The new year is getting off to a rough start. On Sunday, New Year's Day, I dropped off R--- and F--- at the subway and headed over to Bedford to return a video. Walking up Grand, an elderly Chinese man approached me and started talking to me. He did not ask me for money, and he did not appear drunk, but he did seem to be marginal, impoverished at the least: bad teeth and underdressed for the weather, tromping through the sleet in sneakers with no socks or laces. He told me that there were too many bars in the area -- he's completely right about that, btw -- and that in his youth back in China, there were dance halls and singing clubs and mah jong parlors where you could go and drink, but also do something besides drink. And drink was bad because his father drank too much and it killed him.
When he first approached me I tried to evade him, but we were walking in the same direction and when I stopped to read a menu he caught up with me and started on the bar thing. And because he was so pitiful and because he didn't seem drunk and because it pained me to try to imagine what it would feel like to be old and broke in a foreign country I didn't try to chase him away when we started walking again. I knew he wanted someone to listen to him and I know what that feels like, so I listened because it didn't cost me much.
We came at last to the corner of Bedford and he was going one way and I was going the other (I was relieved when he told me he lived "this way" because it meant he had somewhere to live) and so I was off the hook except that as we parted I said "Happy new year" to him and the mean drunk guy who happened to be walking by at the same moment must have heard that as something else.
I say that because as soon as I started walking away, I heard someone say, "Hey asshole!" which I ignored because I don't usually respond to "asshole" but then I heard "Hey asshole!" again, nearer and more insistent and I turned around and sure enough, I was the asshole being addressed.
The addressor was a man my age or younger with a bottle in one hand, a sleeping roll in a bag over his shoulder, and an angry look on his face and he was approaching me quickly. He got right up in my face which is when I realized he was drunk, not so much because he smelled but because I could see his tongue and his teeth which had the look of belonging to someone who had not been to sleep the night before. And when he said to me, "Why are you [unintelligible word] me, you fucking cocksucker?" I knew for sure.
In San Francisco I knew a guy who taught self defense and talked a lot about how real people react in stressfull situations, like being attacked on the street. They don't react with machine-like retrieval of their well-practiced kung-fu skills; they react with incoherence and a glut of useless, panicked thoughts that do not help the situation at all and that is exactly what I had cluttering up my head at this moment. Incredibly, I was thinking about whether the things I was thinking of to say to him would sound dumb. And the things I did say were incredibly dumb: "I don't know what you're talking about" and "Be cool." I actually told him to be cool.
He kept ranting, saying things to me that I didn't understand and getting more and more into my personal space and the next idiotic thing that entered my mind was whether I'd look like a wimp if I took off running. I didn't take off running and so I was still there when he started jabbing at me with his elbow and pushing me into the wall and in retrospect this turned out to be a good thing because the shock of an actual physical assault transformed the panicked mess in my mind into anger which in turn produced, finally, some useful behavior. I caught him under the elbow in between jabs and gave him a good, destabilizing push, and said "Get the fuck off me" and I must have looked like I meant it because afterward he did not try to close the space that the shove had opened up between us. I took advantage of that space and started walking away, keeping an eye on the drunk over my shoulder and maybe tossing a "Crazy asshole" over as well although maybe I just thought it.
He didn't follow me and the funny thing is that I immediately wished he would because now I was pissed off and had nowhere to direct my anger; I wanted him to give me an excuse to beat the shit out of him. And I could have; I say that not because I'm a big badass or because I had any weight advantage on him, but with the shove, I realized that unless he'd had a hidden weapon, which I don't think was likely, that there was almost no way he could have hurt me. He was drunk and not too steady on his feet, and he had a bottle and a sleeping roll that were both valuable to him and I know enough self-defense that had we seriously gotten into it, I probably would have come out ahead.
But instead I came out with a lot of anger and no belligerent drunk's noggin to channel it into, leaving only myself to channel it into. So the rest of the way to the video store I beat myself up for even thinking of running (a thought which was probably pretty adaptive, even if chickenshit).
