Snapshots from The New York Minute

"Not all who wander are lost...Unless they deliberately make themselves that way."

--Me 

Graduating from college kind of felt like finishing a book in a series before the next one has come out.  

After graduation, I was feeling a little lost, a little restless, and rapidly running out of episodes of Pretty Little Liars to keep me pacified. When my BFF Emily from the chapter of my life known as Turkish Delight casually invited me to come crash on her couch in White Plains for a month, I scrounged up my graduation money, emptied my closet into a suitcase named Goliath, and was on her front porch before I even made sure she wasn’t actually kidding. I thought it might be nice to document some isolated incidents from the brief, confusing, but awesome chapter of my life that shall heretofore be known as The New York Minute.

Brett gets career advice at a nightclub in the Meat Packing District

The first weekend I was in New York, a couple of our friends J and A came up from D.C. for Em’s graduation party and to explore the concrete jungle. On Friday night, they want to go to some swanky, overpriced clubs in the Meat Packing District to hang out with beautiful Europeans, get skeezy married businessmen to buy them drinks, and of course, pack meat. By the time Em, her friend Abbi, and I get to the MPD, J and A are outside the first club and have picked up DILF, Cisco Dan, and Handsome French Bastard to be our posse for the night. I don’t ask why they abandoned the first club, but I presume it is because Cisco Dan is an obnoxious, loud-mouthed dipshit and probably got them kicked out.

We continue to club number two, where all the tables are reserved and there is no room to dance. DILF and Handsome French Bastard go to find some butts to put their hands on, so the rest of just kind of stand around not even trying to talk over fist-pumpy house music that is turned up to level sonic boom. Fortunately I am carrying a bag roughly the size of a standard carry-on containing my clothes for two days in the city, and it clears a good two-foot radius around me.

“Can I ask why you have such an enormous bag?”

I whip around to see who has dared breach by space bubble and find myself face-to-face with Short Attractive Indian Man.

“To carry the body parts.”

SAIM apparently thinks I’m funny and we strike up some small talk. Normally I would make up a name and life story because I secretly like the sick adrenaline rush that comes with lying to a stranger, but I find it in my heart to be earnest with SAIM and tell him about my dream of becoming a doctor. I find out that he himself is a med student at Rutgers and ask him in the most tactful way possible if he has found a straw to breathe through under his crushing pile of student debt. He provides me with some fascinating and useful advice for starting a medical career and mitigating student debt besides “be Indian.”

At some point he got the hint that I was clearly exploiting him for professional advice and was not fun/dumb enough to pursue sexual activity with. That was that. A successful interaction.

Brett witnesses a robbery and lives to see justice served

On the Fourth of July, my friends (and by my friends I mean Emily’s friends) and I go to a bar in White Plains to celebrate our nation’s birth with booze and hoes. Within the first minute we walk in, a few of us see a sketchy old guy in dad jeans, running shoes, and sports sunglasses pick something up off a table and throw it under his polo. He barrels past us and down the stairs. Mere seconds later, a girl returns to the table and starts searching for something.

“Did you lose something?” Emily asks.

“Yeah, I can’t find my purse,” she responds.

“I think I just saw some guy take it.”

Emily and the victim immediately spring into action and zip down the stairs after Daddy Purse Burglar. Conveniently, there is a cop car parked right outside the bar, Emily temporarily distracts the cop from his donut duty and tells him there is a thief on the loose and that he just ran down the closed road. Cop radios his buddies. Daddy Purse Burglar makes the rookie mistake of returning to the scene of the crime and appears from around a corner. Emily and the victim sprint full speed down the closed road after Daddy Purse Burglar.

A few minutes pass, and my friend L and I have conjured up a terrible mental scene of Emily lying in a pool of blood and Daddy Purse Burglar wiping the blood off his knife with her cardigan. We decide to go investigate unarmed (stupid stupid stupid). We speed walk down the closed road and turn the corner greeted with the friendly, patriotic beaming of red white and blue police lights. Daddy Purse Burglar is smushed against a cop car being handcuffed. Emily is taken in to give a statement. Justice is served.

God Bless America.

Brett sucks at trivia

There were a few days in New York where I was struggling with a big life decision and was very unsure about my future, which rendered me kind of a giant emotional spazz. I call these few days the Emotional Crisis.

One night during the Emotional Crisis, Emily and friends and I go to trivia night at a local bar.
“I’m just gonna get wasted and cry,” I assert the whole way there.

