MD: Bargain Basements and Billionaires

New York is a town of extremes. The rich and the poor, the high and the low, the crass and the divine: all share such close proximity to one another that you may think you can choose which of these buffet items to plate for yourself. This is why it is so attractive to artists, dreamers and the mentally unhinged; the limitations of life seem arbitrary and porous. And while the city does grant access and opportunities unheard of in other locales, anyone who has looked for an apartment here knows that, in this city, some doors are painted shut and some windows face brick walls.

I became acutely of this while working for a billionaire family at their corporate office. One day, I was out on my lunch break, buying clearance sale underwear at Daffy’s when the office called to say that the my boss’s birthday gift from her husband was ready for pick up. I quickly paid for my low-rise briefs and headed up Madison Avenue to Hermes. The doorman - yes, Hermes has a doorman (really a security guard, but we mustn’t give the sense that protection is necessary) – reluctantly let me pass. The salespersons there are very good-looking and well-dressed, as are, of course, the shoppers.

And then there was me. It’s not that I looked homeless. If I had, it would have been easy to deny me entry, but I presented an enigma to this Uptown set. In my fraying chinos, boxy oxford shirt, bland tie that was too wide by half and scuffed brogues that I’d been breaking in since college, I resembled a new substitute teacher with the requisite look of fearful inadequacy or a Mormon missionary lost in a distillery.

A saleswoman approached me apprehensively. I dropped my boss’s name and explained that I was sent to pick up her birthday gift. Upon request, I handed over my proof of identity, both driver’s license and company ID. If social etiquette had allowed her to request a cheek swab and hair sample, I’d have had to provide that too.

With a manicured index finger and a smirk, she indicated that I should wait while she called the office to see if my story checked out. In fairness to her, she is right to suppose that anyone in the employ of a cosmetics magnate would probably have had better complexion than I. Once I had been properly vetted, I was required to sign several pages claiming responsibility for the item I was now to transport four blocks south.

Then the saleswoman put on white cotton gloves that an archeologist might wear to exhibit a delicate antiquity and asked me to inspect the gift for flaws. The gift was a Birkin Bag. For my fellow plebs, a Birkin Bag is a large woman’s handbag, made by hand of buttery leather in a style of simple elegance. Truly, it is a thing of beauty. When I assented to its perfection, the saleswoman placed the handbag into a large orange box, tied it with a brown ribbon and then placed the box into an enormous orange shopping bag.

It was only when she relinquished to me this Holy of Holies that I became aware that, all this time, I carried a small Daffy’s bag – yellow and blue and garish all over. I became embarrassed anew once I realized that I had been fingering the wares at Hermes, all the while toting my undies from a bargain-basement store. Perhaps, I thought, these classy folk don’t know what Daffy’s is, like the Dowager Countess who asks what is “a week–end”. But even if they had only a hazy idea of what I it was, the starchy crinkle of cheap plastic, a sound so familiar to my ears that I stopped hearing it, would have alerted them to the pedestrian purchase within.

As I wended my way back onto Madison Avenue that sunny day, I was oddly conspicuous like scales, unbalanced; in one hand, a perky little bag of underwear, as yellow and common as a daffodil, while on the other side, from shoulder to hip, I steered a trunk like a munitions caisson in a hue of orange so familiar to the denizens of Madison Avenue, that bodies parted to let it pass. And in between these two, was me, wrinkled, scuffed and trying to find equilibrium.

My boss did not keep the bag. I returned it to Hermes where it was promptly resold since the demand for these bags severely outweighs the supply. Not long after, at a private lunch my boss hosted, she pushed her wealthy friends out of the way to introduce to the guest of honor, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. I returned Justice O’Connor’s kind and friendly inquiries with an idiotic grin. Though I had been looking forward to speaking with her and had planned some smart talking points, I was focused on beveling my left side toward her in order to hide the stain I’d just discovered on the right leg of my suit. I have no idea how it got there or what it was, though from its dried slickness, it must have come from a previous wearing. I only noticed it only after hours of flitting around the private dining room at the Four Seasons and right before being introduced to the Justice. I tried to remain present in the conversation with a woman that I have long respected for her fairness in setting the scales of justice. However, I could only smile and stammer out a polite platitude, before she moved on to a woman more at ease and better laundered than I. I regret that I did not make better use of that opportunity, but I was fixated on this blemish, as indelible as a birthmark, that tipped me off balance and ultimately, out of sight.

