east village idiot

There’s a bad habit among New York City pedestrians that needs to be addressed. It’s a problem that’s not just prevalent among tourists, or the bridge-and-tunnel set, or the elderly. It’s a problem that’s surprisingly not just confined to on-street cell-phone talkers, coffee sippers, or iPod listeners.

The problem is sidewalk drifting.

Sidewalk drifting occurs when you and another pedestrian are walking down the sidewalk, nearly side-by-side, when the offender inexplicably drifts over into your straight-line path. They’re not going into a store. There’s nobody coming at them in the other direction. There is no reason for them to move. But for some reason, they find it necessary to move into your way.

Often times, they are slower-moving than you are, and they drift into your way as you approach them from behind. These pedestrians need rear-view mirrors.

Sidewalk drifting is the pedestrian equivalent of changing lanes without signaling.

Generally, it happens without warning. Sometimes the reason is obvious: most of the time, sidewalk drifters are talking on their cell phones, completely oblivious to their surroundings. These are the same people who are literally incapable of walking and chewing gum. But often, sidewalk drifting happens without explanation: does the other pedestrian feel more comfortable on the right side of the sidewalk? Can the other pedestrian only walk at 20-degree angles? Does the other pedestrian enjoy the extremely close company of complete strangers?

There’s one sure-fire solution to stopping sidewalk drifting. We’ll make the pedestrian experience more like driving… with sidewalk lane markings!

There! Millions of dollars in paint and labor and… problem solved!

While waiting for the light to change at the corner of 14th and 3rd this morning, a girl blew cigarette smoke in my face while I was taking a swig of juice. The taste of the hundreds of chemicals masked the taste of my juice. It was disgusting. I nearly choked. And I nearly choked her.

I’m going to make a bold statement here. It’s not one that my cancer-stick-loving friends will take lightly. Nor is it one that my freedom-loving friends will take lightly. 

If urinating in public is illegal, smoking in public should be illegal.

Urinating in public is illegal because it is perceived to be detrimental to society. It is unsightly. But it is not unhealthy. Urine is sterile once it leaves the human body. It does not contain bacteria. Hell, you can use fresh urine to clean wounds (remember that next time you drunkenly trip on the sidewalk). The smell that lingers from the urine stain on the sidewalk is enough to make someone gag, but it’s not unhealthy. Urine doesn’t pollute our air and groundwater. And let’s face it: when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Smoking in public is undoubtedly detrimental to society. It is not necessarily unsightly. After all, a smoking, brooding hipster is infinitely cooler-looking than a non-smoking, brooding hipster. But it can kill you and the people around you. Each breath of secondhand smoke takes time off your life. It smells bad, and it’s unhealthy. Cigarette smoke and cigarette butts pollute our air and water. And no matter what kind of addictive grasp nicotine has on your body, smoking will never be a bodily function.

So, if smokers are going to keep bitching that their rights are being taken away, why haven’t serial public urinators ever staged an uprising? Just sayin’.

Despite the abundance of 24-hour food service operations in New York, at 2:30am on a Saturday night, options for food dramatically decrease here. In addition, considering the lack of sobriety among the hungry at 2:30 am on a Saturday night, the perception of the quality of these options for food becomes dramatically warped.

The result? A visit to Taco Bell at 2:30am on Saturday night with Amish and his friend Rishi. In my drunken stupor, I went for the Grilled Stuft Burrito, much like Carmen Electra.

(Side note: is anyone else surprised that she actually took a bite of that thing in the ad? I don’t think the ad does a very good job at the “sex sells” approach. I mean, the thought of Carmen Electra eating a 720-calorie burrito from Taco Bell is honestly a turn-off, especially when you start to consider the digestive consequences.)

As we were ordering, Rishi drunkenly asked the cashier, “do you guys have any beer?” We all had more than our fair share already that night, so Amish and I shrugged off the question and laughed. After ordering our food, Amish and I sat down. Rishi, however, remained up at the counter talking with the cashier.

“What is he doing,” Amish asked me.

“I have no idea,” I replied. “But whatever it is, it can’t be good.”

I chose to stay out of the conversation between Rishi and the cashier. From our perspective, it didn’t exactly seem heated, but there was definitely a consipiratorial aspect to the exchange. Our number was called for our food, and I picked it up and brought it back to the table - but Rishi stayed at the counter. As Amish and I dug in to our food, Rishi pulled out his wallet at the counter for some sort of transaction. The cashier gave him a large Duane Reade bag from behind the counter, and he lugged the bag back over to our table with a grin on his face.

I was creeped out. “Uh, what just happened there?”

Rishi reached into the bag, fumbled around, and proudly pulled out 3 bottles of Heineken for the table. He promptly spilled one of them all over the table and all over himself, drawing the ire of the other late-night employees. While the sale pretty much happened entirely under the table, the cashier later came over to instruct us to also drink our beers under the table.

