He picked the guy up in front of Veselka, on the Lower East Side. Fat, bald, just past middle age. Clearly Eastern European, and completely drunk.
Hey, guy, where are you going?
No answer.
Guy?
Snoring from the back seat.
He pulled over the cab, came around back to wake the man up.
Hey buddy, where are you going?
“Take me New York!”
You’re already there.
“TAKE ME NEW YORK!!”
This is New York.
Confused: “What? How I get here?”
[I talk to taxi drivers. I know most New Yorkers don’t. But I’m curious to hear their stories, their thoughts on our city. Hence this new intermittent reporting series, relaying at least a bit of what I find out.]
The lady got in the back seat, thoroughly sloshed. It was shortly after 4:00 in the morning. They were at the southwest corner of fifty-fourth and eighth.
“Take me to fifty-fourth and eighth,” she slurred.
They went back and forth a few rounds – he explaining they were already there, she (increasingly vehemently) telling him to shut up and do his job.
So he drove across fifty-fourth, turned down Broadway, back onto fifty-third, then up eighth. A perfect one block circle.
Which corner?
“The near right, please,” she replied. Exactly where he’d found her.
She opened the door with some difficulty, leaned back to slip a twenty through the divider.
“Thanks,” she said. “And keep the change.”
Yesterday afternoon, I almost got in a fight with a bus driver. It wasn’t an MTA bus driver, but rather the driver of one of the big blue double-decker tour buses, the kind that loop out-of-town visitors past the city’s landmark.
The driver had stopped at a red light, then suddenly lurched forward into the crosswalk, almost killing a group of children crossing the street a few steps ahead of me. So, like any good New Yorker, I banged the bus’ front window with my fist, told the driver he was a fucking moron and that he’d almost killed the kids, and suggested he get his head out of his ass to watch where he was going.
This, apparently, didn’t sit well with the fellow. But as he was well strapped into his seat, I was two-thirds the way down the block before he managed to stick his head out the door to curse me in response.
Fortunately, I was at that point on my way back from brunch with Jess and her visiting sister Nina, and Jess managed to restrain me from returning to take up the driver’s stream of street-fight challenges. Still, I suspect it was largely Nina who gets the credit for defusing the fight. Because later that afternoon, once Nina had boarded the Amtrak back home to Boston, some giant fat lady shoved Jess on the sidewalk in front of a store, and it was all I could do to restrain her from a similar throw-down.
We’re small. But we’re feisty.
I lived. My fingers survived. As did my sense of fast-improving cooking prowess. In fact, the teacher – a former professor at Le Cordon Bleu – even pulled me aside with a couple of the other attendees, to assign more advanced homework for the week:
First, find a wine we buy frequently, and create a dish to complement it. Second, roam the Union Square Greenmarket in search of a vegetable we’d never before tasted, then use that as the basis of a second dish to pair with the first.
While reports on both should follow, tonight, according to Jess’ and my Tuesday tradition, we’re taking advantage of the freshest fish day of the week, and heading out for sushi. Not to Mizu (our usual stop, and some of the best bang for the sushi buck in the city), but to Matsuri.
The sushi there is a step down in quality, and a step up in price, but it’s also far closer to the Highline Ballroom, a concert venue where we’ll be catching Julian Velard and the Groove Collective later in the evening.
Tomorrow evening, I’m teaching at CrossFit NYC, my parents come into town, and one of Cyan’s investors is passing through. And the week gets busier from there.
Which makes me, as ever, wonder why – unlike most of Europe – we don’t get to take of the entire month of August. Or, in my case, even part of it. Because I could sure as shit use a break.
Twenty-seven went out with a bang. As the manager of Russian Samovar said, closing the bar on my Saturday night birthday party, “your friends, they drink like little horses.”
Which is true. But I fit right in, having drank like a horse this weekend myself, Thursday through Monday, evenings and afternoons.
Five straight days of dubious sobriety. After which, I woke up this morning, the second day of being twenty-eight, made it out the door largely because Jess literally dragged me behind her, and got on the subway thinking:
No, seriously, I’m really getting too old for this.
[I am a story repeater. Mainly because I have terrible, terrible memory for what I’ve said, when, and to whom. But also because some stories are too good to give up.
So, though I briefly blogged it in the past, though I recounted it on the first episode of my and Sarah Brown’s podcast, when Chicken Soup for the Twenty-Something Soul contacted me for a submission, I had no choice but to retell my infamous beans-throwing date.]
Shortly after I moved to New York City, I met a girl at an art gallery. She worked for the gallery, I was there for the opening of a friend’s show, and we hit it off making jokes about the snottier-looking patrons.
I asked her out on a first date. To play things safe, I pushed for early evening drinks. That way, if the date went badly, I could keep it short; if it went well, I could *still* keep it short, end on a high note, and leave her wanting more.
Fortunately, the first date – at a Gatbsy-esque bar in Midtown – went off without a hitch. So it was with high hopes that I headed to our second date, dinner at a trendy Mexican restaurant on the Upper East Side.
That date, too, started strong. Until the waiter didn’t bring us our basket of chips quickly enough.
“This is ridiculous,” the girl exclaimed. Ridiculous? We were talking about *chips*. No big deal.
But to her, apparently, it *was* a big deal. So, after two or three more chip-less minutes, she got up, found the waiter, and yelled. Then, for good measure, and at ever-escalating volume, she found the manager and yelled at him, too.
By this point, it was immensely clear that my date had absolutely zero relationship potential. I had somehow found the highest maintenance girl in all of New York City. But I vividly remember thinking, “I’m out of college, I’m an adult now; I should at least be civil, and make it through the rest of the evening.”
