Back in January, I met a girl named Simone and we really hit it off. Simone and I listen to a lot of the same music. I used to think that I could hit it off with anybody who listened to the same music as I do. But now I know that that is not always the case. But sometimes it is. And it was with Simone.
I met Simone through a mutual friend, Alex. I met Alex through a mutual friend, Ian. Ian and I first decided to hang out after I saw him at the coffee shop where I worked at the time and I complimented him on a patch he had safety-pinned to his jacket. It was a Fugazi patch. When Simone and I took that giant first step that music-lovers take and exposed our i-tunes libraries to one another, I knew I was going to have to take a ton of her music. She said she would take some of my music, too, except that we basically listened to the same stuff and she already had most of what I had. That comment would haunt me for days. I spent hours going through Simone’s music and I took a whole lot of it.
One out of the hundreds of albums that I took was a Ladytron album: Witching Hour. I knew I had heard Ladytron before and had gotten pretty into it, but I couldn’t remember exactly what they sounded like. I only just got around to listening to the album this past week. Ladytron are a sexy electro-tinged shoegaze/post-punk band, fronted by two girls (or ladies, I presume…). My first couple of listens were marred by waves of fatigue and anxiety I had felt before I pushed play, so, to be fair, I gave the album another listen today as I commuted home after work.
About a third of the way through, I had to switch trains at Atlantic Avenue. I caught a rarely-spotted B train and once inside it, stood, leaning against a set of doors. A sticker above me read, ‘Do Not Lean On Doors’. At the next stop, two seats opened up on the three-seater next to me. The seat in the middle was still taken. A fellow leaner took the seat on the left and I took the seat on the right. I looked at the woman in the middle. Her head was down and her figure seemed to be crumpled over itself. For a second, I froze. I had a strange feeling about this bundle of a body sitting next to me. ‘Is something wrong with this woman?,’ I thought to myself. ‘No. She is just having an epically bad hair day.’ But I should have heeded the alarm my sixth sense tried to send me because the truth of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, I ALWAYS get stuck with the crazies.
I find the jostling of a subway train quite sleep-inducing. Is it because it brings my subconscious back to my days as an infant, being rocked back and forth by my mother? I began to nod off, opening my eyes in flashes just long enough to see that the woman in the middle had tears curving down the longitudes of her face, falling out of her closed eyes. I stopped and stared at her for a little while until I lapsed into another minute-long coma.
All of the sudden, something was nudging my arm roughly. It was the middle woman. She was looking at me and speaking to me in Russian. This kind of thing happens all the time where I live, deep down in the bowels of Southern Brooklyn. I glance in her direction and promptly inform her, ‘Sorry, I don’t speak Russian.’ I close my eyes again and let my head fall back. She nudges me again. Her nudge is not the nudge of a lady. She is digging her elbow into my side with broad strokes. She attempts to focus on my pupils and mocks me in a lazy, weighted Russian accent, ‘I donnnn’t speeeeak Russssian.’ It sounds like her vocal cords were clawed at by a Siberian beast of sorts when she was in exile there some thirty years ago. She looks around at the rest of the train car, heavily scattered with commuters, to see whether she has acquired an audience. She has. She looks back at me and when she exhales, I smell booze on her breath. She speaks to me in Russian again. I tell her I don’t speak Russian again. She looks incredulous. She motions for me to take my headphones off. “I DON’T SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE,” I say, loudly and exactly. But she motions a second time for me to remove my headphones.
