Chronicles of New York

The hulk, amazingly, softens and looks like he’s saying something almost apologetic. But I can barely hear him over my buzzing adrenaline. I think he’s trying to defend himself to me – the neutral passenger – as one would tell an officer that the whole thing wasn’t really his fault.

This is when I realize I can make a choice. I can keep up the fight or I can give in. I can stand up for myself, for my driver. Or I can diffuse the situation, be a Californian, be calm, go all Namaste, go to my friend’s house for dinner.

I decide to yell, because I can’t let my guard down for one minute in this city and it’s not fair! All I want is to stop pretending that this is home and make it home. I have New York dreams I refuse to stop nurturing. No, I don’t say any of that. Really what comes out of my mouth is some mixture of: “Go fuck yourself” and “Why don’t you learn some fucking respect!” and “Yeah? Fuck you!” I also throw in a “cocksucker” or two. It’s a new one in my arsenal.

“You fat. Stupid. Bitch,” he flings back from the Subaru. His face is as jumbled in hate as when he got out and spit on the cab. The red stop light shines on the sweat glistening on the folds of his scrunched up face. “You big fat stupid bitch. Is that your girlfriend?” he asks my boyfriend—who is now stunned at my behavior and ready to fight. “I feel sorry for you. What a fat, stupid bitch,” He said. Of course, I remember that part perfectly.

My boyfriend eagerly accepts the duel. He sticks nearly half of his body out of the window and screams, “Don’t you talk to her, eh! Don’t you talk to her!” He’s stretching his French accent to where I can barely hear it among the gusto.

“Fat bitch! Fat bitch! Fat bitch! Fat bitch!” screams the hulk, or at least that’s what I hear. He’s nearly bouncing out of his car with anger.
I look at the woman in his back seat. It’s presumably his wife. She’s in the shadows watching with the same excitement that had chased away my thoughts of yoga. She fuels me. I picture all of us getting out of our cars and taking it to the street. Taking out our collective bad days on each other. The same street that gave birth to a Western legend named Billy the Kid brought out the ballsy, loud-mouthed New Yorker in me.

“Let’s go! Right here! Right now!” I scream vying with my boyfriend for window space. “Foursome! Right now! Fuck you!” I can take him and his wife.

Just then, a baby starts crying in the hulk’s passenger seat. The light changes. The hulk speeds ahead. Like a cherry on top of a fuck-you sundae, his wife flips us off as they duck-tail through the intersection at Delancey. I look at my boyfriend, “They had a baby in the car?”

“They should not be allowed to be parents.” He straightens out his jacket.

“They had a baby in the car?” I look over to the cab driver to see if he’s okay. He’s seems nearly unphased. Turning onto Delancey, I feel the sting of being called a fat bitch in front of my boyfriend. I hope that man has a family that drives him crazy, really crazy. Then I realize how perfectly my boyfriend rose to defend me. This assuages the prickle of embarrassment. Now on the Williamsburg Bridge, on our way to Brooklyn, the three of us drive in silence. I think I’m smiling to myself, I can’t tell. We’re still in a moment that needs to pass.

Under the lights of the bridge I stare out at the eerily lit industrial mushrooms below and the black of the East River. We came so close to a fight tonight. If that light had stayed red a little longer…He could have had a gun.

I turn to my boyfriend. “We can only get in fights with tired couples who have a baby. Those are the only people we stand a chance against.”

“You think he would have fought us with his baby right there? No. Then I would say he does not deserve to be a parent,” my Frenchman said. He’s still naïve about the freedoms of New York.

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This entry was posted by Willow on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 11:27 am. It is filed under Guest Contributors and has these tags: brooklyn, daily life, fiction, frustration, inconvenience, life, Lower East Side, manhattan, new york city, taxi cab, transportation, victim, violence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.