guards between them. As a matter of fact, the lock on the door to the entrance of the men's room itself has been removed, leaving a large round hole in the door. For discretion's sake, a wad of municipal-grade paper towels is usually stuck in the space--to discourage peekers, I suppose.
A unique feature of this men's room is a one-foot high marble step in front of the urinals. In order to pee, one must literally step up to the task. Of course, once a gentleman steps up, he puts himself squarely into the frame of the large, unfogged window with views into his colleagues' offices. But sometimes, the audience is right there in the room with you. On one occasion, I was greeted by a messenger eating a large submarine sandwich while seated on the step before the urinals. Another man was washing his hands at the sink. "A guy's got to get it when he can," was what the messenger told me by way of explanation. But get what?
Recently, when I had to use the men's room, I immediately recognized that someone was in Stall No. 3--one with a door--because I could hear him talking in a low voice. As this is not as unusual as it might sound--gentlemen often talk on their cell phones while sitting on the toilet, at least where I work--I stepped up to a urinal. Behind me, I could hear a low mumbling, as well as the occupant's grunts from straining. I couldn't make out what he was saying, nor could I imagine, given this bathroom serenade, that the person on the other end could either. I wondered who he was speaking to: His wife? His mother? A buddy? The help desk, perhaps?
Soon, however, the grunts became more uniform, more evenly spaced, and there was some moaning, and something that sounded like a sob. As the room is large, these noises were bouncing off of the walls. My first impression was that this fellow was suffering from a particularly acute case of IBS. But his mumbling continued and began to take a more distinct shape. I heard a series of yeahs and then a "like that." Was he talking to his bowels? Cheering them on? Encouraging a rally?
Eventually, the moaning and affirmations became so loud and persistent that I just had to turn and look. In the space beneath the stall door four boot-shod feet could be seen: two facing the door and two facing the toilet. It was 1pm on a Monday afternoon. Suddenly the messenger's remark became clear.
As a result, I decided to start using the men's room on the next floor down. Directly below my usual comfort station, this men's room also displayed similar features: the step, the wad of paper towels, even the absence of locks and expectation of privacy. When I entered it the other day, I saw a large man brushing his teeth with an electric tooth brush. This seemed normal enough. But when I stepped up to a urinal and opened my pants, he turned to me and said, "I like these."
"Pardon?" I asked, looking at the man, who was now holding his still vibrating toothbrush up for display, which was spraying spittle and tooth gel all over his shirt and tie, as well as across the mirror above the sink.
"Electric toothbrushes," he explained.
I only nodded, relieved that he was only talking about the toothbrush. It's not my habit to talk while I go to the bathroom.
"This one is from Crest. It was cheap. I got it at the Duane Reade," he continued, still spraying gel and spit. I noticed that his lips were coated with a thick layer of blue gel. "The other ones are just too expensive," he added before putting the brush back into his gel-smeared mouth.
I didn't know what to do, so I just said, "Yeah, I have a Sonic Care, and it was really expensive."
He again stopped brushing, looked at me and pulled the vibrating brush from his mouth, sending more spray across the room and his hopelessly stained necktie and shirt. "That was foolish," he said. "You shouldn't let people take advantage of you."
While riding the train this morning, an older man in a business suit removed his earbuds and asked me, "Excuse me, are you into music?" He pointed at my book. I was rereading Nicholas Dawidoff's In the Country of Country, which is mostly excellent except for when Dawidoff slips into a narrative style similar to Weylan Jennings voiceovers for The Dukes of Hazzards.
I responded, "Sure, I guess." I was, after all, reading a specialized book about country music.
Satisfied, the man, with a smug look on his face replaced his earbuds, ending our conversation.
But why? I should have said, "No, cars are my thing."
“I used to be like you,” said an older gentleman standing beside me on the corner of Park Avenue and 34th Street with a crowd of other people waiting to cross the street. His voice was gruff, as was his attire: It was near 80 degrees and he was wearing a filthy flannel shirt and dark green work pants. His matted gray hair and beard were stained yellow from cigarette smoke, and though it was just 12:30 in the afternoon, his body reeked of beer and sweat.
“Pardon me?” I responded when I realized that he was speaking to me.
“I said ‘I used to be like you’, trapped in your office all day like a rat in a cage, shuffling papers and kissing some bastard’s fat ass,” he clarified.
Rat in a cage? Is this the image I project? For the most part, I enjoy my job and I like my office, which is casual and, though fast-paced, creative. “Oh…” I let my response trail off as I stepped into the street with the crowd as the Walk signal gave us the go ahead. But, despite having no laces in his worn out work boots, the gentleman kept apace.
“Now I do whatever the fuck I want!” he said triumphantly with a hoarse giggle, which caused him to launch into a coughing fit. “And I don’t have to wear no suit and tie, neither!”
Neither do I. Though I usually wear a sports jacket, I don’t have to. I can wear pretty much whatever I like. Why, all summer long I worked beside a young Russian programmer whose daily uniform consisted of a sports bra and mini skirt and a guy in a white linen yoga outfit and sandals. “OK…” I again tried to end the conversation there with just the slightest acknowledgement and a quickening of pace.
