Staring Contest
Ok, I tell my niece. Staring contest on the count of three. One, two, three. We open our eyes. I don’t think she’s ever done this before. She blinks. Ha! You owe me $100, I tell her. We can ask at the front if they’ll let you wash dishes to pay it off. I don’t want to wash dishes, she says.
Over the next two days, she racks up a $700 bill. Are you teaching my child to gamble, my sister asks me. We’re not gambling, we’re just… playing for money. So, gambling, she says. We’re learning how to do math, I say.
Then something happens, and my luck changes. My eyes are all itchy and dry. My niece wins this one. She says I owe her $1000.
When I first moved to New York I came with a lot of assumptions about the way things worked. One of them was that it was not a totally horrible idea to talk to the homeless people. They are human beings after all. Maybe they had some interesting stories to tell.
I related this to my boss at the time, who was a typical Philly guy. Trashy accent and everything. He’d get the train into Newark Penn, then to Midtown, and we’d spend the day together. He told me that he didn’t make eye contact with anyone on the street that tried to talk to him. This struck me as very sad. I thought he didn’t know much about the city because he didn’t seem to understand how long it took to navigate between the boroughs. There was the time that I showed up to a meeting in shorts, and he wanted me to go all the way to Queens just to change. The meeting was in Williamsburg, by the way.
My response was that you just have to stand your ground, speak to them calmly, and not let the homeless people know they’re scaring you, because if they sense weakness that’s when they’ll really start to fuck with you. Like a big dog. Like I was the bum whisperer. He didn’t even acknowledge that I had said anything. That’s how dumb he thought what I was saying was.
My typical day usually ended in Hell’s Kitchen, and then I would get the N train from the Times Square or 49th Street station, back to Astoria where I lived. I was walking my normal route and wound up in front of the Port Authority, on the side facing the New York Times building. Someone held a pamphlet out in front of my face. It looked like it had a bus on it. Maybe it was a tour package or something. The guy was wearing a polo shirt so it could conceivably have been his job. People with collars usually have jobs, don’t they? I didn’t really notice the guy standing next to him, and it didn’t register that they might have been a pair.
I was about to explain to the guy with the pamphlet that I wasn’t interested in what he was selling, when the other guy started talking to me. He wasn’t wearing a collared shirt. In fact, he wasn’t wearing a shirt at all. He was what people in the fitness community refer to as “yoked.” As in, he had the frame of an ox, which is a farm animal that wears a yoke, which is an implement used to pull a plough and till the soil. He wasn’t wearing a yoke or a shirt but he was wearing a durag. He had enormous pectoral muscles and deltoids and biceps and defined abs. He looked like one of those dudes you see in the prison yard. Like he was on every kind of steroid. He looked like that guy Kimbo Slice. It may have actually been him.
What he said was: “I will take you places no man has ever been.” I think it was meant to be an offer, like he was offering to have sex with me, for money. But it came across like he was telling me what was going to happen.
I took my boss’s advice and stopped making eye contact after that.