I end up ordering a Diet Coke with lime.  

The host of trivia night looks like Jeff Foxworthy after losing a battle with New York humidity and is about 300% less funny. I admittedly do not know a lot of things about things, but Jeff Not-worthy asks questions that for the most part are completely irrelevant to anyone born after 1975. My usefulness on the team (which Emily stupidly names the Flying Purple People Eaters. It doesn’t all fit on the board so we are just “Flying Ppl Eat”) goes as far as knowing which Broadway musical “Light My Candle” comes from. After that I just check out and slurp Diet Cokes and try in vain to make flirty eye contact with the cute bartender, who I notice has gotten a haircut since last week.  In retrospect it was good thing I was unsuccessful in this endeavor because my “flirty eyes” actually look something like this:

After losing everything on a double-or-nothing and trailing by 300 points, we decide to just be obnoxious assholes and cheer really loudly after every answer even if we get it wrong. Which is every time, because we start putting bogus answers. Jeff Not-worthy does not find our answer of “Bill Cosby OR Steve Buscemi” in response to “identify this celebrity by just his eyes” amusing at all. Dick.  

Brett sucks at dodgeball

Emily recently joined a dodgeball league in the city and insists that it’s soooooo much fun and a great way to meet people. Even though I’m still having an Emotional Crisis, I go without complaint because I’m afraid she will think I’m a wuss if I don’t. She thinks I’m a wuss anyway.

First of all, the dodgeball gym is on the fifth floor of a rise-up, has no AC or any kind of ventilation, and is impossibly humid. It’s like playing dodgeball in soup. I am already getting a headache from walking around NYC all day in 90-degree heat without hydrating properly, and before the game even starts I am raining sweat from every pore. Emily also fails to mention that the dodgeballers are NOT, in fact, young, inexperienced kids playing for recreation, but are mostly athletic, 200-pound black men in their late 20’s who can palm a dodgeball and actually play it like it’s a real sport. Actually.

Despite never having played dodgeball, I’m doing reasonably okay and my shins and ankles are surprisingly quite resilient to being smashed with rubber balls flying at 90 mph. During most rounds, I’m the last one standing because no one wants to be the one to launch their ball at a kind of fragile-looking white girl who obviously has no interest in pursuing dodgeball. I try to catch one of the balls flying at me and jam my finger so hard that I can practically hear the bones scraping past each other in a horrific osteo-symphony of pain. My head hurts, my entire right hand is useless, and I’m in the middle of an Emotional Crisis, so in a gust of drama I attempt to flee the gym.

“Other door.”

“The one with the sign that says ‘Exit?’ Thanks.”

I sit on a random street corner and put my earphones in to drown out the homeless guy, who apparently has this corner scheduled for senseless ranting at this hour. I spend the next thirty minutes crying out every last conceivable drop of moisture in my body.

Brett sucks at mini-golf

We will never speak of this again

Every time I tell someone I’ve never played mini golf they look at me like I’ve just admitted to digging up a corpse. It’s not like I live under a rock, we just did other things when I was a kid. Like getting steamers from 7/11 and watching ABC family original rom-coms in the basement. Okay, maybe that was just me. At any rate, it finally goes that I had my first mini-golf experience at a redneck put-put course in New Hampshire while visiting my friend’s lake house.

You’d be amazed at how many times a golf ball can whizz within micrometers of the hole without actually going into the hole. I’m on par 16 or something, and the overweight couple in cargo shorts and visors waits patiently for our hole and cheers me on.

“Dear God, please grant me Jedi powers for the next 20 minutes so I can be done with this and get some delicious soft-serve ice cream in my mouth.”

Never again.

Brett gets a text from a friend: “How’s the city of big sleep that never has apples, or something like that?”

It’s funny in terms of content but hurts a little because I realize how much I already miss my friends from college. They all feel like characters from a book now, characters that only exist between two covers. Will there be sequels? Will I ever see them again? Nostalgia covers everything like a slimy blanket, and I know that it will never go away, but I can only hope that it will get easier to live with.

Brett and friends either avoid an untimely death or miss the opportunity of a lifetime, we’ll never know for sure

Emily’s uncle is chums with some New York Yankees high-rollers, so we and some friends were able to get a sick deal on some seats to a Yankees game close enough to the action to heckle the right fielder. Which we did. Relentlessly.

