Bodies on the Train

A Puerto Rican man on A train.  I know he’s Puerto Rican because of the flag on his kerchief.  It’s Saturday night, late into the night.  Everyone is tired but no one has thrown up on the train yet. It’s a ritual on Saturday nights on the A train. 

My arms are sticky from making drinks all night for other people.  I could taste all the margaritas I made rise up in my throat. There’s a roll of cash hidden in my pants pocket.  I’m worried about the walk home after I get off the train.  Anything can jump out at you at night in Brooklyn. 

The Puerto Rican glares at another man who sits ten feet away from him.

“Oh no you di’nt! Oh hell no and am I gonna let nobody talk to me like that. Come get in my face. Get in my face. Say it to my face. Why you just standin there? Be a man. Ain’t you man? Ain’t you got the balls to talk shit? Why you all the way over there? You wanna get in my face? I oughtta go up and pop you, son. But I won’t. I’m on this train, cuz I gotta go work, cuz nobody gives me nuthin. Nobody ain’t done nothing for me, son. But I get up and I go to work. That’s my manhood.”

On the train, no one has a name.  We are all bodies.  No one is sure where to look.  The man to whom the Puerto Rican man is talking is staring straight ahead, pretending he can’t hear. 

The women on either side of the two men shift uncomfortably.  The worrying of the women hangs like a cloud in the subway car.  They are not in their bodies.  They are somewhere else, already minutes from now or countless days in the past.  They stand next to and in front of themselves, looking at nothing, remembering. The ghosts of other women crowd around them.  They have been touched, flashed, harassed, violated.

Standing up and holding on to a rail in front of the Puerto Rican is a girl wearing black tights that have words written in white up and down her legs.

Peace. Love. Peace. Love. Peace. Love.

“You wanna come at me? I’ll pop you son! You want to come start some shit? Yeah? Well come finish it! Don’t let nobody talk to me like that. That’s my manhood. Wha happen? Cat ate your tongue? Yeah, I thought so!”

An obese man standing a few people away from the Puerto Rican grabs his crotch. “What ‘bout my manhood? Why don’t you shut up? You botherin’ my manhood.”

The men around the Puerto Rican start to laugh. The train doors open. The train car empties.

I walk behind the girl who has words written up and down her legs.

Peace. Love. Peace. Love. Peace. Love.

GOODBYE NEW YORK

So after seven years in New York City, I'm finally leaving. This time for real. Like I quit my job and I'm heading west for real. So, in the interest of self treatment for all of the weird feelings and pangs I'm feeling, I'm drawing cartoons to capture what pleases and annoys me about this city that I love.

Even though I'm no artiste, I started drawing in grad school to express my feelings of wanting to get out of whatever three hour class I happened to be in. Now I am drawing to express my feelings of wanting to leave and wanting to stay in this seven year learning experience that I happen to be in.

This is the cartoon me. 

What follows is a series of Perks! and Not Perks! about living in the city. This is how I express my complicated feelings of grief. 

Top Ten Signs That You Live in Park Slope

10. You stand behind a fourth grader to buy bubble tea.

9. You live on the same block as Captain Picard from Star Trek.

8. Your landlady calls you “Boo.”

7. You shop at Trader Joes because you (at least 25%) believe the Park Slope Coop is a cult.

6. You refuse to sign over your soul to said Park Slope Coop in exchange for cheaper produce.

5. You want the French guy at the French coffee shop to act French already!

4. You see a single man of child bearing age walking on 5^th Avenue without a child and want to ask him if he’s lost.

3. You experience a moment of panic when you think you hear one of the many kids from the many schools in the neighborhood say, “Hi Miss Celina.”

2. You simultaneously have an existential crisis and miss the hipsters in Williamsburg when you hear a bunch of really square drunks singing the national anthem outside your window on Saturday night.

And number 1... You were almost run over by a trio of stroller pushing moms coming at you head on (more than once).

Who's Juan Villa? How He Wrote His Life Story

When I lived in a little attic apartment in Syracuse, a guy’s name would pop up on the caller id when I used the telephone. “Who’s Juan Villa?” everyone who called   asked. “He was a tenant in the apartment before me,” I answered. But the Juan Villa thing didn’t die down. People took to answering my calls with, “Hola Juan!” Some people pretended to flirt with Juan.  My Nigerian classmate flat out asked me if Juan Villa was my husband that I hid in my apartment and didn't tell anyone about. Unbeknownst to him, Juan Villa had become a bit of a legend.

