The creepy, doormat-hating neighbor

Ever since we moved in two and a half years ago, our weird, anti-social neighbor has made an odd habit of kicking our doormat. It happens multiple times a day. Sometimes he kicks it all the way across the landing. Just about every time we leave the apartment or come home, the doormat is askew or sitting several inches from our door. It is obviously this neighbor. I have caught him in the act.

He is a skinny, older man who, when actually seen outside of the building, is scuffling along the sidewalk in a hoodie with a thousand yard stare and mouth half open, revealing about three rotting teeth. Early on another neighbor warned us that the man is insane. He is precisely what you would imagine when you envision a psychopath. Many times I have come home, fixed the doormat and gone inside, then heard a skidding sound, looked through the peephole to see his door closing or him entering his apartment. Then I opened the door to find the doormat kicked out of place.

All of the doors open inward, meaning that our doormat isn’t in his way. It’s no accident. Even when he’s not coming or going, there are times when he opens his door expressly to kick our doormat. We have no idea why he feels the need to do this. It must provide some sort of outlet for his boiling fury against the world.

Last week the Easter basket my parents mailed me went missing (yes, 30-somethings can still get Easter baskets). The postal records show it was delivered … but I never got it. Obviously someone stole it.

Suspect No. 1?

Oooh! Look at that tasty package just sitting there for the taking on top of that goddamned stupid, annoying, ugly, offensive, infuriating doormat!!

We considered posting a sign over the mailboxes with a message reading something like ...

“ATTENTION RESIDENTS. 

A PACKAGE ADDRESSED TO APT #D3 HAS GONE MISSING. IT CONTAINED JELLYBEANS, PEEPS, A VERY SPECIAL PAIR OF CHOCOLATE JIMMY BOYS AND A HEARTFELT PERSONAL NOTE. WE WERE RECENTLY NOTIFIED THAT A NUMBER OF THE JELLYBEANS IN THE PACKAGE WERE POISONED WITH A LETHAL DOSE OF STRYCHNINE. IF YOU ATE THE JELLYBEANS, YOU HAVE LIKELY ALREADY DEVELOPED A VIOLENT TWITCH AND HAVE LOST A FEW TEETH. YOU SHOULD HAVE YOUR STOMACH PUMPED IMMEDIATELY. 

GOOD LUCK AND HAPPY EASTER."  

Every time I come home and see our kicked doormat I am overcome by a tidal wave of ill will toward our next door neighbor. It must have been him.

New Yorkers are kind in their own way/My First NYC Bike Crash

By now I have tallied a fair number of miles riding around New York City on two wheels.

After several harrowing close calls involving near head-on collisions with shitheads obliviously turning left in their ridiculously sized SUVs while talking on the phone or dodging swerving cabs, opening car doors and partially covered manholes, I finally wasn’t so lucky.

 Only I was pretty lucky.

Several months ago I bought a Groupon for Citibike – that fleet of bikes available all over Manhattan that you can take and return at your leisure for a daily/monthly/yearly fee. They seemed like a great idea. But upon my first attempt to use them, as much as I wanted to love it, it turned out the whole system kind of sucks.

Citibikes come with many bugs and annoyances, the most obvious being:

A) No bikes at a station. Or, as the case may be, the absence of bikes at several stations in spite of the “real time” Citibike App telling you that there are bikes.

B) Broken stalls. Even if it looks like there are bikes at a station, for some reason, they are permanently locked into their stalls. Sometimes you don’t know this until the machine takes your money but fails to give you a bike.

C) 30-minute limit. If you are actually able to get a bike out of the stall, you only have a half hour to ride it to the next station without being charged for extra time. Again, sometimes the App will tell you stations have space to return bikes but in reality, they don’t. Or it looks like they do, but then the stalls are broken and you can’t put the bike back. With all the bullshit you go through just getting a bike, you usually have 17 minutes rather than 30, so instead of enjoying the journey, you’re frantically pedaling to your destination before time runs out.

None of that has anything to do with My First NYC Bike Crash. Except that I was on a Citibike.

Usually I ride my own janky bike ($20 on Craigslist), which presents its own set of dangers (eg: brakes that barely work, broken gears, wobbly wheels, etc).

But today, I had taken the train into Penn Station and was grabbing a Citibike to ride down to the harbor. Miraculously, it took less than five minutes to get the bike, but I was only on it for about 40 feet.