I thought, perhaps, that a round of margaritas might help calm things down.
I was wrong.
By now, of course, the waiter hated us. My date had yelled in his face, had gotten him in trouble with the manager. So, not surprisingly, he was a bit rude. To which, in response, my date was even ruder. Over the course of appetizers and a few more drinks, the situation continued to devolve.
The waiter delivered our main courses with a snide comment. My date said something in reply. Back and forth they went, until something he said crossed her final line.
My date picked up her plate of beans. And threw them at the waiter.
She was seated on my left, the waiter stood to my right. So the beans flew, as if in slow motion, right in front of my face.
I remember wondering, beans mid-air, what might happen on impact. Would the waiter punch her? Punch me? Throw something back, leaving me smack in the middle of a giant food fight?
With a splat, the beans hit, and the world caught up to speed. The waiter, however, didn’t. He stood there in shock, a mass of pintos slowly dripping down the front of his shirt.
My date stood up.
“Well, I never!” she declared. And she walked out.
This was a small restaurant – maybe twenty tables. By this point, every single patron was staring at me.
“Get out!” the manager bellowed. “And never come back.”
Mortified, I backed my way slowly across the floor, apologizing profusely – to the waiter, to the manager, to anyone still willing to make eye contact.
I opened the front door, stepped outside, and found the girl standing there, fuming.
“Well,” she said, “where are we going next?”
At which point, I turned, and started running down Lexington Avenue as fast as I could. And I still remember thinking, finally looking back over my shoulder a few blocks later, “well, at least she doesn’t have my phone number.”
I can always tell I’ve gone too long since breakfast when the wafting deep-fryer fumes from the Taco Bell just outside my office window start to smell really, really good.
Leasing a car:
– Lease, Honda Civic: $225
– Auto Insurance: $265
– Garage: $280
– Gas: $100
Monthly Total: $870
Zipcar:
– 4 x all day Saturday & Sunday: $680
– 8 x 3 hours weekday: $190
Monthly Total: $870
A month or two back, walking with Jess through Central Park, we passed through Time Warner Center on our way back home. And as we needed to buy a few ingredients for dinner, we headed downstairs to Whole Foods.
A mere eight blocks from our apartment, that Whole Foods had still, previously, seemed needlessly far to go for groceries. But, perusing produce and inspecting butchery, it became clear that Whole Foods’ foods were indeed wholly better, quite possibly worth the trip.
So, since then, we’ve been buying food there. But not all our food, and not our non-food items. Because, for many basics, the price difference for the same thing at any of our more local supermarkets seems too offensively large for me to stomach. And also because, for countless other items, such as plastic cups or Coke, the only available Whole Foods versions appear to be made entirely of hemp.
Of course, as soon as you diverge from the American supermarket model, from the idea that the best way to buy food is to have it all collected in one central place, you instead begin sliding down the slippery slope of preferring quality, and of consequently convincing yourself that shopping three different places for a meal isn’t any crazier than two, which isn’t so much saner than four, then five, etc.
Pretty soon, aided and abetted by the (aside from this weekend) warming weather and your central location, you find yourself, Sunday afternoon, not only at Whole Foods but also the Food Emporium and Amish Market and Duane Reade and that place with the good cookies on Ninth Avenue and the mochi ice cream you can pick up the next afternoon at the place near your office and also don’t forget to stop at the Stiles Farmer’s Market while it’s open because they have such great local produce for so cheap.
And the worst part is, it self-reinforces. Because, after all that walking around, you’re so completely starved that the foods you’ve assembled from across the City taste like – whether or not they really, actually are – the best you’ve ever eaten.
About a month ago, Jess bought a white plaster planter shaped like a lion off of eBay, which (in case she’s reading this site) I totally, totally love, despite any earlier comments I may have inadvertently made to the contrary.
Anyway, it became pretty clear that the planter looked naked without a plant, so, also about a month back, we headed down to the Chelsea Garden Center, which actually isn’t in Chelsea, but in a strange shed of a building way, way out in the westernmost reaches of the Garment District. And, while we were there buying a small Dragon’s Blood tree (which, sadly, is far less Harry Potter than the name might imply) it also occurred to me, looking at the bags of potting soil, that I hadn’t repotted my little jade tree in the five or six years I’d been living in New York.
The jade tree came from a clipping of a much larger jade tree in the atrium of my parent’s house in California, which in turn came from a clipping of another much larger jade tree in the atrium of the house of my mother’s graduate advisor at Stanford. And, given its long and illustrious lineage, I figured my jade plant was well worth a bag of potting soil. So, I bought one, and handily replanted the jade.
After which, I was still left with 95% of a very large bag of planting mix. I discovered at about the same time that I had left a clove of garlic on our counter long enough (about this, I am not proud) that it had actually started to sprout. So, I took a couple of plastic containers, filled them with the leftover mix, and planted three of the sprouting cloves.
And, lo and behold, they started to grow. Excited about this – as it brought back happy memories of the farm on my elementary school (which is a whole other blog-able set of stories, actually) – I then headed onto Amazon, and purchased an herb garden planting kit, hoping to round out the blossoming garlics with oregano, basil, rosemary, dill, and anything else that might thrive at windowsill.
And though we still need to find another, hopefully non-lion (not that I don’t love, love, love that lion if you’re still reading Jess!) planter to contain it all, and though it still has a bit more growing to do before the tiny plants would well handle the hop into new plantered soil, my little garden is growing. Bolstered by the jade’s strong example, I don’t doubt it will continue to thrive.
Which, until the spring comes and I can once again wander through Central Park, is as close to pretending I live somewhere far greener and more temperate than this city that I can get.
