PLAYBOYBACON

Having lived in Northern Brooklyn for the better part of 3 years and having been employed full time in Manhattan for the better part of those, the L train and I are very well acquainted. Recently, my 70 year old father came to visit me in New York, after not venturing much further than the local grocery store since the late 80’s, let alone to Manhattan. When I asked him if he knew which train line was closest to the hotel where he was staying, he was aghast.

“The subway train?!” He asked incredulously.

“Uh, yes?”

“The subway train is for the Poors and the Low Classes!” He exclaimed brusquely. “It’s not safe!”

“I ride the subway almost every day, Dad. It’s not that bad.” I assured him, all the while musing to myself that though his summation of publicly transported peoples was supremely imperious, I could easily catalog a few of the other types you’ll find on the train. Classic passengers such as the Vagrants, the Lunatics, the Pick Pockets, the Crowded Car Molestors, the Platform Defecators, the Kids Selling Peanut M&Ms, the Mariachis, the Magicians, the American Idol Rejects, the Anti-Hygeinists, and the “Homeless” Guy Panhandling With a Tattered Dunkin Donuts Cup, Though Apparently Wearing a Pair of Diamond Encrusted Nike Dunks. I urge anyone considering a move to New York who like myself, is incapable of cycling (bike and motor alike), to look into purchasing a used Rascal scooter.

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No Fatties: The Korean Greengrocer Edition

Yesterday afternoon, my self esteem was shot to smithereens by a tiny Asian woman in a veggie market on Graham Avenue when I stopped to grab some crudité as a vessel for the hummus I had waiting at home. Already having suffered at the behest of insomnia and job related ennui, I knew that if I didn’t muster up the gumption for a detour on my way from work that I wasn’t going to make it out of the house again without a disco nap or a small miracle. Lackadaisically perusing the selection, I picked up a small cucumber and a bag of baby carrots and made my way to the counter, where the clerk looked up at me from her Sudoku puzzle and exclaimed, “Oh! I barely recognize you!”

I tried to turn the corners of my mouth up as convincingly as possible, as my energy level had dropped to such a degree that I was hardly capable of basic human interaction.

“I think last time I was here, my hair was different.” I shrugged.

“No, no!” The woman gestured to her face and then to mine, making a large orb sign with her pointer finger like a shaman, “You gain so muchweight! You used to be so skinny!” For good measure, she puffed her cheeks out, as she rang me up on the register. My jaw dropped.

“$3.78, please.” She said.

I fumbled with my roll of bills, dropping 4 dollars and fleeing for the door clutching the carrots and cucumber with my fists, while my blind rage and decimated pride jockeyed for position. Had that really just happened? Did a stranger just call me fat?!

I don’t know many women without body image issues, and my experience has been no exception. During my adolescence I yo-yo’ed between 120 and 200 lbs on a 5’11” frame several times. The fluctuation was partially due to the steroids I had to take during chemotherapy, and then later from a garden variety eating disorder combined with a fondness for uppers during my Party Monster phase. These days I’m a healthy size 10 with a devotion to delicious food and a firm grip on dysmorphia, and my weight has stayed relatively stable for the past few years. Of course, I gain the winter 5-10 el bees each year, as do most people. This one found me in the delightful honeymoon period of a new relationship and on birth control, which didn’t lend itself to keeping a svelte bikini body very well. I’m human, for chrissakes! If you cut me, do I not bleed? If a handsome man brings me a grilled cheese sandwich at 4am because he loves me, will I not mange on it?

I guess my point is, had this been a little while ago, when I was a lot less confident, this inconsiderate and incredibly rude lady could have de-railed my entire life with her unsolicited observations. Instead of b-lining for the nearest GNC to buy Alli and Power Bars in bulk, I’m going to treat myself to a slice of cheese pizza and a walk across the Williamsburg bridge after work.

Because life’s too fucking short for baby carrots.

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Celebrigay: SVU

Last night at work there was an unusual level of excitement buzzing about because we were surrounded on all sides of the restaurant by the cast and crew of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Aside from the fact that a customer had a full fledged panic attack because she thought that there was actually a dead body on a stretcher 2 feet from the entrance to our back patio, we had a celebrity dining in our midst. It was none other than motherfuckin’ Chris Meloni. Light of my life, fire of my loins, circa winter 2008.

As he opened the front door and a blast of cool air hit my face, our eyes met, and my heart fluttered (or maybe it was just my bangs), and he asked for a table for four… with no reservations at 8 o’clock on a Friday night.

There were so many things I wanted to say. Things like,

“There’s a very real possibility that I used you as spank bank material for the majority of winter 3 years ago. Even in spite of your hairline.”

“Show me your badge. I mean, the money. No, no. Your badge.”

“You can have the table… If you come back with Ice-T.”

or, “I used to be a religious devotee of SVU, until I actually lived in New York and realized that all it takes to get sodomized and killed is to hire a plumber with a loose screw and a Target gift card to jimmy my door with.”

Instead, I just smiled, extended my hand and said, “Certainly. May I check your coat?”

Don’t lie. You’d hit it.

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April (510)

When April and I ran around in the same crowd, she and I were consistently being mistaken for each other due to our only two shared traits: being tall with blonde hair. This may have been fine if it weren’t for the fact that April had a hard time behaving herself. In fact, it might be much more accurate and/or generous to speculate that she was severely mentally ill. I couldn’t help but feel slightly resentful, having to defend my own post-adolescent antics and then set several records straight about my doppleganger’s never ending series of unfortunate events and run ins with law enforcement. I dyed my hair red shortly after I was stopped on the street by a friend who had heard I’d been arrested in front of Molotov’s the night before for stabbing myself with broken glass and crying rape when a good samaritan attempted to walk me home.

