Less Than Hero (5 page)

The Fairy stands perfectly still.

She’s a living statue, the hidden pedestal she’s standing on adding a good twelve inches to her height, making her appear more than six feet tall and giving her added stature . . . which is important if you want to be noticed.

For the last hour, dozens of people have walked past her, some stopping to smile or take pictures, most giving a cursory glance, while about two out of ten walk up to the Fairy and deposit a single dollar into the yellow box at her feet.

The moment the dollar falls into the box, her face animates and she comes to life, one hand reaching into a satchel on her hip. She removes something from the satchel and holds her hand out in front of her, fingers pressed together and pointed down. When the person who donated the dollar holds out their hand in response, the Fairy sprinkles a pinch of pixie dust into their open palm, then turns her hand over and blows the remaining pixie dust into the air, coating the person with fairy magic.

It’s an elegant display, smooth and graceful, as if her limbs are gliding through water.

Most of the customers don’t know what to do. Some of them just laugh or smile and continue on their way, while others blow the pixie dust back at her, which kind of defeats the purpose. After all, she’s a fairy. She doesn’t need any more pixie dust. But the act of reciprocation seems like the appropriate response. Every now and then, however, someone walks away looking sour and annoyed while brushing the pixie dust off of them.

Some people just don’t appreciate fairies.

In addition to the Fairy, there are a number of living statues
in Central Park, including the Historian out behind the Met, the Eggman over by Strawberry Fields, and the Silver Skater across from the Wollman Rink.

While those are all good locations with significant foot traffic and the opportunity to attract large crowds, they’re actually better suited for street theater, acrobats, or puppeteers. Sheer volume can work against a living statue, causing potential customers to pay more attention to everyone else around them rather than to the silent street performer standing off to the side. By design, the living statue doesn’t stand out in a crowd or attract attention. Sometimes the location itself can be a liability.

In busking parlance, the location is called
the pitch
, and the right pitch is essential to success. Standing in front of the Olmsted Flower Bed that complements her costume and character, where everyone walking south along the Mall beneath the canopy of American elms can’t help but see her, the Fairy has picked out the perfect pitch.

In the time I’ve been sitting on the bench, she’s had a total of fourteen paying customers. At $14 an hour, presuming she were to do this for eight hours and make one dollar per customer, she’d take home $112 per day. With a regular schedule, that comes to $560 per week, about $2,300 per month, or $30,000 per year.

But this isn’t a nine-to-five job. And the foot traffic changes from hour to hour, week to week, season to season. Plus fairies don’t tend to work during the winter. So even if she takes advantage of the summers and holidays and weekends, which are prime busking times, the best she can hope to make is about $20,000 per year. Still, it’s tax-free, with low overhead and fresh air in a
beautiful park with trees and sunshine. That’s better than earning twice that amount sitting at a desk and having to deal with a middle manager who’s projecting his insecurity issues onto your performance review.

Once I’ve finished my black-and-white cookie, I get up and walk over to the Fairy. Her blue eyes stare forward, fixed and vacant, her mouth open in the faintest hint of a smile, her head cocked slightly to one side as if she’s listening to some distant music, her arms perfectly still.

The Fairy is a vegan. Mid-twenties. Short brown hair. She has a dimple near the left corner of her mouth. Her breath smells like fennel.

“Are you going to be here much longer?” I ask.

Buskers often vie for prime locations, sometimes sharing pitches on a rotational basis. Otherwise it’s first come, first served. Every now and then, a busker will send someone to fend off a pitch until they arrive, though squatting is frowned upon in the busking community. Snake charmers are the worst offenders, with contortionists coming in a close second. Plus they’re fucking prima donnas.

For the most part, the buskers in Central Park tend to get along with one another, but fights can and do happen. I’ve seen competing street musicians nearly come to blows. And it’s not uncommon to see a fire-eater and a ventriloquist slugging it out in front of the Hans Christian Andersen statue.

