THE PEOPLE YOU MEET - Bad (Very Bad) New Year's Eve Date

When I moved to New York, I knew a few people from Texas who had moved up there as well as a few New Yorkers that I met through business, but I thought it might be nice to have a date for New Year's Eve with a native New Yorker who knew some quiet place where we might have dinner.  

Since I worked at home with little opportunity to meet anyone, I looked at the ads online and picked out a fellow with multiple degrees who worked as a psychotherapist. I will call him Drake, which may actually be his name because I've blocked it. I contacted Drake. We emailed a couple of times which led to chatting on the phone. During that call he learned that I was living in Brooklyn, and I guess he assumed that I would prefer to live in Manhattan because he told me that his roommate was moving out and he had a 1500 square-foot, 2-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side that I could share. This wasn't such a ridiculous invitation as it would be in another town or city that isn't quite so rental-scarce. And he did explain that he was only in the City a couple of days a week and spent the rest of the time at his house in Connecticut. But still, it was a bit forward so I told him I was eager to explore Brooklyn and turned him down.

He then suggested that we meet in Manhattan at the northeast corner of Gramercy Park at 6 pm on New Year's Eve and go for dinner. His thinking was that we'd enjoy a meal more if we were in a restaurant that wasn't crowded. I happened to agree which is why I like to have lunch in restaurants at 3 pm.

Anyway, I got to the corner at 6 pm and he joined me a few minutes later. He was over six feet tall and wore a long, tan, wool coat and a felt fedora. Before going to dinner, he asked if I would like to see the apartment he had just purchased in a building nearby. Sure.

The apartment was in an old brick building down East 21st Street. He explained, as we entered, that he also had his psychology business in that building. I realized that from the window of his office, he could see the northeast corner of Gramercy Park and he had scoped me out before joining me there.  I guess I passed his test for appearance.

We traveled up the elevator to the fourth floor of the building where he opened the door to a 300 square-foot apartment, explaining that the last tenant had lived there 30 years and the place had just been cleared out. There were squares and rectangles on the wall clearly contrasted against the dirty and toned paint where artwork or photos had been removed. The baseboards were cracked and coming loose from the wall.  One of them had what looked like a rat hole in it. Could have been a mouse hole. The paint on the wooden window frames was peeling in the most severe way and the windows were filthy. The linoleum in the kitchen had a couple of worn spots so that the four layers of linoleum beneath were visible. The stove was so old I thought maybe it used firewood. Not exactly House & Garden.

Drake suggested that if I wanted to rent the apartment and fix it up myself, he would only charge me $1500 a month in rent. And, he explained, I would have a key to Gramercy Park. This is the only private park in Manhattan - two acres of loveliness that the rest of us could only see through the iron fence. And, even though I was well-aware even that that early stage of living in New York that this was a steal, I politely turned him down. I was beginning to wonder if he was a licensed realtor on the side. Turned out he was.

Rolf's Restaurant

After that real estate rejection, Drake walked me over to Rolf's Restaurant. He said he had not made reservations and we might not get a table, but I should see it. Rolf's is well worth seeing, as I've stated in a previous post, and we did not get a table. I'm pretty sure Drake didn't make reservations because Rolf's is expensive. I know that because two days later I went there for lunch with a friend.

At any rate, we walked up Third Avenue to a restaurant where Drake was sure we'd get a table, and we did. As we read our menus he explained that the portions at this restaurant were pretty big and he wasn't that hungry. "We should split an entree," he suggested. Well, who am I to argue with a psychotherapist/realtor. And, he was right. There was ample food for both of us.  No doggy bag needed.

During dinner, I asked what happened to his roommate. It was just conversation, but he explained that she had moved to his house in Connecticut because she was pregnant. With his baby, I might add. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. The hilarity didn't stop there, though, because he wound the conversation around to his psychology practice. He told me that he had begun offering sex therapy to his female patients and was having success. He offered me his services. At this point I was pinching myself to keep from laughing.