So, yes, in the wee hours of the morning, you can apparently buy beer at this particular Taco Bell, and off the cashier no less. Obviously, we weren’t the first people to ask for beer at this location. When the transaction was complete, the cashier left the store and returned a minute later with another six-pack of beer from the 24-hour drugstore next door, presumably for the next customers willing to throw down cash for some beer - with a wink and a nod.

I talk a lot of smack about Connecticut. But on a 2-hour train ride back into the city, I was sandwiched in a middle seat on Metro-North between a guy who smelled musty and someone’s dog in a carrying case. The musty smell, when the breeze was blowing just right, made me gag. The dog, which I am allergic to, made me sneeze and wheeze. Luckily, I could seek solace in the the next car of the train: the bar car.

See that? A giant Connecticut State Seal. That state is good for something after all.

Metro-North was very aggressive with the marketing of the bar car on this particular train. They would mention the bar car at nearly every opportunity they got:

Announcer in back of train: Passengers coming aboard, if you’re looking for some open seats, there are plenty, just keep moving to the back of the train.
Announcer in front of train: Hey, Jerry, way to take away our business up here!
Announcer in back of train: Oh, sorry, guys. We have a bar car on the train today, in the front car. Snacks, cold beverages, beer, wine coolers, and spirits. So, uh, head to the front of the train if you prefer the bar car over an open seat.

I, for one, do in fact prefer the bar car over an open seat.

• Does your entire diet consist of white bread, cold cuts, and protein shakes?
• How many casual sex partners do you plan on having in your bedroom on a weekly basis?
• What percentage of those casual sex partners do you meet online: (a) 100%, or (b) less than 100%?
• What is your policy on hearing loud, rowdy sex noises? Is it consistent with your policy on generating loud, rowdy sex noises?
• Does your sexual deviance suggest that I should not sit on your bed, out of fear of acquiring an STD?
• A hypothetical question: if there were 15 people in the apartment drinking and socializing, would you (a) acknowledge their existence and greet them, or (b) lock yourself in your bedroom and slip out quietly when everyone is gathered in the living room?
• Another hypothetical question: if I were to knock on your bedroom door, would you yell “come in” every time, despite the fact that you always lock your bedroom door for no apparent reason?
• Do you wash used plastic plates and silverware in the dishwasher?
• Do you consistently forget to put items back into the freezer that you removed, resulting in a puddle of melting popsicles on the top of the refrigerator?
• Will it be revealed months later that you are obviously a 70 year-old woman trapped in a 25 year-old man’s body, given your use of Aqua-Net?
• Did you know you could use your debit card like a credit card?

Oh, New York City neighborhood names: manufactured by real estate scum and delivered directly to you. Sure, there’s the now-overused East Village (somebody shoot me), the completely misleading East Williamsburg (somebody shoot me, seriously), and the long-standing East New York (somebody has probably already shot me). But there are also those in-between neighborhoods - the ones that straddle the border between two ‘hoods with names - where slumlords have also gotten creative. There’s BoCoCa, GraMurray, and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, just to name a few. But too many in-between areas in New York have gotten overlooked. So, I’ve taken it upon myself to bestow a name upon some areas that get lost in the New York City neighborhood shuffle.

First up, Hell’s Kitchen. It’s the neighborhood that is defying the re-naming tradition. Some real estate agents have the nerve to call it “Clinton.” What a boring, non-descript name with no respect for the recent history of the ‘hood. But what’s up with the “kitchen?” What about the rest of the apartment? Well, “Hell’s Bathroom” has to be somewhere, and I know exactly where it belongs:

Next, we head to Brooklyn, where the neighborhoods of Kensington and Borough Park are worlds apart. One is a quaint yet heterogeneous residential community, while the other is one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities outside of Israel. Clearly, there needs to be some transition here:

Over to Queens we go, where Hollis and Fresh Meadows sound like places that are worlds apart. But I propose a great way to unite these two neighborhoods:

Back to Southern Brooklyn, where its proximity to both the beaches and a subway line that stops at West 4th Street provides a great backdrop for a new satellite gay neighborhood in Brooklyn:

Finally, we head over to the vast wasteland that is Red Hook. For too long, the residents of The Point’s well-kept rowhouses have tried to distance themselves from the eastern side of Red Hook, with its public housing and proximity to the disgusting Gowanus Canal and exhaust-spewing Gowanus Expressway. Well, their wish is my command:

There’s been a lot of flack lately about an article in the Haverford College Alumni Magazine that disparaged the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn and its large Polish-American Community. The P.C. Police have already come to the rescue to take the article off Haverford’s web site, but this controversy begs the question: who the hell goes to Haverford College and where the hell is it?