But I’m not interested in sharing her pitch. One, I’m not a performer. And two, this isn’t a great place to panhandle. Instead I just wait to see if she’s going to acknowledge my presence. But
she doesn’t show any indication that I’m standing directly in front of her. Not a flinch or a twitch or a blink. Her lips don’t move and she doesn’t look at me. She’s a statue made of flesh and white paint and seafoam-green silk.

I reach into my wallet and pull out a dollar and drop it into her yellow donation box and let her go through her routine because I know that’s what she has to do; then I hold out my hand to receive my pixie dust as she offers a smile and leans down toward me.

“I’ll be done at seven,” she whispers as she sprinkles the pixie dust into my palm and blows the rest into my face. “Can you pick up some organic spinach on your way home?”

S
ophie and I live in a one-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side across from Seward Park. We’re just a few blocks from the Tenement Museum and right around the corner from the Doughnut Plant, the best doughnuts in Manhattan.

That’s a personal endorsement, not a statement of fact.

I don’t get to frequent the Doughnut Plant as often as I’d like because Sophie encourages me to live a food lifestyle that minimizes the consumption of cooked oils, wheat gluten, and processed sugars. I counter that the Doughnut Plant uses all-natural ingredients, but I tend to lose those arguments more often than not, which pretty much screws me on my doughnut fetish.

“Can you pass the spinach, please?” Sophie asks.

We’re eating a dinner of soy-marinated baked tofu with brown rice and fresh organic spinach. On the linoleum floor next to us, Sophie’s seven-year-old cat, Vegan, laps up a bowl full of rice milk. Vegan only eats cat food made with organic animal products. He also doesn’t consume any dairy products, even if they’re made with non-GMO ingredients or come from cows that aren’t factory-farmed or injected with HGH. According to Sophie, this is a decision Vegan came to on his own.

I tend to think Sophie has more than a little influence on Vegan’s diet, but even though we’ve lived together for the past five years, I still don’t feel it’s my place to question Sophie about her cat.

I take another bite of tofu as Vegan looks up at me and lets out a meow, which to me sounds like Cat for
I could really go for some prime rib
.

Or maybe I’m just projecting.

When Sophie’s not a living statue in Central Park, she’s the night manager at the Westerly Natural Market, which offers a huge selection of nutritional supplements, organic produce, all-natural groceries, and environmentally friendly body-care products. She started out as a part-time clerk during college but quickly worked her way into a job as full-time manager.

“So how are the boys?” Sophie asks as we continue to eat our organic, gluten-free, animal-friendly dinner.

Sophie always refers to the guinea pigs as
the boys
, never individually by name. It’s like they’re all one person sharing the same body. Or some mythological creature like a Chimera or a Gorgon, with Vic and Charlie and Randy as different snakes weaving around my head.

“Frank’s a little crankier than normal,” I say. “I think he’s going through menopause. And Randy’s been educating us on classic-rock-themed anal sex.”

“I tried that once in college,” she says matter-of-factly. Like we’re talking about acupuncture. Or blowfish. “It wasn’t my thing. Would you like some more spinach?”

I take another helping and wonder how anal sex has never come up before. Probably because I’ve never been interested in
going in through the out door and Sophie never mentioned any interest in taking a trip to the dark side of the moon.

But then I guess some relationships are like that. You come together due to the serendipitous circumstances of your life without thinking about what’s going to happen next, and before you know it, five years have gone by and you’re sharing an apartment and joint custody of a cat and discovering that your girlfriend had anal sex in college.

When Sophie and I met, I was twenty-five and doing freelance marketing for a start-up company that had taken on too much debt and was hemorrhaging money. The owner blamed everyone and everything but his own bad decision-making and fired his entire marketing staff, which consisted of me.