I was pedaling down the open pathway behind the line of Citibikes and looking at the upcoming busy intersection. Seeing a green light, I was just standing up to increase my speed when instead I launched over the handlebars.

It’s funny how in any kind of crash, the spinning-out-of-control-before-impact part of it can feel like it lasts about 10 years.

Even though my crash happened suddenly, during the 10 years it took to hit the pavement, I had a couple of thoughts. The first was looking down and realizing that it was a random parking block sticking out into the street that had brought my robust, 70-pound Citibike to a dead stop. And the second was to realize – while the panicky half of my brain was in AAAAARGGGGGH free fall mode – that there was a crowd of about 200 people at the street corner witnessing my crash.

“Fuck,” the observant part of my brain noted on the way down. “This is embarrassing.”

Happily, my ego ended up the most bruised part of me. Although I did land hard on my knee and tear my jeans (new ones, dammit) and felt incredibly sore all over the next day. It could have been way, way worse.

As I brushed myself off and started picking up my ridiculously heavy bike, keeping my head down to avoid eye contact with anyone, a pair of hands helped pull me up.

ARE YOU OK?

 I looked into the furrowed brow of a middle-aged man who spoke with a strong New York accent.

ARE YOU OK? he shouted again, genuinely concerned.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you.”

“WHAT HAPPENED? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? OH! YOU MUST HAVE HIT THAT THING,” he pointed at the concrete block. “WHO PUT THAT THERE? WHY WOULD SOMEONE PUT THAT THERE? STUPID ASSHOLE!”

I thanked him again and walked away shaking and unsteady, but smiling.

Some stupid asshole put some block in my way that made me crash. Stupid asshole.

Anyone who says New Yorkers are cold, selfish and uncaring has not met enough of them to know any better.

Spin class VS the outdoors

These are the options I find myself weighing for my daily exercise each morning now that it is no longer the dreary Arctic here in NYC.

I had never attended a spin class before moving here, but given the discomfort of riding through the city in winter (you’re still gambling with your life even in the most glorious of spring conditions), I decided to give it a try. Now I am a weekly regular.

The energy and spontaneous dance moves of the spin instructors at my gym are truly uplifting. However, there was one drill sergeant woman who, rather than shout motivating axioms in coherent English (“YOU CAN DO IT!” “THERE’S MORE IN YOU!” “FASTER!” etc) would grunt loudly into her face mic, sounding not unlike an angry predator having sex (“HEF! HEF! GAH! GAAAAH! AW … SHIT! GEF! HEH!”).

The “Aw shits” were especially charming, and only vaguely indicative that she had any idea she was supposed to be teaching a class and not having her own lung-busting workout. After experiencing her class twice (giving it a second try because I had convinced myself the woman was just overwhelmed with psychological problems during that first class and not believing it could possibly be her MO) vowed never again to go to her class. Thankfully she is no longer instructing.

This morning’s class was taught by a sexy accented hulk of Latin origins. We’ll call him Mateo. He is perfectly sculpted (not that I’m into that sort of thing, but it does make the whole experience more pleasant) and has a way of shouting out numbers over the maxed out pounding club tunes that is almost indecipherable but perfectly fine because he’s aware of it and starts pantomiming while off his bike, shaking his ass and marching around the room.

Of course I have also been pedaling outside and my last adventure involved attempting to ride to the industrial wasteland of College Point (that has nothing to do with higher education at all and is in fact one of the city’s ugliest areas). It was actually a very enjoyable ride – down breezy residential streets in Corona and East Elmhurst and over Grand Central on a pedestrian bridge that spits you out directly in front of Laguardia Airport. From there you ride on a spacious and empty promenade along the water, which unfortunately reeks like hundreds of years worth of hepatitis-infused sewer waste. Once I reached the end of the promenade near the Worlds Fair Marina the only options were to ride up a variety of on-ramps into blaring horns and bumper-to-bumper traffic. Google Maps’ highlighted bicycle route failed to clarify this.

The destination was never quite crossed off my list, but there will be other attempts. To other parts of the city hopefully less armpit-like. The shockingly disparate (from interesting and relatively pleasant to sludge-infested and death-defying) cycling options are endless here. And there is always spin class to fall back on.

Maybe I’m a tree hugger after all

Contrary to my disgust for hippies and jam music, I do actually love trees. In fact, I’m not at all sure about how these things became mutually affiliated. In my mind, trees are natural, powerful, inspiring, strong, clean, fresh and beautiful whereas hippies are exactly the opposite on at least one count.

