Britical

 

NYC

Two weeks ago, I stopped carrying my knife. A gorgeous, Languiole instrument with a shiny 4 inch blade, I have carried it with me for over ten years. There was never any logical reason to think it would make me feel safe exactly, but as a rescue professional, and having carried and used it out on wilderness expeditions, it has always made me feel more …capable. And so, at some point, it must have become a talisman - my "lucky" knife, the vegetarian version of a rabbit’s foot.

Two weeks ago I was in the U.K. again. I spent quite a bit of time watching the news and what was news every day, it was shockingly clear to me, was teenagers stabbing other teenagers to death. In England! Those of you who live there will find my incredulity a bit shameful and hard to believe. But living in New York for so long, a city now declared one of the safest cities in the world (still a hard fact to digest, I know) I had had the luxury of not quite believing English friends who started to tell me, even ten years ago, about people getting stabbed and mugged for cellphones or footwear or for the dastardly crime of looking at someone, or not looking at someone, in the wrong way.

 

Despite my having all the usual credentials that get trotted out at these times - being a mixed race child brought up by a single mother on a council estate (projects in American) - I still found this inconceivable…in England. Perhaps even because my own upbringing would statistically suggest a perfect recipe for disaster. And then, almost laughably, it dawned on me, because I do, after all, carry a knife. And I have at times, to be really, really honest, carried it partly for the same reasons the perpetrators of stabbing say they do: protection.

Flopped in front of my Mum’s television, I didn’t have the knife with me anyway. The last time it travelled on a plane was the night of September 10th, 2001 when I flew into NYC from London. I am now too concerned for its welfare to chance putting it in checked baggage. So, knifeless, I watched endless BBC news footage of the bewildered, tearful relatives of the latest victim, a 19 year old actor in the upcoming Harry Potter film (of all things) stabbed to death outside a pub the night before for the usual reason: that is, no reason in particular.

But there it was anyway, scrolling across the TV screen, the technicolour parade of wounds inflicted by knives - presumably an attempt by the "authorities" in England to scare people into relinquishing their weapons. I expect someone thinks these tactics will go usefully hand-in-bloody-hand with the pleading, the outright begging, by stupefied looking dead childrens’ parents, to please, please, please just stop. It is a reasonable thought, after all - its flaw being it may appeal only to reasonable people. The gallery continues, of gaping, ragged holes in flesh surrounded by ripped, flapping skin, and unruly heaps of entrails piling uncontrollably, inappropriately even, out of places you’d think too tiny to hold such human soup. The victims’ faces are hidden, of course. It looks to me like the stuff of a combat medicine lecture I attended last year and not the surgically tidy if deadly slot machine incisions you (I) might naively imagine a stabbing to look like.

So I have stopped carrying the knife. Because of what I know now, I feel a bit ashamed. Meanwhile, here I am living in a safer city than London, but in a country where 2nd Amendment rights have been interpreted to allow the approximately 193 - 250 million guns currently in circulation. No surprise then that thirty thousand people are killed by guns every year in the U.S.- numbers that outstrip England’s puny efforts many times over. So here is my fear: that knives will turn inevitably into guns, and that this present murder epidemic of 2008 will be looked back on by the English, in years to come, in much the same way that England itself is still regarded from here: as something rather quaint. We may realise, with some awful nostalgia, that we didn’t know that we had it so good. That is the saddest part.

 

Note: On June 26th, just a few days after this was written, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, endorsed the personal right to own a gun. (District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07 - 290)

 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved. 

 

 

 

I rounded the corner of Fifth Avenue onto 42nd Street fully expecting to find the ‘’Tell Me Off for One Dollar" man waiting for me - in fact waiting just for me. After all, last week, rushing to class, I had had no time to tell him off for even a quarter. But it was not to be. Leaving myself some reasonable time for a good dressing down before my class started, and after a fruitless reconaissance of the vicinity, he was nowhere to be seen. I stumped off, now much too early for class, as the warm sun seemed to retract its rays grudgingly westwards along 42nd Street, its heat adding to my general feeling of dismal aggravation.
 