I met the real Juan Villa before I moved to New York City. It turned out that he’s an actor, and was also moving to New York City after living in Chicago. We became friends, and he took me to his home on the Lower East Side where I met his mother and the rest of his family at their apartment on Allen Street.

I had a feeling that Juan and his family were epic in some way, but I had no idea how epic they were until I went to see his solo show, “Empanada for a Dream.” This show, written and performed by Juan Villa, seeks to answer thesame question inspired by all the people I talked to in Syracuse. Who is he? He's a Colombian kid who grew up on the Lower East Side. But there’s so much more to his story. And isn’t there always more to the story?

I went to the show and sat, aghast, as his mother sat in the front row, reacting to all of Juan as he aired the secrets, confessions, and confrontations of the family on  stage. After the show, I happened to see a woman who had a tattoo of a signature on her foot, like an artist’s signature at the bottom of a canvas.  And I wondered if we all are works of art, paintings, books, plays, in human form. And if this were true, what would make them good?

Juan gave me some insights when we talked after his show. Although these are ostensibly tips for writers, they also double as strategies you’d pay personal guru lots of dinero for.  These are some of the tips that Juan would give to someone who is writing their life story:

· Figure out how you feel about everyone and everything. This can be a revelation, especially if you’re one of those people that need to let go of something or someone in their life.

· Tell your truth. Don’t edit yourself based on what you think or know others will say about you. Also, internalizing other people’s truths leads you away from what you want and who you are.

· Find your thematic cord. In acting, this is the through line of all the roles you’ve played. In other words, these are the themes or subjects that have inspired or drawn you to them throughout your life. Think about what roles you have played in your own life and determine if there are themes or situations that are repeated.

· The more specific you are about your experience, the more universal it is.  Also, the more you you are, the more genuine and relatable others find you.

· How do others see the subject you are writing about? Getting feedback about your subject (even when the subject is you) is necessary, at least as a starting point.

·
  Have an objective observer or editor help you find what’s necessary and important. This is important in so many areas of life. In order to tell the true story, we need someone to let us know if we’re over focusing or cluttering our vision with extraneous or impertinent details. I often wish I had an editor for my life.

Juan did a lot of soul searching to tell his story.He turned what could be a typical Latino coming of age story into a Greek tragedy. His solo show is populated with many characters that he plays with a searing honesty that hits hilarious and heart breaking notes. If you’re in New York City, go see the show and find out who this guy on the caller id really is.

Empanada For A Dream - soloNOVA Arts Festival


 May30 at 7:00pm until June 6 at 10:15pm


Written and performed by Juan Francisco Villa Directed by Alex Levy Tickets on sale at: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/246641 Wednesday, May 30 at 7:00 pm Thursday, May 31 at 9:00 pm Saturday, June 2 at 7:00 pm Sunday, June 3 at 4:00 pm Wednesday, June 6 at 9:00 pm Fresh from a sold out run with Ballybeg at the Barrow Group Theatre, EMPANADA FOR A DREAM is a haunting love song to the Lower East Side. Juan Francisco Villa's return to the neighborhood of his childhood is a dangerous and hilarious tale about growing up by getting out.

Drive by

It was one of those moments on the B44 bus when I really wished I had a car. I had a crumpled bag of food in my lap, along with my book bag, which I was trying to balance my bottle of water on as I ate my soggy sandwich. I dubbed those hurried meals on the bus my “grad school dinners,” in other words, dinners that have survived various states of refrigeration to be consumed during the 65-minute ride from Williamsburg to Brooklyn College. Bon appétit!

The bus was stuck in the usual rush hour traffic on Nostrand Ave when something made me look out the window. Parked on the curb on the opposite side of the street was a silver 1997 Honda Accord with a dent in the rear passenger side door and another smaller dent on the side of the trunk. There were like facial features on a person I knew because I could tell you exactly how those dents were made (an unfortunate scrape with the fender of a pick up truck and an ill-fated encounter with a pole in a dark parking lot). I never had them fixed, and it seemed strange that they were still there. As the bus inched forward, I saw the New York State license plate and confirmed it.