At this point, I start to wonder if she thinks I can’t understand her because I can’t hear her. This is quite bothersome to me because it is obviously not the case, but all the same, I take my headphones off. She stares into my eyes as she sways like a drunken gypsy. She is probably in her mid-fifties. Her skin is dark but not because she is dark-skinned. Her skin is dark because it is caked with dirt. She is a weathered woman, wrinkled. Her wild but presently tamed eyes reveal that she is a little out of her mind. ‘Brighton Beach?,’ she says. ‘Yes, this train goes to Brighton Beach. It’s the last stop on this train,’ I reply. She mocks me. ‘Oh, but I donnnnn’t speeeeeeak Russsssian,’ she says again, looking at me triumphantly as though my answering a question that she asked in English negated my previous confessions. She asks me if I speak French. Honestly, I reply, ‘No I do not. I only speak English.’ Now she starts to mock me with crude Russian-inflected French phrases. The faces of every single person on this train are turned to us, waiting to see what will come of this odd acquaintance. Time is frozen. The middle woman searches and locks her gaze on two unsuspecting pairs of eyes that she judges belong to her kinsmen. She points at me and starts making fun of me, pretending to punch me, shaking her head back and forth, and looking back at me threateningly with a ‘Why I oughtta…’ face. She says things to the Russians that make their eyebrows fly upward, things that are powerful enough to make their pale asses clench in both discomfort and disbelief.
I decide to let this play on. I don’t know why. Right then and there, I could have gotten up and walked away. I could have switched to another train car at the next stop. I could have escaped this indignity. But this isn’t the first time I’ve refused to shy away from a confrontation with a stranger this year. I tilt my head back and belt out a hearty laugh as I slap my knee. ‘You are so funny,’ I yell as I turn my sarcastic face toward hers, ‘Ho, ho, ho! Ha, ha ha!’ She looks back at me and elbows me again, this time even harder but with more candor in it. She communicates with her hands that she wants to know what I am listening to. She starts sounding out the word, ‘Yesterday,’ and then finishes the line, ‘all my troubles seemed so far away.’ She sings it again. This time, though, I am singing it with her. She asks me if this is what is on my ipod, if I am listening to the Beatles. I shake my head. ‘I’m not listening to the Beatles,’ I say. She gestures for me to hand her my headphones. I hesitate but inwardly, I smirk. I hand them over to her. She puts them on top of her mangy hair. Her hand gestures demand that I do it, that I push play and get on with it already. My ipod screen shows that I am at the end of a Ladytron song. I skip to the next song. I wonder what she will think of Ladytron. I imagine her hearing a few measures and then shoving the headphones back into my hands, dismissing it as weird, ultra-modern, digitized noise.
The middle woman closes her eyes and purses her lips intently. She opens her lips and screams, ‘Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh!’ She starts shimmying and shaking, bouncing her head back and forth. She takes my hand and waves it in the air with hers. I glance at all the bewildered and terrified faces on this train. I glance back at the middle woman. I start bopping my head and giggling. I tell her she is a really good dancer. We give each other a thumbs up. An older man across from me diverts his eyes and shakes his head with disdain. A woman by the other set of doors stares at me. Her glare asks me to give up this farce. But I can’t. I’m too far in—and so is the middle woman. She starts kicking her feet out. Then, she does the unthinkable—she gets on her back and kicks her legs up into the air like she is riding an invisible upside down bicycle. She is out of control, raucous and yet somewhat radiant. I detach myself from my surroundings momentarily and I zone out, musing on the combination of those two adjectives: raucous and radiant. At that moment, the middle woman picks her head up from the seat and comes at my face with her lips. I deem all other thoughts irrelevant and return to the situation at hand. I push her back gently but authoritatively. I tilt my head, wag my finger, and say, ‘No’.
The train stops. We are at Avenue J. One stop to go. The train starts again. The middle woman’s eyes are closed and she is still headbanging to Ladytron with all that lives in her. A brief note: Later on, to relive this whole incident, I went back to hear the Ladytron track I had randomly skipped to that had induced a passionate frenzy in the heart of the middle woman. It was titled, ‘Fighting in Built Up Areas,’ an electro-punk anthem sung entirely in Bulgarian. I ask a Russian friend of mine about the similarity in the 2 languages and learn that my Russian friend has no problem understanding Bulgarian. This information reveals an irony of cosmic proportions as I recall my three failed attempts to convey that I did not speak Russian, sharing the zeal of Peter when three times he denied that he knew the Christ.
