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.

I had an honest-to-God Missed Connection on the 6 train today. I’ve read these things on CraigsList, but had little faith that they happened to normal non-stalkers like me. Furthermore, when Mitsu told me he sometimes saw 20 women he found attractive in the course of a given day, I had to counter with a measly 10 men a month, which makes this experience even more special. Here’s how it went down:

Me: Wearing a hard-to-describe white Max Studio top that buttons down the side, a long gray French Connection skirt that ties around the waist and poofs out to make my hips look even bigger than they actually are, a flowery April Cornell scarf wrapped around my neck approximately 2.5 times, and blue canvas tennis shoes with rainbows on them and no socks. My just-beyond-shoulder-length brown hair was brushed into manageable “please don’t let me look like a strung out maniac in my passport photos this time” ringlets. I was sitting next to your friend across the aisle and fiddling nervously with the fringe on my scarf and the handles of my blue Vision Sciences Society 2005 totebag as we made eye contact 5-7 times but did not smile at one another.

You: Even slouched over with your elbows on your knees, I could tell you were at least 5 inches taller than me. Your eyes were of Precious Moments figurine proportions, which I have to say freaked me out a little at first, before I fully appreciated your face as a whole, and your slightly long but not at all immasculating brown hair, which looks an awful lot like my father’s in that picture of him from when he was 25 and so hot I don’t even feel embarrassed saying so. Unlike my father at 25, you are not built like a string-bean. Your bright green tee shirt and shorts might have looked dorky on someone else, but on you, they said “I’m European, possibly Italian, I play futbol, er, soccer, and I look great naked.”

We both got out at 59th and Lex, where we transferred to the N/R. I went uptown, and you went downtown, and you’ll probably fly back home to Italy and completely forget me and the amazing 5 stops we shared.

Hipsters and businessmen let go of their faces. Old ladies do their plastic rosaries in the morning. Sometimes I can just stare at someone, lock eyes for minutes with no expectation of speech. These are our real, slouching selves, with our sad eyes and our earbuds protecting us from the noise of the City.

A Hispanic girl is crying on the R. She has a large purple bruise across her right cheekbone. Her hair is pulled back so tightly she seems to be going bald around the edges. She pulls tissues out of the side pocket of a motled brown bag with cultural embroidery. She knows I know she’s crying, even if no one else is noticing. She has a really wide nose and I wonder if it’s ever been broken. Her lips are swollen and her knees have dirt on them. Our else they’re designer jeans spray-painted to look dirty. She looks at herself in a compact mirror; she has large silver rings on both hands. We get off at the same stop and I follow her down the sidewalk a couple blocks. I think about asking her if she’s alright, but she’s on her cellphone talking cheerfully to someone she calls Baby, someone she’s meeting in a few minutes.

There’s a crazy guy masturbating on the W. His hair is greasy and his eyelids are droopy and he’s jacking off like a woman. With two fingers, he’s tracing quick tight circles on his inner right thigh, in a spot where I can only imagine the head of his penis lies beneath his bluejeans. While he does this, he’s slowly sliding over the hills and valleys of the bucket seats on the other side of the car, which is nearly empty. His head is tilted upward. When the train stops, he snaps out of it and gets off.

To the Gallery:

I came looking for Nan Goldin photographs in a sea of graffiti and acrylic cartoon. There were only three. One for every dollar I paid in admission. Trixie on the cot is my favorite. A beautiful sort of ballerina junkie whore sits near passed-out in her 80’s party gear. Tulle and neon shoelaces against cigarettes and beer, amidst the butts and cans they shed. Our herione (maybe she’s on herion) is all slender wrists and tight angles.

All around are transvestites and glitter. On one screen is Karen Finley, safely behind earphones performing a one-woman reenactment of being finger-fucked on the subway. The bastard left her hangin’. On another, hidden in a corner, a woman is raped by many hands while calm and flute-like eyelash-batting geisha music plays sweetly over her shrieks. A crowd gathers to watch as a breast is shaken in a long nipply wiggly close-up. I stand up.

There is free beer in the lobby.

On the Subway:

A tall white man and an even taller black woman are hugging around a hand-hold pole. He kisses her softly and an asian youth wearing headphones while leaning against the door you’re not supposed to lean against makes a face.

A French couple smooshes up their vowels over a map of Manhattan. An MTA employee asks them if they’re visiting and they say yes, then he asks them where they’re from and they say France the French way. He says, France the English way? They nod. He disappears into his little room at the end of the train, then comes back after the next stop and asks them if it’s their first trip to New York, very slowly, as if he’s talking to children.

To the Reading:

I am pushing down my pink legwarmers in a sweltering chain bookstore, very early for the reading. The old floor creaks as hipsters trot by, toting tomes. My latte gets cold by my side. A girl with cottoncandy hair passes.

On the way here, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in three years. We stared at each other for seconds, then hugged in the sidewalk. I said “I still have your copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and we exchanged e-mail addresses. When I gave him the two second recap of My Life Up Till Now, he said “You’ve done interesting things.”

Stephen Elliott is a somewhat timid reader. As he leads up to the lines about childhood anal rape, his forehead gets shiny. The bookstore is even more sweltering than before.

To the Thai Place:

These is a virtual revolving door of couples on first dates at the two tables two inches to the left and to the right of Leigh and me. They are talking about something. We are talking about something. I picked the restaurant, but I did not think. The music is too loud, the temperature is too high, the mod decor is too mod. The smell is so overpowering I’m already envisioning myself vomiting on the R. Puking on the subway, like abortion, is a fate one really shouldn’t have to suffer more than once.

The lefthand couple gets up to leave. The girl has a lip ring and dyed-black hair but somehow avoids looking sixteen. She says one thing she’s not used to is this constant layering-up. Perhaps she’s a recent transplant from California. Her date is clean-cut, unpierced and blonde. He says laying is essential, otherwise you’re fucked.

They’re replaced almost instantaniously.

Down the Street:

Walking down 22nd, one first sees houses and houses, expensive residential, and then auto garages and diners, somewhat menacing in the dark, and all of a sudden the street breaks into song - gallery spaces with green and blue windows, a warehouse door vibrating with the club music it struggles to contain.

The snowpiles leak snotty lakes out over the black street, spreading the Terror of Falling Down. Metrocards float along in the muck. The sidewalks are pockmarked by long-blackened chewing-gum buttons - moles from the mouths of a century’s smirking adolescents and bubble-blowing girls in miniskirts.

My breath, too, is thin and white.

To the Theatre:

I imagine all the ticket-checkers look up to me a little, with my second-hand front-row-centers.