Who the fuck do you think I am?
October 3, 2008
Out To Lunch
It was about one-thirty in the afternoon and I was eating lunch in midtown manhattan along with every other asshole stuck working in midtown manhattan. After I’d finished eating, I had planned on reading a book until I decided it was time to go back to work, but instead I watched a small Asian man rolling a large suitcase down the sidewalk try to sell a Black man eating lunch in the backseat of a car some mysterious pale green rectangular box that he pulled out of a tote bag.
“No thanks,” the Black man tells him, looking around suspiciously, as if this is part of some kind of set-up and there are dozens of cops just standing silently around the corner. The Asian man puts the box away, stares at him for less than one second, and then pulls it back out. He is smiling. I wonder about what. The Black man laughs, tries to explain that the Asian man has misunderstood. The Asian man nods, puts that box away and pulls out a smaller, tan box. Oddly, the Black man is interested in this item, but still looking around as if something very serious could happen any second. The Asian man puts it away, and pulls out the green box again. “No, no, no, man, the other one, the other one!” the Black man says.
He looked at it as if it was something he hadn’t seen in a long time, as if seeing it brought forth some long buried memory of something that he had once seen in passing.
The Black man asks about the price of the small tan box, still looking at it with a sense of wonderment. The Asian man names him a price he likes, the Black man stands up, pulls cash out of his pocket, and trades the cash for the box. The Asian man rolls away, out my view, the satisfaction of a good sale beaming from his face.
The Black man stares at the box as he finishes the sandwich he was eating. He opens it up, and pulls out a small glass bottle, filled with a golden liquid. Ambrosia? I think, unhumorously. He drinks most of the bottle’s contents in one long chug, and when he puts his hand down, it looks as if he’s chewing something, but he’s actually just swishing some of the liquid around in his mouth. He spits it out into the gutter. “Ewww,” I accidentally say aloud, quietly. He finishes the rest of the bottle. No swishing this time. He gets out of the car and throws away the box and bottle in the trashcan on the corner. He comes back to the car, pulls out a plastic bottle of apple juice, finishes that, too, rests the bottle on the armrest in the backseat, closes the door, and walks away.
Peculiar indeed, I thought. I considered calling someone to tell them how weird I thought this situation was, but instead I went back to work. Some Jewish holiday was coming up, so a lot of people didn’t come that day, or were leaving early, so I was allowed to leave early, too. Being a non-practicing Protestant sure has its advantages, I thought, irreverently.
It had been raining all day, but I decided to walk home to my apartment in Chinatown anyway while it was stopped. The air was thick with humidity and fog made the tops of buildings disappear and for a little while every building in new york city was the same size and we had nothing to be cocky about. The empire state building only looks good in profile, anyway. From the ground, it doesn’t look like shit.
April 14, 2008
A Tuesday
It was a perfectly calm Tuesday afternoon. The sun was bright, the sky clear, the air warm on my skin. I was walking north on Third Avenue. I was excited. Good days were on the horizon. I felt this, completely, surely. A deep red-colored sedan pulled up next to me, but I didn’t think much of it. I like that color, I thought. I walked, it crawled, I walked, it crawled, I walked, it crawled. I noticed then that there was nobody in front of me on the sidewalk. I took a casual glance over my left shoulder just in time to see a moderately tall woman in a deep red-colored dress swing her purse into the right side of my head. As I fell to and collided hard with the cement, I pondered what could have possibly been in that bag that hurt my head so badly. As I was dragged into the backseat of the deep red-colored sedan, I pulled my hand up the side of my head, and felt a pulsing heat and stickiness that meant I was bleeding. I looked at my hand, now a bloody shade of deep red. I like that color, I thought as I lost consciousness.
I woke up tied to a dining room chair in somebody’s kitchen, possibly in New Jersey. My head pounded. I was pretty sure the bleeding had mostly stopped, but I also just might have lost all feeling in my head, so I wasn’t really sure. I heard the clacking of heels on hardwood coming my way. Just as a timer on top of the oven began to scream, that woman in the red dress, now also wearing a blue-and-white checkered apron, pulled a mitt over each hand, reached deep into the oven, and came back out with a tray of cookies. I thought I smelled chocolate, but they turned out to be oatmeal. As she walked toward me, holding the tray firmly with each hand, I realized that the timer was still ringing, I realized that I had absolutely no idea what was happening or why I might have been in New Jersey, I realized that I was really in a lot of pain, and I realized that I would not be able to complete any of my crucial errands unless this ended soon. She briefly stood still in front of me, right in front of me, and just before turning to walk back out of the room, she dropped the tray on to my lap.
January 30, 2008
“As you can see,
it reminds one of the parting of the Red Sea, or whatever.”
- a tour guide in an abstract expressionism exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, describing Morris Louis’ Alpha-Pi.
January 13, 2008
“I shot a cop.
Loan me $2000 and run away to Rome with me. The newspaper business is stale anyway.”
January 5, 2008
“I gotta tell you -
I really think I’m falling for you,” he claimed as he snorted the cocaine off her breast.
