One Manhattan...on the rocks(Part 2)

Just a few weeks ago, anything was possible. New York was, for her, a magnificent playland. From the northern-most borders to the southern tip, and skipping through the long, green park across town horizontally, lay a lattice framework of wise, antiquated finds. She believed the city to be a landscape where the lofty old and the quixotic enterprises of the new converge. A center for hot pursuits to meet impractical feats. Rare, golden triumphs that land in the face of adversary, or even impossibility. Her very first time in the city about six years ago, she failed to come to grips with the amount of electricity flowing through just Times Square alone. And later that same evening, she ate spaghetti out of a white bowl at two in the morning - another first.

Certainly, the heavy presence of a few hundred years of turmoil and trends and historical booms hang thick in the air. She sometimes wonders how anything tragically chic, the sleek lines of a stainless steel and granite bar, could be built over anything mahogany and Edwardian. Somehow it happens, though. The superior edge of tomorrow surely sings with some of America's most humble beginnings. An afternoon spent winding the curvaceous walls of the Guggenheim and standing inches from Picasso's paint could actually lend itself to a night plunged either in downtown pints or unaffordable midtown martinis, the two sects of the day ostensibly parallel yet surprisingly complimentary. And the funniest part about such a day in New York is that it can happen without you even knowing it. New Yorkers may even find it blasé, typical. Despite whether the morning found you at an obnoxious hour, it is not unusual for you then to find yourself sitting indifferently at that south-of-Houston pub twenty-one hours later. You're perfectly awake, too, possibly even vivacious and feeding off the energy that surrounds you.

The inevitability of apathy towards the extraordinary or flat-out freakish, for that matter, is realized within the first couple of weeks. Just as you acquire a knack for rolling with the punches, you no longer bat a lash at the most outlandish of run-ins. A week and a half in, the NY amateur was starting to understand the definition of close quarters. Carrying boxes up the stairs to her 7x8 room, she remembered an architecture professor’s description of Rome during the reign of Caesar. Like our New York today, the powerful Rome only had room to expand vertically. The Roman apartment being the first of its kind, small rooms were stacked on top of one another. The result was a brand new system of society, as well as a cramped standard of living. The poorer you were, the higher up you lived. The higher up you lived, the cheaper the condition of your walls. Whole, completed buildings would often plummet to the ground if built insufficiently, which they were more often than not. And even as certain buildings did stay put and stood tall, a modern kind of community had been introduced: the city. As property margins waned, neighbors grew nearer. Climbing the flights, the mover-in began to think of this Roman development as an anthropological revolution. Could people simply get used to being so close, all the time? (Excuse my…elbow hitting your forehead as I…make my bed…just …pass over a dish and I can help you dry…oh, I’m sorry…could you just…pardon me…ow!)

But, it could work, right? Or at least New Yorkers have made it work, colliding into a few notorious mishaps along the way and forming a solid reputation for being…let’s just call it, assertive. Sitting at a coffee shop, she so ingeniously smiles at a stubborn old lady with a Brooklyn accent regally boss around the poor, young waitress and demand her coffee the way she likes it. That’s right, damnit! So, confirming her recent opinion that New York is partly about being aggressive, making what you want happen, all while maintaining your dignity, the city apprentice walks back to her apartment. The sidewalk is broad before her stride. Tough cookie. Opens the door and into the narrow hallway.

A bare-ass naked man with red, unfocused circles for eyes slowly meanders right passed her.

Without any forewarning. Sans the time to brace herself. He’s totally exposed and lost in his own reality. Bare. Naked. The girl’s hands shaking from what she was not prepared to see, she makes sure to not make eye contact. That’s what they all say, isn’t it? Don’t make eye contact. Never look a dog in the eyes. Never look at a naked, stoned-out-of-his-mind, possibly crazy New Yorker walking down your apartment hallway and out on to the public avenue? A group of them laughed about it later, from now on remembering him as simply “the naked guy”. Christine from 4c, the forthright neighbor, mentioned that she had a conversation with him before he made it down the stairs. He had been struggling with the door down the hall from her door. She asked him to his face, (f.y.i.: Christine’s lived in New York for at least ten years now. She’s not afraid to talk to strange, naked guys. She’s not like our new, New York girl. Christine’s miles ahead of our girl. She’s on an advanced level as far as New York goes. Our girl is still at orientation. Just to clarify things a bit more, this was probably Christine’s like third or fourth naked guy encounter.) So, she asks him what he’s trying to do. He somehow forms the words to tell her that he’s trying to get into his apartment, but that he is having trouble doing so. Obviously, “trouble” is an understatement. She asks him where his keys are. He replies, “In my pocket”.

Read Part 3