Hello?
Feeling a little cloudy, lately. Foggy, or whatever you want to call it. It’s been a while, but let’s see if I remember how to do this.
Deborah and I were walking around Williamsburg after work last night — she needed to pick up some yarn from the yarn store to feed her knitting habit — and decided to get something to eat afterward. “How about Diner?” I suggested — a rehabbed Kullman Diner car in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge that I used to go to all the time until I met Deborah. Around the time we met, Deborah was hired as a bar tender at Diner but bailed on the job at the last minute, choosing to take something closer to where she was living at the time, instead. She was always afraid of running into the the guy who hired her and having an awkward moment so she never wanted to go there. That was years ago, though, and Deborah was willing to give it a go. “Do you think it’s early enough to beat the crowd?” I said.
“I doubt it,” said Deborah, somewhat relieved, perhaps, to have an excuse to go somewhere else. “It’s already seven o’clock.”
“Let’s see.”
She was right. You could see the old style Diner seething and humming from a block away. Opening the front door was like peeling open the lid on a tub of nightcrawlers. “No fucking way,” I said, and turned around only to be engulfed by a gaggle of yupsters anxious to add their beards to the tangle of facial hair already inside. Their momentum nearly pulled me into the plasma of yellow light, but managed to swim against the tide and make it to the safety of the sidewalk. “Oh well, so much for that idea. Where to?” I said.
There’s a fancy restaurant next to Diner (same owners, I believe) called Marlow and Sons. Neither of us had ever been there before, but we knew it expensive. It was a Friday night, though, and we hadn’t been out in ages, so what the hell.
We were offered a choice of two tables, one in a back room that was humming at near capacity, and a small table in the window. “Let’s sit in front,” said Deborah, “the back looks too cramped.” Unfortunately the front didn’t turn out to be any more comfortable. The table was only 2 foot square at most, squeezed between the front door and a another small table where a couple sat engrossed in romance. I offered to take the corner and we sat down. The hostess brought us water and menus and told us the waitress would be around to tell us about the specials shortly.
“I’m not really feeling this place,” said Deborah, pulling the tale towards her to give me more room, while at the same time sliding her chair in to avoid getting knocked as someone walked in the front door. “What do you think?”
“You want to leave?”
“I think so, yeah. How about you?”
“Let’s go.”
We apologized to the hostess and were back on the street, the elevated J train clattering overhead.
Deborah made the executive decision to simply go home and order a pizza. As we walked to the bus stop, we passed by Dressler, an even more expensive, even fancier restaurant. We made reservations for there once, but canceled for one reason or another. I can’t remember why, though it was probably because neither of us felt like spending a hundred bucks on dinner at the time. We didn’t feel like spending a hundred bucks last night, either, but even if we did, judging from a quick glance in the window, we wouldn’t have gotten a table anyway.
How ’bout that recession, eh?
We waited for the bus across the street from Peter Luger — a famous steakhouse that’s been around since the nineteenth century. A line of limos and taxi cabs picked people up and let people out like roller coaster cars at an amusement park. As I stood watching a waiter in a white shirt and black bow tie take an order, Deborah looked down and found a set of keys on the sidewalk. A guy standing nearby, waiting for the bus with us, was listening to his iPod. Deborah jangled the keys to get his attention. “Are these yours?”
He pulled his headphones out of his ears. “Oh my god. Those are my apartment keys. You saved my life.”
Deborah blew off work on her birthday yesterday, which meant that I did the same thing, more or less. When I’m working from home, it’s always a risk. My friend Reflux was in town from San Francisco and asked if we were available to meet him for lunch. “My treat,” he said. Never one to reject a person’s generosity, we accepted.
We met him at a southern-fried comfort food restaurant near his New York office and sat down for catfish and twenty questions, beginning with, “How’s married life?”
“Good.”
“Are you still thinking about leaving the city?”
“If by thinking, you mean fantasizing, then yes, we’re still thinking about leaving New York. But no, we’re not doing any planning.”
“Where would you go?”
The question caused my brain to leak so much voltage that my mouth couldn’t move. A brief moment to recharge and I answered: “Who knows?”
“How about kids? Any plans for kids?”
