Country Mouse Meets City Rat.
A New York City Story.
(Sort of.)
Understand before I tell this story, which takes place about a decade before I actually lived in New York City (which was for 8 years, long after this takes place), that I have been visiting the Big Apple since I was about five years old. My family on both sides are from Jersey, so we’ve always come here to visit friends, take in the kul’cha, the sights, the sounds, and back in the 70’s, the Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showings at what is now the IFC theater. The Natural History Museum is one of my oldest friends (Hello, Blue Whale!). Central Park lights my heart on fire (Hello eight thousand dogs I have asked to pet!)! I have seen at least seven shows on Broadway. I’ve wandered the quaint, lantern-lit streets of the Village. I’ve successfully haggled the price of sodas at the little bodegas all over the East Side. What I mean by telling you all of this, is: suffice to say when I came down from Troy, NY to visit my best friend-since-Middle School (still to this very day!) B. for a Girl’s Night Out; I felt pretty confident I’d manage my way around without her before we met up just fine.
(This is where the delusional tourist thinking kicks in.)
See, when I say I have been visiting this fair city since I was 5, what I actually mean is: “I was always with someone else who knew their way around.” Also: “I was always visiting in the same small section of the city I’m familiar with and therefore THOUGHT I knew my way around.” My friend B. at the time, lived in Brooklyn. At this time in our lives, which then was our mid-20’s, she lived in a ramshackle part of Brooklyn that I had never been to before. I hadn’t really thought this through when she asked me if I could meet up with her at her apartment later that evening before we went out, as she had a date that night.
(*Author Addendum: Dear Reader, to be clear, as I did not make it so in an earlier version of this story: I knew she was going to be on a date with an uncertain time-table, and that would mean meeting up with her later and said that was no problem, I would be perfectly fine. NONE OF WHAT HAPPENED WAS HER FAULT!).
So I arrive at Penn Station via bus early that day so I can take in some sights. I did the usual stuff tourists who think they know NYC do: went to Central Park, visited the Natural History Museum, and then decided to take in a Broadway show (whatever was cheapest, even if it meant nabbing a nosebleed seat). I got my money’s worth: a bad production of Gypsy with an unusually mediocre *insert living theater legend here*. Being a lifelong theater nerd, I was so excited to see whom is often considered the Queen of Broadway live! But she didn’t sing nearly as well as she normally does (likely just having an off-night), and the play itself was depressing and slow. You get what you pay for. If the seats don’t cost more than $200, then the show isn’t a bestseller to begin with. Lesson learned.
I got out around 9 p.m. and called my gal pal for a glorious night of wandering the Brooklyn streets, eating raw cookie dough, and dishing about her date. Unfortunately for me, she was still on her date and would be for a while. I was glad for her that it was going so well, but I felt adrift.
So…
I go to a pub in Times Square, have a couple of highly overpriced, watered-down drinks and then head out into the Manhattan night. I call her again after an hour or so. She asks if I can just head down to her apartment and she’d me there whenever her date ended. I ask her what subway line to take. “The Green Line to Dekalb Ave”, she says. Ok, I say, as if I had any idea of what that meant. (I definitely did not.)
I head down to the great sweaty underground of NYC where the mole people of Manhattan spend entire chunks of their days and nights, especially with delays. I had always loved the subway(…well, of course that was before I was a denizen of the city. Having actually lived in the city for eight years, now I know better and wince at my naiveté.) I know now that if you look nice and approachable, the supah-crazy people will never leave you alone. Especially the ones that appear perfectly normal until out of nowhere they start talking about how 9/11 was an inside job in a perfectly calm, rational voice. In August it gets so hot the clothes literally melt off your body into a puddle. There is never enough room with 1,506 people packed in beside you during rush hour. But…on this night, I was very much looking forward to a carefree wheeled hurdle towards Brooklyn with guaranteed people-watching, crazy or not.
