Off the Record

Well. I'm here. I'm in what I think I could, someday, call home.
While I was eating lunch in the cafeteria of the Condé Nast (a Wash U grad, I think...) building with my cousin (who works for Vanity Fair), I noticed that, on his tray was what looked to be a muffin top. "Is that a muffin top?" I exclaimed. "No," he replied, "...it's actually a black and white cookie." Even better. My first black and white. It's not black or white...it's black AND white.
His wife and I traveled about 40 blocks by foot, passing along the way the most amazing structures. Chelsea Market, Hell's Kitchen and some Midtown goodies.

Today I walked around Brooklyn: Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, downtown. I stopped in at a coffee shop, a bar, a Mexican soda fountain (strange, no?), a gelato café, a couple grocery markets where I purchased fun drinks in little bottles--a product for which I have a softspot. Sitting in a park with a Boylan's bottle of carbonated water while watching little children (I'm not creepy, really) play with their nannies could not suit me better. Walking semi-blindly onto a subway line in the hopes that I'll get off somewhere half-decent (not hard in NYC) is right up my alley (a safe one, of course). Getting heckled, while it's terribly annoying and violating (one choice male used: "Hey honey, can I get a hamburger with that shake?"), somehow feels a bit more intelligent in New York.
I'm very pleased to be here. It's just what I needed.
I'm moving here. Sorry, mom, dad. Sorry.

I walked home in the newly-cold air with my tail between my legs. I whimpered a bit and managed to unconsciously hang my head lower and lower the further I went. I hadn't felt this way since grade school when all the mean girls in my class would make fun of me because I didn't wear a sports bra or Teen Spirit deodorant or the school uniform skirt or because I talked with big words or acted strangely around police officers or brought pepperoni for my lunch. It had been years. But I still recognized the feeling: I was defeated. Deflated. Denied.
I wasn't exactly sure what she had said...I could have been wrong...it could have been my imagination reacting in ways I only have the guts to write about, but I could have sworn she said, with an excessive amount of sarcasm, maybe meant for other people to hear as well, I think she said,

"Thanks for stealing all my friends; have a good night."

1) I don't steal--I share.
B) I never slept with anybody.
C) I never went on a date with anybody (maybe that should have gone before #2...).
4) I have invited her to go out with "her" friends numerous times when "her" friends and myself have gotten together.
5) Were they ever "hers" in the first place?

If that IS what she, in fact, DID say, then I'm hurt.
If it isn't what she said, then I'm still hurt, because I don't know what she really said.

I thought of turning back and approaching her about it, just saying, "What?" but, by the time I realized that I hadn't understood what she said, I was too far away.

Don't hate me because I don't wear a sports bra or make friends easily. Please
I'm only here to bring you all funny-shaped vegetables and day-old pastries.
That is all.

We drove up 16th Street and I remembered each dip and bump and break in the brick road. I remembered the way his room was set up when we were just 10; drinking water from aluminum cans provided to the flood victims (us) by Anheuser-Busch, sorting through dozens of baseball cards and eating popsicles on his bunk bed. He said we had supposedly kissed once, with a sheet held between us by Catharine McNelly. I, of course, do not recall this "kiss," as I have boasted for the past 8 years that my first kiss was at the age of 15.

On a night like tonight, when the weather is perfect (a little bit of rain and an addicting breeze), there is nothing sadder than listening to a song about yourself and looking in the car next to you, only to find the woman sunken in her seat, slightly chilled, and crying. Sobbing, really. Her face clenched, teeth showing, tears running so slow that not even she can catch them before they fall. Had the windows not been pulled up so tightly, I could have heard how she was moaning.
But it was cold.
And her tears, moving so slow, would have frozen if they'd left her face.

Tonight is the first night back with my computer after a long hiatus due to its crapping out on me. These things happen, I kept telling myself. But I was never really trying to convince myself of that attitude--it just came. The Mac Man told me that nothing could be recovered from my hard drive and I just said, Oh. All my pictures from Spain, my writings from the past year, saved files and irreplaceable suvenirs had vanished. A clean slate, perhaps. A symbolic renewal and desertion of things forgotten. So now the old bitch is back and running faster than ever. Hoopla.

I still have a crush on Buster Keaton.

Buster Keaton

 

 

As someone who knows a considerable amount of people in this city, I often wonder whether or not other cities are like this. In Seattle, if you get out enough or hang around in different circles, do you end up meeting the same ratio of people to total population as you would here? Maybe it's due to the fact that the city is rather small and that, on a weekend night, there aren't too many events to choose from. Or maybe it's due to the incestuousness of St. Louis and the recycling of friends/lovers/co-workers.

Last evening I went on one of the most memorable adventures of my five years in The Lou.  

I continue to speak of these nights of spontaneity, and I suppose it's because I have a lot of them, but sometimes, to some people, they aren't so memorable. 

Rode my bike home from work around 5pm, weaving through traffic and the usual Loopla hoopla on a Friday afternoon. I stopped at my favorite coffee shop for an iced and a read-through of the New Yorker, only to run into a friend Marcel and his biking crew who were headed on a trip to North City for a gypsy party on the Rockaway Aramada. I had several options that evening. 1) Go straight home, have dinner, do a little work. 2) Go straight home, eat dinner, then go see Buster Keaton on the big screen. 3) Join them, skip dinner, ride 8 miles to the secreted riverside spot in my dress, Mary Jane's and leggings.

Of course I chose option 3. Of course!  Hopped the Metro downtown then onto the smooth Riverfront Trail which I had yet to see. At sunset, it was phenomenal. Factories, prisons and NC to our left, the river to our right. We rode and rode until we ran right into the site, off Hall Street, right across from Cassilly's Cementland. There was a bridge-type structure that extended out over the water where they set up a stage and had welded some metal wire around the perimeter to keep anyone from falling. Everyone there wore makeshift clothes and looked as if they hadn't showered in days (which they probably hadn't). They were all incredibly happy--singing, working and cooking for the dozens who had come to see their concert. 

At one point they herded everyone back down the rickety, grated walkway and onto the actual ship, which had an amazing hot pot of pasta salad and a bucket of pans, cups and plates ready for their guests to ravage. Yum. I ran into a few people I definitely didn't expect to see at a place like that, and continued talking to them while taking swigs from a cheap bottle of Gin. We enjoyed some music played by three women (girls?) on fiddle, acordian and guitar and tried to swat away the mass amounts of chiggers and mosquitos that ravaged any part of the body uncovered. 

After about 3 hours there, I caught a ride back to the Metro with Michael A and Lynn J then continued my evening adventure heading westward this time.