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Jackson Heights-Astoria-East Village
Saturday, August 3 2002
I have an alarm system built into my lifestyle that alerts me whenever it's been "too long" since I last enjoyed Indian food at the Jackson Diner in Queens. Every time Gretchen and I eat there, I always buy a large box of black tea at a nearby supermarket. When that tea runs out, it means it's time for us to go back. So today we went there again, this time meeting up with some friends there: Mary Purdy, her boyfriend John, and John's friend Jason.
For a change, we caught a local municipal bus in Park Slope and it conveniently took us up Vanderbilt to the general vicinity of a G subway station in southern Fort Greene, not terribly far from the western fringe of Bedford-Stuyvesant. It's a very black neighborhood, enough so for me to joke, "Lock youwah dwooahs!" - a reference to something one of Gretchen's relatives once told her when driving through a bustling black business district in the middle of a workday. When Gretchen ducked into a store on Fulton to ask for directions, the woman at the counter knew why she was there even before she said anything. Stores in this neighborhood don't get a lot of business from white people.
The G subway has a reputation for being one of the slowest in the whole MTA system, but it's the sole crosstown line in Brooklyn. The only other way to Jackson Heights from our part of Brooklyn is via Manhattan. When we ran down into the G station subway, we saw it was only half of a train and didn't fill the station. We had to run down the platform to board it. Being the G train, of course, it was happy to wait for us.
This was the first time we'd ever eaten the Jackson Diner's Saturday buffet, and though a couple dollars more expensive than a weekday buffet, it was also somewhat more lavish, including (for example) a shrimp rice dish. People also seemed to be there in greater numbers, even though it was a couple hours past the noon rush.
Gretchen had been telling me about John and Jason and how much alike they are. This alikeness is partially a reflection of the subculture, which grants all its bright, creative 30-something white males a standard wardrobe of attributes and preferences, which they then tailor to suite the peculiarities of their respective genomes (and issues from childhood). But, according to Gretchen, there is also a geographic element to this alikeness. John and Jason both hail from Oregon, and there is a similarity between them that has allowed Gretchen to triangulate and identify other Oregonians based only on their conversational behaviors and expressions. It's a certain hippie-derived earthiness (marijuana usually included), coupled with an easy-going aw-shucks backpacker's rusticism. A common rhetorical question asked by Oregonians is "What in the world?"
I love the Jackson Diner, but there's a fundamental problem with my dining experiences there. I tend to be so hungry by the time I get there that I wolf down my food and go from famished to painfully overstuffed in about five minutes, as if my stomach is only the size of a thimble. Today I tried to eat slowly and deliberately, not reflexively. It's awfully hard to do when the food is this good.
Mary was telling us a crazy story about a political ad she made for some local politician when she was out in Los Angeles recently. In the ad, Mary played a constituent who is concerned about "gridlock," problem that evidently this politician claims he can fix. In the ad, she's shown saying, "I try to get from here to there but it's really hard because of all the GRIDLOCK!" The camera, a shaky handheld device evidently operated by an amateur, then zooms in on her face, revealing an archipelago of glistening bumps, zits, and craters that Mary didn't even know she had. There's also a guy in the ad, and his face is rendered in a similarly unattractive manner. But the kicker comes later in the ad, when Mary assumes different expressions and repeatedly says, "I'm voting for [name of politician]!" Mary had just assumed that these would be edited into little clips and interspersed throughout the ad. But then she saw the actual ad, the one now being broadcast on television, and it shows her making all these different expressions and saying "I'm voting for [name of politician]!" without any editing at all, in one long ridiculous take near the end! Then, at the very end, one of the politician's relatives from Poland is shown saying, "I come from Polend and I cen't wote, but if I could wote, I would wote for [name of politician]!"
Later during the meal I was talking to John about my new business of fixing people's computers in Park Slope. I said that computer repair wasn't really my calling in life, even though it's something I enjoy doing. I then told him all about what it's like to write computer code, to automate repetitive tasks, find patterns in systems, write the code to create those patterns, find further meta-patterns in that code, and rewrite the code to be more general, etc., etc. "I do this because I'm lazy and I hate doing the same thing twice," I explained. John is a drummer who plays in a bunch of different bands professionally. By their very nature, drummers must love doing the same thing over and over again. Nonetheless, John could get a sense of why I like programming, and he seemed intrigued, particularly when I explained some of the artificial intelligence projects I've been working on. Come to think of it, my programming effort seems to have as its ultimate goal the automation of all my behaviors so I can, in theory, go off on an Aerosmithian permanent vacation, hopefully aging with somewhat more grace than Steven Tyler and the boys. This may sound like a bit of an overstatement, but in my final months at Yahoo.com, I'd managed to disentangle myself from nearly all of the grunt work my job would have otherwise entailed.
After lunch, after getting my box of Taj Mahal tea at the nearby Indian supermarket, Jason drove us all back to his place up in Astoria, a neighborhood in northwestern Queens. It's a dismal part of the city, an uncomfortable mix of concrete playground urban and bird-chirping suburban, with a little too much sun and not nearly enough trees. Jason lives in a small basement studio bachelor pad, a very recent residence in the aftermath of a 12 year relationship. He's a bass player, and one of the largest objects in his apartment was a standup bass. When Gretchen showed interest in it, he immediately gave her a quick lesson on how to play a couple tunes, including Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused." I also got a crack at it and was delighted to see that there are little dots along the neck to show me where the frets would if the thing had frets.