“No plans.”
“Your parents must be hinting about that, no? Any pressure?”
“Deborah’s father told her she’s too old to have kids,” I said. “He told her they won’t come out right, they’ll be retarded.”
“Well, there is some truth to that, I’m afraid,” said Reflux. “But, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you Deborah.”
She’s told him before, and she told him again.
“Why do I always think you’re younger than that?”
“I got an ‘old joke’ birthday card this morning,” she said. “My first one.”
“Oh no, the old joke birthday card. Brutal. But you’re still young enough to have kids. Or you could adopt. An Art Director I used to work with, remember him, Jamie? He recently left San Francisco, took a new job and moved back to New York. He’s mixing his baby batter with a doner egg and a surrogate mom and now he’s having twins. A boy and a girl. A middle aged gay guy living alone in New York City suddenly having two kids. Talk about a lifestyle change.”
Deborah just shook her head at the whole business. Aside from her two cats, she has no pressing maternal urge.
“It’s hard for me to say this,” said Reflux. “I love both my kids dearly, and they add a whole new dimension to my life, but there is something to be said for being free and unencumbered.”
“Is that what this is called?” I wanted to know.
“Speaking of which, you guys have to come out to visit.”
Reflux has been living in San Francisco for a few years now, and I still haven’t managed to take him up on the offer. As he tortured us with descriptions of his laid-back California lifestyle in swanky Mill Valley, I added him to a long and growing list of people we can’t afford to visit. Not right now, anyway. He’s already beginning to talk about eventually moving back east. Hopefully time and money will align for a visit before he does.
When we’d finished eating, our waitress brought the check along with a questionnaire for each of us. “If you fill these out,” she said, dealing them like cards, “We send you information about special events, and every year on your birthday you can come in for free food.”
“Really?” said Deborah. “Today’s my birthday.”
“Today?” the waitress said, surprised, and maybe only half-believing. “Sorry, I can’t do anything about it today. But next year.”
“In other words, she has to wait the longest of any of us,” I said.
The waitress shrugged and slipped away.
“I’m not filling that thing out,” I said. “They just want to steal my identity.”
We lingered for a while, Deborah drawing absent-minded swirls all over the questionnaires while we finished our conversation.
3. What’s your favorite sport?
Doodling.
After lunch, we ran some errands around town, then went to Brooklyn to pick up a small chocolate cake from the bakery where Deborah does bookkeeping. By the time we got home, Deborah wasn’t sure she still felt like having a semi-fancy birthday dinner of periwinkles and champagne like we’d planned, and asked if we could do it the next day. Of course we could, I told her, “Whatever you want. It’s your birthday.”
But after sitting home for a half hour she shook off her birthday depression and changed her mind again. “If we don’t go tonight,” she said, “I’m afraid we never will.”
“Put your shoes on, let’s go.”
I unexpectedly got out of work early and returned Virgo’s phone call from earlier in the day. We made plans for dinner. “I’ll be finished with work in about a half an hour,” she said. I was about 20 blocks away from her office and decided to enjoy the late day sun and mild temperature by walking to meet her. A peck and a hug hello, a quick pow wow about where to eat, and we were on our way — again enjoying the hint of spring by walking from Chelsea to the East Village. As soon as we set out, Harriet’s ex-boyfriend walked past in the opposite direction.
I think I caught him giving us a sidelong glance, but I couldn’t be sure if he recognized me. I explained who he was to Virgo. I told her how, after reading Harriet’s account of our evening together, I felt bad about shit-talking him. “We didn’t really shit-talk him,” Deborah had assured me, “Besides, who cares?” she said. “You’ll never see him again.”
But one thing’s for sure in New York City: despite it being crammed with millions of people — or perhaps because of it — you always see someone again.
“Oh well,” I shrugged, and we changed the subject.
As we stood on the corner waiting for the light to change, Virgo suggested we change our plans and go to a restaurant up the street from where we stood called Frank’s. “It really good Italian food,” she said. I squinted uptown in the direction she was pointing.
“The red awning?” I asked.
“No, on this side of the street. In the middle of the block. Right there.”
We walked through a door with the name Vera etched into it’s glass window.