The next day I had the unpleasant task of taking a subway, and then a train, and then a taxi to lovely (by which I mean, not lovely) Roselle, NJ outside of the even less lovely Newark. My car had recently refused to leave Newark on my return trip from the holidays, amid billowing clouds of steam and threatening gestures of the temp guage needle towards the bad, bad, red line. So rather than give $400.00 to the auto parts shop where I'd left it to replace the radiator (which later turned out not to be the problem) I poured stopleak into the not-actually-leaky radiator, bought a couple of gallons of water at the chinese grocery next door, and prepared to make a sweaty, anxious run for it over two bridges and a crowded highway to get back to Brooklyn.
I got two blocks.
By the time I had gotten into Roselle with the holiday train schedule, it was late afternoon, and by the time I abandoned hope of driving myself back to Brooklyn, it was rush hour and no tow truck that I was able to contact via AAA was willing to drive me. The dispatcher informed me that I'd have to wait until 9:00. It was 5:00. Four hours to kill in Roselle. On foot. I took off hoping I'd run into a movie theater or a good coffee shop or even a bar. My standards lowered rapidly as it got dark and then started to rain and Dunkin' Donuts turned out to be the best I was going to do. I settled into a corner table with a book and a not-as-bad-as-I-expected
Unfortunately, this drunk had neither stories of his childhood in China nor an adrenalin-surging assault to offer, but instead, racist, profane and mostly incomprehensible observations on the demographic makeup of Brooklyn, where he was from. Besides having to strain to understand his slurred rant, and averting my gaze a couple of times when he drooled on the table, most annoying was his barely disguised contempt for my jewishness. Yes, I know. I'm not jewish. But apparently, to a certain type of person, any guy with glasses and curly hair is a jew by default, and he kept asking me why he should celebrate Hannukah instead of Christmas, a case I was not prepared to make. I tried simply ignoring him but whether or not I was a participating audience clearly didn't matter, and I finally got up and moved. But annoyance and CNN together had wrecked my concentration and I headed back out into the rain, frustrated.
Lucky me, AAA called just at that moment and said they'd found somebody who'd take me before 9:00. I met the tow truck in the parking lot behind Dunkin' Donuts and was greeted by a big talkative guy with a heavy New Joisey accent. We got the car up on the truck and headed toward the Goethals bridge (we could already see the stream of parallel lights lined up into the distance - rush hour clearly wasn't over) and it was only then that he informed me of the $50.00 flat fee on top of the towing charge for going into the city. The AAA dispatcher had not mentioned this. I said so, and also that as a result, I hadn't brought enough money with me to cover it. He happily offered to take me to an ATM once we got to Brooklyn and reminded me of how lucky I was to be getting a tow there at that time of night, out of the cold and rain. This was true, and it was his leverage over me, as was the fact that my car was already up on his truck and we were already on the bridge. Most of the remainder of the ride was silent.
Two things changed our negotiating positions. One was that I realized the tow truck driver had no idea where, in Brooklyn, Williamsburg was, and as a result was straying well out of known territory and had also committed himself to a longer trip than he'd realized. The second was that after we were well into Brooklyn, I made a show of calling AAA on my cell phone to complain about having been misinformed about the cost of the tow. By the time we got to Williamsburg, it was late, the driver had no idea where he was, and the thought of having to drive me to an ATM apparently seemed much less appealing (as perhaps was the thought of losing business from AAA). In the end, I paid for more mileage than I had originally estimated, but the flat NYC fee disappeared from the bill calculations. I was glad that I didn't get (very) screwed, but annoyed that I spent this last hour of what had already been a massively stressful day preparing to be.
Is the theme clear, here? 2006 so far, a series of petty assaults of one form or another. I'm not a believer in things like omens, and of course my interests would seem to lie in not reading too much into these episodes, so I won't. But I am looking forward to things taking a more positive, or at least less combative, turn.
In the mean time, I have a dental appointment on Wednesday.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment