slacker in businessman's attire - Saturday July 13 2002
John, my old housemate from the year I lived in Los Angeles, called me the other day and arranged to visit me during his drive back to Vermont from Washington, DC. He arrived this afternoon along with his new girlfriend Julie. She's young, thin, blond and beautiful, but she's also a number of other things John likes in a woman: outdoorsy, funny, intelligent, and (above all) hypercompetitive. The big "weird story" about her is that she's from Montana and once shot and butchered an Elk. John, who doesn't normally eat tetrapoidal meat, actually ate some of the elk jerky she prepared. As far as I know, Julie has never slaughtered an elf and made elf jerky, though John claims "she could kick my ass."
John was in full-on exuberant mode, talking constantly and manufacturing one hilarious joke after another extemporaneously. His energy seemed to stem partly from the excitement of being in New York, though I think it came mostly from his months-long abstinence from ADD medication (such as Adderal).
I'd thought ahead and stocked the refrigerator with my favorite summertime beer, Molsen Ice, and this gave John something to offer us. We sat around talking for awhile and then went for an extended walk around Park Slope. After eating pizza in the back air-conditioned part of the Big Pizza Café, we went down to 5th Avenue to experience Park Slope's bubblegum-bespeckled seamier side. In place of ADD medication, John drinks lots and lots of caffeine, so we had to stop somewhere to get coffee. We found a tiny bakery featuring iced coffee containing ice cubes made of frozen coffee, so we all had to get cups of that. John was fascinated by the outlandish coloring of some of the weird Hispanic cookies, so he bought an assortment. As we walk down the avenue, he'd pick at them a little and nibble, but mostly all he wanted to do was use them as props in his nonstop running commentary (similar to that one day we spent on the streets of San Francisco). Every now and then he'd try to force me to eat some sliver of alien-colored confection and I'd refuse with an "I don't eat things that look like that." Somewhere along the walk John determined that the frozen cubes of coffee weren't such a great idea, since they had a crumbly consistency and didn't contain cream or sugar (not a problem for a black coffee drinker like me).
It was 5:00pm by the time we made it back to my place, and John and Julie were on the verge of running late for their night on the town. They had tickets for the musical Urinetown, and though we'd tried to get a ticket for me too, it had naturally sold out. So I arranged to meet up with them later in Times Square after the show.
Because I'd be going out tonight, I took Sally on her midnight walk early, at 9pm. I rarely venture into Prospect Park at this time, and I happened to catch the tail-end of a nice weather summer Saturday, with people streaming out of the park with their folding chairs and empty coolers. The only group of people remaining was a bunch of black kids blaring the Beastie Boys (yes, Hello Nasty) from a boombox. It's never much fun to take Sally into the park in the aftermath of a big weekend picnic day. One grows hoarse from shouting "No garbage!" as she runs around crunching on the chicken bones and tearing Popeye's boxes out of the sides of plastic garbage bags.
As one is supposed to do, John and Julie had dressed up before going to see their musical. So I decided that if I was going to be hanging out with them it only made sense that I dress up also. So I put on an ensemble of clothes that I hadn't worn since Gretchen's brother's wedding. The weather was just cool enough to permit me to wear my pinstripe jacket.
So there I was, walking down Park Slope's 8th Avenue on my way to the Q Subway dressed up as a responsible, functioning adult in society. People I passed didn't seem to notice that I was a fraud, an imposter, a slacker in businessman's attire. What made this swindle all the more comic was how good I looked in my suit. I'm getting to the age now where I look like an overripe underachiever when I'm dressed in my usual teeshirt, ragged-cuffed pants, and flip flops. But I'm also getting to the age where a suit makes me look confident, distinguished, and worldly, not like some nervous pimple-faced Mormon going door to door. I could actually feel this confidence contributing to the serotonin in my stride. I must have looked like one arrogant prick by the time I turned to go down Flatbush.
The Midtown corner where I'd agreed to meet John and Julie was 43rd and 6th Avenue. There's a little Korean convenience store on that corner and I ducked inside to buy myself a bottle of white grape juice. As I was waiting in line, there was a teenage girl standing behind me singing lines from a pop song (it turns out it was "Move Bitch" by Ludacris, though sometimes she'd also sample "My Neck, My Back" by Khia).
Move bitch, get out the way
Get out the way bitch, get out the way
Move bitch, get out the way
Get out the way bitch, get out the way
It was so funny to hear this that I turned to smile at her. She had a pleasant face of indeterminate ethnicity and was smiling back at me with a trace of defensiveness. I'd sort of forgotten that I was wearing the outfit of mainstream authority. "It's not a bad word," she explained, reaching out to touch my arm in reassurance. Suddenly I felt like her high school principal.
Shortly thereafter John and Julie came hobbling towards me. I say hobbling, because Julie's shoes were proving so uncomfortable that each footstep was bringing her ever-increasing levels of pain. The musical had ended an hour before they'd expected it to and they'd been sitting around in a tiny Midtown park watching people. "We should have gotten some forties," John added.
Julie was delighted that I'd gotten dressed up for the evening, though John felt obliged to apologize. "No, this is great!" I insisted. "Alright then, you know what this means, we're going to go get drunk now!" "Yeah, bars let you get a lot drunker when you're wearing a suit," I observed.