Asian Erin (206)

“Asian Erin” who programmed herself into my phone as such, insisted that everyone knew too many Aarons and Erins to begin with. I met her at a hoe-down themed bike race my hairdresser had invited me to, nestled in the recesses of Golden Gate Park, and I noticed just behind her right ear she had a tattoo in swirling script that simply said, ‘Meh’. I inquired about it to make conversation, and she explained that it was her philosophy for life, a sort of self-designed MO.

“For instance,” she said, gesturing to a bearded young man nearby, “I just up and moved here from Portland for this guy that I’ve known for 3 weeks.”

“I see…” I trailed, off, fidgeting with my bolero tie, unsure of what to say next.

Erin pointed to her neck and said, “Meh.”

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Allegra (917)

I met Allegra the Bar Fairy but once, though she made quite an impression. Naturally, I try and limit my activity in bars to revelry and shenanigans in general, but that particular winter’s night felt like it was meant to be between a pen and I in a place where no one could ever find me. I picked a cobwebby East Village dive and sat at the far end of the bar in a position where I could see everything, but I was mostly obscured by the jukebox in a shadowy corner. An hour later, so deeply engrossed in my scribbles on a stack of cocktail napkins that I practically had my nose to the paper, a waifish wisp of a blonde girl slid unctuously onto the barstool next to me and asked in a husky, implacable accent, “Have you ever written on an airplane puke bag?”

I was shaken from my trance and I looked up at her, as her large caramel eyes peered at me inquisitively. She was disarming as she was tiny, and she focused her doe-like gaze on me as the folds of her long grey cashmere sweater settled around her in an elegant manner. Her beauty was undeniable but subtle, with an almost elven quality to it that was accented by the tips of her ears poking slightly through her long golden hair.

“No, actually, I haven’t.” I smiled. “I’ve written on a lot of other weird shit, though.”

“What are you writing?”

“Honestly? It’s nothing of terrible consequence.”

“Sure.” she said, curling her lip coyly, unconvinced.

“I’m writing about how I shattered my toilet last night.”

“What are you really writing?”

“Seriously.”

She paused thoughtfully, unsatisfied with my answer, and then replied, “You’re fucked up, aren’t you?” I shrugged, bristling into slight self consciousness, unsure of how to respond to the query without having opened up with even the lightest conventional formalities.

“It’s okay, I’m fucked up, too. How’d you break your toilet?”

“I’m a klutz.”

“Ah. you think you’re fat, don’t you?”

“No… that’s not quite it.”

“You can tell me. Is it a boy? It’s amazing, these things strangers can say to each other in bars. don’t you think?” The cadence of her speech was effortless and soothing. “Your heart must be broken, I’ve seen that look in the eyes of others… let me tell you a story,” she went on and I leaned in, anticipating her confession, “Once, I mailed a puke bag break up letter.”

“Oh? To whom?”

“An African man that I was in love with. It was written on the plane back to Costa Rica, and I still hope that it never arrived. When I was twenty-two I’d gotten unexpectedly pregnant by him and we were going to get married, but I had a miscarriage when I was dancing at our wedding, and we just couldn’t survive the strain. After I left him I moved to New York to pursue my art. It’s funny, you see, the most tragic things in life always end up leading to shaping your life into what it was meant to be, and it’s for the better.”

“Wow. That hardly compares to my toilet story, I don’t know if I can follow up with that now.”

“You’re not fat.” she said, putting her small, dainty hand on my thigh. It was childlike and genuine, and suddenly I wanted to hug her.

“Thanks.”

“Listen,” she went on, chewing on the straw of her vodka soda, “you can’t take yourself too seriously. Some people will say you’re not sensitive enough. You know what I say to that?”

“What?”

“Sometimes your clit’s too big, and sometimes it’s too small. You just have to have faith that someone out there has the right touch.”

The bartender, a surly man in red with a mammoth goatee, had begun to eavesdrop and raised a pint glass to cheers to her whimsical meme.

“Here here!” she said. “Simpatico!” as she lowered her arm her sweater fell askew and exposed a small scripted tattoo below a rising sun on the top of her wrist.

“What’s it mean?”

“Funny you should ask about this; perfect example. I thought it would be so cool to get my tattoo in Arabic, despite the fact that I don’t speak the language and have no tie to the culture. I thought it would be thoughtful to have a saying on my wrist that everybody knows, in writing not many could understand. I thought it said, ‘this too shall pass’ for a year until a Tunisian classmate of mine pointed to it and asked me what ‘that too shall pass’ meant. Figures, no? Forever in my skin is a grammatical error, the thanks I get for trying to be too cool.”

“You could always get it covered up to say ‘this clit shall pass’.”

She laughed melodically and slipped me a cocktail napkin with her name and address on it in swirling script. “Promise you’ll send me a puke bag someday.”

“Next time I fly.”

With that, she gracefully lowered herself off of the stool and left me to my stack of napkins in the shadows.

The next time I flew, I did grab some extra vom bags from the plane to send through the post, and I realized that I had lost Allegra’s contact information in the shuffle of several months and the vortex of clutter I call a bedroom. I remembered our peculiar exchange as well as her full name clearly, and sat one afternoon looking askance at the Facebook search field as the cursor blinked expectantly. I wanted to write that letter, but, I also didn’t want her to be real. I was almost disappointed when she came back as the first result, with a photo that confirmed her existence in the tangible world outside of a surrealistic vignette with a mystery minx at a location I couldn’t find again if I tried. In the spirit of modernistic defeat, I sent her a friend request instead of a puke bag.

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