How Did You Get This Number (9 page)

“This is going to drive me crazy.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mac put a thumb over the neck of his beer and turned it upside down. “From where you’re sitting, I think you can walk there.”

 

 

 

 

INQUIRIES WERE MADE. MINOR INVESTIGATIONS launched with finesse so as not to set off any “How many fingers am I holding up?” alarms. When those proved inconclusive, it occurred to me that it didn’t matter. Perhaps this is always how ghosts appear in real life. More the suggestions of themselves, a series of shadows and arrows and unaccounted-for conversations. Even if I did move downtown, I would probably never see one of McGurk’s famed prostitutes in all her detailed glory. I would just see Sang, sitting barefoot at the Norwegian picnic table, one leg drawn up to her chest, staring into space. And she wouldn’t be able to do that for long....

Just as Nell and I had gotten back into the rhythm of things (me hiding my possessions and her hunting them down like Easter eggs), she moved out. Shortly after a new roommate moved in, I happened to walk past 295 Bowery. The building was boarded up from the inside, and a piece of official city letterhead was stuck to the door. I ducked under the orange tape and peered through a cloudy peephole. It looked the same as it had when it was inhabited. But that wasn’t saying much. The only real difference was that the framed pictures were gone.

Despite valiant efforts on the part of the long-term tenants to get the building recognized as a landmark, McGurk’s was evacuated and set to be torn down as soon as the city got around to it. When they did, 295 was replaced with the universally abhorred high-rise that currently bloats the space between Houston and Stanton. The building is tall and reflective, covered in futuristic (if by “future” you mean 1984) windows. They enable the residents to live on the Bowery but not live on the Bowery, to pick over choice pieces of the past and dump the rest. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not one to stand on principle when I can sleep in a duplex. I wouldn’t kick gentrification out of bed if it crawled in there free of charge. But it never does. And so despising it becomes not only the right thing to do but the economical thing to do. Reading the ordinance, I found some small consolation in all this, both morally and personally. My haunted real estate heaven would have quickly become a living hell. A few months of freestanding fireplaces and toothbrush haircrafting and the whole building would be dragged down into a pile of rubble. Not reduced but worse—replaced.

Already replaced was my conviction that my whole New York existence hinged on my address. Nell ceased to bother me as much once I realized how close I came to leaving her, how easy it would have been to say good-bye if Sang had welcomed me into her home with track-marked arms. I was a grown person and free to do as I pleased. It was the unhappy whores of McGurk’s who were trapped at that site. I knew a thing or two about ghosts. So I knew a bulldozer, though a literal interpretation of “confronting the ghost head-on,” wouldn’t actually release them. Instead, they would be forced to move into the new space, fixed and displaced at the same time. They would confuse one homogeneous condominium for another. Lose one another in identical walk-in closets. Find themselves shoved into odorless rooms, where they would be doomed to run like mercury along those perfect lines where the walls meet floors for all of eternity. A horizon of happiness around every corner.

E
very New Yorker’s personal annoyance scale is best pictured as a cell phone commercial. The semipermeable bars of varying colors and heights extend up from people’s heads as they move along the sidewalk. One person finds an open-air cigar smoker more irritating than a skill-less subway performer. Another considers the person who mistakes a subway pole for a full-body pillow during rush hour exponentially worse than a taxicab keeping its overhead lights aglow despite being occupied. One person knows that frozen-yogurt chains are the devil’s handiwork and will penetrate the ground levels of civilization as we know it, softening our brains into the consistency of same, like hazelnut-flavored soylent green. Another just likes low-fat dairy. You begin to wonder if all of these infractions are actually detailed in a warning pamphlet you were meant to see when you moved here. It probably had pictures of people in solid-color clothing, like those on airplane safety cards. It was slid under your front door and accidentally discarded with the take-out menus. Now you are forced to learn the rules on a case-by-case basis.