It was like looking at an old boyfriend. I almost spilled my water as I was staring at it.

I could almost hear the car saying, “Remember cup holders?”

No doubt my old car and I had some good times in the 11 years we were together. And now, looking at its miraculous reappearance in Brooklyn, it somehow stood as a remnant of one of the longest relationships I’ve had. Clearly, the car was busting a drive by—in other words, stalking me a little after our breakup.

The car wanted to see how I was doing on my own. Of course, I remember cup holders, and a trunk to put all of my stuff in, and freedom of mobility and being able to listen to my music and NPR. But now I’m involved with public transportation. I’m being green and all that.

The water bottle tipped over and spilled because my neck was craned as the bus passed the parked car. Should I have kept the car? I wondered.

I’ve survived harrowing blowouts of tires on the highway, colossal overheating on the freeway and in the snow (how can a car overheat in the snow?!). The car had broken down and had to be nursed back to health many times. I’m sure it cost as much to fix over the years as I paid for it. Everyone who came into contact with it called it a lemon (no offense to citrus or citrus named people).

So when it finally blew a gasket (literally) in Syracuse during the last month of my last year of school there, I knew we’d reached the end of the road. (I had to make one pun at least). It would cost more to fix than what the blue book said it was worth. I put an ad on Craig’s list and sold it to a mechanic within ten minutes (literally). I was leaving the car in good hands. The mechanic said he would fix it up to sell. I thought the car would have a better life with someone who could care for it better. I knew too much about its failings to give it the benefit of the doubt any more. It seemed I had learned the names of all its parts that had broken.

As the bus pulled farther and farther away, I realized that I had always blamed the car for breaking down. In my mind, it was something that should have been reliable no matter what I knew or did for it. And trust me, I knew nothing and did very little.

I was haunted by the drive by. It was if our fates had somehow fused in the metal. I was relieved the car looked shiny and well kept despite the scars I’d left on it. I didn't know why, but the car’s body had become the past, still in one piece, and somehow found me all the way in Brooklyn.

Monologues

One week ago today was the first time in its history that the New York City subway system was shut down. We were waiting for a hurricane to come bearing down on us, but it hadn’t hit yet.

The city was eerily quiet. There were no buses screeching to a stop, or cars starting and stopping down the street, or neighbors blasting reggae music on my block. If I didn’t have to stay indoors, I would have gone and spied on the city. I would have found what the 7 million people who ride the subway were doing.

It was so desolate; that I felt the world was right again only after the subways starting running again, fueled by the unique brand of madness of NYC commuters that is part monologue, performance art, street violence, and just being bat shit crazy. One friend calls it dinner theater; I would suggest it’s more like a Grand Performance series from this past week:

Grand Performance #1

Featured a woman dressed in traditional Muslim attire that was a bit frayed at the edges. It took place after midnight on the suburban Brooklyn bus that she, along with a handful of people were taking into Crown Heights.

Woman: (pointing to a young Arab man sitting across from her holding a bag of takeout Halal Food) That’s spilling! There’s a hole! Look!

(Alarmed, the Halal guy looks at his bag of takeout, only to find that there is no hole and no spillage).

Undeterred, the woman continues: It’s going to spill all on the floor. I’m telling you. There! You see? On the floor. It’s going to be all on the floor. And you. It’s leaking! I see it.

(Halal guy glares at her but says nothing).

Woman: (To a young woman sitting a few rows behind Halal guy): You're Sudanese?

(The woman, with very erect posture, bows her head, which is wrapped with an African headdress. The Muslim woman takes this as a yes).

Woman: Hrmphh (triumphantly)

(It is unclear if she is addressing the Sudanese woman or the bus at large).

Woman: Do you know…(turning to me, who unfortunately, is sitting right behind her, pretending to be really involved in game of solitaire on my phone)…that some people are looking to see how they can rip cell phones out of your hand?

(I hold my phone away from her so she can’t reach it. She leans toward me like she’s going to tell me a secret).

Woman: I think about inventing a laser. You know, a laser. (She makes a motion of a gun firing). It would scan the area for phones that are taking a picture of me and blast it!

(My internal technology having alerted me from the onset that taking a picture of her was out of the question, I put my phone in my bag and make direct eye contact with her).

Woman: (Pleased that she has my attention) But I don't have the technology yet.