I had been very taken by Tell Me Off Man’s concept; also intrigued. He had not had any takers as far as I could see. Unsurprising, since there he sat in his stripey deckchair (of all things), a large black man in a black t-shirt, arms folded stubbornly across his chest. He was a regular Mr. T., inscrutable behind dark, wraparound sunglasses. People swarmed past him, glanced at him furtively if at all, and kept going, perhaps with a little more urgency to their stride than they had before. It was a wonder he had not sought employment abroad with some private security company in, say, Iraq. He’d be so very, very perfect for riding, sheathed in Kevlar, atop the Humvee in a red bandana, all cracked up on power and blithe ignorance of, say, Section 843, article 43 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If this felt too chancy, he could surely make a nice living as a bouncer. I couldn’t imagine him not enjoying that mean little club doorman fiction as he stood, looming at the rope, waiting for the poor, unsuspecting post-college cretins in white pleated chinos and blue chambray shirts to approach him, clear in their intentions, only to have him pretend to not understand quite what they wanted; to humiliate them, in front of their jeering mates or tottering girlfriends, by unnecessarily enquiring in an indetectable customs officer type sneer: "Can I help you?"

What was his …deal anyway? Was he really trying to make some money? For sure, he did not appear to be some sort of faux pauvre rich kid performance artist from the School of Performing Arts wedged midway up his own arsehole. Would a telling off provide him some form of challenge or self-punishment? And if so, what ever had he done to deserve it - and were there heads and buckets of blood involved? And if not, if he was some peculiar type of street dwelling masochist, shouldn’t he be paying me for the verbal spanking? I had to know, but more importantly, I simply couldn’t believe he wasn’t there. Wretched man.

Used to be you could rely on such people in New York.  Zoning out in class that night, Tell Me Off Man made me think, once again, how much the city is changing. Apparent lunatics are, after all, almost a tradition here, appearing to have a particular penchant for New York itself. They have always appeared on a regular basis and with a frequency unparalelled elsewhere. Ironically so, if you think about it, when their audience, New Yorkers, have perfected the blank middle distance stare that says, "I do not see you. But know also, especially if you’re a bit violent, that it’s not personal, merely I am in a preoccupied state of hurrying or intently checking my text messages here in the subway car, and indeed, may in fact have failed to register the fact you’re blaring at the top of your lungs about Jesus or how you fought in Vietnam before you were born." Then again, and the genuinely desperate and poor aside, maybe it is precisely because of this fact, that some relish the comfort and freedom to just be completely whacked out in public and have no one bat an eyelash. I know I myself have been grateful for this fact on occasion (occasions we will not go into here).

When I first moved to New York, I actually used to work very close to Tell Me Off Man’s corner, on 42nd and Madison. I walked home most nights, and would usually come across the terrifying "Sign the Pe-TI-tion, Ladies!!!!!" woman. Same stomping ground as Tell Me Off man, except she had a much bigger sign, and was surrounded by grim placards, depicting all sorts of alarmingly blown-up grainy photos of various women, always in the same uncomfortable, nipple-ripping, chain-encrusted poses.  It was torture porn allright, but worse, it was wantonly uncreative. I say this but then I didn’t have a fair comparison since I never saw the stuff anywhere else; only on her corner. I used to wonder if I should point this damning irony out to her - but I never did, and I never signed the petition either, because, quite honestly, even I am not that stupid.

But not so my boyfriend, S., who, having come to collect me from work one day announced he would actually go "Sign the Pe-TI-tion!!!!!!" himself. Sweet boy. I think he was puzzled that I, a woman, had not already done so, and wanted to set me an example. As it turned out, although he, like me, had witnessed her railing furiously against men in all their forms, he was falling victim to the naïve logic that she might appreciate one of them trying to help. So off he bounced as I lurked at a safe distance wondering what would happen. And what happened was that I will never forget her face as he, a tall, genial looking dirty blond, strolled towards her; and she, a fidgety, red-skinned, equally dirty, dangerously skinny person started to flap her scarecrow’s arms and then… opened her mouth in a howl of such screeching banshee fury that the whole of 42nd Street turned to stare. S. stopped dead in his tracks. He turned his head towards me, looking bemused in the way gormless people in movies look when an obviously menacingly overly-familiar hitchhiker suddenly produces an axe. I looked away, of course. I did not know him. And finally, as realisation dawned - that she was, in fact, as mad as a snake - he fled. And so did I. And after that, we were always on the lookout for her and an opportunity to quickly cross to the other side of the street - much as I do with clowns and people who walk on stilts.

On the other hand, there was the harmless Duck Man, who rode cheerfully around Soho on a rickety old bike to which were attached, in some tricksy way, a LOT of large, yellow, furry ducks such as you might be unfortunate enough to win at a fair. No one seemed to think him particularly unusual or strange. More mysterious still is that I would frequently see otherwise quite sophisticated looking post-diners (usually men) late at night, walking around Soho clearly having just purchased one of the plug ugly things. Since they’d not had to expertly shoot anything off something at the Jersey Shore to actually "win" the duck, their silly grins and the adoring expressions on their girlfriends’ faces always seemed to me rather undeserving.