“I mean, honestly,” says a speed-walking aficionado trapped behind a dawdler, “you wouldn’t pull your car over in the middle of the street without signaling, would you?”

Well, no.

“And you wouldn’t synchronize drive across the highway.”

Certainly not!

“And you wouldn’t change lanes without looking!”

Never admit you’ve done this.

And what of the more personal situations, the ones where money is exchanged? With so many options to get it right, people are always ready to brandish a laundry list of “no excuse” peccadilloes. No excuse for slow waiters, for faulty coffee lids, for mangled manicures—for actual bad laundry service. The question is never “Should I be annoyed?” but “How annoyed should I be?” Those cell phone bars are never not there. If you want a dead zone, move to New Mexico. But there is one annoyance common to all New Yorkers. One grain of sand slipped into every oyster, one irritant that joins us together at our intolerant edges like a giant puzzle of irritation. Local tragedies fade, scaffolding comes down, and not to worry: someone will always be there to break the buttons of your cashmere sweaters and clip their fingernails onto your lap. But somewhere in that varied cacophony of callousness there is the single constant that unites us all: everyone has been victimized by the smell of a taxicab.

Picture it in your mind’s nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener. This is a scent that does not waft in real time so much as seeps into your memory to replace every pleasant aroma you have ever smelled with its pungency. You bury your nose in your scarf, but not before last night’s Vomit throws an especially acidic right hook. Putrid as it is, you say nothing. Like a stranger on the street witnessing a lovers’ quarrel, you’re not sure you should interfere. But your annoyance bar is spiking. The backdraft from a cigar smoker is both avoidable with some fancy footwork and punishable with a judgmental glare. But there is no escaping the concoction of armpit and cheese rot currently molesting your face. Your mind does a quick calculation, multiplying the degree of stank by the distance between here and your destination, dividing the whole thing by your fear of overreacting. The idea that you might offend the driver is irrelevant. If he’s going to tool around this town in an air bubble of poop, he should know there are consequences.

Perhaps you make a dramatic sniffing sound for effect. You think: Okay, a lover’s quarrel is one thing, but when someone busts out the olfactory equivalent of nunchucks, maybe it’s time to call in the authorities. Two blocks later, you demand that the cabdriver pull over, and you apologize but not sincerely. He comes slowly to a stop. Despite the fact that you can see the door handle at your side quite clearly, you fumble for it as if there’s been a fire and the cab is filled with smoke. Your cabdriver notices you doing this but does not care. He doesn’t know you and is thus unfamiliar with the authority of your nose or the infrequency with which you jump out of moving vehicles. It is about as likely that he will take your behavior as “constructive criticism” as it is that people working the deli will mourn the loss of your business when you storm out after waiting ten minutes to buy a six-pack of beer and a package of gummy frogs.

You glance back, checking for the next surge of oncoming traffic. The instant you’re sure you won’t kill yourself, you spring out the door. You do this before you can enter into a screaming match over the $2.50 minimum fare. If you can still see the location from where you hailed the cab, you don’t have to pay when you get out. Everyone knows that. It’s in the fine print of the gum-speckled Taxi Rider’s Bill of Rights. But now what? You’re still late for wherever you’re going, guilty as usual of thinking the laws of time and space will bend for you because you’re paying them extra to do so.

As you hail the next cab, you wonder: Did your new guy see you get out of the first? Does he think you’re hostile? In possession of an explosive device? You do anything remotely off-color in this city anymore and people think you’re either homeless or in possession of an explosive device. Go ahead, hover by a streetside ATM too long. Look in the window of an apartment complex that does not belong to you. Switch subway cars while the train is in motion. See what happens. There was a time when New York boasted the highest threshold for weird in the country. Between the blackout of 1977 and the closing of CBGB, you had to do a hell of a lot more than look askew at a building before someone suspected you of wanting to blow it up. Now people mourn the closing of a Starbucks on St. Marks Place and applaud the opening of an American Apparel on the Upper West Side. It’s reasonable to register a noise complaint before midnight, and there’s no shortage of dirty looks waiting for you if you fail to recycle whatever that is you’re drinking. Our laws have become hard, our hearts soft. Of course, New York has always been the one place where people are nostalgic for when it used to be worse.