You sometimes don’t realize how much you appreciate trees until they don’t make a regular appearance in your daily and weekly routine.

There are approximately five trees on the entire block surrounding my apartment building. And one of them is now just a stump because it fell on my girlfriend’s car during Hurricane Sandy (dumb luck … I know). As trees go, this sort of dearth doesn’t really do much for a person in terms of yielding any ameliorative benefit. 

So, my love for and withdrawal from trees is probably at least half the reason I make a point to run in Astoria Park or bike in Central Park a few times a week. (The other half is because I’m getting fat. No amount of sea level jogging, yoga or pedaling makes up for the calories burned by hauling oneself up a mountain six days a week).

I biked to Central Park yesterday and the presence of greenery put my mind (well, the 2 percent of it that wasn’t toaster-in-the-bath sizzling from weaving through traffic in Manhattan to get there) at ease. Although it is mobbed with horse carriages and gapers on the weekends, the shared bike road through Central Park (no bikes allowed on smaller paths or trails) is gloriously open in some sections on weekday afternoons. I think about a full second elapsed at one point yesterday in which I didn’t see anyone else on the street. And Central Park’s assortment of trees and rock formations jutting out of the jade-green grass even bare a convincing resemblance to real nature.

It’s just too bad that it’s such a daunting journey across the East River and the eastern part of Manhattan to get there and back.

Although I think the stereotype of New Yorkers being loud, uncaring assholes is generally not accurate (except for the loud part … that’s 100-percent true), I do believe that certain New Yorkers are just salivating for confrontation. They honestly can’t wait to berate you for something.

Riding along a side street and turning onto 3^rd Ave where there were construction barriers and wall-to-wall, blaring horns and traffic, I hopped onto the sidewalk for a few pedals to avoid getting wedged between a taxi and the barrier. You can get away with riding on the sidewalk in Queens – delivery guys do it all the time – but in Manhattan, it doesn’t fly. Within a split second of jumping onto the sidewalk (which was relatively empty, by the way), there were two older men holding little squirrel dogs on leashes, all ready to get up in my grill. The first one yelled “hey! What the fuck?!” as I rode by and the second one – as I slowly, carefully and in no way dangerously pedaled by him, screamed “IDIOT!” right into my face.

The serenity that the trees instilled in me was by now long gone as I pedaled home over the bridge listening to the amplified acoustics of dozens of drivers laying on their horns in stopped traffic. But I had to remind myself that I’ve yelled “idiot” at a lot of people in this city, both out loud and in the privacy of my crowd-addled head.

If you can imagine that in life, about one out of every eight or so human beings is a true idiot, then calculate that there are 8 million people in NYC … you’re dealing with a lot of idiots.

I’d rather be surrounded by trees any day. 

Even liberal NYC not immune to hate crimes

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Every morning a large, bespectacled, older man wearing a neon yellow safety vest hands out the daily NY Metro newspaper to people swarming up the stairs to the subway. He knows me by now and we smile at each other as I take a paper. The exchange is one of the small weekly instances of feeling some vague connection to this crazy city.

The Metro is nice because it offers brief snippets of big national stories, the occasional exclusive feature, previews of NYC entertainment and a high concentration of local news. There are also inexplicably graphic ads for things like varicose veins and open sores. These same image-heavy advertisements also appear on posters on the subway and on local commercials. I don’t really get the marketing value. They make me nauseous.

Sometimes the paper has amusing stories about thwarted attempts to jump off the Empire State Building (one guy poised himself on the sight-seeing ledge and then, when he knew everyone was watching, hurled himself off  but - Wile E. Coyote style - only fell one story to the wider platform below). But today it was really, really depressing.

First there was the story about a 14-year-old girl riding on a bus in Jamaica, N.Y. killed by mysterious stray bullets, another about a cyclist killed by a taxi in Brooklyn, another about someone who fell between the train tracks and then the worst – a man shot in the face in the WestVillage for being gay.

As most of you are well aware, I’m not thrilled about living in a concrete jungle with 8 million people – a glowing target for terrorist attacks, derelicts, spit on the street and a gazillion other possible dangers and revulsions not typically found in the pristine mountains of Colorado. But I am thrilled to live in a place that not only allows but celebrates same sex marriage, diversity and equal rights. 