Immediately, I notice that no one I talk to knows what the hell I mean when I ask about “the Green Line”. My dear friend, in her genuine attempt to help her buddy from Upstate New York (and fellow childhood Vermonter) read the subway maps in order not to get lost didn’t really mention the whole Numbers-And-Letters scheme of the NYC subway system. That was my fault, as I assured her I knew what I was doing. (Again: I did not.). Eventually I figured it out, but it took me about three wrong trains to do it. Keep in mind, I’m also mildly buzzed from that wretched Times Square beer, so logic has clearly already flown the coop. (Also, even 17 years later, I am still not sure why I didn’t think to get a cab at any point during this entire adventure.)
On my way to the second-to-last-stop (it is now 2 a.m.), I see a tall, lanky, bespectacled old man sitting across from me. He is intently reading a big, crimson-red, beautifully leather-bound book with gold edges. On the cover in big golden letters, it says: “Poisonous Gases”. This is disconcerting, but I am oddly comforted by the fact he doesn’t look up at me or anyone else the entire time.
FINALLY it’s my second-to-last stop. It is now 2:45 a.m. and raining nails-in-a-bucket hard outside. I know this because my second-to-last-stop IS outside, and I am totally alone. I don’t mean metaphorically alone or emotionally alone or single. I mean ALONE. It’s just me, G-d, and the rails. No one is on this platform with me. It is as deserted as a Mensa meeting in Mar-a-lago. I start to freak out a little. Keep in mind that the alcohol has still not completely worn off, I’m exhausted, have been lost for hours, and just want to crawl under the covers of a bed and die a little.
I’m going to get mugged. This is the thought that keeps running through my scared little “Not From New York” head. I’m going to get stabbed by some homeless junkie in this horrid, squalid-looking station and die alone in a gutter where no one will ever know I existed. I try and call B. again in melodramatic fashion. And with typical Irish luck, just as I do this, my phone dies. Just like I will. By homeless zombie junkies that will suddenly materialize out of the grates of the subway.
Where is that GODDAMN TRAIN??!!
(I say this quite audibly, not in my head.)
Suddenly, I notice I have a visitor. He walks right up the middle of the stairs like he owns the joint. He’s very large and very furry. He looks as if he wants to take the next train himself. He has total confidence. For a rat that likely lives on garbage, he doesn’t look mangy at all. In fact, well-fed would be my guess. Probably from feasting on the bones of the dead tourists in the grates who died being murdered by homeless zombie feral ghost children who hide in-between the rails with the sewer alligators.
I don’t scream because I am actually one of those people who really loves all kinds of animals, which very much includes rodents. I used to have pet mice, and an ex-boyfriend of mine once kept three adorable blue-grey rats. So I’m not exactly frightened by my new traveling companion, and he doesn’t look the least bit afraid of me either. Ok, frankly, that does begin to bother me just a wee bit. I have heard tell of aggressive city rats biting people in their sleep in various apartments throughout the five boroughs. (Thanks, Dad!)
The freaking train still isn’t here yet, and my fuzzy friend is walking right towards me. The Michael Jackson song Ben keeps floating in and out of my head. So I do the only thing I can think of to do that does not involve total hysteria: I buck up. I stop sniveling. I stop worrying over the armies of invisible junkie zombie warriors ready to kill me at every last turn in this squalid stop.
We make eye contact.
“Look bud,” I tell him with a firm, only mildly quivering voice. “I have a big-ass umbrella here and I don’t want to have to use it, but I will if you start anything. So I won’t bother you, if you won’t bother me. Capisce?”
The rodentian traveler seems to take this in. He squints a little with his beady, intelligent eyes. He walks on, scurrying towards some unforeseen hole to his million-strong rat army that will at some point gnaw on the bones of less street-savvy tourists than I. Victory is at hand! I have conquered danger in the big city and have NOT gotten mugged or eaten!
- *Cue We Are The Champions
The train arrives at long last. As I step in, only briefly getting soaked by the nattering tears of Brooklyn’s Heaven, I feel unshakable, undefeatable. Like I could handle ANYTHING. I think to myself: I’m so much tougher than I thought. I could totally live here.
On the walk B.’s apartment, I get lost twice and sob.