“Where you going now? Back to your cage?” He was taunting me!
“Lunch.” I don’t know why I responded. Perhaps because he was still hurrying alongside me and I was beginning to feel a bit threatened.
“Oh, ‘lunch’,” he said sarcastically. “What do you get, like 20 minutes? Me? I’ve got all fucking day to do whatever the hell I want!” A new round of laughter sparked another coughing fit, this time causing him to stop hunched over on the next corner trying to catch his breath while spitting out gobs of phlegm on the sidewalk amid a new crowd of rats rushing back to their cages and staring at him doing exactly what he wanted to do.
When a poet, describing a woman, begins:
“I was walking down the street and my corset was pinching,”
Of course, here the “I” is not to be understood directly.
That is, it means that beneath the woman hides the poet.
I’m only pointing this out to be helpful:
The poet, after all, is a man –– with a beard, even.
––Sasha Chernyi (To a Critic)
An incident on a trip home a few weeks back had led me to believe that I was turning into a woman. But another incident on a recent business trip to Anaheim convinced me that I might actually be turning into an old woman instead.
A few weeks ago while traveling between Newport, Rhode Island, and New York City, E fell sick. We had just deposited the rental at the New Haven Amtrak Station and would finish the journey by train. So I hurried to find her a ginger ale at a station store before our train left. While approaching the register, the young lady behind the counter called out to me: "Ma'am," but I didn't respond because I don't consider myself a ma'am. "Ma'am," she tried a bit louder. And finally a third time, "Ma--!" But she stopped short, realizing her mistake. However, rather than correcting herself with a "Sir!" She just stared at my face as I presented the bottle of ginger ale for purchase, the way that someone might when they suddenly realize that they've encountered a crossdresser, which I am not.
Then, while killing time in the lobby of the Anaheim Marriot while attending a recent conference, I was approached by a woman who must have been in her early 70s. I was reading the New York Times and felt like a businessman in my black chinos, blue dress shirt and dark sportcoat amid the crowd checking in for a weekend at Disney. "Anne? Anne?" the woman called shyly. "Excuse me, Anne?" I looked up at her and she immediately saw her mistake. "I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed putting her hand to her chest to signal that she was properly mortified for having made such a mistake. "I thought you were a friend I haven't seen in 25 years!" She apologized again and retreated into the Disney crowd to continue her search for her friend who may or may not be a 70-year-old drag king.
The first morning I woke up in New York City, I heard some things that I hadn’t expected to hear: the sound of a rooster crowing at the crack of dawn and then that of several horses trotting past the window of my new street-level apartment. Before I moved from Newport, Rhode Island, two nights earlier, I had heard the distinct sound of gunfire—a sudden shot piercing the night, as they say, and another retort, presumably sounding in reply. But this morning in New York’s East Village, I was hearing barnyard animals. A few hours later I would learn that the crowing rooster was the neighborhood cock fighting champion and the horse sounds originated from mounted policemen en route to nearby Tompkins Square Park to surround the crowd of topless lesbians and overdressed drag queens assembled there for the annual Wigstock festival—another thing I hadn’t expected. In August 1988, a riot was incited in Tompkins Square when the police charged a crowd protesting an action to expel the homeless from the park. In the years that followed, any event taking place there was accompanied by fears of commemorative protests and actions that might spark another riot. So this is why, four years later, mounted policemen outfitted in riot gear had surrounded the park: to make sure that the revolution wasn’t started by a bunch of men in dresses and women with no shirts on...
“Wait! Hold up! I said, ‘hold up!’” a man was yelling desperately from outside of the public bus as it was pulling away from the curb. And, surprisingly, the driver complied with the forceful request and waited for the man as he raced across the commuter Park-n-Ride parking lot to catch the bus that slowly wound its way along Rhode Island’s southern coast from Newport to the Kingston train station, where I would board a train for New York.
“Didn’t you hear me?” said the man, out of breath and sounding a bit angry as he climbed aboard. He was wearing an army field jacket over his slim frame and his shaggy salt-and-pepper hair was held in check by a red bandana tied over his head. An unruly mustache rested above his lip and he wore a small gold earring in his left ear—by all appearances, a pirate on the high seas of the Rhode Island public transit system!
“I heard you,” replied the driver casually. “I stopped, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but only after I yelled and had to run all the way over here,” the man, who appeared to be in his late forties, said testily, as he pulled a yellow form from his military surplus coat. “I just got out of jail, and they said that I could get a free ride with this. Well, can I?”
It has been a long day. I just now found myself standing in front of a urinal in my office's men's room with my Metro Card in my hand. Let's hope that there is no equal but opposite reaction when it comes time for me to swipe on the crosstown bus...
[UPDATE: For those of you who expressed concern, the only thing that I *whipped out* on the bus was my Metro Card. So there were no unconcious exposures.]