In the sixth inning, after taking a much-needed break in the VIP lounge to absorb some air-conditioning, we return to our seats and notice that a lot of people have left because it’s hot as balls and the Yankees are losing by a number of runs that seems embarrassing at a major league level. Even though we are only five or six rows back, we decide to move to the front row so the Minnesota Twins right fielder can hear us sexually harass him more clearly. No more than ten minutes after we move seats a home run is hit. It is coming straight at us. The world is in slow motion. The ball soars over our heads and lands in our seats. In our row. In OUR seats. The ones we paid for and then decided weren’t good enough. The Asian man that had been sitting in front of us turns around and picks up the ball. From our seats.

Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe all of us would have been checking our phones at that very moment and the ball would have smashed one of our faces in. Or maybe I would have caught a home run ball at Yankee Stadium and lived the rest of my life as a legend. A ball that I missed by ten minutes and ten feet could have changed everything, but it didn’t. So it goes.

I did not get a home run ball that day, but I did get a free bat and half a second on Sports Center. 

Emily gets her professor cross-faded in Rhode Island

Emily is best friends with one of her college professors. Not just friendly, but honest-to-goodness, braid-each-other’s-hair-and-talk-about-boys best friends. This came in handy when we visited Rhode Island and needed somewhere to stay for a night.

That night, Emily, Professor, two random college kids, and Professor’s Grateful Dead-worshiping neighbor sat on the porch and smoked weed out of a bong named Stacy or Laura or something, and then ate chocolate cake straight out of the pan with forks.  I fall asleep in Professor’s 13-year-old daughter’s room under the twinkly eyes and white smiles of One Direction. For a minute I pretend I’m 13, and it’s a nice vacation from being 22.

Brett finally wins something

One of NYC’s best-kept secrets is Broadway “standing room tickets,” which you get if you are one of the first twenty or so people show up a couple of hours before a show and wait in line. Emily and I decided to wait in line for standing room tickets to a matinee performance of the Book of Mormon, which she had already seen but wanted to see again with me so I could verify that all the jokes about Mormons are true (they are). 

The day we choose to wait in line outside for two hours also happens to be the one day of the summer that it is hotter than Satan’s rectum. After waiting and frying our cheeks on the New York City pavement for about an hour, we decide to enter the lottery to win front-row center tickets to the show. The lottery draws a huge crowd, so Emily goes to the front to listen for the winners while I sit in the line with my head between my knees. I don’t expect to win so I’m not really listening, but as soon as I hear them announce that the winner is from Utah, I know it’s me. I can sniff out a Utahn like a bloodhound and I’m the only Utahn in this crowd. Emily and I do an awkward chest-bump high-five thing and I push to the front of the crowd to claim my sign that the universe has finally acknowledged my personhood.

“You’re from Utah? Are you a Mormon?” the announcer asks. I’m starting to get really sick of this question. When people tell me they’re from New York, I don’t say, “You’re from New York? Are you a Jew?” I’d like the same consideration.

The show was incredible. We were close enough to the stage to get spattered with the performers’ insanely talented saliva and take selfies with the conductor’s score. After the show one of the stars said she noticed my cute shorts from onstage. 

This was right before I stuck my phone into the pit and snapped a picture of the bassist

 Brett almost gets in a fight with a barista named Raven

During that same hour we’re waiting in line for Book of Mormon tickets, Emily stays outside the theater and I go around the corner to the Starbucks in Times Square to get us some iced coffees. I sense that I am beginning the transition into a New Yorker because I already hate Times Square.  I enter the biggest Starbucks I’ve ever seen in my life and I instantly regret my decision. First of all, there are two separate lines formed behind two separate counters, and they are both out the door, which means that the door is open and the godforsaken New York City hellfire is getting in. Second of all, every single employee in the Times Square Starbucks is moving like they’re underwater, completely unfazed by the fact that caffeine-starved New Yorkers are piling up like ants on a fudgesicle. When I finally make it to the counter, I am very friendly to Raven the barista because I am sensitive to the stress she must (should) be under. I slowly and explicitly order two grande vanilla iced coffees.

“You want whip on that?”

Who the hell puts whip on iced coffee? “No…”

She rings me up for two mocha frappucinos.

“’Scuse me, I ordered two iced coffees. With vanilla.”

“There’s no whip on iced coffee.”

“Yeah I knoooow that.”

“Well that’s what you said.”