“Why does the door say Vera if the restaurant is called Frank’s?”
“Yeah, I don’t know.”
We ordered wine and salad and pasta and talked about, what else: genetic engineering, of course.
“A friend of mine works in a lab where they create flat chickens in petri dishes,” said Virgo.
“What? What are you talking about? Flat chickens?”
“Yeah, I guess they’re easier to experiment on, or something.”
“They must just be tiny embryos, right? I mean, they don’t grow full grown flat chickens, right?”
“I guess so. Yeah.”
“Still, that’s just wrong. Flat chickens. Doesn’t that strike you as cruel and bizarre?”
“I don’t know,” said Virgo. “I don’t like chickens anyway, so…”
“You don’t like chickens?”
“I hate them. They’re dirty and disgusting. I mean, I like to eat them, but I only eat animals that I don’t like, you know what I mean?”
“Not really,” I shrugged. “I love all God’s chil’ren.”
“What about cockroaches?” Virgo asked.
Why does everyone always pick on cockroaches? They’re always cited as the classic example of something no one likes. The way people use McDonald’s as the epitome of crap jobs. “It beats working in McDonald’s” they say. And, “You like ALL living things? Well, what about cockroaches?”
“Sure, I like cockroaches,” I said, “Why not? You gotta respect them, at least.”
“If you were in your kitchen and saw a cockroach scurrying on the floor, you wouldn’t squash it?”
“I probably would. But I’d feel bad about it.”
It wasn’t true, of course, since there I sat twirling black linguini and stabbing sauteed calamari with my fork. It was delicious.
“I used to know someone who worked at Genzyme Corporation.,” she said. Genzyme is a Boston based research facility. “They just had a relatively menial job as a lab assistant or something, but everything was top secret. This department didn’t know what that department was working on, and that department didn’t know what the other one was doing. No one was allowed to talk about their projects, everything was stamped top secret and confidential, and everyone had to sign confidentiality agreements.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “I do a lot of work for ad agencies and have to sign confidentiality agreements all the time. The bureaucracy is astounding. You can’t get anything done without going through ten different people. Everyone is paranoid. And it’s not like they’re growing chicken spleens on tomato plants or anything.”
Virgo studied fashion design at a school not far from MIT, and during her time there, she met a lot of MIT braniacs. They always seemed to be working on secret things, she said. Apparently burdened with knowledge of secret government projects and biotech godlessness. Virgo would hang around the bars near the MIT campus hoping to find someone she could flirt with and get drunk enough to spill the beans about something interesting.
“Well?” I asked. “Did you?”
“No. One guy got trashed and told me he made robots. He said I should design clothes for robots. ‘That would be cool‘ he said.”
Just then, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around in the dim light and looked up to see a smiling face I didn’t recognize at first. “Excuse me sir,” he said, as I squinted at his silhouette, “How is the gnocchi?”
“Brian! Ha! I didn’t even recognize you.”
Brian recently moved back to New York after a couple of years of groundlessness, but I hadn’t seen him since his return. His hair was longer and the way the light shone from behind made it seem lighter, too. He looked thin, but fit. Above all he looked happy to be back in New York, grinning ear to ear.
Brian and Virgo had met once before, but it was clear they didn’t remember each other, even though they both pretended they did. We talked briefly but the restaurant was dark, noisy and crowded and Brian had to constantly shift around to avoid the busboy, the waiter, the host, and the patrons coming and going. “I’m going back to my table,” he said, patting me on the back. “Good to see you, we’ll talk soon, my friend.”
When Virgo and I finished dinner, I stopped to say goodbye on our way out the door.
“I was going to tell you this before,” said Brian, “but I thought I should wait.”
The guy and girl he was sitting with were engaged in their own conversation, and Virgo was waiting by the door.
“When I saw you sitting there, I said to these guys, ‘Hey there’s my friend Jamie.’ and they turned to look. ‘Is that his girlfriend,’ they asked. No, I said. ‘Then you can’t go over and say hello! What if he’s having an affair!’”
We laughed.
I looked at the girl sitting with Brian. She looked up at me, then at Brian, “What?” she asked.
***
These posts are getting way too long.
