New York Moments

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)

I probably should save these for my long-awaited memoir.

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.

Gods of New York: Ed Koch, Moonstruck and yellow snow of a different kind

Cher's neighborhood in Moonstruck...and mine for a year or so in the 1980s.

New York City is where my heart lives.

It’s true.

I was born there, lived there for many years of my youth and again, even longer, as an adult.

I loathe the NY mayors one is supposed to loathe, chief among those Abraham Beame and David Dinkins. I love those one is supposed to love, chief among those Edward I. Koch, but also including Rudy Giuliani.

I know. Giuliani has recently been tarred with a lot of brushes, and possibly his feet are more certainly of clay than many others’ feet. Still, after he became mayor, the city became liveable once again. So, for that―no matter what else emerges that tarnishes his glow among New York’s mayoral glitterati―I will continue to love him.

But my true hero is Ed Koch. Koch served for 12 years, virtually all of the time I lived in NYC consecutively, having moved back to the city during the preceding Abe Beame administration (I shudder to think) and remaining until the minus-4 temperatures and tornadic winds blowing through Manhattan’s canyons one Christmas Eve convinced me to seek sub-tropical temperatures in Florida. But then, we’re all entitled to the occasional mistake.

Anyway, Ed Koch―bless his little soot-and-Nedicks heart―used to stand at the subway steps at 86^th Street and Lexington Avenue when I first moved to the Yorkville neighborhood, saying good morning to people scurrying down that hole in the ground in the darkness of the Nixon ban on daylight savings time.

I was using the subway to get from Yorkville to my first real publishing job, as an editor for Prentice Hall business newsletters. Unaccountably, the offices were in Midtown, on Fifth Avenue at 54^th Street, almost across from St. Thomas (Episcopal) Church, which shortly became my lunchtime refuge as I realized the managing editor I worked for was N-U-T-S. I lasted a mere six months in that asylum before quitting to freelance, an enterprise that could only be undertaken because my husband had a job reverse commuting to the Stamford, CT. daily newspaper.  This meant that one or the other of us spent a minimum of one hour a day cruising the streets near our apartment to find parking for the car. We couldn’t afford a garage, and needless to say, on-street, legal parking spaces in NYC are always at a premium.

I wish I had had some more seasoning as a writer back then. If I had, I might have written a novel like Tepper Isn’t Going Out, a fictional account of parking in Manhattan by Calvin Trillin.

Or maybe I’d have written it later, when I was living in Carroll Gardens, the area of Brooklyn made semi-famous in the Cher vehicle, Moonstruck. The year I lived there, in a converted munitions factory at 505 Court Street that had the grandest 3-BR apartments with views of NY harbor you can imagine, it snowed almost as much as the blizzard of 2010. It took weeks and weeks for all the snow to melt and all the cars to be freed from their ice sculptures.

One car, very close to the corner on one of the blocks where we took the dogs to poop, had a 3-inch stack of parking tickets on it, as it hadn’t moved since right before the snow, and alternate-side parking was in effect.

When the snow did finally melt, the car began to drip. Not water; the snow was GONE.

It was dripping bodily fluids from the “missing wife” of a minor mafioso and her boyfriend found in the trunk with one bullet each in their brains.

As I said, it was the neighborhood made famous in Moonstruck.

As for me, I was glad we had found cheap, safe, permanent parking under the el a few weeks before the snowstorm so we hadn't had to do the New York parking mambo. Indeed, since we had joined the parking aristocracy, it was a wonder we even noted the stack of tickets on someone else's car. No longer our worry!

It was lucky, too, that my dogs were both Type A and very goal-oriented, basically only interested in smelling other dogs’ peepee, and not any other sort of light yellow liquids they noticed on the street. But I’ve always wondered whether we might have brought some human genetic material into the apartment on our shoes, or on eight furry paws. We always crossed right about there….

But it doesn’t bear thinking about. Not when I have all of NYC left to worship, and might travel down this holy path again soon.