Bible Girl Goes West

The Borders by Penn Station was having a closing-business sale, and I walked in, hoping to pass the time before my train and to buy more books I have no room for. I picked up a couple Saramago books in Spanish and headed to the Bibles section of the second floor, in the northeast corner of the store.

The Bibles aisle in that bookstore is no more than a couple feet wide, the window to the street on one side and a few Bibles on the other. I made my way to the end of it, and looked up and down for the Hebrew letters of the Masoteric OT, passing in front of a girl while blurting an "excuse me."

"Are you looking for a Bible?" the girl said. "Yes, but I can't seem to find it," I responded, a little confused at first. We began to talk. We exchanged a few sentences about our churches and the ESV. I asked if she worked around there, and she said she had just left her job around Union Square today. I was encouraged when I found out she lived in Queens, not too far from me. After our exchange, she said "well, nice meeting you," to which I responded in like manner, and the she walked away.

I stood there, staring up and down the Bibles bookshelf. After regaining consciousness, I kept on looking for the old Bible, and then threw a quarter in the air, thinking tails would excuse my hesitation. It fell on heads, and I interpreted it as lots saying I should get her number.

I saw her browsing around while heading out. I timed my walking so we would be standing together at the escalators and have a minute to talk on our way to the first floor. I said "hello, again" and then noticed she was holding flowers. She said they were for her sister, and then I chit-chatted a little more.

We got down to the first floor. I said to her, "I'm leaving, but I'd like to get your number, and we can get some coffee." She said she was sorry, but she was moving to L.A. the following week. "Ah, so that's why you left your job..." I managed to say, feeling deflated.

She said "I'm Lydia," I gave her my name, and we shook hands. I walked away, confused about how to feel, and didn't look back.

First CwS of the Year: The Line at Pommes Frites

NYE Midnight passed and, after we got our [alcoholic] fix, we headed to St. Marks to do some karaoke. After a couple hours of yelling, we got hungry. We headed to the Pommes Frites a couple blocks away, and stood at the end of a long line, in what ended up being the last call for [belgian] fries with mango chutney.

I left the line. My friends stayed. I stood by the side, thinking how much self-restraint I had exhibited this year so far. I wasn't drunk, I wasn't indulging in discretionary spending and I wasn't eating fatty foods. I stood absorbed in self-righteousness until the sound of my friends [verbally] fighting with a stranger caught my attention.

-My Friend 1: [...] I've been waiting here for a long time. I did not just cut the line.
-Random Guy from the line #1: You can curse all you want. Just because you like to curse a lot does not make you right.

After my friend and Random Guy #1 argued for a while, I interjected and took my friends' side. Eventually, the guy in front of my friends said that the guy behind us was in fact the rightful owner of that spot in the line, and after a few more almost-belligerent words, my friends gave the place to the guy.

Now, the guy behind Random Guy #1—we shall call him Random Guy #2—started claiming that he was supposed to be in front of my friends too. We all got angry. This guy was just messing with us, but his laughing didn't please us. He started winking at me; I called him gay; his friend interjected and asked me to stop calling his friend names.

We left the line after my friend got the [belgian] fries and we ate some while walking to the next bar.

Subway Antisemite

I took the 6-line on Friday night, trying to get to Penn Station from the Upper West Side. It was late at night, and the trains weren't coming very often. In my side of the tracks, there were only a handful of people, one of which randomly started talking to me as we both got in the train and he sat right across from me.
The train started going down from 103rd St. via Lexington. We started talking about life, about how it sucked to wait for the train on a Friday night, and how at least we got to have a few drinks before going home. I eventually picked up from the guy that he wasn't a native English speaker, so I asked him where he was from, and he ended up being a Puerto Rican hotel doorman from a midtown hotel. "Cool," I thought, and we kept on talking, this time in Spanish.
I don't remember exactly how, but we started talking about Jews. Maybe it was because of the drinks I'd been having, or because we both had Jewish friends. (Shout out to David!). He eventually started telling me how Jews were bad people and how they killed Jesus.
I started getting a little uneasy as the train got to 51st St. I wanted to explain to the guy that Jews didn't really kill Jesus, but that the Romans did, but at the same time I wanted to get the hell out of there. I started telling him that crucifiction was actually a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one, but as soon as I said "Roman," he started saying things like, "yea, man, I'm a Roman Catholic." We just left Times Square as he started saying that, and saying "those Jews, they're bad people, they always choose their own over you, no matter whether you're friends with them."
I had one more stop to try to explain to the guy that Jews were as ethnocentric as Puerto Ricans or Koreans, but as we neared 33rd St., my stop, I thought "fuck it" and left.
Sometimes 70 streets aren't enough time to explain inter-ethnic relations and religious history to a drunk Catholic, especially while a little drunk oneself.