I was reminiscing back to Friday night when my girlfriend and I passed through the West Village on the subway on the way home from a concert in Brooklyn, her asleep on my shoulder. I was thinking about how, had we gotten out at one of the West Village stops with the mob of people who typically flock to this young, cool, high-energy epicenter of diversity and acceptance that we would have probably been in very close proximity to where Elliot Morales followed Mark Carson and his friend down a busy street and without skirmish, shot Carson in the face because he was gay.

I realize that one takes a risk any time one leaves the house. Shit, even in your house, who knows when an airplane could suddenly fly into it or an anvil could land on your head the minute you lean out the window. Still, there is clearly a higher risk when you live in a place with such a high density of people. You never know when you can board some form of public transportation with a wall of people and fall victim to a gangster’s stray bullet or a terrorist’s carefully placed explosive. And there comes an even higher risk when you choose to ride a bicycle on the NYC streets (more terrifying, as I have mentioned before, then any steep, loose, rock-filled mountain bike ride I have ever been on. I do believe some of the taxi drivers actually TRY to hit you. Remind me to write about the time I got lost in a really shitty area of the Bronx and resorted to riding with one trembling hand on the handlebars and the other clutching my pepper spray).

But I never want to think that I’m taking a risk by allowing my girlfriend to fall asleep on my shoulder on the subway or by holding her hand as we walk down the street. I thought we had moved passed all that. Especially in New York. But I have to admit this story makes me very sad. And scared.

A part of me wants to march in the streets with all the gay people I know wearing rainbows, daring all the haters to come get up in my grill. The other wants to hunker down at home … taking my chances with falling anvils.

St. Paddy's Parade and other noise

Did anyone ever tell this lady that you shouldn’t bring infants to quiet coffee shops where people are trying to work? I realize there is a significant amount of restlessness that comes with being cooped up at home with a baby all day. And yes, I know on a day like this – grey and freezing in spite of being mid-March when the weather is balmy in Denver and in many other places – it’s tough to go to a park for the getting-the-fuck-out-of-your-house break that new moms need. But the nonstop, one-sided commentary between this woman and her 2-month-old (who just puked up on the counter) is a little distracting.

“Oh, your diaper is dirty, isn’t it?”

“OK we’re leaving now. No screaming in the restaurant. We’re going to leave.” (this was stated about 10 times – clearly just to assuage those of us nearby)

“We need to find a new place to live, don’t we?”

Now that I type that, it suddenly occurs to me that this woman might legitimately be in a very bad way. I mean, she doesn’t look homeless. But. Maybe I’m just an asshole.

Every time I find myself getting irritable with strangers (about 283 times a day), I undergo a sort of guilty flurry of afterthought wondering if I have a cruel heart and am unnecessarily intolerant. What if one of these targets of my irritation is some sort of genius with a painful, abusive home life? What if the guy on the subway who keeps clearing the mucus in his throat like he’s the champion of hacking up lungers has esophagus cancer and can’t help himself?

When the baby let loose a particularly piercing scream, I winced a little and the woman noticed and once again told the kid, “OK. We’re leaving now.”

She then went to change the dirty diaper (I know cuz she told the kid everything) but before she left she glanced my way and said, “Sorry if he was bothering you.”  

I went to the St. Patrick’s Parade in Manhattan on Saturday and I was bracing myself for irritating people but had no idea of the scope of it. We emerged from the Metro at 9:30 a.m. and there was already a sea of 21-year-olds wearing green capes and drinking 40s. Yelling like frat boys. We went to an Irish bar where the staff was really Irish (thus deterring us from ordering Car Bombs … out of respect) and already annoyed as hell with everything. The parade went on from 11 to 5. In the rain. And sleet. All the leprechauns got water-logged. Four-leafed clovers were squashed to mush. We all got soggy. But the parade went all day. I do love bagpipes. 

This morning the sound of helicopter propellers woke me up at 6 a.m. When I walked to the subway at 7:15 there were four helicopters hovering high above. Obviously, I wondered if there was a killer on the loose. I stared at them for a good three minutes while everyone around me went about their business. When I got off the subway there were fire engines roaring down the street with their sirens at 3 trillion decibels. It made me think the world was ending. But when I looked around me, nobody else seemed to think anything was amiss.  

Subway Characters

Yes, I may have lived in the mountains of Colorado for the last 10 years, but even the coldest day I ever experienced there doesn’t compare to the bone-chilling winter in New York City. I’m pretty sure this goes for anywhere in the northeastern United States. And Prague. And Moscow … all of those cloudy, grey, thick-air winter places. I may be a mountain girl but the humid Arctic wind around here is almost too much for me.

