Tuesday night an elderly woman approached me at 34th Street and 35th Avenue. She wanted to know where 33rd Street was. I pointed toward the street, one block away. She seemed unsatisfied, or confused by my answer.
I asked “Where are you going?”
She said “I live on 33rd Street,” adding that Key Foods and the 36th Avenue subway were right around the corner from where she lived.
She started talking.
“He gave me a lift. I went to the hospital to see my husband. Now he claims I didn’t pay him enough. He wanted 30 dollars or so from here to 21st Street and Astoria Boulevard.”
“$30 bucks for that?” I asked. “30 bucks is a lot for that trip. That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, what a bastard. It’s too much, huh?”
“Maybe 12 to 15, I would think, and you tip nicely.”
“Wow,” she said. “What a crook. I gave him $25 but he let me out right here, and now I’m lost. You know I don’t come out much at night and my husband’s sick. I’m on 33rd and, let’s see, near the block with the Key Food. I get off the train there, where the Key Food is.”
A bit more back and forth in which I tried to assure her that we were on 35th Avenue and she wanted to go one block over toward 36th Avenue. She sadly replied “I’m not gonna find my way home.”
I asked if she knew her street address. I swear she said “35-54” which sounded about right for an address where she described it: on 33rd Street two blocks from the Key Food and the subway. I said “OK, I know where we’re going. I’ll make sure you get home.” She said “Ooooh, you’re the best.” I chuckled and said “I don’t know about that…” We started walking toward 36th Avenue. She kept talking.
“That bastard took about $25. I never hand nobody that kind of money, not for that trip from the hospital.”
I said “I’ve been walking all day. I feel a little lost myself.” She asked “What’s your job?”
It was nice to have someone new to talk to. According to a GPS tracker app I use I had walked 17 miles that day before meeting this woman. This encounter would add another mile and about an hour to that trek.
“He took me to hell. This is not home.”
“35-54 you said?”
“Yeah, something like that. On 33rd Street.” I chuckled under my breath at her reply “something like that.”
She had worked in the subways selling tokens underground for 27 years. She proudly showed me a lifetime pass given to her by the MTA for free subway and bus transit. “I can go everywhere without paying.” She said she took a cab home today because she did not like to take subways after dark. I said “It gets dark so early now,” and that I didn’t like the sound of this cab driver stiffing her for $30 fare from 21st Street. She responded that he was a middle-aged white guy.
It occurred to me later that she might well have given the driver confusing directions, and that he did the best he could. I will never know.
We got to 35-54. That was not her house. I didn’t know what to do. I asked if she had identification on her that would contain her street address. She kind of dodged that question by re-showing me her lifetime MTA subway and bus pass. She asked me to show her the Key Foods. That would help her get her bearings, she said, as she rarely comes out after dark and could barely recognize the neighborhood with the lights out.
I had to agree. That stretch of 33rd Street leading up to 36th Avenue is pretty dark.
We walked toward the Key Foods, past a bunch of loud drunks smoking cigarettes outside a bar. At 32nd Street she asked another passing stranger where 33rd Street was. He correctly replied that it was one block thattaway. I was growing impatient and had a thought that this person did what I should have done when she asked me for directions: Just point her in the right direction and keep walking. But I couldn’t do that.
We turned back toward 33rd Street.
She entered a cell phone store and asked the man behind the counter “Do you know me? Do you know where I live?” He smiled and said “I know your name, you’re Lucy right? What happened? You’re Lucy. You live on 33rd Street.” She let flow comments about her husband being in rehab and being stiffed by a cab driver. I took this man’s recognition of this woman as a positive signal that Lucy (now I knew her name) was not demented and delusional, and that she would be able to find her home if she was not confused by the darkness and being dropped off at the wrong intersection.
In response to her “Do you know where I live?” the cell phone store employee pointed in a general direction that proved to be accurate. He asked if I was with her. I replied “I don’t know her, just helping her get home.” He smiled and responded something affirmative, implying that others had had similar encounters with her. Lucy, I took it, was a neighborhood character.
The cell phone store employee gestured again in the general direction of 33rd Street, adding that her house was on the east side of the street. 33-54, the address Lucy initially gave me, was on the other side.
