Advice from a Grown-Up

In order to fight falling asleep at my desk after lunch today, I walked to the corner store (Do we call them delis in New York? Bodegas?) to get a caffeinated beverage and a bit of chocolate. The scorched coffee from the kitchen downstairs doesn't do anything for me but make me sweaty and fidgety. These days, I'm on to Coke Zero, which is discernably better, in my opinion, than Diet Coke.

On the way to the store, I walked behind a little boy, maybe 9 or 10 years old, walking home from school, accompanied by a man and a woman. He was dressed nicely in a red sweatshirt and clean but trendy blue jeans. And he had some kind of funky (probably basketball) shoes on, like every kid in this pocket of the Lower East Side. What caught my attention was the way he walked. He rose up on the balls of his feet before lifting them every time he took a step. And his heels were turned inward just slightly. It was a distinctive gait, and it struck me as somewhat cocky. I wondered if he'd grow up to be a bruiser or a softie.

He was telling a story about something relatively dramatic that happened at school that day. Some trouble he found himself in. Or some sort of conflict with another kid in his class. I couldn't make it out.

The woman responded by saying, "Stop that kind of talk. That only gets you locked up and in a lot of touble over nothing." She had a remarkably hoarse voice. I laughed to myself that this woman should remind me of Harvey Fierstein. She would not appreciate my saying so, I'm sure.

I was instantly curious about what he had done. Had the kid talked back to a teacher and gotten reprimanded? It was good of her to guide him, but I was sort of alarmed at the early-childhood notion of being locked up.

I supposed she was an aunt or a friend of his parents. I couldn't imagine (or maybe I did not want to imagine) that she was his mother.

The boy said something about another kid kicking him in the back. The woman interrupted and rasped, "So then you turn around and kick him back. That's what you do!"

Act, don't talk, basically. And take care of it yourself. It's different from what I was told in similar situations at that age. I had a git reaction against what she said, and immediately judged her to be a bad influence. I imagined him ruined by his mid-teens. Fighting all the time. In trouble at school. But is it really such bad advice? It might be appropriate for this neighborhood. And who could prepare him for the world any better than this woman, who has evidently seen some of the underbelly of life?

Tóqueme

It seems to be ingrained in our upbringing that we are not to touch people who are neither family nor friends. Lately I've been considering how much of our time we spend not only not touching people, but in fact assiduously avoiding touching people.

(Obviously I'm speaking for myself, but I think this applies to American society at large, so I'll use generalizations.)

Closeness is a fact of life in a city such as New York. On public transit, especially. We all tend to stop moving when we're close. We make ourselves small and shut ourselves down. We concentrate on a book. We fade into our iPods. We stare at the floor, the ads, the biceps of the guy standing next to us... If someone touches our foot with their foot, they immediately pull it back and apologize. If someone leans in to check the subway map, we shift to avoid them touching us.

It feels like politeness. It looks like politeness. But I think there's something else there. It seems protective — or defensive. Motivated by Fear? Disapproval? Disgust? Where some folks are concerned, yes, definitely, all of the above. But for the run-of-the-mill strap-hanger, what gives? Is it that famous American spirit of independence we're always congratulating ourselves on? There's a sort of coldness in this avoidance of contact, this willful ignorance of everyone around us. It's sort of sad and lonely. Solitary. Isolationist.

Usually when someone presses against me, I move to accommodate them if I can. But sometimes when there's an accidental connection, I like to not move — to feel the heat of someone else's leg through their pants and yours — just to see what happens. It can be kind of exciting. Accidental intimacy. This person would not touch me on purpose, but here we are trading body heat. And who's the one not pulling away? Me or her?

Sometimes when I'm gripping a pole in the subway car, and someone leans their body against the pole and covers my fingers with their back or their arm, I'll leave my hand there. I want them to feel that I'm there, that I can't be erased, and that if they're uncomfortable, they can move back, but I'm staying put. Sometimes I swear they just don't feel me there.

