I continue on, marveling at black streetlights, which are M-shaped like seagulls, their clear bulbs hanging at the ends as if dripping from wings. I travel through a cloud of perfume that has some sort of off-pickle undertone that makes me happy and must remind me of something from my childhood.
I spot the clearest wall-sign on a building yet: Style Undies Mfg / Children’s / Distinctive / Underwear / Gowns / Pajamas / Bo-Peep Mfg Co / Brother / & / Sister / Individual & Companion / Clothes / Play Togs. What is a play tog? I’ll have to look it up. That drives me crazy, a word I don’t know. After my perfect verbal SAT score, there shouldn’t be a word I don’t know. I try to figure out if it’s supposed to be a Y instead of a G, but someone jostles me. There’s no stopping or standing on New Year’s Eve.
I continue north past Walk/Don’t Walk signs, office buildings, shoe stores, gyms. Slapped on a light pole is a thin white square of paper saying No Parking Sunday, Police Dept. and under it, as a kicker, is some marketing genius’s fluorescent orange sticker advertising 24-Hr Towing.
Around 38th Street is when I see the snake.
There is a multicolored, lit-up quivering serpent running down the corner of a building. As I get closer, I realize that’s what a lit-up wall-sized ad in Times Square looks like from the side.
As I approach the polychromatic creature, I see the other trademarks of Times Square: the orange lit-up scrolling Dow Jones “zipper” that displays the news; mirrored office windows reflecting millions of tiny lights; ESPN Zone, steak places, nut vendors, caricature artists, and incense stands trailing thin caterpillars of smoke that creep into our noses intending to arouse our wallets.
The noise is pollution—a loud, bubbling din accompanied by sirens, signals, shrieks, squeals. The crowd thickens and soon I can barely move.
Everyone seems happy. They’re laughing, talking, hugging. I start feeling miserable again. The people are tall, the buildings are taller, and I’m just below them.
Suddenly a voice next to me says, “Are you alone?”
I turn.
“Come with us!”
It’s a woman in a black wool coat, talking into her cell phone. “Me and Eddie are meeting at ten. No, it’s packed here. I can barely get through. Ow. Someone just bumped me again. Yeah, I better go.”
I hate cell phones.
“Hello. Ed? I don’t know what got into me. I just invited Jessica. Well, she called and she was kind of hinting. I know. Well, you don’t have to talk to her. Hey, hold on a minute. Hello? Jess! Yes, on Broadway. Yes, right. All right, well we can’t wait to see you! Bye. Hello, Ed? That was her again. So I felt sorry for the girl. What do you want?”
I want to keep listening to her conversation, but the noisemakers drown her out. Can’t people be polite when someone is on the phone?
She makes her way into the crowd, and I follow her, deciding to be a people-listener. I will try to isolate other people’s conversations, catch their phrases, see if they’re talking about anything worthwhile. I manage to hear a few snippets:
“Not only didn’t they discipline the dog, they left the cheese out for everyone to eat.”
“Urinals? Forget it. I can’t ever concentrate if someone’s in the next stall.”
“I had no idea it meant something different in England, and no one talked to me for the rest of the trip.”
“Weren’t you supposed to use that money for grad school?”
“I think he faked it to get mouth-to-mouth.”
“So she, like, bought the clothes in New Jersey, ’cause the tax on clothes is only three percent there, and she wanted to go return them to the Macy’s in New York so she could get the eight-and-a-half percent sales tax back, and we were like, first of all, you’d be only gaining like five cents per clothes, and besides, like, Macy’s is going to know. It’s on the receipt. She’s, like, a moron.”
Petrov thinks I’m negative about people, but look at everyone talking about each other behind their backs! I don’t talk much about people behind their backs—so why is being privately irked by them so bad?
I walk swiftly ahead so I can follow Cell Phone Woman into her party. She hasn’t managed to get too far ahead of me. She seems to be on the phone an awful lot. “Everyone from the show!” she says. “Even David, and Alcott. You have to go! Yeah, on the sixth floor!” She gives a corner on Broadway. Maybe I can follow her. And meet her “friend” Jessica, who clearly needs better friends. The corner she mentions is nearly in the heart of Times Square. And right now, so are we.