So, I am invited to have sex with a stranger who had become immensely unnatractive and pay for it too. Who could turn down such an offer? Me. I did. I said, no thanks. He did not appear to be crestfallen. He must have been putting his mind onto some other way that he could get money from me.

Oh yes, we split the bill. That, I think made his New Year's Eve complete. I said goodnight and never saw him again. The end.

THE PEOPLE YOU MEET - JIMMY THE FISH

One of the greatest aspects of living in Brooklyn is that you get to meet a lot of native New Yorkers.  People for whom the City and all its noise, grime, frustration, danger, shabbiness, competition, union labor, cooperation, inventiveness, history, excitement, entertainment, and four complete seasons are just regular stuff that has been absorbed into their psyches to create their intriguing perspective.  Rich or poverty-stricken, educated or illiterate, old, young, and any ethnicity - no matter what – I find native New Yorkers to be interesting because they exude the City.  

I met Jimmy the Fish - not his real name, but similar  – one day on the boardwalk in Coney Island.  He was bald, muscular, Sicilian, and had a thick Brooklyn accent.  Jimmy was born, raised, and still resided in Bensonhurst which was mainly an Italian neighborhood in South Brooklyn, although transitioning, as it was being populated by Chinese and Russian immigrants.

Jimmy the Fish explained his 3-word name, telling me that when he was in high school, he and his friends aspired to get connected to a certain Italian-run organization.  Their dads weren’t capos or soldiers, so to get attention from the members of that organization, they created a nicknames for themselves.  Eddy the Fixer, Johnny Bats (not the animal, the weapon), Bobby the Shadow.  I’m not sure how connected Jimmy ever became. He didn’t wear a fedora or carry a violin case, but he told me that he made his income by loaning money a few weeks at a time and lived off the vig.

He shared a duplex with his mother which was not unusual for a native New Yorker, especially Italian, who was divorced.  Jimmy actually had lived in the same duplex when he was married.  Many people in Brooklyn married and lived in the same neighborhood or multi-family home with their parents.  Family ties were tight even if they fought all the time. 

I asked Jimmy if he would show me Bensonhurst and he agreed to do it.

On our first adventure, he took me to the Santa Rosalia Festival, an annual week-long festival that ends on Labor Day.  This is a celebration of Saint Rosalia who, for the love of God, went to live in a cave in Sicily and died there. During a time of plague, she appeared to a man in a vision and told him to fetch her bones from the cave, which he did.  He carried her bones around the town twice and the plague was cured and she was made a saint dear to the hearts of Sicilians. 

This festival, now dying out on account of parking and other problems, was a bit of a disappointment.  Mainly it was just about food – sausage and pepper sandwiches, funnel cakes – things you could pretty much get any time of the week at an Italian deli or donut shop.  I think there might have been ring toss and that game where you try to ring a bell by slamming a hammer on a circle.  But there were no men carrying a 2,000-pound statue down the street like they do for the Giglio Festival in Williamsburg that I wrote about earlier on the blog.  There were no stalls where I could buy bootleg mixes of old-time Italian crooners singing love ballads.  Jimmy and I didn’t stay long there because it was a hot, muggy August night, but long enough for Jimmy to ogle the teenage girls and tell me that he longed to be younger.

Next time, we went out to a diner.  I ate dinner.  He didn’t order anything for himself. .Jimmy told me this was a gathering spot, a hang out for him and his friends when he was in high school.  I’d heard about King’s Highway in Flatbush as a place where kids used to walk up and down on weekend nights.  I asked him if he ever went over there.  He said, “That wasn’t my neighborhood.”  Like it was a foreign country or something.  

That night, he taught me the Italian slang word. goumada which is what an Italian married man calls his girlfriend.  I’ve since looked it up.  Goumada derives from mumbling the Italian word comare which literally translates as godmother.  I guess it’s a joke, as in, “I’m going to see my godmother.”  I hope it’s a joke.