It's my experience that co-workers are especially careful not to touch each other. When we do touch, it feels weird to me. It sounds little alarms in my head. Handshakes? Fine. They're supposed to happen. I don't even think about them. But if someone puts a hand on my shoulder — whoah! If someone returns a dollar they borrowed at lunch time, and their hand touches mine — eek! If someone puts their hand on my arm when they're talking to me — ooh, I could just shudder. And if someone removes a piece of lint from my cheek ... I dare not continune.

There was a guy I used to work with who, every once in a while, would give my back a pat or very briefly rub a shoulder or even put an arm around me. It always totally arrested me, a reaction I think (I hope!) is imperceptible. A second later, though, I calm myself. No big deal. Actually, this is kind of nice.

He's straight. It never occurred to me to take it as anything other than what it appeared to be. Why should I? He thought nothing of it. It was natural and unplanned and meaningless to him. But to me it signified so much more.

I've noticed that straight guys communicate with other straight guys with touch like gay guys communicate through touch, but in different ways. Watch straight guys at the bar. Watch them in front of Monday Night Football on TV. Watch them wrestle each other for no reason.

When this guy would touch me in any way other than a handshake, it felt like he was doing something highly unusual. Not wrong or even uncomfortable — just vaguely alarming. Maybe I've grown to see that sort of touch as a signal of something else, and when't not actually, my brain spins a couple times. I don't know.

All I know is it would wake me up. Every single time it underscored how little I touch the people around me every day — familiar people; friends. I'm always there, but I'm never there. And those meaningless gestures encourage me not to be afraid to hug someone, slap someone on the back, touch someone's face, touch someone's arm, grab someone by the back of the neck — whatever.

A Quarter Pounder and four Chicken McNuggets

It's not every day a ticket to a major award-winning Broadway show — with the original cast — falls into your lap. It's never happened to me. My husband bought tickets to see Bernadette Peters in Annie Get Your Gun for my birthday a few years ago. By the time our show date came around, Peters had left the cast and been replaced with none other than Cheryl Ladd. It was a fine show, but I feel compelled to point out that anything Bernadette Peters can do, Cheryl Ladd cannot do better.

Last week a friend of mine, who will remain unidentified, bought a front-row seat to Spamalot from a colleague for $30, a considerable bargain for an off-Broadway show, let alone a ticket worth ... what was it? ... $240 or something? She had a scheduling conflict, apparently, the poor thing. So, hooray for my friend.

The social conventions of tourism being what they are, it's reasonable to expect that much of the audience of any given show will be wearing t-shirts and blue jeans. There's a certain casualness about a night out on the town these days. That's fine. It's Spamalot, not the La Traviata. But there are certain things I would not recommend doing in the front row at a major Broadway production.

For example: Eating a Quarter Pounder and a four-piece Chicken McNugget during the show!

However, this is precisely what my friend did. He didn't have time to eat before the show, and apparently, he didn't want to wait until intermission to eat a cold hamburger.

After being roundly admonished for this, he tried to defend himself.

No one knew! he said.

He described to us how he ripped the burger up into pieces in its package inside his backpack and only extracted one bite-sized morsel at a time. I give him credit for discretion, but the fact remains: He was chowing down on fast food in the front row in plain view of hundreds of people and the actors on stage.

Besides that, didn't someone smell it? Someone in the front row must have been wondering where the scent of grilled beef and fried chicken was coming from in the first act.

I mean, even Spam is mostly pork, so it couldn't have been a special effect for the show!

But no one smelled it! he said.

I'm not so sure. McDonald's has a distinctive odor. It'll stink up a subway car. I can tell from down the hall if someone has a McDonald's take-out at lunch time.

He told us that David Hyde Pierce looked at him during the performance. I don't doubt it. Maybe he was amused by my friend — or maybe he was just hungry. ("Are you finished with that?")

I can just imagine him on a talk show or in a magazine interview talking in his clipped, erudite way about memorable moments from the run of the show.

"... Yes, and believe it or not, there was a guy one night in the front row who had brought McDonald's to the show. And he actually ate it during the show ..."

Not a bad deal for my friend. Cheap and easy notoriety for less than $5.