But it also begs the question: how far off was he? I will not pass judgement, because I am embarassed when people reinforce stereotypes, but I want to share this story from my days living in Greenpoint:

One Saturday afternoon, my roommate and I were walking down Manhattan Avenue to grab some lunch at the Triple Decker Diner. Two middle-aged blonde women were walking in front of us, obviously speaking in Polish. They stopped to turn into one of the two thousand 99-cent stores that line Manhattan Avenue.

The 99-cent store had double glass doors at the front. One of the women grabbed the long handle of the door to pull. The door did not budge. She tugged again, and the door would not move. Not willing to give up so easily, the two women moved to the other door. The other woman grabbed that door’s handle and started to pull. That door wouldn’t budge, either, so she pulled again. At this point, it was clear they were annoyed. Frustrated, the two women assume the store must be closed, so they walk away and continue down Manhattan Avenue.

As we passed by the doors of the store, I noticed two signs. Inside the first door the women tried to open was a white, handwritten sign: “PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR.” Right next to the handle of the second door was another sign: “PUSH.”

I was in complete disbelief. I turned to my roommate and asked, “did you just see what I just saw?”

“Yes,” he replied, “yes I did.”

I had heard that Rangers fans were just as batshit crazy as Yankees fans, but I had no idea how young they started. Last night, I watched my Buffalo Sabres come back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Rangers at MSG, 4-3 in overtime. In the suite next to us, separated from us by just a sheet of glass, was a group of 10 rowdy children, all probably 8 or 9 years old. They were all Rangers fans, and they had no shame.

As the Rangers came out on the ice, the kids went nuts. They jumped around and screamed like they had missed their daily dose of Ritalin. Hell, they probably did, as their fathers just sat back, downed some beers, and watched in amusement.

Early in the game, the kids spotted a Sabres fan in the crowd beneath the balcony, and dropped their popcorn onto them from above. This did not bode well for our suite full of Sabres fans on the other side of the glass.

After Buffalo scored their first goal, our suite erupted in cheering. The children took notice, and turned their taunting away from the crowd below. For the rest of the first period, they schemed to come up with ways to taunt us. And once the Rangers scored their first goal, the barrage began. First, in a mind-boggling show of the masculinity of themselves and their team, they lifted their shirts:

They jumped up and down, pointed at us, laughed, and chanted, “Let’s Go Rangers!” The most confusing comment from one of the kids was, “we own this place… literally!” Was his father the CEO of Cablevision? I doubt it.

For most of the game, we all struggled to come up with a kid-friendly comeback as we watched the Rangers take a 3-1 lead. We sat in our box in silence, and we stewed as our neighbors continued to taunt us. Finally, my friend Brendan chose to break the silence with the most brilliant comeback ever:

Obnoxious 8-Year-Old Rangers Fan: BUFFALO SUCKS!
Brendan: You’re fat.

That pretty much shut them up for the rest of the game. So did Buffalo’s two goals in the third period, and our eventual victory in overtime. As we cheered for the game-winning goal, the kids glared back at us. One of them gave us the death stare.

This solved one mystery. I now know where Yankees fans who taunt old men with canes and throw beer on girls wearing Red Sox hats at Yankee Stadium get their start: taunting innocent Sabres fans. They’re delinquents-in-training, and in fifteen years, they’ll be in top shape for getting arrested for drunken disorderly in the Bronx.

From Page 4 of today’s am New York:

Someone at the paper must be color blind; apparently, they can’t distinguish red from black.

Free papers: you get what you pay for.

Recently in amNY Watch: NYPD Beach Patrol, Floridian Edition

The residents of the East Village can claim to be #1 for something: our bus service! In two very contradictory ways!

In last week’s Best of New York in the Village Voice, the M14A bus was voted Best Bus:

Their veritable river-to-river routes take you from the industrial/jock/seminary precincts of far west Chelsea to the Latino and Chinese enclaves beyond the East Village’s education ghetto. Dip your MetroCard in the slot and go shopping for food at the burgeoning Chelsea Market; the biggest of the city’s greenmarkets, at Union Square; Trader Joe’s; or the Essex Street Market

Break out the champagne! The bus that serves our fine neighborhood is #1! We’ve got the best bus in the city! And no other free alternative weekly independent newspaper can take that away from us!

We basked in that glory for as long as we could: six whole days. This morning, the Straphangers Campaign’s Pokey Awards were released. Who got the award for the slowest bus in New York City?

The M14A! With a lightning-fast average speed of 3.9 MPH. I walk faster than that, which reinforces the fact that I am better off (a)walking to Union Square or (b)being at the mercy of gropers and hipsters on a two-stop trip on an L train packed tighter than a fat girl’s top at a Murray Hill bar.So hurray to the M14A, the best and the worst that the MTA has to offer!