Me: (Feeling brave enough to answer only because I’m about to get off the bus)
You’ll find the technology.

Woman: Yeah?

Me: Someday. (And get the hell off the bus.)


Grand Performance #2

Different from a monologue, an apostrophe features a speaker who addresses an imaginary person, an inanimate object, or idea. This performer is a tall African-American man, standing in the middle of a crowded subway platform at Broadway Junction during rush hour.

Man: SUCK MY DICK! SUCK MY DICK! Mumble mumble mumble. SUCK MY DICK! Mumble. Mumble. I SAID SUCK MY DICK! Mumble mumble mumble. SUCK MY DICK! (He walks by me and my co-workers punching someone or something invisible that is apparently blocking his path while he walks to the end of the platform). SUCK MY DICK! (more punching) SUCK MY DICK!


Grand Performance #3

Features a Hispanic man on A train, who is sitting at least ten feet away from a man who purportedly had been startin’ some shit with him minutes before I entered the crowded subway car.

Man: Oh no you di’nt! Oh hell no and am I gonna let nobody talk to me like that. Come get in my face. Get in my face. Say it to my face. Why you just standin there? Be a man. Ain’t you man? Ain’t you got the balls to talk shit? Why you all the way over there? You wanna get in my face? I oughtta go up and pop you, son. But I won’t. I’m on this train, cuz I gotta go work, cuz nobody gives me nuthin. Nobody ain’t done nothing for me, son. But I get up and I go to work. That’s my manhood.

(The people standing near him are shifting uncomfortably, not sure where to look. At the door across from the guy is a girl wearing black tights that have words written in white up and down her legs. Peace. Love. Peace. Love. Peace. Love).

You wanna come at me? I pop you son! You want to come start some shit? Yeah? Well come finish it! Don’t let nobody talk to me like that. That’s my manhood. Wha happen? Cat ate your tongue? Yeah, I thought so!

(An obese man sitting a few people away from the Hispanic man speaks up)

Obese man: What ‘bout my manhood? Why don’t you shut up? You botherin’ my manhood.

(The people around the Hispanic man start to laugh. The train doors open. The train car empties. I walk behind the girl who has words written up and down her legs. Peace. Love. Peace. Love. Peace. Love).

Home on the A Train

In the summer of 2007, I visited Manhattan for a week. I stayed at a friend’s apartment while he was out of town. I walked the streets of the village and called every person I even faintly knew to see if they would see me. I was struggling with being in a strange city by myself.

I walked the streets and marveled at the throngs of insiders that scuttled to get to work, or the ones walking their dogs. I didn’t have a job yet, so I studied the people on the streets. I was so absorbed, I almost smacked into Alec Baldwin in SoHo.

Then I focused on woman in front of me whose high heels clicked hastily on the pavement. She was sort of faux Sex in the City (possibly from Jersey). She went into a restaurant where there was a group of other women wearing dresses and very impractical shoes. They greeted each other and went to go find a table. When I looked around everyone seemed to be in groups or couples and I was the only person in the vicinity that was alone. It was then I found myself wondering if the day would ever come when I had friends that I would hurry to meet at a restaurant, if I would ever look at someone in a crowd and recognize them, if New York would ever in any way feel like home.

Well duh.

I thought I got my answer when I was riding the A train the other night. I had taken the A to go meet my co-workers at a tapas bar in the Village. Yes, I was late, and yes, I had to kind of hurry, and yes I consider them friends, but that’s just part of the story. After some drinks and then a pizza and beer interlude with a subgroup of them, I got on the A train back to Brooklyn. The train was crowded but I found a seat. Since it was Thursday, no one had thrown up on the train. (It should be a well-documented fact that someone always throws up on the A train on Friday and Saturday nights). So I hugged my purse to me and was floating off into a sleepy torpor for a couple of stops. Then I heard the doors open and people move around. I opened my eyes.

“Hi,” I heard.

I looked up and my friend Julia was standing in front of me holding a shopping bag with two dozen roses. She’s one of my Teaching Fellow friends who goes to grad school with me. After class, we’ve started shopping at stores by the college and having leisurely conversations that somehow feel spiritual (maybe in part because she does yoga?).

“Hey,” I said, sitting upright. I remembered walking behind the woman in high heels. Then, maybe because of the drinks I had, the last two years of teaching, and grad school, and parties, and marriages and children of the Teaching Fellows in our cohort drizzled back to me in droplets.

