TWIST AND SPIEL
It was a nice, somewhat ordinary May Saturday in New York City. My girlfriend and I had spent a good portion of the day there shopping, sightseeing, and walking, but the day was slowly drawing to a close and we needed to get back to the bus stop to meet the 6:30 bus back home, a chartered bus.
We had a half-hour to spare. We had eaten two good meals during our day in New York, but the lure of the Sabrett hot dog cart was too great. We got ourselves a hot dog and a Coke apiece, my treat.
After we ate our quintessentially New York-ian hot dogs, my girlfriend and I stood in front of the Fox News building where the bus had dropped us off. Radio City Music Hall could be clearly seen from where we stood, as was the Sam Ash guitar store down the street. A tinny loudspeaker dispensed Fox’s biased news reports behind us. I looked at my watch. 6:07 PM.
As we stood sipping the last of our sodas, a scruffy looking man slowly walked up the street. He wore a dark gray – perhaps even off-black – denim jacket, blue jeans, motorcycle boots, and a baseball cap turned backwards but clearly displaying the catchphrase of a brand of beer arching over the opening between the hat and the plastic adjustable strap. His face looked sunburned. His eyes were as grey as his jean jacket. There appeared to be a day’s worth of stubble on his face.
He had a cigarette in his hand and a brown paper bag with an open can of beer – presumably the same brand his hat promoted – in the other. The cigarette was unlit and looked like it had been badly made somehow. A bit of tobacco jutted out of one end of the cigarette, almost like the cowlick on the back of Dennis The Menace’s head.
“Do either of you guys have a light?” he asked us.
“No,” my girlfriend and I both said.
“I’m sorry, we don’t,” I said.
“Oh, did you guys quit smoking?” he asked.
“We never even started,” my girlfriend said.
“I got this off of some sailor,” he said. “I saw him rolling a cigarette and said to him, ‘Would you twist me up one of those?’” He held the cigarette up and pointed at the errant strand of tobacco jutting out of it. “Lookit that. Just like that, he twisted one up. Didn’t even know me from Adam.”
“Hmm,” I said. I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s Fleet Week,” the man said. “M***********s from the Navy are all over New York today. You guys serve or have family serve?”
“My grandfather was in the army in World War II,” I said. “I had an uncle in Vietnam, too.” My girlfriend shook her head “no”.
“I was in the Gulf War, Desert Shield – not this farce that Bush Junior and that cocksucker Cheney is pushing,” he said. “Desert Shield was all bullshit. Hung out on a naval carrier for months. Most of the action was on the ground when it turned into Desert Storm, and not much at that.”
We nodded. I looked at my girlfriend. Already she couldn’t figure out what this guy was up to. Neither could I.
“Where you guys from?” he asked.
“Pennsylvania,” we said. “Northeast, near Wilkes-Barre.”
“Wilkes-Barre? I know guys in Scranton,” he said. “Is that far from you guys?”
“About 20 minutes from Wilkes-Barre,” I volunteered reluctantly.
“I’m from upstate,” he said, meaning upstate New York, I presumed. “Every Fleet Week I come down here, hang out, try to shoot the s**t with some of these guys.”
Then he mumbled some kind of inquiry about the “availability” of my girlfriend. I didn’t trust this guy as far as I could throw the m**********r to begin with, so I simply clamped my right arm around my girlfriend as if to say that she was private property – no trespassing.
“My woman won't even let me touch her anymore,” he said. I didn’t ask why. I had my ideas though. He kept looking around nervously, like he was anxious to get something.
Finally, a guy walking over in the opposite direction caught this man’s eye and was asked for a light. He got it and left. In a bit of perfect timing, our bus arrived. We got right on and hoped that this alleged navy guy with the hand-rolled ciggy and the open container of beer didn’t follow us onto the bus. Thankfully, he was already walking up 43rd Street, probably not intending to stop until he smoked the last of that cigarette or drank the rest of the beer.
On the way back, I tried to imagine what the guy’s trip really was. Was he in a relationship? Did he have a job? What kind of job did he have? What kind of place did he live in? How did he spend the other 51 weeks of the year? Did he really serve in the Navy? All I had to work with was what he looked like and what little personal information he had voluntarily divulged.
My initial guess was that he lived with a wife or girlfriend upstate, doing something like construction. He had the tanned, rugged look on his skin, but I couldn’t picture the guy with a hard hat, working a crane, building a wall, or doing spot welding.
I dismissed the possibility of, god forbid, the guy being homeless. Despite his scruffy and sunburned appearance, he looked and smelled clean. That got me to wonder.
Ice-T once said that he felt that people often looked for an opposite situation to the one they were actually in. I imagined the guy actually being some suit-and-tie office person – a clean job, maybe middle management, and not actually living that far upstate – maybe someplace outside of New York but accessible by car or public transportation.
When Fleet Week comes around, he puts away his suits and ties for a week. Instead of the long leather breast pocket wallet that he might normally carry, he hides his platinum American Express card, an ATM card, and about $100 in denominations from $20 on down in a battered denim or nylon wallet that seals with Velcro, packs a duffle bag rather than the fancy suitcase he uses on business trips, and drives down to New York City. He parks his car for the week at a parking garage near a hotel – perhaps something modest like a Holiday Inn – and disappears for the night.
The next morning – the first of Fleet Week – he gets showered up, has room service breakfast and an entire pot of coffee, dresses in one of his T-shirt and denim outfits, perhaps a set of colored contact lenses that turn his eyes a different color, and begins a day of walking all over New York City. In order to keep his façade intact, he avoids the touristy restaurants in Times Square in favor of smaller restaurants, maybe even hot dog carts, delis and bodegas. When he runs into a sailor in town for Fleet Week, he shoots the s**t with him. When he runs into someone he knows, the façade comes off a little. When he sees some stranger on the street that looks interesting enough, he approaches them looking for a light and talks with them the same way. He doesn’t pay for cigarettes unless he can’t bum one off someone he meets.
Why he does it is also a mystery. Maybe he does it because he’s a budding writer and wants to observe various people in a benign way in order to get character and story ideas. Maybe he does it just to see the different reactions he gets from people. Maybe he does it to unwind after a year of pushing pens and papers in the office. Maybe he does it just for the hell of it. Maybe he does it for all of the above reasons plus a few I haven’t even thought of.
“I got this off of some sailor. I saw him rolling a cigarette and said to him, ‘Would you twist me up one of those?’ Lookit that. Just like that, he twisted one up. Didn’t even know me from Adam.”
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