SJ: New at New York

When I moved to the city, I didn’t just want to live in New York, I wanted to become a New Yorker. New York wasn’t just a place to go, it was a thing to do, and I was going to be good at it. Tourists and rubes might be intimidated by the city, but not me. I belonged here. I was a natural.

Turns out there was something of a learning curve, but if I’d thought much about all the ways I was going to act and look and feel clueless in the upcoming years, I probably wouldn’t have lasted a day. There’s no way around it – if you wind up migrating to this town, there are going to be times when you’re just no good at doing New York.

Case in point:

I was twenty. I was living in the city the summer before my last year of college. My boyfriend had gotten us a great sublet in Brooklyn, I was doing this cool acting program, I’d had a temp job at the Carlyle Hotel! I was killing it.

One Friday night in August, I headed to a party in the East Village. My boyfriend, who had a job with a theatre company, went across town for a work event. We had loose plans to catch up with one another later - or at least I thought we did. How this meeting was to be engineered is lost utterly onto me, as this was during that strange, only hazily memorable time before cell phone ubiquity, when “loose plans” meant we all just careened around like pin balls from pay phone to pay phone, remotely checking answering machine messages and hoping we’d eventually stumble into the one another’s paths. But even overlooking that inconvenient reality, it seems likely that I just thought we were meeting up, and that when I heard “We’ll see each other later” what was actually said was more like, “I’ll see you later - at home.”

Nonetheless, around midnight, I decided it was a good idea to hit the streets and put the perceived meet up plan into action. That I didn’t really know where I was going or how to get there was inconsequential. This was New York, and I was good at New York, and it was a very New York thing to run around from party to party all alone and a little drunk.

After discovering the L train existed (who knew?), I hopped it from the East Village to the edge of the Meatpacking District, a place that these days is so overrun with douche-y club-goers it makes you feel like you want to kill someone, but back then still seemed remote enough to make you think someone might kill you. (In fairness, Pastis was already open, so the gentrification fairy had definitely started visiting the hood, but it’s not like I knew that). The streets were badly lit and mostly deserted. I walked alone to 11th Avenue, wondering if I’d gotten the address wrong.

I had imagined this theater-company-event-thing, whatever it was, would be a small gathering of artists, drinking beer and wine, rapping about the theatre and arguing the finer points of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, which seemed like exactly what theatre professionals would be doing pretty much all the time. Instead, I found a pulsing dance club, complete with red velvet rope and guys with guest lists manning the door. I was wearing denim cutoffs, converse sneakers and a stained Gap t-shirt, carrying a backpack, a messenger bag, and wearing a camera around my neck. This was not my scene.

The place was huge and packed and looked to me like the set of a David Lynch movie, probably because I had neither been in many clubs nor seen many David Lynch movies. It was loud, there were tons of rooms and everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion. I couldn’t find my boyfriend or anyone else I recognized anywhere.

I left the club and found a pay phone. I called my friend’s party to see if my boyfriend had ended up there. No one answered. I called again. While the phone rang, a car carrying three men pulled up to a next to me. The guy in the passenger seat rolled down the window and shouted, “Hey baby, we’re coming back for you in five minutes!” then cackled as the car tore down the street. Odds are if these people had actually meant business, they wouldn’t have bothered making an appointment to hurt or steal or kill me when they could have just gotten on with it in the moment, but their threat was enough for me. I dropped the phone and ran east, back through the empty streets, back underground, back on the train, back across town, back to my party, to find my boyfriend and to go home.

But when I got back to my friend’s place, a sprawling apartment that housed maybe 8 people, there was no party, just a couple of strangers who not only didn’t know where my friends had gone, but seemed not to have registered that they’d been there at all.

I acknowledged defeat. It was late, and it was time to head home.