Through it all, the purpose and politics of taxis have remained constant, even if the makes and models of the vehicles have not. Even if the next car door you touch slides open like a minivan’s and you wind up sitting as far away from the driver as a coffin in a hearse, the driver/passenger dynamic remains the same. It doesn’t matter what your new driver thinks of you, just as it doesn’t matter what you think of him. You’re just a fare with hands that raise and legs that step off a curb. Taxicab drivers are like doctors. Professionals. You can’t allow yourself to think they’re passing judgment; otherwise, you might never go back. Often you find yourself thinking of them as your personal fleet of anonymity. Do a quick slideshow of every experience you’ve ever had in a cab. What if they were all the same cab? If these pleather seats could talk! The moment you shut the cab door, you can be who you want to be. If you are normally loath to make demands, you are now free to raise definitive questions:
Why this route? Can you avoid Times Square? Can you please identify this sticky substance? How in the name of all that is holy can you not smell that?
If you are a gregarious sort of person, you can finally have ten minutes of absolute silence in the presence of another human being without anyone asking you what’s wrong. If you spend your day making decisions, you can stop, releasing yourself with those magic words:
Whichever way’s the fastest.
Repeat it again when your driver attempts to brainstorm with you. He could tell you that the West Side Highway is closed and he’ll need to swing around the moon first.
Really. Whichever way.

You get in the new cab and sniff. You’re in the clear. You say “What?” but your driver establishes that he’s not addressing you by gesturing at his ear and shouting, “I’m not talking to you.” When hands-free devices first began to infiltrate the cabs of New York, you found yourself annoyed by this frequent exchange, duped into making an ass out of yourself.
I am not the asshole,
you thought. If he doesn’t want the Spanish Inquisition, maybe he should keep his voice down. But these days this banter only makes you feel stupid. By now you should really know better. And
of course
he’s not talking to you. It must take a lot of restraint on the cabdriver’s part not to whip around and say, “Why, do you speak Punjabi?” You marvel at the round-the-clock friendships and strong familial ties cabdrivers must maintain. You can barely stand to talk on the phone with friends anymore. Mostly because you can never figure out how to end conversations without apologizing for ending them. This goes double for blood relations. To get your taxi license in New York, you must be a phone person first and a person who stops at red lights second. A very distant second.

Your next order of business is to smack the off button on the increasingly ubiquitous taxicab TVs. You must do this before one of the female talking heads can take you to a new karaoke bar or make you wait with her for Shakespeare in the Park tickets. Or put on a sexy apron behind the scenes of a famous restaurant. Shield your eyes from this bizarre display of false modesty and kitchen knives.

Maybe if you hit the screen hard enough, you’ll get lucky and break it. Try not to think about how many greasy pointer fingers have touched that exact same spot. The idea of the taxicab TV turns every New Yorker into an erratically gesticulating Woody Allen.

“What do you need TV for? You’ve got the best slideshow in the world!” says you-slash-Woody.

“I like it,” says the tourist. “It makes the time go by faster.”

“You couldn’t do that at home? Who goes on vacation to make it go by faster? Would it kill you to stop and smell the urine?”

“There’s nothing to take pictures of in here.”

“Get out,” says you-slash-Woody.

You try to imagine exactly for whom these mini movie reviews and weather reports are meant. Often even the tourists find them repugnant. Most foreigners are already so disgusted by the garish hue of our cabs that there’s no point in speculating about their reaction to an all-you-can-eat dim sum festival streaming in their faces as they are held hostage by the vehicle of laziness that made us fat to begin with. They do not share our disgust so much as mock its insufficiency.