EASTORIA

I’ve been seeing the hashtag #eastoria on light posts and mailboxes in the eastern portion of AsLIC. Nobody really seems to use it much, on Twitter at least, except for Fatty’s. I don’t generally think of Astoria as having an east or a west or a north or a south. But hey, why not…

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That above bold blip of text emerged from these prestidigitational tendrils yesterday. Monday. Today is today. Tuesday. Walking over here I saw Larry. I pretended not to see him. I don’t know if he did the same or if he genuinely did not see me. We have more of a connection than anyone else I passed today. He used to live in the same building as I. One sunny Sunday afternoon I attempted to exit the building. The angry woman who lived downstairs at the time was also attempting this seemingly mundane maneuver. The door was locked from the outside. Neither of us could open it. The angry woman was freaking out a bit, saying she could not be late to work. I don’t remember if she did but I attempted to call the angry landlord. He did not answer. It being Sunday around 3pm the possibility of someone happening to enter the building was as unlikely as it could be. So I had the bright idea to knock on Larry’s door. I only knew him to grunt and say hi in the hallways. I later learned that for some random reason he had an IMDB entry. He is in fact a more interesting guy than many others.

He answered the door and the angry woman and I stood before Larry, who seemed to see the humor in the situation. We asked if it would be OK for us to climb out his window. Larry let us do this largely because he at least recognized me, while the angry woman was a stranger to him.

It was a longer drop than I might have expected from his first floor window to the ground below. I jumped first, then helped the angry woman soften her fall by extending my hand. She gripped my palm so hard I thought she’d rip my arm off. I remember thinking, at every moment of our encounter, “angry.” She could be heard screaming at her husband/boyfriend (I never knew which) at all hours of the night and day. Neighbors left handwritten notes on her door asking to please be quieter with her arguments, at least in the wee hours when she really seemed to relish the screaming.

In later days I would be mugged at knifepoint in front of Larry’s apartment window. He was not at home but a woman friend was there and sitting by the window when it happened. She saw the encounter. It later emerged that she had no idea a mugging was taking place, and that she thought I handled the situation like a seasoned professional. I forget how we became acquainted but she came to my apartment and we talked for hours. She was platonic friends with Larry. Somewhere in the conversation it became appropriate for her to mention that she had not had sex in 5 years. She lifted both her legs up when she said this, and she clapped her hands. Later in the conversation she would say that she was having the best sex of her life.

Memories of that encounter have become somewhat foggy. I wrote about it soon after it happened, but I don’t remember where….

Page 181 today comes from a volume that claims to be “THE DEFINITIVE VISUAL HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH”: Prehistoric Life, published by Dorling Kindersley. Page 181 is mostly occupied by an image of what looks to me like a horseshoe crab, or else a leather shoe. It is a DITOMOPYGE. Yeah….

Circling about my personal space moments ago was an elderly man I see around AsLIC. I first noticed him a few months ago on Broadway, looking for a working payphone. He walked along, stopped, and looked at a payphone for a few seconds. Then he kept walking. I thought I had just seen a vision of myself in 20 years. In his wake I, too, passed the payphone. It was damaged beyond use. This explained why he paid it no mind. I thought he was simply looking at it to look at it, as I might do. The phone’s handset and almost all of its tethering cable looked like it had been severed with pruning shears. The man walked on a half block or so, where he found another payphone. That one worked. He deposited a coin or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 and made a call. That stretch of Broadway east of Steinway Street (#eastoria) happens to be pretty rich with payphones, as is Broadway in general from 29th Street eastward.

I wonder now if he recognizes me, or if he knows I am the one who has been stuffing the coin return slots of AsLIC payphones with printouts from the old “What Are You Doing?” board. He is precisely that morsel of individual who goes from one payphone to the next, stroking the opening of the coin return slot for loose quarters, nickels, or dimes. Pennies might also be found but I suspect he is a further variant of the change-seeker species who leaves pennies on top of the phone, or on the sidewalk below.

I suspect recognition from him because of how he briefly lingered in front of me just now. The DITOMOPYGE looks like the shoes he wears. He smelled of deep musk, almost polecat but not quite. Skunk is one of my favorite scents, probably #1, though I can sometimes be seduced by the hard and mean smell of healthy human feces and horse shit.

The woman with the interesting tattoo just arrived. She seems to know a lot of the people here. This is her social scene, or so I gather. Some library patrons greet her with a knowing smile that segues in to their continued reading of a book, others make physical contact in the form of outreached fingers touching hers. Once in a while she approaches someone who, from their reaction, appears not to have ever spoken with her. I don’t know what she says. I cannot hear anything through these amazing noise canceling headphones and, at the moment, the music of Chinese pianist Yuja Wang.

Whatever that woman says always seems to result in a smile from the person she says it to. I think she made a comment about someone’s Mets t-shirt and how he was A-Okay for wearing it.

Oh jeez, a dude from the neighborhood who I cannot stand just walked in. I don’t remember the last time we spoke but he has persistently cornered me at a bar to talk about classical piano music. For the most part I would be happy to talk about that subject until the sun rises and sets and rises again. But this guy is just too much. It’s been a long time since we spoke so I am at something of a loss to elucidate exactly what about him was so irritating.

Bah, he left.

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A curious ritual plays itself out here. People come in, they take a Queens Library branded plastic bag, and they leave. The bags, of course, are free for the taking. I’ve seen the same individuals do this time and again.

I remain progressively more and more astonished that chaos does not erupt more often. A 1010 WINS report today referenced a head-on collision of 2 cars somewhere in Connecticut. It was from a town far enough afield that I could only assume they reported it on an NYC radio station because it was just that unusual and newsworthy. How do head-on collisions not occur repeatedly, hourly, and continuously? Life seems so close to the brink of chaos that these purportedly bizarre accidents should be commonplace. I think they are quite common but we cannot document or catalog them on account of their subtlety….

Writing prompt: Write a story about someone who accidentally travels back in time to his high school in the 1980s.

The library here actually makes me feel like I am in school again. I was the scoundrel in high school who screamed — and I mean screamed — the word “BOBO!” in the library. The librarians could never figure out who did it, and no one outed me. Whenever I did this the entire population inhabiting the library would get kicked out. It was really great. So everyone would leave and then one by one they would file back in. “BOBO” I think was our nickname for one of the librarians, the generally unpleasant one who I think was a nun.

If there was any justice in the world I would be trapped in that library for eternity, screaming that name like I really needed to. That was freshman year, I think. Everyone who knew nothing else about me knew me as the guy who screamed “BOBO!” in the library. Pete, who I became friends with a year or so after I stopped doing this, said that was all he knew about me.

If I was trapped in that library today, or somehow transported back to those halcyon high school days of yore, I would gravitate to the typewriter room. There were 2 typewriters in there but students could only use one of them… or maybe the other one just never worked. I don’t remember. But I monopolized that thing some days.

Ah crap I gotta go.

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The Mi Tierra is now a Bravo. Alert your favorite hyperlocal news web site.  I wonder if prices will blast off now.

Just saw something kind of troubling. At 32nd Street and Broadway police had a man in handcuffs and under arrest. Nearby a woman was being rolled into an ambulance on a gurney. Assuming the two were related I guess some kind of assault took place? I don’t know, and nobody standing around had any idea what happened. Plenty of police on hand.