Since I’d been hired as an independent contractor, I couldn’t collect unemployment. So while I looked for another full-time marketing job, I got a minimum-wage gig as an office clerk. When my life savings started to get sucked down the fiscal drain of rent and monthly bills and Chinese takeout, I got another minimum-wage job working five nights a week making pizzas and I started eating Top Ramen for lunch and dinner. But you can’t make a living on minimum wage. At least not in Manhattan. Five years ago, even if you worked two full-time minimum-wage jobs at eighty hours a week, you’d barely earn a whopping $30,000 a year. Before taxes.

The great lie about a college education in the infancy of the twenty-first century is that it guarantees a job that will allow you to live the lifestyle portrayed in all the beer commercials and car advertisements you see on TV. The reality is that you have a lifetime
of student loans to pay back while you send out résumés and serve pizzas and wonder when your proverbial ship is going to pull into port to help you navigate your ocean of debt.

So there I was, my savings dwindling down to pocket change, struggling to pay my bills even after canceling cable TV and my health insurance, trying to figure out how the hell I was going to make rent without having to get yet another part-time job or move to Washington Heights.

It was near the end of October and I was walking through Central Park, watching the pigeons milling around on the ground in front of me, the first real autumn chill blowing off the Hudson and the leaves from the American elms turning yellow and falling to the ground like broken promises, when I looked up and saw Sophie standing perfectly still in front of the Olmsted Flower Bed, holding a rose in her left hand and wearing the faintest of smiles. As if she had a secret. As if she knew something I didn’t.

I watched as people brought her to life with their donations and received their pixie dust, unable to look away, my gaze drawn to Sophie like a magnet to metal. Like a compass to north.

After a few minutes I decided I didn’t have anything to lose but a hundred pennies. So I walked up to her, told her I’d gotten laid off, was working sixty hours a week and running out of money, about to lose my apartment, that I didn’t believe in God but I believed she’d appeared to me for some divine reason, and that I could use a little pixie dust to change my luck. Then I gave her a dollar and watched her go through her routine and I wished for a job with the Yankees or
National Geographic
when she blew her pixie dust over me.

Before I could thank her, she leaned forward and whispered:

“Do you like cats?”

One month later, I moved in with her.

“Would you like some more tofu?” Sophie asks.

While Sophie has removed her wings and chiffon skirt, she’s still wearing her makeup and has pixie dust on her hands and in her hair.

“Thanks,” I say, helping myself to another helping of baked, marinated, coagulated soy milk.

Sophie started her living-statue act during the fall of her junior year at NYU as a project for her Behavioral Psychology class, only to discover that she enjoyed being the Fairy so much that she kept doing it even after getting an A in the class. At the time I met her, she’d been the Fairy for two years.

Before I met Sophie, I didn’t know anything about fairies. When I Googled them, most of what I got was useless crap about tiny winged creatures and fairy godmothers and a bunch of Tinker Bell porn.

“That’s not uncommon,” Sophie once told me. “Most men are drawn to the fairy energy but they don’t know why, so they sexualize it just like they do everything else they can’t understand.”

According to Sophie, there are a lot of different types of fairies, including Dryads, Pixies, Flower Fairies, Cloud Fairies, and Earth Fairies. Sophie is an Earth Fairy, as she loves nature and animals and has plants all over the apartment: dracaena, ficus, English ivy, spider plants, Chinese evergreens, golden pothos, and bamboo palms, all of which are supposed to improve the quality of the indoor air.

I suppose they do, but most of the time I can still smell Vegan’s litter box.

After I moved in with her, it didn’t take me long to discover that Sophie’s living-statue act isn’t an act at all. Even though she doesn’t wear her makeup or her fairy outfit all the time or stand still for hours in the corner of the apartment while I research potential clinical trials on my laptop, Sophie is truly a full-time fairy, spreading her good cheer by volunteering at the SPCA three days a week and giving half of what she earns in Central Park to the Bowery Mission. She also sprinkles her magic pixie dust everywhere, even in the apartment, and I’m constantly following her around with a dustpan and a brush, sweeping it all up and recycling it.