Apparently, it’s too much for the bums, too.

Riding the subway continues to be both the most fascinating and revolting part of my week. The other day when the high temperature was around 24 degrees (comparable, I’d say, to maybe 2 degrees in drier climates), I got on the subway from Queens to Manhattan and there was an enormous garbage bag in the middle of the floor with a passed out, dirty man slumped onto the seat behind it. Like most homeless people who ride the subway, there was a thick odor emanating from the guy like a palpable, Pigpen-like cloud. I found a seat a couple benches away, but kept glancing over at him. His head rolled slightly every time the train slowed. When it pitched to the right at a particularly abrupt stop I saw a noose-type cord around his neck and actually jumped up to get a better look, thinking he had been strangled. The cord was wrapped around the top of his garbage bag, presumably so nobody would steal it. After I stared long enough (while the surrounding passengers glanced a little at my peculiar behavior but essentially – as they do – ignored me) to decide he wasn’t actually dead, I sat down.

 I took the subway twice more that day and saw another couple of derelicts passed out. When it’s this cold, they pony up for a subway ticket and just ride the trains around the city all day.

 My GF told me that a homeless guy sat next to her on the subway the other day (reeking to high hell) and she noticed he wasn’t wearing socks. She now travels with an extra pair in her bag in case she sees him again … or someone else who needs them.

The first time I ever took the NY subway from Jamaica Station to Manhattan a black guy with no legs opened the door between train cars and crawled along the floor between the crowd asking for money. In Queens, there are some guys on some sort of probation program selling packages of Oreos and fruit snacks, kicking off with an announcement about how they’re just trying to make some honest money and work toward a better life. They follow up with the same speech in Spanish.

The other day we were headed into Manhattan on a relatively empty train and the doors between cars loudly puffed open. Who should come striding through but a dude wearing an impeccable Batman uniform. Like, he could have really been Batman. He even had a camouflaged box of supplies (Bat-shaped Chinese stars? Tranquilizer darts?) built into the costume at his chest. At first, my blood ran cold and every muscle in my body clenched up. My Catastrophic Imagination pitched forth an image of the guy whipping out fistfuls of explosives and blowing up the train. As he strutted down the aisle closer to where we were sitting, it turned out he was wearing jeans. Otherwise the outfit was spot-on. As my girlfriend shot me a look and hissed, “what the fuck are you doing?”  I managed to take this blurry photo (left) before he got off the train.

At the Queensboro Plaza subway station today the crowd on the platform quickly doubled and then quadrupled. With the razor-like wind blowing and everyone trying to turtle their heads further into their jackets, the train was horribly delayed but finally, after about 10 minutes, it rolled in as the loudspeakers announced that a water main had burst and the tracks were jeopardized. The voice apologized for the inconvenience. A guy wearing a San Francisco 49ers hat and jersey was shrieking at the front of the train as it pulled in.

“What the fuck. This is bullshit. It’s too cold for this shit. These trains are shit. The MTA is shit. This fucking shit doesn’t happen in Chicago and Detroit.”

As everyone boarded, so did he and his rant continued.

“Look at this fucking garbage everywhere. This fucking train isn’t even clean. I hate this train. I fucking can’t stand this shit.”

At least he was expressing his anger by ranting and not shooting the place up.

Also today, before the hordes piled into the train, a Hispanic man sat next to me as I was glancing through my email on my phone. His eyes kept darting in my direction and again, my inner guard dog leapt to attention. “Dude wants to steal your iPhone,” the guard dog said. A while after I put my phone back into my pocket and started flipping through a book, the guy stood up to get off the train but first handed me a single, card-shaped flyer. He didn’t have a whole stack. He didn’t give anything to anybody else. I tried to reject it. He left it on my knee and got off the train.

“Jesus will save us all,” the card said. “God is waiting.”

But the subways aren’t all bad.

The Union Station stop is awesome. There are always people busking there – either right on the platforms playing the cello or violin or harp or on the floors between platforms. Most of them are amazingly talented. There is a hip-hop group that has a boombox (straight out of 1986) blasting while they take turns break dancing while the others strike flawlessly choreographed collective poses. Also, there are hiphop dancers that bring their speakers onto the trains and do rhythmic acrobatics on the ceiling bars, slow-motion running in the air and dangling by the tops of their Converse.

It’s a circus of reality around here.