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| Don't even THINK about ordering decaf in this neighborhood's cafes; it's for sissies...and they don't like sissies. (Wiki Commons photo) |
OK, now that the first laugh is out of the way, here are a few true gems from the World's Greatest City.
@ When I was in college in Binghamton, NY, and already married, we went to Long Island to visit my parents, and then to Manhattan to visit my husband's aunt. We drove. We were broke, of course. We forgot that the bridge back to Long Island--or perhaps I should use the local patois and call it Lawn Guyland--cost 50 cents. We pulled off the highway, scrounged around in pockets and car seats (the old bench seats, down which coins regularly disappeared) and came up with a fifty-cent combination of coins, mainly pennies. When Paul put them in the toll both attendant's hand, the guy asked us, "How long you been savin' up for dis trip?"
@ After college, I moved back to The Big Apple. The most obnoxious teller at the Bank of New York branch where I did my banking was named Mrs. Rascal. A toll-booth attendant at the Newburgh exit of the New York State Thruway was named Mrs. Bovine.
@ One day, the escalator from Columbus Circle down to the subway stop 50 feet underground was broken. Most people just took the stairs, steep ones, while a mechanic worked at the top on the escalator. One guy stopped and when the mechanic looked up from the becalmed grated moving stairway, said, "I lost a quarter down there last week. Did you find it?"
@ When I owned some "gentrification ready" rental housing in Newburgh, NY, I joined the local Landlord's Association. The president thereof told me, when I collected the rent, to stand to the side of the door, not in front of it, when I knocked. Why? "Because sometimes they shoot through it."
@ Walking up Eighth Avenue on a Wednesday, matinee day in the nearby Theatre District, on a late winter afternoon, I heard two women from Queens (one of the boroughs, NYC and yet not NYC) talking. The younger one said, "Look, Ma, dere's only buses and taxis here, no caws."
@ While having breakfast in a diner on Manhattan's West Side one morning, I overheard a couple of German tourists ordering breakfast from the Puerto Rican waitress. They asked for dark bread, soft eggs in their shells and some fresh fruit, using whatever English they had to make these requests. When the waitress yelled out the order to the kitchen, staffed by Greeks a la Saturday Night Live, she shouted, "Two eks over izzy, hull whit toast an' a slice of candle lope." Lord knows what the Germans had for breakfast; I had left before their order came.
@ Later that day, in another diner, a waiter told a patron that the special was lantalzoup.
@ One night at Larre's, for a long time an institution among pseudo-French NYC restaurants (but closed now for many years), I came back from the ladies' room to find my husband laughing quietly. While I was away, the waiter had come back to inquire about the vegetables we would like with our order. "You like piss?" he asked. Peas.
@ While trying to rent an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY, as Step One on our trek back to Manhattan from Newburgh, we went out to have coffee until the rental agent, who had called the doorman to say he would be late, arrived. I also needed a toilet.
Carroll Gardens is, to New Yorkers, well-known as a middle-class Italian neighborhood--clean, safe and family-oriented. (Only sometimes, you don't ask what they mean by Family.) It is also the location for the movie Moonstruck, despite the fact that most people, including Wikipedia, think Moonstruck was filmed in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn Heights lacks the essential element: front gardens with lots of flowers and a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It also lacks Italian families, which Carroll Gardens has in boatloads. In Moonstruck, you can see the very streets on which we ended up walking our dogs, eventually, and the front-yard shrines, just like in the movie.
Anyway...with about an hour to kill, we found a corner coffee shop and went in. I asked for the ladies room, and Burly Hulk behind the counter--gold religious medals peeking out from the pelt on his chest above his half-open silk shirt, knuckles groaning under the weight of gold and precious stones--ushered me to the back room. To the far side of the back room. Past all the adult men looking down at the cards in their hands and the piles of money on the tables. At ten in the morning on a weekday in October. Don't ask. Wouldn't be healthy.
I relieved myself behind flimsy pine panel walls, and hurried back to my husband, looking neither left nor right on that rite of passage. I didn't want to be able to identify anyone later, if asked.
My husband drank only decaf at the time--Sanka--but astonishingly was sitting over a cup of espresso, while another tiny cup of black gold awaited me. I asked about that.
"I did order an espresso for you and Sanka for me. The guy leaned over the counter and said, "Yiz want two espressos. Sanka is for sissies."
@ And my all-time favorite: My brother, my husband and I were walking from the car park to the entrance of Smith Haven Mall, a large enclosed shopping center on eastern Long Island, or perhaps I should use the local patois, on eastern Lawn Guyland. We were following a woman with a baby stroller holding one brat and a few other kids in tow. Another lady--with oversized rollers in her hair, the better to create a Married to the Mob hairdo--pulled her station wagon, crammed with half a dozen bambinos, alongside.
"Where ya been?" asked the stroller mom.
"We was at da pizza parlah," replied stationwagon mom.
"Yere, I could see. Yiz got saw-ace all ovah ya face, ya little piggy."
OK. One more. Not New York...except Larry (my brother) and I are in it. So it is.
@ About 13 years ago, I was staying with Larry, his wife Donna, and daughter Caitlin for a couple of months until I found a place to live for myself and my dog. It was almost Christmas. Caitlin was in bed, but Larry, Donna and I were watching the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree on TV. One of the performers was Rosemary Clooney (yes, George's late auntie.) She was telling tales on herself, one of which was about her tremendous weight gain. (We particularly enjoyed the 96 yards of electric blue sequined dress she had on.) Clooney said, "I went to my doctor last week. He took one look, and said, 'Rosemary, what have you been doing'?"
As one, my brother and I replied, "I been eatin'."
Moral: You can take the kids out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the kids.
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