Subway Conversation

The 7-train at rush hour is a "fucking standing Benetton ad," to borrow from the white guy in the Mets shirt who was standing a few inches away from me. My car was full of white people in Mets shirts, and Latinos and Asians going back to Queens after a day of hard work.
I was sweating and, from the smell of the train, I could tell everyone else was. I avoided people's eyes by keeping mine fixed in my New Yorker and, everytime the doors opened, I hoped somebody would get off the train. It didn't happen. A girl walked in at the first stop out of Manhattan and she stood right next to me.
We were holding on to the same post, and she asked, "Is this the train to Jackson Heights?." "I don't know, but there's a map right there," I said. I sounded like a douche, without meaning to, so then I said, "but what's your stop? Maybe I can help you."
She wanted to go to 74th St., I think, so I told her to switch to the local line on Queensboro Plaza. She thanked me. Then I started to talk to her about other things, trying to practice my people skills. I started with the first obvious question that came to my mind: "so you're not from around here?," and it ended up she was from around, but never really took the Subway to get around. We kept on talking about other things, like the recent death of Michael Jackson and that I used to watch his movies as a kid, that she was going to Berkeley College and that my college education didn't really pay the way I wanted to, and that I knew only two words in Bengala, which ended up being foods (I learned them at a restaurant).
As we neared Queensboro Plaza, I wasn't sweating so much. Maybe I was keeping my cool. She asked me for my e-mail, which she wrote down in the iPhone, and we parted ways. I've been checking my inbox every few hours since that day, but only work mail comes in.
Sometimes I wish more Subway people would get in there more often.

Jamaica, Queens

After sucking at a job interview and wasting over an hour at the Social Security Administration, I walked 15 blocks to the bus stop. I walked up Jamaica Avenue, dodging pedestrians and snow-shovelers, and stepping on the remnants of Sunday night's blizzard.
My bus stop was in front of a Baskin Robbins. A Q110 bus was parked there, and two people were talking inside. I paid no mind to it.
As I looked into the horizon for my Q31 to come, some lady started talking to me. "Just couldn't take it," she said. "Excuse me?" I replied, and she explained to me how she was kicked out of the parked Q110 when the bus driver went crazy. "Some people just can't take it, you know? This economy, not knowing where the next meal's gonna come from, you know? Just too much pressure."
She told me how she always had two jobs. Now, she had one at the Postal Office and, now that she was 65, was also going to cash in a Social Security check. Over three-thousand dollars in total. "I'm blessed."
Another Q110 came, and she took it. The Q31 came a few minutes later, and I took it home. The parked Q110 and its driver did not move.

Chinatown Bill

Bill was sitting right by the entrance of the Chinatown McDonald's, asking pedestrians for change. He was wearing a navy-blue sweatshirt and black sweatpants, folded where his right-leg prosthesis should have been. He sat confidently, with his left leg stretched, his prosthesis to his right and with a black beanie with some pennies in front of him. Most of the crowd walked right past his heavily-urban-accented requests for change. I was waiting for someone, so I stood just a couple meters away from him, looking at my cell-phone and at the white-tourists in search of cheap, fake Louis Vuitton bags.
I lit up my lucky (last) cigarette while I was waiting for my lunch partners. Bill asked me for a smoke. I told him it was my last one, but that he could finish the half that was left. He took it and thanked me. I kept standing there. I got there about 20 minutes early, and I couldn't just leave. A few minutes later, a middle-aged Chinese man passed by and gave Bill a pack of cigarettes, and he offered me one. I didn't take it because I didn't feel safe smoking something from a beggar, but I thanked him and gave him a light.
We started talking and he told me about a Chinese lady who was doing yoga at Columbus Park a few blocks from where we were. She had given him a hot plate of rice. "I love that Chinese lady," Bill told me. "If anyone messes with her, I'm gonna kill them! I love that Chinese lady." He smiled. "And I love rice."
Bill told me other things too, but I couldn't understand much. He spoke as if to himself, with a really Black-stereotypical vocabulary and saying "You kno' I sayin'?" every other sentence. From what I could make up, he grew up in New Jersey and lost his leg in a war about a year ago (which war he wouldn't say), in a place where there were a lot of Black people. He also told me he wasn't a thief, and to underline his point he said he could have taken my stuff if he had wanted to. "I just sit here and ask people for change," he said. "I don't bother nobody."
My people arrived a few minutes later and I told him I had to go. We shook hands and I left thinking I would bring him some food on my way back from lunch. After I had eaten dim sum to my heart's content, Iwalked across the street from the McDonald's on my way back to the Canal Street Subway station. I didn't stop by to say hi to Bill and I didn't bring him food.

Hookah-ing Up Astoria

I've become a cheap bastard in New York. My money supplies have been reduced to the point I have to put foreign currency and maxed-out cards in my wallet, just to feel like a functioning member of Capitalism. I've been surviving on pasta, stolen Wireless and cigarettes.
To save money, I've been hanging out in my place with friends and beers. A couple days ago, we decided to change things a little, so we went to a 5-dollar hookah coffee shop in Steinway Street, in Astoria.
The place looked like a run-down house. Some Egyptian men were chatting in there, and they greeted us as we walked in, smoke coming out of their mouths. "Hello," they would say, and as I asked them how they were doing, they smiled like fruit-flavored chimneys.
A man dressed in a yellow shirt, who looked like the owner, sat in the table next to us with his friend. "Hi, how are you doing?" I said, and he said he was doing good. He said he was from Egypt, and his friend recommended us the apple-flavored hookah, so we got it.
"So, why did you come here?" I asked him, and he started talking in what I presume was Arabic. I kept on smoking my apple-flavored hookah, letting the bubbles rise. No Arabic came out of my mouth, just apple-smelling smoke. I turned to talk to the people in my table.
As we were leaving, his friend told us to come back anytime. "We will," I said, and we stepped out into a street with parked yellow cabs and smoking coffee shops. I jumped over a few trash bags to get into my friend's car, and we took the expressway out of there.