Author: RBK

Ratboy

RBK2 Comments

What I learned: he may be perfect on paper. Reality is another story.

A colleague fixed me up on a blind date. I spoke to him beforehand. His voice was deep. He owned his own law firm. He owned an apartment in Union Square. A penthouse. He was single. Supposedly straight. We were to meet in Bryant Park. He told me to meet him on the Southwest corner and he would be wearing a Yankees hat.

This is where things started to go wrong. You see, my sense of direction is non-existent. And I will overthink until my brain explodes. Southwest corner of the city? Southwest corner of the park? Southwest corner of the street?

“I’ll be in a black sundress.”

There is no baseball cap. There is no one here at all. Except for some pigeons pecking at pizza, some teenagers in a pack on a bench.

“You’re not wearing a baseball cap?” I said. His first lie to me.

“Yes, in case Steve was playing a trick on me. You could be really fat. It could be a joke.”

We went to the oyster bar in Grand Central. Drank, talked. He started mocking strangers at the bar. Making fun of people. That night, a refrigerator overheated in the famed tiled restaurant and the oyster bar burned down.

Sitting in the wrap around porch overlooking the city, the Empire State Building in the bedroom window, the water towers, blinking lights, I wondered about dating a man just for his apartment. “Can’t you just close your eyes and think of something else?” my friend Cathy asked.

He called me “Grand Central.” His computer was filled with investments, Vanguard statements, and porn. His mind was filled with perversion. His heart, like him, not present. His body, his skeletal system was like a fish, the spine and body long, all the same, no curves or crevices. His butt was as if God had taken a black Sharpie and simply drew a line on his back. He drank gin martinis every night, popped Viagra and sleeping pills.

When he won a million dollars, he said he wanted to go to Vegas and have sex with hookers.

“He looks like a rat,” my brother said after we broke up. “Big ears. Let’s call him rat boy.” My brother made up a song. “Rat boy salon.” It was about his nice apartment.

Years later, he married his cleaning lady, who smelled like Fabuloso. She was thinking of something else.

The dentist

RBKLeave a comment

I had this throbbing pain in my tooth. So intense it was nearly impossible to sleep. I could feel something stuck there. Right under the gum. In the back. I sprayed it with the waterpik. Gargled, swished, mouthwashed. I flossed obsessively. I dug in with a toothpick. I imagined it was unlike the feeling of having a phantom limb. This thing stuck there but not there.

I’m in the dentist chair on Park Avenue. “Ah ha!” the dental hygienist screams. She pulls out a piece of dental floss.

“Now you know that I’m not lying when I say I floss,” I chuckle. She continues to clean my teeth, one by one. Polishing. Asking me to spit. I’m vulnerable and helpless, wearing this bloody paper bib. Having to do all of these sit ups to get to the miniature sink to spit. I’m in the chair doing my ab work out, the dental hygienist has her back to the door, I’m facing out, looking in the hallway of the dental office.

“He touched me! He fucking touched me!” A man is screaming. Filled with rage. A man dressed in blue scrubs is running back and forth like a squirrel. I see him through the doorway. “He touched me! I’m going to report you to the ADA! I have worked in Singapore! In London! I have never been so…”

The dental hygienist is apologizing. “Stupid,” she whispers under her breath. I see the H.R. person come out. Gathering the keys. Removing the white coat. The man leaves. The other dentist who grabbed that one’s dick at 11am on a Thursday comes out. He stares at me with eyes so black and lightless, it reminds me of a Great White Shark, when their eyes roll back into their head, just before they attack their prey.

As I’m coming out of the chair, my dental hygienist says “don’t forget to floss!” She hands me the used bloody plastic toothbrush in a plastic bag. And once again I’m reminded. Every day in New York, you come home with a story.

The beginning.

RBKLeave a comment

At this point, I was living in the East Village. On Sunday mornings, the sidewalks were littered with stories from the night before. A purple feather boa wet from rain. A lone red sock. Condoms in all forms-used, unused, boxed, wrapped, normal, giant, lubed. Underwear. Wine bottles. An acrylic nail painted blue. A wig. And I’d make up stories to go along with each item, as I discovered them. This Tuesday morning, I was on my way to work at the Agency, which was housed in the Gray Bar Building in Grand Central Station.

I got my usual order at the bodea–a hot black coffee and bacon, egg and cheese (BEC) and carried it greasy in a brown paper bag as I weaved from Second Avenue to Saint Marks Place. Saint Marks Place echoes with the ghosts of musical icons from the eighties. Madonna was here for her movie, “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Lou Reed sang about it. As I walked down Saint Marks Place to head to Union Square, a man popped out right in front of me on the sidewalk. The back of his head with his wild, scraggy hair, his squishy, square back were merely feet away from me, outside the tattoo parlor with the blinking purple sign. It all happened so fast. He promptly pulled down his pants. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be mooned by a strange man before nine in the morning. But then. Then. He proceeded to take his hands, spread his butt cheeks wide and take a shit right in front of me, right on the sidewalk. I was so disgusted, I started running up Third Avenue but also laughing as I ran. And then I was running for my life, terrified, mortified and laughing and crying and cackling, all at once. Which really is a moment that describes perfectly what it’s like to be a New Yorker.

Once in the subway station in Union Square, cops were all over the place and people around the station were shaken up. I asked a woman dressed as a nurse what happened. Someone on the R train had sexually abused a passenger. The criminal was on the loose. The only thing is, the passenger was a corpse.

It was then that I realized it: Every day in New York City, no matter what you have planned, you will come home at the end of the day with a good story.