“If you want to fall asleep, don’t feel like you have to talk to me or entertain me or anything,” she said.

But I perked up and chatted with her anyway. And then right before my stop, I said, “Running into you makes me feel like I live in New York.”

“Don’t you feel you live here?” she asked me.

I cobbled together some answer, but it wasn’t right. Feeling that you belong somewhere isn’t so much about knowing people, or recognizing them. I mean, in that case, I would have had this epiphany weeks ago, when I saw the principal of my school on the train platform. I was giddy and taken aback when I saw her.

“It’s sort of like a celebrity sighting,” I told her.

She laughed. “It’s because you’re seeing me out of context,” she said

But my mind doesn’t work in that kind of linear way.

I actually got my answer when I was out today with two friends. We walked the length of Prospect Park to get to a concert. Around 10th street, I relived a field trip I took with my students on a blistering hot day, where we hiked through the park and saved the day by finding a playground and ice cream. When my friends and I got to the band shell, the line to get in snaked beyond our line of vision. So we left and went to see Midnight in Paris.

In the women’s bathroom at the movie theater, I remembered my students again. I was washing my hands and almost went to look under the stalls for the little feet of the only girl in my class. On field trips, she and I were the only ones that went to the women’s bathroom. All the boys were usually in the men’s room with my paraprofessional, who is also a guy. My only girl always took a long time to zip her pants back up. I would wait for her to finally walk out of a stall and made sure she washed her hands.

It was strange to go to the bathroom and not have to wait for her. I don’t know how many field trips we’ve been on in the two years I taught her and the boys in my class. It couldn’t have been more than ten trips altogether. But somehow those children have become part of the fabric of my life here. It made me sad that I won’t be teaching her or those boys next year.

The main character in Midnight in Paris gets into a car and travels back in time. While I don’t believe I have that power, I do think that I might live several lives at once. There is a life I live in present time where I’m an individual, and another life that I live with other people, and a life that’s coiled in my memory. And when those three lives intersect, I’m home.

The Wild, the Passionate, and the Fanatical

When you live in New York and you leave town, you don’t know you take them with you. I had been in Central New York for a week. I was staying with friends, surrounded by green grass, trees, fresh air, and pleasant people in the town I was visiting. I was driven around by my friends in their cars and for a while, I regressed back into that comfortable, seemingly normal way of living. There was polite conversation, and porches, and children, and the relatives they belonged to. Everything made sense in that world.

After my visit was over, I said goodbye to my friends and took the Amtrak back down to the city without incident. But as soon as I got on the A train at Penn Station in the middle of an afternoon on a Monday, it hit me.

I was in a relatively empty subway car headed downtown. There were only a few other people there besides me: a guy scribbling in a notebook and muttering to himself, couple of teenagers tongue wrestling and feeling each other up through their clothes, and a man contorted like a pretzel so he could smell his foot.
I blinked. It occurred to me that they had been missing from the tableau of normalcy that I had enjoyed upstate. In the next second, I had to stop myself from almost saying out loud, “I missed you crazy fuckers!”

Even if they’re silent, the crazy people are always the loudest and the ones who seem to take up the most space. They peel back a layer or two of reality so that you sense something genuine about the human condition. Sometimes they don’t know they’re being crazy. It could be that they just stole a big bag of fish and they had to take it home one way or another. I’m sure that if we asked them, they would all have a workable explanation for what they’re doing. I don’t want to get into the psychology part of it too much. I’m more like a bird watcher, except I’m not watching birds.

So, not claiming to be an expert or anything, here are some of the crazy people subtypes that I’ve identified in my public transportation travels thus far:

• The Ones who Should be Scary but are Funny
A very angry guy on his cell phone, pacing up and down the A train at rush hour, repeating, “I’m gonna do somethin’ awful. I’m gonna peel his balls off and clip em!”

• The Ones who Should be Funny but are Scary
A homeless man sitting across from a girl, reaches into his cart containing all his worldly belongings and pulls out a French roll and a jar of mayonnaise. He rips pieces of the bread and dips them into the mayonnaise and eats them, all the while glaring at the girl, as if daring her to look away from him.


• The Ones that People Don’t Look Twice At
A man with a large nose, carrying a briefcase, dressed as a frumpy grandmother with support hose rolling down his hairy calves.

A man running into a subway car a split second before the doors close stands to catch his breath while he holds a black trash bag full of raw fish that has ripped and is seeping fishy water onto the floor of the train.

Two women sitting side by side, sharing a jar of pickles.

• The Fanatics
Otherwise known as the proselytizers. These ladies and gentlemen think it wise to undertake fiery, passionate diatribes about the hellfire and damnation that will surely befall all of the people around them if they don’t repent. The proselytizers like to speak or yell at unnaturally high volumes, usually in the early hours of the morning, and always in crowded subway cars or platforms in order to maximize the number of sinners they reach with their message.

• The Heroes
These are the brave souls that tell the proselytizers to shut up. The best example that comes to mind is one man whose name I don’t know, but who seemed to speak for all of us in the standing room only A train headed into Manhattan at 7:00 a.m. that was being (morally) hijacked by a very loud song about salvation. We were all suffering through it, when he interrupted the song with, “Aw hell no!” And then proceeded to tell the singer to shut the F- up because it was too early for that Sh-.

• The Pervs
Luckily, this is a subtype I hear about and don’t see with my own eyes. I have an acquaintance that claims that she’s been “wienered” many times by different men on the train. She was incredulous that I had not been wienered even once. We concluded that she must be a wiener magnet.


• The Lovers
Among the early morning weekend passengers on any subway train you can usually find those that are engaged in the “Commute of Shame.” Those who could not walk home from their random hookups, trying not to look embarrassed in the now crumpled clothes they wore during their conquest, bearing some of the battle scars of the night before, their eyes are glazed over from lack of sleep, sometimes accompanied by a slight trace of euphoria, and other times, by a world weary disappointment.

Then there are the people who commit to no more commutes of shame. Like the couple that was sitting at the front of the B65 bus with their bags of groceries at their feet. Something about the blue interior of the bus must have inspired the woman to ask the man, “Will you marry me?” And the man, slightly taken aback, to ponder for only a few seconds before answering, “Okay.” And then for the two of them to high five, and the woman, who was wearing shorts but you know wears the pants, to announce, “We just got engaged!” and for old the Caribbean ladies and the stray hipster and I to break out in scattered applause.

The Politics of Laundry

I might be renting out a room this summer to a friend. She made a phone appointment with me and asked a list of questions about living in my place in Brooklyn. How far is it from Manhattan? What trains do you take? Do you have Internet? Can I use the kitchen? I answered all her questions matter of factly. Then she asked about laundry.

“I heard you take your laundry on the bus?” she said like it was some sort of urban myth.

I took one of those prolonged intakes of breath.

Laundry is complicated.

When I moved into my apartment, I was too infatuated with the size of the walk-in closet to give much attention to the matter. There’s no laundry in the building, but just like any neighborhood in New York City, there were bound to be Laundromats nearby.

Here comes the political part. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is not gentrified. Coming from a working class neighborhood in L.A. I was no stranger to crime. My mother knew the cholos on our block by name. We had our house robbed twice when I was a kid. I thought I knew what was up. I was like, whatever Brooklyn. I came from the hood. I didn’t think it was a big deal.

The first Laundromat I found was five blocks away from my apartment on Nostrand Ave. I got tired from schlepping my duffel bag full of clothes and detergent five long blocks to the place. When I got there, it was packed with women, children, and granny carts stuffed with trash bags bursting with clothes. I managed to navigate my way through the people and carts toward the washers, which were all taken. I waited until one of the big washers finished washing and the lady in curlers stuffed the clothes onto a rolling cart to dry. I pounced, shoving all my clothes in there regardless of color or fabric or anything. I needed clean underwear. We’ll get to back to underwear in a minute.

So while the laundry’s washing, I notice there’s no place to sit down. I decide to take my bag and detergent with me to get a snack. There was only one Caribbean bakery open on the next block. They had a sign for beef patties. I went in and ordered one. It was cold and not that good. Then I walked back toward the Laundromat to check on my clothes. There was a guy who was uh, belligerently begging? It was like he would’ve mugged me if he weren’t so high.

As I got familiar with Nostrand Ave., I learned that guys like him are not a rarity. When I came home late from work, there were people who were experiencing zero gravity and poverty right in front of me. But that’s just one part of the mix. Nostrand is a busy street where 99 cent stores, Crown Fried Chickens, Halal Chinese Food, and shootings abound. Yeah, shootings. Like the kind where people leave glass candles and flowers on the street corner to mark the place where their loved ones died. And the kind where someone texts me that they heard on the news that there was a shooting at the nightclub that I walk past on the way home from the train. And the kind at the subway stop where they shoot the attendant at the booth and you have to stay home or figure out another way to get someplace.

My friends who are native New Yorkers are like, whatever. Shootings happen. They say it like it’s something they saw on Law and Order.

“Yeah, I used to take my laundry on the bus,” I told my prospective subleter. I tried to normalize it. “The Laundromats in poor neighborhoods are always fuller.”

I felt like a traitor to my own social class when I took my duffel bag down the stairs of my apartment and stood at the bus stop five feet from the gate of the brownstone, and took the bus to Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope and was dropped off about ten feet away from other Laundromats where there were washers and empty seats, and good snacks.

Then I got too busy to do my own laundry and I started to drop off my laundry. More feelings of class betrayal, especially thinking of what my mother would say if I told her I paid someone $20 to do my laundry. The guilt was assuaged when I factored in the physical labor of carrying the bag of clothes on the bus roundtrip.

Then during a conversation with one of my sisters it came up that I drop off my laundry.

“You let someone wash your calzones?” she asked, incredulous.

According to the popular sentiment in our house (promoted by our mother), the most shameful thing you could have or let anyone see is your dirty underwear. According to her, it’s akin to being laughable, incompetent, and a disgrace to have dirty panties, especially for a girl. When she made fun of someone who was a fuck up, she’d call the person “calzones cagados” or loosely translated, skid mark.

So now I was a traitor to my family, and possibly my gender because I let someone wash my underwear.

But I couldn’t go back to spending two or three hours in washing and traveling by bus again. Especially when I got my neatly folded clothes back tightly packed in a plastic bag that was formed into a rectangular prism.

Then a new Laundromat opened up only one block from my house. It was brand new, and kind of empty because it’s on a more residential street. There are seats to sit in, and a TV. But they also take debit cards if you drop off your laundry. I had a choice to stop being a traitor. But of course, I decided to drop off my laundry.

I noticed two things when I started leaving my laundry there. The first was that they use a lot of really strong cheap detergent that kind of gives me a headache. The second thing was that the Caribbean ladies who work there look at me with a little disdain.

I asked my New York friends about their laundry life. One of them said she had to stop dropping off her clothes at a place that used that strong cheap detergent—she said the smell of it on her sheets gave her weird dreams. Another friend said that her Caribbean friend told her that Caribbean women never put dirty underwear in a hamper—they wash it by hand themselves. I’m assuming they must do this everyday. I’m also assuming that’s why the Caribbean ladies at the Laundromat are so judgy when I drop off my clothes and they ask me my name.

When I say my last name, I become a traitor to my race.

While this place doesn’t put my clothes in a plastic bag, they do neatly fold my socks and stack my panties in size order like magic. And they switch up the kinds of detergent they use from week to week, so it’s like my clothes are playing in an olfactory lottery.

But there’s something bugging me about the women who don’t trust their hampers with their underwear. It suggests that underwear tells our secrets about being human, and all the peeing and shitting and fucking that goes with it. And even though I think I know the answer, I ask myself, is it just women who are concerned with getting rid of all the evidence of being human?

There are Steps

No one tells you that when you move to New York, you learn to walk again.

Sure, there are movies that show the throngs of people walking the streets of Manhattan, the crowd is usually a large, mobile entity that’s faceless until we focus on one particular person in the crowd. That’s the person the story is usually about, the one the camera zooms in and focuses on in the middle of a rush hour mob.

But to be one of the people in the rush hour mob is altogether a different story. You notice, for instance, how fast everyone is walking. And that there is jockeying for position to see who gets to the light, or the subway, or the bus, or to the door first. Elbows, backpacks, bags, and a whole side of flesh can skim past or push you out of the way if you don’t keep up. You notice that every person thinks they are the one in the crowd that the camera is on, the one who matters, the one who is only a few minutes away from being late to a plot twist worthy of destiny.