After the diner, we toured Bensonhurst in his car, driving past New Utrecht High School which he attended and which was the high school shown at the beginning of the Welcome Back Kotter series that brought John Travolta fame.   You can look at yearbooks of the high school online as far back as 1929 when Dr. Harry Potter was principal – maybe you'll see a

picture of Jimmy: 

http://www.classmates.com/places/school/New-Utrecht-High-School/586   

You can buy a yearbook, too.

After seeing the school, we drove under the elevated D-train tracks that run along New Utrecht Avenue.  He told me this was where they filmed the chase scene in The French Connection.  We turned onto 86^th Avenue where there were a lot of small specialty stores selling cheese, meat, and other foods designating an Italian neighborhood.  These stores are being replaced by chain stores that I won’t name.

Bensonhurst is not a high-rise kind of place.  Commercial buildings are generally no more than 3 or 4 stories tall.  There are plenty of residential streets with nothing but 2-story red brick duplexes or 2-story limestone row houses with the bay windows, or streets hosting detached houses with wood or aluminum siding – again 2 stories high.  Almost feeling suburban.

Reciprocally, a week later, I invited Jimmy to lunch at my apartment and made us a pot of tea.  I told him I pretty much only drank hot tea and water and asked if he wanted ice.  He did. 

When we went out for dinner one last time, when he arrived, Jimmy presented me with a crate of boxed teas.  All sorts of tea.  I asked him where it came from.  He laughed and said, “It fell off a truck.”  Who am I to judge God’s plan?  I accepted it.

We went to dinner at a restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, a nice little neighborhood of curvy streets and quaint little stores on the waterfront where you can pay boats to take you deep-sea fishing. Again, Jimmy didn’t order anything for himself.  It’s not all that comfortable to eat with someone who isn’t joining you, but then, he was so busy looking at the pretty women who walked by. 

I didn't see him again after that night and I hope Jimmy has found a nice Italian girlfriend over 18.  (PS Jimmy had just turned 40)

Post by Alana Cash

THE PEOPLE YOU MEET - CHESTER

Once the weather was nice – meaning no further threat of a snowstorm – people claimed their spots on the sidewalk in my neighborhood.  There was a line of men who sat on chairs, wheelchairs, or on the seat of a walker along a storefront on Lincoln Avenue. One man was particularly friendly and always called hello whenever I passed by.  

Around the corner and down the block on Flatbush Avenue, there were a couple of permanent kitchen chairs outside the barber shop, usually filled with men complaining about one thing or another.  They never spoke to me, but looking inside the barber shop it always seemed like a party was going on.  

On Parkside Avenue, where there was a sort of crummy grocery store, sometimes I might pass gang members – there was a shooting there one afternoon while I was shopping, once there was a hooker laying on the sidewalk (saw that in Manhattan too).  Once, I was propositioned once in a very vulgar way by a large sweaty man getting on a bus.  Good luck, buddy.

Walking down Ocean Avenue on a warm day, I might find Chester standing underneath the awning of the apartment building where he lived. He was friends with my landlord so I had been formally introduced and we always chatted whenever I saw him.  He’d lived in the neighborhood for forty years and he told me all about the changes that had happened

He told me that some of the apartment buildings along Ocean Avenue had doormen and carpets and furniture in the lobbies.  Now they were lucky if the front door actually locked and the elevators were running.  The lobbies were now floored with cheap linoleum and empty of all furniture.

I remember one day Chester was just chatting about his foot hurting, then changed the subject, saying, “Hitler was sitting on my refrigerator this morning for three hours.  Yes, he was only 12 inches tall and he sat on the top of the fridge from 9 o’clock until noon.  I tried not to look at him, but I could see him out of the corner of my eye.  I went out of the kitchen for a long while, checking every once in a while to see if he was still there, and finally he was gone.” 

Well, that certainly surprised me. 

Another day he told me about some crows three feet tall that flew in his bedroom window and spent the night.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say during some of his conversation, but I sure did find him interesting.

Post by Alana Cash