Heading back toward 33rd Street the drunks outside the bar gave me a particularly curious look as we passed them by a second time.
She asked “Are you cold? Do you want to be around me?” I replied “It’s not that cold.” She said that she knew where she was now. She recognized the RIO Brazilian place, and that her place was right around the corner.
Lucy grasped my coat sleeve as we crossed 33rd Street.
I asked “Did he say your name was Lucy?”
“Yes! Lucy Miller. What’s your name?”
“Mark Thomas.”
“Oh, what a nice name. Lucy Miller and Mark Thomas.” Chitchat ensued as we traversed 33rd Street, passing the site of the former “Viking’s Dungeon”. She asked two women standing on 33rd Street if they knew Michael. They did not. I asked if Michael was her husband. No, she said, Michael owned the building in which she lived. She commented that nobody around here knows anybody. I responded “New Yorkers never know their neighbors.” I asked how long she had lived in Astoria. I thought she said “7 or 8 years” but now I wonder if she didn’t say “78 years”. Lucy, I learned, is 90 years old.
We reached an apartment building and she produced a set of keys. My relief was immense when I saw one of those keys slide into the lock and open the door to the building. I told her I could not stay but that I would go upstairs with her to be sure she got in safely. I looked at the mailboxes in the downstairs foyer to see if one of the boxes said MILLER. It did.
Slowly she climbed the stairs to her 2nd floor apartment. She unlocked the door and ushered me in. I had fleeting images of this person pulling a mask off their face and revealing a middle aged transvestite, or that this was some kind of police sting operation. No such insanity occurred.
“Come on in,” she said. “Ain’t nobody here. Shouldn’t be.”
We climbed the stairs and entered her 2nd floor apartment. The door closed behind us. I heard the sound of Lucy locking the door, making a mental note that just one turn of the lock was needed to reopen it. The apartment smelled a wee bit of pee but not so much that opening a window wouldn’t relieve the odor. It was no palace but it looked comfortable and, save for the smell, tidy. She showed me every room. She showed me how her television worked — she turned it on, that is. “We got one of these gadgets, see. You press the red button and watch…” The TV turned on. I said “Nice. Very nice.” The kitchen was roomy. A closet was filled with paper towels and day-to-day essentials. Commenting on a stack of blankets I said “You’ve got lots of blankets for when it gets cold.” She started asking “What else do you wanna see?” Four or five times she asked. Her clocks were off by an hour. I was going to offer to fix them for her but she got perked up, and started talking about going back to the rehab center to visit her husband. “I’m gonna go back. You wanna take me back to my husband?” I told her to stay home. She had just walked a long distance and would be very tired. I told her the cab driver would stiff her for $25 again. She showed me her toilet. She showed me her refrigerator. “I don’t feel like going lay down. Can’t I go back to my husband?” I tried to change her mind but she insisted that she was going back to the rehab center. I asked if it was typical for her to visit her husband having just seen him an hour earlier. She said “Yeah.” I shrugged and said “OK.”
Lucy is a free person and as such I was in no position to get in her way. As we exited the apartment she said “I’m going to leave that light on.”
We went back downstairs. As she slowly made her way down the steps she made some biting comments about how I must have thought she was lying. “I wanted you to know I wasn’t lying. You thought I was making all this up, didn’t you? You thought I was some dopey old lady.” I did not and do not know what she was talking about. I never thought she was lying. I just thought she was confused.
I have not hailed a yellow cab in years but my memory of doing so in Astoria had me thinking it was impossible. On that account I contemplated calling her an Uber car. It is a good thing I did not. I suspect she gave the first cab driver confusing directions which landed her at the dark and unfamiliar intersection where we met. She might have told an Uber driver to take her to Portland on my tab!
Cabs were plentiful on this early Tuesday evening. I hailed a cab from 36th Avenue, directing the driver to head north on 33rd Street. Lucy got into the cab and told me to come with her.
“You don’t mind coming?”
“I’m not coming.”
I said nothing that should have made her think I would go with her to visit her husband at the rehab center. If she wanted to go back up there having returned from an earlier visit just an hour before then I was in no position to stop her.