Then, we’re completely at a standstill.
There’s nowhere to go. People’s shoulders are pushing against each other. The lights assault us: red, blue, pink, green. The conversations mix to form one roar. Confetti is raining from everywhere, showering slowly. The ads on the Coke display are exploding. We’re in a wonderful phantasmagoric dream kaleidoscope.
“I’m, like, totally stopped,” Cell Phone Girl says. “I may have to crawl through someone’s legs.”
“Tonight!” booms a speaker. The crowd packs tighter, shoulder to shoulder. “We present…” I manage to look around, and still find that not one other person seems alone. Guys are hugging shiny-dress-clad women; burly men are laughing with their friends. Don’t people have any guts? Why am I the only one in the world who ever has the courage to do anything alone? Why does Petrov think I’m the one with the problem, when I’m the only one with courage? Is there not one other person in Times Square alone?
I don’t know if I can blame anyone, though. It’s hard to be alone. What’s strange is that one more person is all it takes to make you feel like you fit into the world, even though a couple is only one more than one. Just the mere addition of one person makes your life 800 percent better, and makes you all of a sudden fit into the social structure of society. Why does one plus one equal a quality-of-life increase of 800 percent? Without that one person, you must walk alone, eat alone, travel alone, sleep alone. If I had one person whom I fit in with and who was beholden to me, I wouldn’t have to prove anything to the rest of the world. I’m sure there are couples who are both misfits, but they fit in with each other so it doesn’t matter.
Suddenly I realize I am flanked by a pair of tall men.
“We’re, like, squeezing this girl,” one of them says to the other.
“It’s okay,” I manage to yell.
The first guy says, “Jim, come over this way.” Then, to me, “You here alone?”
“I’m meeting friends.”
“Here?” the first guy says. “What did you say, ‘Meet me in Times Square’? Forget it.”
“I guess you’re right,” I say, trying to sound cheerful. I figure I should leap through the window of opportunity before it closes. “What are you two doing?”
“Just waitin’ for the ball to drop,” Jim says, then sniffs. I see the breath come out of his mouth. He has a chain around his neck. “Is it always this cold here?” He blows into his cupped hands.
“On New Year’s Eve,” I say. “Where are you from?”
“Fresno,” Jim’s friend says. “We’re visiting college friends. But they dissed us.” He proffers his hand. “I’m Rudy, by the way.”
“Carrie,” I say, shaking it. It’s beefy.
“What? Shari?”
“Carrie.”
“I’m Jim,” Jim says.
“You got a boyfriend?” Rudy asks me.
“Nah,” I say. They look at me, and I add, “It can be hard for me to meet people who I can really talk to sometimes.”
Jim says, “Well, you know, maybe you shouldn’t rule out just having sex.”
I laugh.
“No, I’m serious,” Jim says.
“Very funny.”
He is dead serious. They both are. “It’s New Year’s Eve,” Rudy says. “Why don’t you just hook up?”
“You’d just have sex with someone you didn’t know?”
Rudy shoots Jim a look, then says to me, “Hell, yeah. If she’s cute.”
“What if she wasn’t, but you liked her personality?”
“How would I get to know her personality?”
“You wouldn’t speak to someone unless she was cute?”
Jim and Rudy look at each other and laugh.
I look at them. Rudy weighs about three hundred pounds. Jim is wearing a stained Clifford the Big Red Dog sweatshirt. And they’re being picky.
“What about a 4-9-1?” Rudy says to Jim.
“Naaaah,” Jim says.
“What’s a 4-9-1?” I ask.
Jim leans close enough to my ear that I can feel his hot beer-breath. “It’s a girl who looks like a four when you’re drinking,” he says, “a nine when you’re drunk, and a one the next morning.”
