Up until now, I haven’t spoken to anyone on the streets, except to ask for directions. And no one has spoken to me. But since my heroic encounter with the rat, something inside me has changed. People on the streets must sense that I am a real New Yorker—someone with street cred, someone worth talking to now.
I’m waiting on the F train to go into Manhattan to see a movie. I’m fairly confident I’m going the right way, but then again who knows. When the train buzzes by with an “out of service” sign, a guy next to me says, “Did you see that? There was no notice the train was going to be out of service.”
I’m surprised someone is addressing me. “But it was going toward Manhattan, right?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
“Good, I’m just learning the subways,” I say.
“Really? Where you from?” he asks, sensing a chink in my armor.
I tell him I’m from California and thinking of moving to New York. People find that odd. Almost no one moves from California to New York. It’s the other way around. But then again, I’m an other-way-around kind of person.
“Do you need a tour of the city?” he asks.
“Maybe, I might,” I say.
He asks for my phone number, and I, feeling rather brave after my rat encounter, give it to him. The man’s name is Kennedy. He’s tall, skinny and olive-complected, maybe a few years younger than me, and not bad looking.
“So, what are you doing now?” he asks.
“I’m going to a movie,” I say,
“I’d go with you, but I have to work, “he says.
“What do you do for work?” I ask.
He looks away for a split second and then back at me. “I’m a broker. I work on Wall Street.”
I cringe. My ex-husband was in “finance”. Now he’s likely going to jail for securities fraud.
Kennedy takes his yellow-tinted sunglasses off his face and places them on top of his head. “I’m sorry. A lady likes to look a gentleman directly in the eyes,” he says.
“Well, sometimes a lady likes to look a gentleman in the eyes. Not always,” I say, flashing back to William with his black, black eyes boring into me.
We board the next train together and I tell him about my horrendous rat experience. “Here’s my stop. I’ll call you and I’ll make sure there are no rats wherever we go,” he says.
Another Wall Street broker making promises he can’t keep. When he calls, I won’t answer. He exits the train and I give him the thumbs up as the doors close behind him.
The movie I see is Vengeance—a dark comedy thriller about a man, who after having a series of one-night stands, accidentally wreaks vengeance on himself. After, I go off in search of pizza. I walk into a small pizzeria, and a short, Italian man making a fresh pizza crust wipes his hands on his apron, bustles out from behind the counter and shakes my hand.“ Thank you for coming in dahling! So happy you’re here!”
I’m happy someone is happy to see me, so I sit down next to the counter to eat my pizza. The man comes from a long line of pizza makers, and complains about Midwestern tourists eating Papa John’s Pizza.
“What are they thinking?! They come all the way here to eat crap!!”
It’s tragic—these tourists who have made it to this holy grail of pizza and eat fake cheese and frozen pizza crusts. It’s like journeying Mecca, but then facing the wrong way to pray.
On my way to the subway, I smell the man on the street before I see him and veer around him. He’s about six feet tall and is standing with a wooly green blanket covering him from head to toe. Everyone else walks around him, but I stand there admiring him. He’s taken the next great step forward from cowering in bed with the covers pulled over his head to standing fully blanketed in plain view. Good for him. He is a world of one—cocooning himself to become who knows what. I want to tap him on the shoulder, crawl inside with him, and ask him what are you doing? What are you thinking?
But I keep going and end up in Trader Joe’s, packed in with a bunch of other shoppers like sardines in the produce section. A woman next to me holds a hardened peach high in the air, and asks the cosmos, “how do I know when they’re ripe?” I can’t help myself from answering. “None of those are ripe,” I say. “Leave them on the counter or put them in a paper bag. But don’t refrigerate them. They’ll never ripen like that.”
“Wow, thank you,” the woman says.
I see she is choosing the 79-cent conventional peach over the 89-cent organic one.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Get organic. The conventional peaches are covered in poison. Trust me. I used to be a farm reporter.”
“Wow,” I’m learning so much, she says, and discards the conventional fruit.
I, who have been lonely for conversation—or let’s face it, a little high on edibles, continue on. “Also, don’t buy conventional celery or apples. They’re poison. Anything you eat with the skin, buy organic.”
She nods her head vigorously in agreement, a happy convert to my organic way of thinking. On my way back, an old man in a wheelchair, who looks my dad’s age shakes a cup half-full of coins. He says nothing, and I say nothing as I walk by.
I am oddly happy in New York—much happier than I’ve been in a long time. But just like everywhere else, whether it’s a small town full of friends and neighbors or a big city where I know no one, the universal sense of loneliness seeps in. I go back home and sit on my fire escape as dusk settles and the fireflies come out. I look over into my neighbors’ backyards and watch them preparing their evening barbeques and tending to impossibly tall, eight-foot high rose bushes.
I think back to the man on the street cocooned in his blanket. Maybe I could join him? We could start a whole movement of blanketed people in the city—people cocooned inside themselves waiting to become something else. I smile at the idea, but I wouldn’t want to intrude on him.
I climb back in from the fire escape and close the window and watch the fireflies outside lighting up the sky.