Living with Jason in his apartment were two ancient, sickly felines: 17 or 18 year old Elizabeth (a skin & bones relic of a black cat), and a 12 year old striped grey suffering from a stomach tumor. The cats are so old and frail that Jason actually has to give them fluid injections on a regular basis. I was petting Elizabeth and the progress of my fingers going down her back kept being halted by the knobby summits of each vertebræ. She was so frail I thought that any moment she might just crumble into a furry pile of cat dust.
We drank a few beers and Jason played some CDs of a local band that he and John have played in. Later he put on something so overplayed at Oberlin that it was like Muzak to my ears: Jimmy Cliff's Harder they Come. I found myself thinking, "Wait, people still listen to this?" It was as if he'd put on "Stairway to Heaven" or Beethoven's Fifth. Some music, just like some imagery, has had all the meaning wrung out of it from sheer repetition.
At about five, Gretchen, Mary, John and I caught the N subway back to Manhattan. It's another one of those slow trains, which wouldn't have been so bad, but I found myself sitting next to guy with inch-long yellow fingernails who smelled like a rotting animal. This sort of unpleasant subway experience is a mercifully rare one, and normally I would have just gotten up and moved, but since there were four of us, I decided not to complain about it.
Mary and John went forked out of our contingent somewhere on the way to Union Square, where Gretchen and I disembarked. We'd arranged to hang out and play cards with Mikila and Drew in the East Village, but we still had an hour to kill and the East Village is ideal for that. We started out watching the dogs cavorting in the Union Square dog run and then set out southeastward. We wandered into a makeup and novelty store staffed by goths and heavily-pierced retro punks and were interested by the temporary tattoo section. They stocked just about every conceivable fake injury, including fake hickeys, fake bruises, fake road rash, and even fake acne (featuring quarter-inch-wide whiteheads).
Later we stopped in at the B&H Dairy for cold beverages and pickles. At first Gretchen was going to drink lemonade and eat pickles, but the two aren't really compatible, so she switched to ice tea instead.
At Mikila and Drew's place we sat around drinking Budweisers and shooting the shit until we had the five people necessary to play a card game called "the Great Dalmuti." Eventually we were joined by Phil, the lead singer for Austin's Black Lipstick (whose girlfriend Gretchen wanted "take home with us" after a show in Brooklyn). We started discussing the shitty way in which Mikila was recently fired as drummer from the Fiery Furnaces. The two others in the band, "the twins," had reportedly taken the non-confrontational approach and simply hired a new drummer without ever bothering to tell Mikila. To Gretchen, this sounded "typically Californian," but to me it sounded "typically dotcom," though the words "dotcom" and "Californian" might be synonymous in this context.
So then we were playing the Great Dalmuti. The game features its own unique deck with one "1" card, two "2" cards, and so forth out to twelve "12" cards. There are also two wild cards. Everyone gets a random hand, and the lower the cards, the greater their value. One tries to get rid of cards by putting down sets of identical cards whose face values are less than and whose quantity is equal to those of the previous hand put down by the previous person. If what you put down goes unbested by anyone, then you get to lead the next round. The first person to get rid of all his cards gets to be "the Great Dalmuti" in the next game. Subsequent people to get rid of their cards are given progressively lower and lower status for the next game, culminating in the shittiest status of all: "Greater Peon." The Greater Peon has to do all the card shuffling and clearing, and also gets assigned such shit work as fetching beers. Status also dictates where one may sit around the table, with the Great Dalmuti getting the comfiest chair and the Greater Peon perching, ideally, atop a splintery wooden stool. The intermediates between these two levels are referred to mostly as various castes of "Merchant," and tonight they were crowded together on a couch.
In the first game, Drew was the Great Dalmuti and Gretchen was the Greater Peon, and Drew played his role with all the arrogance of a medieval despot. "Just wait..." Gretchen would say as she shuffled the cards. But in that first game, Drew's Great Dalmuti status had been severely jeopardized by something called "revolution." If someone gets two wildcards in his hand, he can call "revolution" and this removes one of the Great Dalmuti's principle means of staying in power from one game to the next: his power of "taxation." Normally, when there is no revolution, the Greater Peon must give the Great Dalmuti his two best cards in exchange for whatever two cards the Great Dalmuti doesn't want. At first I couldn't understand why the removal of this tax was called "revolution," but after I became the Great Dalmuti and held onto my power for three consecutive rounds, I realized it was mostly because of the good cards I was taxing from the Greater Peon. For most of my term as Greater Dalmuti, Gretchen happened to be the next-lowest caste, "Lesser Dalmuti," and I referred to her as my Queen (and she came over and sat in my lap on a couple of occasions, precipitating mild unrest amongst the rabble, which by now had swollen to include Drew and Mikila's former - but not current - housemates).
It was a much more engrossing game than expected, and somehow the hours flew by. It was well after midnight by the time Gretchen and I headed home. We caught a cab out on Avenue A and were driven home across the Brooklyn Bridge.
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