I recently received the happy news that I had been awarded a writing residency from a New York City cultural organization to support a new translation project. In the notification letter, I was cheerfully informed that the award was the result of a last minute opportunity that had just fallen into the lap of the organization--which usually only supports visual artists--and a hastily organized pilot program for writers had been created. Despite this good news, I know I had applied for this very same residency earlier in the year and had been summarily rejected. According to this new letter, however, I had now been accepted into the new program based on the strength of my *recent* application. Choosing to ignore the details of the freshness of this program, I was pleased to report, as directed, two days later for orientation.
At the meeting, our small group of excited writers were presented with strict contracts and a keys to our respective studios. According to the terms of the residency, each writer would be provided with an office, keys to a restroom, and a "community of peers in a field otherwise known for its solitary labor" in exchange for a guarantee that we would utilize the space and make “substantial progress” on a writing project. There would be no stipend, as the original residency information had advertised, but at least we would have "opportunities to collaborate" should we be seeking relief from the "isolation" and "loneliness" inherent in a life "dedicated to the writerly path."
I spent the evening after orientation celebrating a lonely writer-friend's birthday, and there were one or two other alienated writers, none of whom were connected with the residency, suffering along side us in their own sad and lonely worlds. Now, thanks to this new residency, I spend my evenings alone in an overheated office space with water stains running down the walls, trying my best to protect my laptop from the plaster falling from the ceiling. And because there is no cell phone or Internet reception in the space, I can't alert the cultural organization that there is no chair to sit on at my desk or that they had supplied the wrong key for the restroom door, rendering the toilet useless and any long-term work impossible. Still, it is comforting for me to know that I am no longer suffering alone, that somewhere down the hall and scattered across the building, there are at least five or six other writers unable to get a call through to either a friend or loved one or even to concentrate on their work.
While lunching in Madison Square Park this afternoon, I was approached by man holding a sign strongly suggesting that I “REPENT NOW FOR THE END IS NIGH.” These prophetic if archaic words were spelled out in more contemporary and puffy cloud-like letters decorated in red, white, and blue and sprinkled with stars. He stood directly in front of me for several moments with a blank look on his face intoning the gist of the sign and throwing in a bit more Old Testament-style rhetoric for clarification before moving on to the people seated beside me on the next bench.
Perhaps this doomsayer meant well, but I have to say that I resented this lunchtime intrusion. Not only was it a beautiful sunny afternoon, but I was enjoying a refreshing and cooling breeze and iced coffee while quietly reading a book my girlfriend had given me for my recent birthday. As soon as I had arrived at work this morning, things were stressful, with new problems arising as their forebears were resolved. The idea of lunch in the park seemed the perfect respite for someone who had worked hard and diligently all morning long and who had performed the work he was being paid to do to the best of his ability under tense circumstances. Now I was being told to apologize in a rather extreme way. But what had I done wrong?
I surveyed a mental catalog of my morning’s activities to see if there was some act I had committed worthy of contrition: My cat had awoken me at 4:30 by licking my armpit and, try as I might, I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I started reading the book my girlfriend had given me. After about an hour of this, I was again sleeping. I woke up again at 6:30 and decided to go to the gym. There I performed thirty minutes of cardio and subjected myself to the weight-training machines for another half an hour. I returned home, showered, dressed, cleaned Dreamka’s litter box, took out the trash and recycling, and headed to work. As I mentioned earlier, work was stressful. Under a tight deadline, I edited and produced two stories for an online news publication, answered numerous work-related e-mails, and endured a frustrating hour on the phone trying to convince a technology-challenged reader that his e-mail wasn’t necessarily the World Wide Web. And while I don’t think I was successful in this, I hardly feel the failure worth repenting. As a matter of fact, the phone conversation had run well beyond when I had planned to take lunch, yet I stuck with it until the end. Had this been some trial proctored by a higher power all would have to agree that I had passed with flying colors. Still, my peaceful lunch had been nonetheless interrupted by this sign-waving glass-is-half-empty type of person.
While, I didn’t believe a word of what his prediction, the pessimist’s approach had given me pause. Why the puffy American-inspired font to warn of the fast-approaching Rapture? If the end of the world was indeed upon us and our souls would soon be trembling before the Lord in his Kingdom of Heaven, why would anyone choose to align himself with the United States? And what’s with the Old Testament language? Who uses words like “nigh” anymore. Frankly, if I was trying to convince people that the Lord’s wrath would shortly forthcoming, I would use a more popular turn of phrase or produced a report like “Alpha and Omega: Lessons Learned, Next Steps” or perhaps have gone with something along the lines of Def Leppard’s Armegeddon It:
Yeah, but are you gettin' it?
Armageddon it
Ooh, really gettin' it?
Yes armaggedon it
C'mon get it
I mean, a catchy song broadcast over the radio or a glib contemporary statement presented through a carefully orchestrated press strategy to the appropriate audience would likely convince a lot more people than this sloppy bit of guerilla marketing. Besides, how was the tourist couple from Korea beside me supposed to understand specialized doomsday jargon like “repent” and “nigh”?