There are, these days, less of these "characters" (as they would likely be described by some). I suppose less are able to live in the city or cannot afford the commute. The artists, writers, or even just plain old bartenders and restaurant people have all moved further and further out - to Red Hook and beyond, to upstate New York, to Jersey, Pennsylvania and even (shudder) Queens. And I fear the Tell Me Off Man types may be ridiculed, less appreciated or respected for their utter weirdness by the more recent immigrants to Manhattan: the eternally blow dried Heathers and Melissas and the aformentioned doughy post-college fratboys in blue chambray shirts and pleated chinos who are more likely to shriek, respectively, "Omigod, euuwwww!" or "Dude! Check it out! Gross!" rather than respectfully walk on by, stop out of curiosity, or at least enjoy this phenomenon as a uniquely New York entertainment.

Now, unless you’re selling fake Balenciaga bags, or the Euro tourists find you amusing, you are much less likely, as an inventive or slightly deranged yet admirably resourceful person like Tell Me Off Man, to gather an audience on the corner of 42nd and Fifth by offering the unique bargain, in democratic tradition, to anyone at all in possession of a mere dollar to verbally rip you a new arsehole. It seems a shame.
 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved. 

 

 

NYC

This November, as we all know and have already had it up to here with, there will be a presidential election here in the U.S. I wouldn’t bring it up, but it made me think about someone I had almost forgotten about, a young man I dated - briefly - a few weeks before the last election. There is some lame comfort in knowing it was now almost a whole four years ago. Because as is often the way, and with time, I now wonder, "Why?"

He was waiting at the gate of the small Soho park he’d described on the phone, and he had a large bag over one shoulder. “What’s in the bag?”, I said, amused he would bring an accessory of such size on a "first date" (as the whole performance is known here). I was really hoping the inexplicable bag was a wily fail safe rather than an overnighter into which he’d just put his toothbrush and some clean socks. “My computer…might have to do some errands after this…”, he answered, unconvincingly. "Oh, really?" I said, and made a note to use that one myself some time – far more novel than the mid-dinner Dire Emergency phone call. 

Later on that night he admitted this was essentially a blind date for him. He actually hadn’t got a proper look at me the night we sort of met. I could see why - so I must say I admired his bravery. Viciously prodded by a friend who was impatient to leave some lacklustre after-party, I had got my nerve up and marched over to this guy we had been scrutinizing all evening, tapped him on the shoulder, and, for all the world as if serving the poor fellow legal papers, thrust my number into his hand. He had looked up, taken aback, as well he might be - but likely I was already barrelling away again as fast as my would-be killer heels would let me, feeling appalled and exhilarated.

We walk up West Broadway (I’m assuming. Quite honestly, I can’t remember.) and I sense he seems quite reserved – not, I hasten to add, in a serial killer way, but like a much older man, minus the sagging skin, budding beer belly and the inevitable desire for children. Perfect. Naturally, this attractive “reserve” would, within weeks, morph smoothly into "stodgy". This is how it often goes, doesn’t it? But for now, entranced by almost comic-book heroic straight dark brows slashed above clear grey eyes, what did I care? He also, later, turned out to be a Republican. Oops. I was baffled and dismayed, of course, but took it on the chin and indeed patted myself on the back for seeing it as an opportunity for "self-growth" in the open-minded and "non-judgemental" department and in that uniquely American style. Oh yes.

In this smug vein, a few weeks later, I graciously took the Republican for drinks on election night, full to bursting with my own magnanimity. Still, I was already becoming profoundly irritated by him for some reason I couldn’t quite fathom and was feeling simultaneously guilty about. What was it about him, I kept asking myself, that just pissed me off lately?

And then it happened: at some sorry point that election night, I glanced over at him, his face lit by the blue glare of the bar’s television, and realized with a horrible, horrible start that he looked physically and with unnerving precision, exactly like the Republican presidential candidate. I wasn’t imagining it either. How ever had I missed this?? It was in that moment that he finally lost my vote. It was an image I knew I wouldn’t be able to shake, even with my eyes tightly shut….