“Owooooooohhhh!” Rudy howls. “Don’t see any nines yet.”
“Keep looking,” Jim tells him.
“Or, keep drinking.”
They guffaw.
Rudy puts his left hand on my shoulder. “Now, tell me,” he slurs. “Would Jim be your type?”
I look at Jim, trying to be open-minded. “Maybe,” I say. “If I found out that we had things in common.”
“You’re just a ray of sunshine, you know that?” Jim says sarcastically. “You have a real good attitude. It’s such a shock you don’t have a boyfriend.”
I don’t understand how I earned his scorn. Isn’t it interesting that people are fine with judging potential mates based on looks, but if you try to mention a nonphysical criterion instead, suddenly you’re the snob?
“Well,” I say, “It was nice meeting you. I hope you find what you’re looking for.” I edge past them. I hear one of them call, “Hey!” but I’m not interested. I’m disheartened, is what I am. Just when I start to believe things aren’t as bad as I thought, I meet a pair of numbchucks like those two. Is this what’s out there?
If so, why do I want to be here?
I look back, and Jim is giving his friend a what-a-bitch look.
Even when I try to find middle ground, I meet people who are so completely at the opposite end of the planet from me. And that makes me feel creepy.
I try to remember which building Cell Phone Woman’s party is in. There is a tall hotel that a crowd of people is disappearing into. I walk behind them. One of them gives me a quick glance, but they’re busy with each other and don’t seem to care when I follow them in. The bellhop doesn’t notice. We all squeeze into an elevator.
They press the fourth floor. Maybe there’s a conference room there.
The guy who looked at me before looks again. “What floor?” he asks me.
I look at the numbers. I say the highest one. That way, I can wait until everyone is off, then decide where to stop.
When the elevator doors open on four, the group steps out. It is loud, and I hear someone on a microphone announcing something. There are balloons and streamers in the hall. The doors close. I’m in there alone.
A feeling overtakes me.
I must get higher.
And higher.
High above the world.
As I pass various floors, I either hear music or silence.
I decide to stop at the tenth floor. It’s quiet. I walk to the end of the hall. I pass silent rooms, then rooms with TVs on, rooms with low discussion and periodic laughter. Then, I am at some sort of red stairwell door.
I push.
Inside, the stairwell walls are white and badly painted, with a brown stain creeping up one.
I head upstairs. There’s another level, and it’s got a nondescript gray door with a hole where the knob should be. I push again.
I am hit with a gust of cold wind. I walk out, and it is like I have landed on the moon. It’s some sort of subroof full of J-shaped metal pipes and quartz. Beyond that, I see the city, lit up like a forest of Christmas trees. Beyond that, the stars.
I tread on black mesh rubber matting over the rocks to a gaggle of overturned plastic milk crates a few feet from the edge. I wonder if anyone has ever been arrested for illegal possession of a milk crate. There were people at Harvard who made dining room sets out of them.
I see crushed cigarettes and a beer can on the subroof, but it doesn’t look like anyone has been here tonight. Do I worry that it is dangerous for me to be up here alone? No. Do I worry I am trespassing? No.
Did I have some weird things to drink?
Yes.
I sit on a blue milk crate, ten stories above Times Square, and hear honking below, and sirens, and cheers and various convergences of the three. Then, noisemakers like the ones at football games. The cold air swirls around me, but it feels good. I am finally high up enough to read one of the Parental Hotline billboards, the ones that say, “To be a supportive parent, you have to work” and “To be a supportive parent, you have to stay home.” This time, I can make out the phone number: 1-855-NYC-COPE.
There’s a number I could use.
I look around. I see black iron fire escapes. I gaze down at roofs that contain debris, plants, and in one case, a broken table whose legs are flattened and bent around it like a smashed spider; farther down, inside glowing windows, are people’s heads, couples dancing, cats, lamps, computers. There is black lighting, blue lighting, red lighting, pale lighting. I see a woman in a window looking out, and then a man handing her a drink.
I realize something.
I love this city. God, I do.
