on New York: What I Imagine a Typical Day Would Be Like if I Lived in NYC
The second entry in an ongoing series dedicated to what I imagine living in different cities would be like.
Here’s the first entry, where I struggle to co-exist with writers, shitty improv actors, yoga enthusiasts, and dogshit restaurants: on LA.
Meg
Meg, originally from New York, who moved to LA, sits in a bar in Brooklyn on Thanksgiving day. Mulling over her failed pilot script about a successful comedian who returns home to confront her overbearing mother, she tells the bartender there are no rats in Los Angeles, and it’s always 70 degrees.
“I bet they live in the fucking palm trees,” some guy yells from down the bar. On the way back to her parents’ house, Meg rolls over a flat rat on her bicycle and it crackles like a soda can.
Fade to black…
George
On the Lower East Side is George, with fluff in his eyes, walking into his kitchenette. He switches on the coffee pot and walks into the shower, part of a shared bathroom down the hall. The water is cold, no matter how much he turns the handle clockwise.
Back in the kitchenette, minutes later and in a terry blue bathrobe, George pours hot black coffee into a heavy ceramic mug. In the bedroom, coffee steaming and recently placed on his dresser, George pulls his outside pants up, his dress shirt down, and tucks. He’s hitting the town tonight.
Then, George leans in the doorway to the kitchenette while a foot-long rat crosses the slots of his two-slice toaster, sniffing the chrome.
Dev
For two weeks after a breakup, Dev walks while on downtown streets, wearing sunglasses and AirPods. Two tender weeks where he walked all night, every night. Reality zooms in so close that the foreground focus is soft.
Dev sits at dawn with the sobering drunks. In the all-night Chinatown restaurant, he chooses a chair facing the door. He orders vegetable lo mein, moo shu vegetable and fried vegetarian dumplings, doughy and crisp, every night, and eats until he is done, wiping up the last purple of plum sauce with the last pancake shred. He eats the tiny kernels of corns one by one.
Dev gets it. He’s been back for years and only recently thought about how the city has smelled odd since he’s been back, especially near the blocks-long line of people outside St. Vincent’s waiting all day to give blood. Standing in line, he suddenly becomes very aware that within the walls and beneath the streets of this city there are seething legions of vermin all tearing at one another in an endless, seething orgy of unimaginable horror, and that really the city is theirs and theirs alone.
Mattie
One hundred taquitos in the fridge for the benefit party for the newspaper, gone. Who would eat 100 taquitos? Three hours it took for Mattie to make them all.
Mattie’s aunt’s recipe for 100 taquitos ain’t actually that bad: Simmer two big cans of Goya black beans with one small can of Goya adobo chipotle peppers, and three tablespoons of granulated garlic. Spoon a small row of beans into a corn tortilla, roll tight, place in a pan with one inch of hot oil. Fry until brown. Cool on paper towels. Let sit in the refrigerator until one hour before twenty five or so motherfuckers arrive.
But once the twenty five or so motherfuckers show up, there are zero of 100 taquitos left in the refrigerator. And if each of you swear on our friendship and her lease that you did not eat them, then who the fuck did?
George
On the Lower East Side, George buys a rat trap: 18 inches of plywood platform with red paint like runway markers and a bar that takes two hands to pry back. George sets the rat trap with peanut butter and sprinkle cheese and places it with ginger hands next to the coffee pot.
In the morning, expecting blood, he stands in the kitchen doorway with eyes half cowered. Then he looks under the counter. In the oven. In the shower. Behind the radiator. Under the bed.
No blood. No rat. No peanut butter and sprinkle cheese. No trap for a foot-long rat.
Fuck.
Mattie
“Hey. There’s half a taquito under here.”
“I think this is a bean. Oh — ”
“No way.”
“Oh shit.”
“Really?”
“You guys, I think — ”
“Jesus. They can open the refrigerator.”
“One hundred taquitos, my God.”
Paul + I
Paul is just a man fresh off the bus. He puts his navy canvas suitcase down on the tile floor of the N/R subway platform. On the same platform, already, a rat is looking at a homeless man; already the homeless man stands closer than Paul thought a person should stand to a rat. But what did he know; he was new to the city, just like me.
The man kneels down and puts his hand out. The rat walks over on four legs. Paul thinks the rat is thinking: Old man, hello, is that food you’ve got there?
Then, with a swiftness, the old man springs up on one leg, booting the rat into the air. Then, with a cry, the old man strikes down with one arm, bouncing the rat off the floor. The old man, grinning, looks at Paul.
Paul looks down, without hesitation, at his iPhone; there is nothing to be done about that. We are both stunned.
Jessie
At potluck dinner parties and book club gatherings in her second-floor walk-up, there are varying opinions about whether the rats like to fuck in Jessie’s garbage bags because of the G train that runs below the three-story brick building or the neon Chinese restaurant that occupies the ground floor.
The rats fuck in winter and summer. Jessie knows the rats are fucking because she had asked Google: Why do rats scream?
In cold, in sun-bake, in sheeting rain, the black trash bags writhe and roll like boiling tar because they are having sex on the sidewalk outside Jessie’s apartment.
Then the garbage truck announces itself in air brakes, and one rat whisperes to all the others: shhhh, someone’s coming.
George
George, in the doorway of the kitchenette on the Lower East Side with a pint of black coffee hot in a ceramic mug, yells, “Hey!”
The rat looks up, making eye contact with George.
George balances the mug on his palm. He throws it overhand. It cracks in two on the carapace of fur, hot black coffee flying everywhere. The rat, who hasn’t given a fuck for around two or three minutes now, turns around and once again makes eye contact with George.
George realizes that the city is theirs and theirs alone.