I hold my hand on her shoulder and I motion with the other hand for her to take off the headphones. She pushes away from me and looks offended. Her scowl expresses, ‘…But I’m not done yet.’ I begin to wonder if this is going to turn into an even uglier dilemma wherein I am prying my headphones off of the skull of a maniacal, drunk, post-Soviet woman, along with clumps of her tangled hair. She moves back close to me though, and, while lifting her arms to remove the headphones, puts one arm around the back of my head and brings hers forward. I start to push her away again, but this time I am not fast enough. She kisses my face. Her chapped lips press against my cheek. She falls back in her seat and stares at me smiling, nodding her head. As she starts to speak, she pushes the edges of her mouth downward into the crescent of a sad clown. She raises her hands and places her fingers on her face, up to her eyes. She digs them into her skin and drags them down over the trails her teardrops left behind, just a little while earlier. ‘It’s my life,’ she says, pushing each word out through a stuffed marshmallow-mouthed filter. She balls up her hands, lifts them above her head, and then brings them back down over her ears, as if to imitate headphones. She smiles a proud smile and mimics a rock n’ roll rhythm. My mouth slightly ajar, I raise my eyebrows and blink, perplexed. She goes through this charade a second time over. But this time she sings ‘Yesterday’ when she frowns, and when she smiles and puts her grubby little fists on the sides of her head, she closes her eyes and rocks her skull slowly from side to side. She opens her eyes, focuses them on my eyes, and says, ‘Spasiba… spasiba.’ This happens to be one of the only Russian words I know. But for the moment, I can’t remember how to say ‘You’re welcome.’
The middle woman jumps out of her seat and starts climbing the pole a few steps in front of us. She does a drunken pole dance and it is grotesque. She sits back down and starts speaking to me again. From what I can gather, she tries to communicate to me that I should get myself a Russian girlfriend because they are sexy and fiery (and slightly insane?). She grabs my hand and gives me a tight, masculine handshake, looks at her own hand, and then wipes it on my pant leg. I stand up and walk toward the open doors. I turn around and flash her a peace sign before I take my last step from the train to the platform. ‘Victory!’ she yells out after me. The automated train chimes ring out into the air of the muddled night, mingling with the echo of her harsh voice, and the doors slide shut as I descend the staircase.
Joseph (7) and Susanna (4) came over today. Susanna always wears pink. Today, she was dressed in a ‘ballet suit.’ It was pink. Susanna does not take ballet.
So, I came home and my parents had cooked some squash and some chicken. I decided to play with my food and make a curry out of it. I cut up the paprika-spiced chicken, I scraped the squash out into a pot of coconut milk and added Thai red curry as well as an Indian ginger/garlic paste. Lastly, I put water chestnuts in. I ate it over rice. It was pretty good. I would do a couple of things different, but it was def delish. During Autumn, I’ve realized, I want absolutely every meal I eat to include squash or, if I have it exactly how I want it, pumpkin. I go crazy for pumpkin. That is why the week after this venture, I convinced Maeve to make a pumpkin alfredo sauce with me. We do not have photo documentation. I am not upset about this. Let’s just say when a recipe calls for pumpkin puree, don’t use pumpkin pie filling. It’s hard to persuade pie filling to taste savory. I’m not discouraged, though. I know what I did wrong and I’m excited for the second try. Here are the other pictures of my pumpkin-family (squash) curry: 
Samuel Dickison came to visit me in mid-October and I don’t know if I’ve ever had that much fun taking someone around the City before. We did it ALL–which means I got to go everywhere that I like to go and he got to go everywhere I like to go. What a great deal, right? I will try to recount the itinerary, though I can’t imagine remembering everything we did.
For Halloween, Maeve and I and some of our friends dressed up as the villains from the musical, Annie. Of course, we chose to channel the 1982 film version with Carol Burnett as Ms. Hannigan , Tim Curry as her brother, Rooster, and Bernadette Peters as Lily St. Regis, Rooster’s lady friend, because nobody did it justice like they did. As you can see, we rocked it:
I simply can’t get enough of this Cuban restaurant, Cafe Cortadito. I first came across the name while I was searching for coffee shops in New York City that made my favorite coffee drink– the cortadito. After multiple failed attempts to visit, it was almost a year later that I was first able to eat here with Peter Kong this past July, when we ran into it entirely by accident on the most serendipitous of days.