This makes no sense. People who wax poetic about New York have always irritated me. It’s like feeling nostalgic over the TB shots you used to get as a kid. It’s a city. What’s to love about poverty and grime? It’s pseudo-artsy to speak of a predilection toward such a place. Woody Allen said in Manhattan, which is on one of the AAFR lists, that it’s a great city, and that he doesn’t care what anyone says. Yeah, maybe it’s great if you’re a forty-five-year-old man and can have a romance with a teenage girl and you’ve constantly got “Rhapsody in Blue” tinkling in the background like in that movie, but in real life, you’d more likely have a dozen homeless people tinkling in the background. How can someone love such a place?
But I do.
I step away from the crate, kneel down and lie back on the rubber matting, looking up at the sky. A few small rocks on the matting pinch my back, but aside from that, it’s quite comfortable. A white film is now covering the stars, like thin curtains at the end of a performance.
The cold air envelops me. The lights spill over the buildings. Red. Blue. Green. Yellow. I am part of everyone else now. We’re all in a giant Lava lamp, together.
Lying here on my back, I’m ready for good things to shower upon me. I want the bulbs to explode and rain brilliant bits of yellow and purple and white. I feel ebullient. I wonder if this is the way other people feel all the time.
Maybe I do usually suffer from depression. Maybe the way I feel now, everyone else feels most of the time, and that’s why they’re so much more comfortable with the world than I am. Maybe it’s chemical. Maybe Petrov was right. How would I know, if I’ve never felt any way other than the way I usually am? And this feeling I feel now, what if I can replicate it with antidepressants? Even if they’re drugs, so what—if I can feel this good with them, why shouldn’t I? Is this what it’s all about?
I don’t really believe I’m depressed, though. But that whole idea is something to think about, the question of whether we should reject anything that could make us feel better. Even if it’s a drug.
But tonight, lying under the stark black sky, I need to think about something more important.
I need to think about how I view the world.
Okay, so I think I’m smarter than other people. Okay, I don’t have much patience for them. I’ve already started confronting that. But why am I like that?
It is true that my great acceptance always came from grades. A smile from a teacher was like an embrace for me. I was able to elicit them routinely, just by doing an extra good job on my homework or on a test. I could do that several times each week. It was within my power. Work hard, get
a hug.
There were deadlines, assignments, quizzes, contests. Compliments abounded. Teachers would gush on my report card. Each A was a pat on the back. It happened sometimes in college, too.
But now I am out of school. Whenever I figure out what it is I should be doing, I certainly won’t be embraced for it.
Instead, I sit in my room. It has structure and it’s safe.
One thing I need to do is accept that the value of people, and myself, has little to do with test scores or what college they went to—if they went. I guess I do know that, inside. I can accept people who are different. This is something I know.
But I also have to acknowledge that what truly excites me is learning and understanding new things. I can’t help it. When that bulb snaps on and I can see something in a new way, it’s exhilarating. And when someone is excited to share this perspective with me, that is wonderful. That’s the way I am. If people want me to accept them, they have to accept me.
I also know that the part of me that needs to analyze everything to death leads to the part of me that needs to understand and feel comfortable with the morality behind what I do. If I have to give up these concerns, I’m not me. If I have to be just like everyone else, something’s wrong.
I can compromise a little. I can decide not to turn up my nose at those who aren’t like me, while still staying true to my own beliefs. I can do this without changing myself. I can be strong and still discourage those who pressure me. I can recognize middle grounds.
Yet, there are some other things I know.
I know, standing out here tonight, that I will never be the person pressed up against the wall at a party getting a teeth cleaning by Barn.
I will never be the one horsing around in Harvard Square with a guy and his Saint Bernard.
I will never be the one holding four guys’ attention at an alumni club.
I will never be the one sitting on the floor, smoking pot in apartment 3B.
And that’s okay.
I need to believe I’m doing the right thing, and maybe learning something if I’m lucky. If others don’t think that’s valuable, so be it.
Carrie Pilby Page 28
