the habit of being

New Years Day was vomit on the floorboard of the N and I could not stop looking over. There may have been pineapple. I watched the getters-on buckle back like horses spooked by snakes until I thought I could smell something and moved to a seat on the opposite end from which I could not see it.

I’d left the apartment in a rush that day, trying to escape the pizza boxes and the post-Times Square Canadian sleepover crowd dispersed on my livingroom floor. They were only peripheral, at best, having left much too late to have any chance of seeing the Ball, but the two girls from Toronto had taken the bus down just for this, and needed to be able to say: “I was kindof far, but I Was There.”

I was not There, though I did make a bit of an effort earlier in the night, involving pink glitter 2006 specs and low-budget soft drink cocktails. I joined in, I mean to say, with my roommate and her friends, and then I tried to dress them in my clothes. “This looks kindof New Year’s Evey, don’t you think,” I said to Miss Ontario, holding up a tight lacy black top I’d gotten with my employee discount from TranquiliT Boutique back when I worked at Tranquil Space and hadn’t worn since moving here. But I didn’t want to be trampled, so I did not go out, and when they returned, more drunk, with more people in tow, I hid in my room and did not come out until morning.

Mitsu called me as the Ball was falling on my set, and I did some of the countdown, but not all of it, and he said “where is it now?” and I said “it’s over” and he said “Happy New Year!” and the neighborhood kids set off their firecrackers only a couple seconds too late, but at a wrong angle to see from my window.

I’ve gotten sick on the subway twice myself, and these are stories I am proud of because they make me feel like I really live here. Once it was too much to drink, and once it was that I had just unequivocally broken up with a man who still unequivocally loved me. Neither time did I have the gall to just spew on the floor of the train. Once it was into my purse, the other time I made it out of the car and to a trashcan in the station. Both days it was raining.

. . .

There I was. It was 2006 and I was sitting in my favorite coffee place up on the Upper East Side, where the wireless wasn’t working, or at least wasn’t working for me, and I was wearing a very New Yorky look. This was a distinctly Everything Is Going To Be Different Starting Now look, which is to say, I shouldn’t have been wearing that skirt in that weather, give or take the legwarmers, and also, that it may have contributed to my being carded at a rated-R movie earlier that day.

The movie, by the way, had been about five tall escalators above Times Square, and I was already twenty minutes late when the ticketeer asked to see my ID, but it all worked out, actually, because I missed all the real previews and walked in just as the fake cell phone ring was interrupting the fake preview just before the actual movie starts. I did have to sit next to someone, though, and the New Yorky look may also have contributed to that person’s looking over at me, several times, in a lingering way I couldn’t help but notice despite the fact that it was dark and I was thoroughly engrossed by a starlet much too pretty to live.

But, there I was, 2006, cinematic moment, coffee shop, Everything’s Going To Be Different, reading none other than Play It As It Lays, a book that could say more to a potential onlooker about Who I Really Am than possibly any other choice from my shelf. It was even an old copy, an early 80s copy at least, a $3.95 copy. Let me tell you, this was me. This was the me I wanted to actually be. This was the last day of winter vacation me, to say the least, and there were no less than three passibly attractive men with Powerbook G4’s at my table, one of whom even had a copy of Lolita next to his Mac.

I am never quite sure, when I see a person in public reading a book that is very much worth reading, whether to be impressed that that person is reading, say, Lolita, or disappointed that that person hasn’t read, say, Lolita, already. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t already read Play It As Is Lays, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Now, if this story had been about anybody else, I am positively sure that the circumstances I have just described would have lead to an Event, or at the very least, they would have lead to a conversation, with the man who was re-reading Lolita or one of the other Mac people or even the bar guy, whom I’d been trying to get up the nerve to ask how one goes about getting one’s art on the walls in there for months. But, new year or not, this story is still about me, and, like always, I walked back out into the City that night marginally cool but unapproached, infinitely intriguing but unapproachable.

(Two more)

1. When I was a child, I was very particular about my socks. The thing was that I didn’t like to feel them. My mother had to align that little line across my toes just exactly right, had to pull and shove my heel into place, pat everything down and smooth out every crease. She sat on the floor with me, with a pile of balled-up pairs. I kicked and pulled them off. She tried another if the first wouldn’t work. If there was a bump in my shoe, I screamed. A thread between my toes sounded like a knife blade. Sometimes she gave up took me to daycare, unshod, apologizing to Miss Diane. I just couldn’t get them on her. Good luck, if you want to try it. Miss Diane thought it was because she let me go barefoot too long.

2. My problem with escalators is that I’m afraid of falling. I hesitate about stepping on. I want to hit the first step dead center, and there’s only a small window. I usually let one or two steps go by, trying to get the timing right. This is embarrassing when there are strangers waiting, but my friends are worse. They’ll realize I’m a few steps behind, gripping the rail, and say, Oh yeah. I forgot about you and escalators. Then they think it’s hilarious to jump around, to show off how unafraid they are. They walk from step to step, get close to me, turn around with no hands, tell me how they’ll block my fall. And I always say Stop it, That isn’t helping, It isn’t funny. They seldom stop. If my center of gravity ever shifts at all, a wave of nausea runs all the way down me, so I clinch all my muscles to my bones and keep my breathing shallow. They have to laugh at me all the way down, and then they take too long getting off, and I’m afraid of banging into them on the bottom. And then they forget about it, until next time, when they say Oh yeah.