If you don't live here, you won’t notice that there are people coming up out of a womb-like underground into the light of day, almost like they are being born every time they come up from the train. You can’t count the stairs that they have to go up and down just to travel horizontally across space, and gauge how tired or impatient this makes them.

The first thing you notice when you first move here is that you walk too slow. If you are walking to dinner with friends, they are a block ahead of you before you stop looking at the NYU dropout doing performance art on the corner to even notice. What’s the hurry? You say to them. How can we be late for dinner?

And then you notice that you begin to walk defensively during your morning commute. There is no such thing as strolling, or enjoying the view in the morning in Bryant Park, unless you want to be run over by pedestrians in suits and trench coats. You begin to drink a lot of iced coffee every morning (sometimes while walking) to get amped up to walk from the subway to the door of the building where you work.

You see your first celebrity in New York on the way to the subway after work. In this case, the celebrity is the woman who plays Charlotte in Sex and the City, which is filming across the street. She is being followed by a band of paparazzi who are taking her picture as she’s trying to run in a tight black evening gown that makes it hard for her to walk. You notice that across the street there are two other mini mobs following Miranda and Carrie who are also running in evening gowns. This is the closest you’ve ever been to couture. You don’t know why but you run to keep up with Charlotte. You hear her Jimmy Choo heels clicking as she trots down the street toward the door of the hotel that will shelter her from her own fame. You hear her whine. “I let them take pictures with me, I sign autographs, what more do they want from me?” You want to answer the question. But she isn’t talking to you. You realize that you are just like the other people she’s complaining about. You just want to be in her shot.

Then you get another job and learn a whole other route to get to work. You notice that the walls, and graffiti and the faces of people change, and like alchemy, your thoughts change too.

You learn to avoid ice patches and stomp your way through the slush and snow piled on the streets. You step in some deep puddles and almost fall on your ass before you get good at this.

You visit home for the second time after having moved to New York. After landing at the airport, you push a woman out of your way because she is too slow.

You get that one epic job in New York where you are part of history. In this case, you work at a Mexican restaurant on 14th street. While walking there, you feel like you are retracing the steps of your immigrant parents who would have had to take a job like this. This is ironic because you are over-educated and underemployed. You reinvent yourself. You make this the plot line of your own personal imaginary movie about your life. You walk to work everyday filling in the blanks of the plot using the buildings and the people on the street as your backdrop. Everyone who works at the restaurant has very colorful stories to tell about the drugs and celebrities that have been there. One of the famous people they say ate there once is the woman who plays Carrie in Sex and the City. You see some other celebrities while you work there, and you wonder if recognizing someone from a reality show makes you a loser.

You walk on the Brooklyn Bridge for the first, second, and third time. You notice that you’ve developed a disdain of tourists.

The Mexican restaurant closes and you find yourself walking past on purpose trying to catch a glimpse of something that bears a resemblance to what you remember.

Your family and friends decide you’ve been in New York too long. Your severe moments of underemployment and roommate drama don’t fit the glamorous images they see on television. In a moment of frustration a friend asks you why you don’t move back home. When you don’t give a reason she ventures an opinion. “Maybe you’ve watched too much Sex and the City.” That comment bothers you.

You get another job, and another one after that. You begin to know how to get places without printing out maps or using hopstop.com every time you go somewhere. You begin to recognize the storefronts and buildings you’ve been to or walked past before. They become like faces of people you know. These landmarks become signposts that you revolve around.

One morning after a snowstorm you open the front door of your apartment and the stairs have disappeared under a foot and a half of snow. You think there’s no way you’re getting to work. Then you decide to sit in the snow and slide down the stairs like a toddler. You get to work that day. It is some sort of metaphor for overcoming frozen obstacles.

Then the first New York person dies. It is the cook from the epic Mexican restaurant. The cook whose food was so good it made you want to call your mom. He had just opened his own restaurant and then he had a heart attack. His wife says that it was as if he knew he was going to die. On his last day, he walked alone around 14th street where the old restaurant used to be.

Then there’s the day that the personal imaginary movie of your life becomes real. There are the crowds of people walking the streets of Manhattan; it is a large moving body that isn’t faceless anymore. Ghosts and memories hide in every corner. You focus on one particular person in the crowd, the one who tosses a coin into a fountain or lays a crooked carnation on the sill of a boarded window. This is the one who understands what the story is about.