1) Just Missing the Train: You're walking into the station and you hear the rumble of the train coming in. You pull your Metrocard from your wallet and slide it through the slot - you start to run down the stairs, but all the people getting out are pushing their way up. Shit. You get to the 8th stair from the bottom and you hear the rush of air (the air breaks letting loose?) so you push to get there - you're at the 2nd stair from the bottom when you hear the bell - ding dong - SHIT! You run to the edge of the platform just to see the door close in your face...but then, perhaps somebody at the edge of the platform has held the door, so there are the two seconds of pure and utter hope - then that bastard starts pulling out. You just missed your train. Nothin' like it.
1a) The Disappointed Faces of Those People that Just Missed the Train: You're sitting on a Brooklyn Bound 4 train. You're reading a book, but you look up at what you think is Astor Place (is this a 6 or a 4?!?), cuz you're going to Court Street and - fuck - where the hell am I??? - but the doors are just now closing and you see a young woman running down the steps, and the doors close right in her face, but she still holds out hope that they'll reopen, but they don't, and you see her face, and it's miserable and disappointed and somehow so goddamn beautiful and you think,
Well, how's THAT action? And you love New York.
2) The Black Spot on the Ceiling at Grand Central Station: They cleaned up Grand Central, so that it now has fancy olive oil stores and a really fucking snazzy food mart where you can get just about any spice your sick and twisted practices require. They cleaned it up good. But, just to let you know what a fabulous job they did, they’ve left a black spot on the ceiling for comparison. The grime was said to be somewhere in the area of 90% cigarette residue.
3) Inherent and deep distrust of any woman named Molly.
4) An Asian chick in Washington Square Park playing something slow and sexy on a violin, while the hustlers hustle close by, below the radar and beneath the fast moving clouds.
5) The Conductor on the N Train Who Drags out His Announcements – He says: “This is a Coney Island Bound N Train; Lawrence Street is Next; Stand Clear of the Closing…………………Doors Please” At every stop, everyone on the train looks up, waiting to see how long it will take for “Doors Please”. Talk about inserting a singularity into a bureaucracy….
6) Meeting friends for an early breakfast – replete with many Bloody Marys - in the Village to watch various college students and twenty-somethings, wearing the same clothes they went out in the previous night, making the ritual walk of shame back to their own apartments.
7) Brooklyn. Specifically: Eating a Jamaican beef patty in East Flatbush on a sunny Tuesday morning; the bodega owners on 4th Avenue who won’t let you take a picture of their signs; mentally aiming at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge while playing golf with hoods at Dyker Beach; hanging out with the Jamaican kite-flyers in Prospect Park, while they smoke their hoolie rats and insult each other in a language thoroughly unfamiliar to you.
8) Graffiti. Big, fat chrome fill-ins that disturb complacent architecture and awe you with the sheer life that refuses to be ordered, and that can’t help but bubble up with shock and difference through any screen of sameness. When arriving or returning by land, you can always tell how close you are to NYC by the marked improvement of the graffiti.
9) Those Tourists that Mistakenly End Up in Brooklyn: They went on the Staten Island ferry to get a cheap view of the Statue of Liberty. They trudged down the stairs at the Whitehall – Southferry Subway stop, but they went down the wrong side, so now they’re on a train to Brooklyn. They have those haircuts and clothes that say “We’re not from around here” – maybe Dallas, maybe Minneapolis - and the husband is terribly misreading the easiest train map in the world to read, to wit:
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/maps/submap.htm(It may be useful here to recall item #1a). The wife – impossibly blonde – is busy holding the youngest kid back from acting a fool, somehow terrified that all the diligent workers who got on in the financial district are aiming to harm her family. You approach them and say “You don’t wanna go to Brooklyn, do you?” and they say – “No, we’re going the 53rd St.” So you tell them where to get off and where to go, and they thank you and thank you while you give your sidelong glances to the others on the car, who are all doing their level best to muffle their laughter.
10) Dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen and environs, nowhere near as tough as they were even ten years ago, and they were already gentrified then.
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