But that first date night, after a dinner I can’t now, shamefully, remember anything about either, he asks would I mind if we drop by his friend’s birthday party. Sure, I say, why not! – and off we go to a loud, post-college-y East Village bar. It reminds me of places I hated even ten years ago. But as we enter he puts an arm round my shoulders, carefully shielding from the heaving, raucous, beer sodden crowd as we push our way through to the back. His friends seem younger, more immature than him. Or perhaps it’s my wishful thinking and the only thing separating them and him at this moment is his sobriety. A tall, concave-chested man suddenly appears lurching towards us like an extra from a zombie movie. I can see he’s winding up for one of those drunken, latently homosexual back-slapping sessions of “I love you, maan! I fucking love you!!”. I recoil. And then my date does an impressive thing: He smiles genially at the zombie, sticks his hand straight out to shake hello, and as he introduces me, manages simultaneously to neatly place his body between me and the threat of being puked or fallen on. It’s a skillful and considerate bit of manoevering and I am struck by the grown-uppy gentlemanliness of the gesture. Yet within minutes I find myself thinking, ungratefully, of an unhappy friend who’s dating a much younger woman. Her friends, he complains, can only speak in uptalk? About college? And beer kegs?

“Let’s get out of here”, he says, sooner rather than later. I wonder if this is code for Let’s go back to my place. Or not. I am never sure. So we leave and take a zig-zaggy path across town at the whim of the traffic lights. He’s quite new to the city, so I lead us through various streets I’m fond of and think might interest him. One of these is 9th Street between University and Fifth. For as long as I can remember there has been a large parrot in the window of one of the  brownstones there. It has always been an immense treat for me to go and peer through the gap in the curtains, preferably with someone in tow who can be suitably awed by my vague acquaintance with the creature. But, as we walk by, the curtains are, for the first time, completely closed.

Ahead, a couple turns off Fifth and wobbles towards us. They’re clearly 2am tipsy, holding hands with their arms spread wide, giggling, and taking up the whole pavement. But at a few feet, we make eye contact and their arms lift into an arch, as I somehow knew they would, and I run underneath, as they somehow knew I would. We all laugh - delighted, I suppose, at the spontaneity of strangers in this city - and keep going. No one stops to chat or needs to – it happens in a strangely choreographed instant, a typically perfect and silly New York moment. It reminds me – as I am reminded about eight times a day – why I moved here in the first place.

I want to share this thought with my date, but for the first time that night, he is not by my side. I turn and see him just a few feet behind me stepping back onto the curb. He is scowling slightly, his mouth a sour moue of distaste, and I realize he must have decided to step into the street rather than indulge the silly New York moment. Oh well, I think - and dismiss it.

But as the tipsy couple’s footsteps recede behind me, the man turns back and delivers a disconcerting and rather unkind parting shot.  “She gets it, he doesn’t!!”, he shouts. And in my head, a soft little voice pipes up immediately. If the voice was a person it would be the cliched gay best friend, and he would be hissing at me in a stage whisper, and furiously waving a red flag.

But I ignore the pesky voice. Even, within two weeks, when I find out my date is a Republican…that he doesn’t believe in universal healthcare because his Dad doesn’t…that he uses a PC and not a Mac….that he ran with the bulls in Pamplona. I willfully ignore all these damning facts.

The day after the election I did the considerate thing and tried to dump him via email.  Maddeningly, he insisted on meeting up to "discuss this in person". I skulked along, to the same bar, untactfully enough, from the night before, mainly because it was close to my house and I couldn’t be bothered to travel further downtown. We sat in the corner this time and I played my brilliant trump card: "It’s the age difference…" I lied. He was silent. "I’m sorry, but it’s really the truth. You’ll understand when you’re older. It’s an inchoate thing, just a….feeling". I was floundering and I knew it, and maybe he did too. This pitch was bad and condescending, even for me. It sounded like a combination of a teenager’s parent and an ad for Coca Cola, but I didn’t care. He looked stony. I blundered on, taking another blabbering stab at it (him): "Besides, if we continue, one day you’ll want to move to Connecticut and have children and I want to live by myself and have a dog." That bit was the truth, actually. I instantly felt better about myself. (How American I was becoming.)

 

But he was quite unmoved by all this. Instead, he looked into my eyes, paused, and said simply, "But age does not necessarily breed wisdom." I have only lately wondered if this was a perceptive little dig. But at the time, caught up in my own sense of perceptiveness, I just sneered inwardly and thought, Ain’t that the damn truth! "Mmm..", I said, distractedly, and took another sip of my drink, wondering if I could get home in time for Gilmore Girls on TV.

 

Copyright Britical 2008 All Rights Reserved