We rode the Q down to Union Square and then set out into the East Village on foot. Julie's foot situation wasn't going to improve without assistance, so we stopped at a Walgreens along the way to get bandages. My shoes were also somewhat untested for distance and by now one of my toes was starting to blister as well.
We were in a little bodega getting cash from an ATM and I saw some typical looking slacker dude with longish greasy hair, faded black jeans, and threadbare tee shirt. I turned to John and said, "Look at that, so disgraceful, not wearing a suit!" John agreed, adding, "Fuckin' longhair. They shouldn't serve his kind." It was ridiculous commentary, but it was nonetheless rooted in real feelings. There's something about wearing a suit that makes you feel like a member of a species superior to those in lowly casual garb.
As usual for a night on the town with John, we had no specific destination in mind. This would have been fine for John and me, but the situation with Julie's feet meant that we couldn't cover all that much terrain. Eventually we settled on a little half-empty bar whose jukebox either had really screwed-up speakers or whose songs all consisted of remixes of familiar rock and roll classics. The bartender wanted to see all of our IDs, something that hasn't happened to me in New York in recent memory. I suppose John and I looked like cops and Julie looked 19, but still, this is supposed to be a lawless city, Giuliani, post-Giuliani, or otherwise.
The next bar we hit was a cute little place featuring ceilings of arched brickwork. We sat outside watching people walking up and down the street. At some point Julie told me the story of how she and John met. Evidently John and Fernando (he moved from Los Angeles to Vermont a few months ago) had gone to some dance bar in bumfuck Vermont and Julie was there and she saw them and naturally assumed (judging from their evident worldliness) that they were from some big city and only stopping in town briefly. She danced with Fernando for awhile but decided she liked John. Then she found out that John was actually a local. She never actually got his number the first night, but she did get Fernando's, so she called him and left a message for John. Meanwhile Fernando had been telling John, "I think she really likes me."
When Julie went to the bar to get a round of beers, John was telling me how she was the first girlfriend he's ever had who didn't leave him craving the next beautiful girl he saw. As an example, he pointed to a cute brunette talking to some guys at the bar. "See, she's cute, but I prefer Julie." Meanwhile some guy at the bar was chatting up Julie and we wondered if perhaps he'd buy her a drink or maybe just come to be in need of a good old fashioned ass kicking.
After Julie returned to our table, our attention was drawn to a domestic disturbance happening in the street. Some big guy was having a fight with his tiny girlfriend. He never actually struck her, but she was cowering in a way that seemed to indicate he'd struck her in the past. Also, sometimes he'd grab her and hold her in what might have passed for a hug but what was really more of a headlock. John was getting all worked up about it, wondering if he should jump to her defense. And then somehow we were distracted. That cute brunette at the bar, the one whom John had indicated, finally mustered the nerve to come over and talk to me. Yes, me. I told her I was from Brooklyn and that I had come here with my friends from Vermont. "Oh, I'm from New Hampshire!" she said. Seconds later John had invited her to sit with us. It turned out that this brunette's name was Joslin, she lived only a few doors down this street, and worked as a Corporate Tax Attorney. She was talking exclusively to John (since he wasn't allowing enough dead air for either Julie or me "to get a word in edgewise"). Nontheless, periodically she'd turn to make cutesy-eyes at me. It didn't really bother me that John was dominating the conversation; something about Joslin's personality irritated me. Perhaps this had something to do with the likelihood that she never would have come to my table had I not been wearing a suit. Julie picked up on my mood immediately and kept smiling knowingly at me. When Joslin finally got around to asking me what I do, I said, "I'm a web developer, but I'm unemployed." She was doing her best to be conversationally accommodating, saying that she too was in imminent danger of losing her job.
But then the subject of horseback riding came up and John lobbed a conversational handgrenade. "English or Western?" he asked Joslin. "English, or course," she said, proceeding to disparage Western as being "easy." Knowing John and Julie are from Vermont, she probably felt she could win speaking points for busting on Western riding. Unfortunately for Joslin, Julie is originally from Montana, and she wasn't going to let anti-Western statements go unanswered. "I could kick your ass," Julie insisted. This caught Joslin completely by surprise and caused her to rapidly backpeddle conversationally. She was, after all, trying to ingratiate herself to us.
Somehow we managed to bring our conversation to a civil conclusion, bidding Joslin adieu and catching a cab to Union Square. We had endless fun performing play-by-play post mortems on what had just happened both in the cab and on the subway platform. It was 3am by now and we were treated to the usual 3am Saturday night extended subway wait. There they were, the drunks, couples, and romantic failures, most of them dressed to get laid. A couple of guys were making out with one another completely unselfconsciously. I'd only had three beers tonight and this was probably the first time I'd ever experienced the 3am subway platform sober.
Julie's feet were at their blistered Bataan Death March limit during the walk back to my place from the Q. But near the end the suffering appealed to her competitive spirit and she seemed almost excited to have succeeded at making it. Once inside, I overheard her delight to rediscover what it's like to walk without torture shoes, "I have these things called feet that I can, you know, walk on!" John and Julie spent the night on the hide-a-bed.