I waited the usual eon for the F Train at the 2nd Avenue Station (not yet knowing that I would spend most of my 20s waiting for the F Train at the 2nd Avenue Station). When the packed subway finally showed, I dragged myself on, slouched against a pole and counted stops back to Brooklyn. At the station before mine, a crowd of people got off, and I collapsed into an empty seat with all my stuff. Three little minutes and I’d be home and this dumb chase would be done. Three. Little. Tiny. Minutes.

And then I woke up in Coney Island.

I didn’t know it was Coney Island. When I opened my eyes in the empty, unmoving train, the scene made so little sense given my last conscious thoughts that I briefly considered the possibility that I’d leapt dimensions or something. Not quite awake enough to panic, I checked the subway map and learned I was, literally, at the end of the line. Moments later, I looked around the empty train car and learned that if you fall asleep on the subway in Brooklyn in the middle of the night, people will steal your stuff.

My bag was gone. I had no identification, no money, no credit card, no Social Security card (yes I know you’re not supposed to carry that in your wallet now), and no apartment keys.

I walked onto the deserted platform and started to cry. I cried because I was alone and afraid and lost, and I cried because I was tired of this summer spent pretending I wasn’t alone and afraid and lost, and I cried because I was too young to know how ordinary it is to feel alone and afraid and lost.

It took about ten seconds before two cops magically materialized and came running towards me. They asked what happened, they tried to calm me down. I recounted some version of the night through my tears, told them I couldn’t find my boyfriend, told them I’d had fallen asleep on the train, told them that someone had stolen my things, told them that everything was horrible.

I finished my story. There was a tiny pause. And then one of the cops said, “That’s it?”

I looked at him blankly.

Then the other cop said, “You’re really lucky, kid. So you lost some stuff. It’s stuff. Get on the train. Go home.”

And then they both walked away, and there was nothing to do but take their advice.

I got back on the subway and sat sniffling, wondering if the train would ever move again. After a while I started to think the cops were probably right. Probably I was lucky. It had been a shit night, but nothing really terrible had happened. No one had hurt me. Which was something. Which was the most important thing. I tried to feel grateful.

And right at that moment, that thank-god-nothing-worse-happened moment, the Creepy Man got on the otherwise empty train, the doors shut, and the subway pulled out of the station.

Oh God, I thought, Now’s when someone is going to hurt me.

The Creepy Man sat on the far end of the car, hunched over and hollow-faced. I felt him glowering at me. I looked at the floor and tried to make myself small. The Creepy Man got up. He started walking - no, lurching - towards me. My heart pounded. There was nowhere to go. He was closer. Could I dart past him? And go where? Oh god - he was right in front of me now - Oh god Oh god Oh god -

“Miss?” he said.

I looked up at him with dread. He met my eyes. He didn’t smile. He handed me a pocket-pack of Kleenex. He said don’t be scared. He told me he was a security guard at Coney Island and showed me his I.D. so I’d believe him. He gave me his pepper spray and told me to hold on to it. He sat back at the other end of the train. He asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he said that it was terrible, that it was not right, that people would do that to a nice young girl. He said he came to this country because he wanted to be in a place where nice young girls didn’t get robbed on trains. He rode six stops out of his way to see me home. He offered to walk me to my door. He told me to keep the pepper spray. I stopped crying. I said Thank You.

Eventually I did get home. Eventually I was collected at the door by a very concerned and sympathetic boyfriend. Eventually I calmed down enough to tell him where I’d been until 4 in the morning. Eventually the sun came up, the credit cards were cancelled and the keys were re-cut. Eventually, it was just a silly story of a stupid night.

I suppose I’ve become better at New York than I was all those years ago, but mostly I just don’t think about it that way anymore. I’d still like to be a real New Yorker, but now when I imagine what that is, I don’t think it means the accumulation of expertise, or the striking of some assured pose. Now when I think about it, I think about that man on the train, who gave me Kleenex and comfort and got me home, just because it was the kind thing to do. That guy, who’d come to this country from the other side of the planet, that guy was a real New Yorker, and that guy was really good at New York.