I started to think she was playing games with me, intentionally or not. She moved over in the back seat of the cab, patting the seat next to her and telling me to come with her. I said no, I had to get home. She turned more sour, and more sharp. She said “I trusted you. I trusted you.” I said “Tell the driver where you want to go” and shut the door, heading toward 32nd Street and not looking back.
The drunks outside the bar had retreated inside.
I have not been in a woman’s apartment for a good long while so that was something.
Thinking about this encounter with Lucy I wonder what I could or should have done differently. One thing I think is certain: I should not have entered her apartment. She invited me and it was no pressure or anxiety but it could have gone horribly wrong. I mean, for it to have been a setup then the execution was pretty ham-handed. I did draw the line at getting into the cab with her. Even when it’s a yellow cab and the person trying to lure you is 90 years old and probably harmless I think it is unwise to get into a car with a stranger.
But I should not have raised her hopes of spending more time with her (if that is indeed what I did) by entering her apartment.
She was no Alice, that’s for sure. Alice was the elderly woman who lived 2 floors up from me on the Upper East Side. Alice one day appeared at my door as I was leaving for work, scaring the crap out of me. She said something about her freezer being broken, and asked if I could fix it. Or something like that. Her voice was kind of a hissing grab bag of words that almost made sense, but I seemed to get the gist of what she had said.
I went upstairs (it took many minutes as she moved up the steps at a glacial octogenarian pace). She opened the door. The apartment was just a carnival of cockroaches. The sunlight coming through the window cast long, moving shadows of cockroach bodies. Roaches seemed to form a vortex-like circle around the drain of the kitchen sink. The bed was covered with bugs, roaches, chunks of food, and stains to explain.
I stepped into the kitchen to inspect the freezer and felt my shoes crushing multiple hapless critters. I had to kick them off of me as they earnestly and matter-of-factly crawled up both the inside and outside of my pants legs. She opened the freezer door. Roaches poured out. I don’t think the freezer itself worked, or else it was not plugged in, as no cool breeze belched from the compartment as one would expect. She said the ice tray was broken, and that it would not fit into the slot. Or something like. Once again with the hissingly obfuscated voice of near coherence. It was like she had an exotic foreign accent. In a way I guess she did. The accent of age.
I slid the ice tray into the slot with no trouble. She reacted in a certain reverence, as if a great but obvious truth had just been made clear to here. It was a “Very true, Plato” kind of reaction.
I got the hell out of there, pausing at the stairwell to swat any remaining roaches off of me.
I wrote a story about it that night for sorabji.com. The next day my boss at work read it. He said that if I had told him all this had happened that day he would have given me the day off, it was just that fucked up.
Interestingly I just re-read that story and see I omitted some of the memories that are crystal clear in my mind now, and which I recounted to others in the days that followed. Maybe I did not want to be too disgusting with the crunching sound of the roaches under my shoes. Or else I just wrote it in a hurry and left out some details.
I had roaches at that place but they were not really that bad in my apartment. 509 East 78th St. If I tolerated it better at the time than I would today I think it’s because I was yet to shake the memory of the Parc Lincoln, where roaches routinely convened on my food the second I turned away from it, and where I would wake up in the middle of the night with roaches crawling into my mouth and pigeons standing on the window sill, clucking.
I later learned that the unfortunate folks one story up from me (and therefore directly downstairs from Alice) had it far worse. They told me they might have to report Alice to the building management. Those guys worked at the 24/7 convenience store around the corner, which I frequented almost every day. One day at the store one of them asked “Have you seen Alice’s apartment?” I was like, hell yeah. We all shook our heads. I think those guys hesitated to report Alice because they had something like 7 people living in a tiny studio apartment, which is way in excess of occupancy laws.
I never thought of this until now but I wonder if those guys actually served as a buffer between the roaches and me. With so many people living in that tiny space the apartment must have been occupied 24/7, with somebody stomping out roaches all the live long day. What a strange scenario. Imagine a real estate broker selling my apartment with that “amenity”: “You got yourself a small army of people upstairs protecting you from being showered with roaches!”
Roaches aside I liked that place, and have often wished I never left that apartment complex. I gave it up for the guts and glory of moving to Atlanta and putting CNN on my resumé. What a difference that made in my life. Not.