“That is definitely not what I said, I said I wanted two grande vanilla iced coffees.” We have a moment of pouty silence and intense eye contact. I’m not a combative person, but I am a thirsty person, and I have to decide quickly whether this exchange is worth prolonging. It’s not. She could beat me up. I cave and apologize for absolutely nothing, and the conflict subsides. To the best of my knowledge, Raven does not spit in my coffee. 

This is basically the story of how I am way too much of a pushover to ever fit in in New York and I should just move to Canada.

Brett almost kills everyone at Westchester County Airport

My trip to New York, originally scheduled for five weeks, was cut short because I decided to take an internship in Santa Cruz and had to get home sooner. I flew out of Westchester County Airport because it is closer to Emily’s house and easiest to get to.

I get to the airport three hours early because my flight has been delayed due to mechanical errors. This will subsequently make me miss my connection in Atlanta, but I’ll get to that story later. I check my bag, Goliath, which is predictably four pounds overweight even though the only things I accumulated in New York were some novelty coasters.  I have to open Goliath right there at the check-in desk to throw some shoes and other crap into my purse, and everyone at the Westchester Airport gets a sneak peak at my skivvies packed haphazardly on the top of my suitcase. The security line is bearable, but if you aren’t familiar with the frantic TSA dance it goes like this: everything moves painfully slow until it’s your turn to go through, then all of sudden everything rockets into fast motion. Whip off your belt, whip off your shoes, unpack your pockets, forget about your laptop at the last second and reach over the people behind you to grab another tray, meanwhile your pants are falling down, your bra is somehow riding up to your chin, your hair is stuck to your face and the back of your neck starts to sweat. You say “sorry” to the people behind you a grand total of seven times. They don’t hear you because they are busy dancing also.

When I finally get through the big whirring teleportation chamber/nudie-pic-taking machine, my hindquarters are patted down and my hands swiped for non-existent corrosives because the nudie machine has indicated that it has found some contraband in my buttcrack. The TSA agent decides I am clean and hands me over to another TSA agent, who informs me that I have to check the bag with my free baseball bat in it because I can’t carry a baseball bat on an airplane. I take my tennis racket on airplanes all the time and part of me wants to argue the finer points of arbitrary sporting equipment discrimination, but my underslept, undercaffeinated brain is not up to it. I check my baseball bat for $25. So really it is no longer a free baseball bat, it is now a $25 baseball bat.

When I get through security for the second time, the only seat left in the tiny terminal is in a corner next to a dumpy white family going on vacation to Key West. The four-year-old uses my leg to balance as it throws the world’s most spontaneous tantrum. There is nowhere post-security checkpoint to buy magazines or books, so I read Amanda Bynes’s twitter on my phone. My flight is delayed an additional twenty minutes.

Brett falls in love at the Atlanta airport

When I finally get to the Atlanta airport, I have missed my connection to Salt Lake City by about five minutes and am put on the flight that leaves three hours later. I buy a sandwich, watch some CNN, and compulsive shop in Simply Books. I go back to my gate to charge my phone and enjoy my spoils from Simply Books. I sit down, plug in my phone, and look up in the twinkly, smiling blue eyes of the World’s Most Handsome Stranger.

He smiles at me. Two days worth of scruff adorns a perfectly chiseled face. A solid gray baseball cap sits on top of tousled light-brown hair. He looks uncannily like Jon McLaughlin before his sophomore sell-out. I go into cardiac arrest.

Like are you kidding me I don't even...

I also notice that he is wearing socks with his Sperrys, which means he is definitely Utahn and definitely on my flight to Salt Lake City.

He is thoroughly engrossed in a dog-eared copy of The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva, and I bury my face in Slaughterhouse-Five. Every time either of us looks up from our books it’s at exactly the same time and right into each other’s eyeballs. I feel like I am going to throw up. I haven’t been this infatuated with a stranger since EFY when I was 14. He wore Abercrombie Fierce AKA teenage girl kryptonite and played guitar, and when he smiled at me on the bus on the last day of EFY I promptly spilled my bag of mini-muffins down the aisle. As I sit here in the Shitlanta airport eight years later I can still hear the mini-muffins mocking me as they tumble gleefully down the aisle, “As IF girl, you’ll never be good enough for him, weeeeee!” In the end, my distaste for making small-talk outweighs my desire to stick it to the mini-muffins. Fallen Angel and I board our plane.

On the plane, I finish Slaugherhouse-Five and then remember Fallen Angel sitting ten rows back in Zone 3. I reason with myself, “Brett, the only reason you’re still thinking about this chump is because he is a symbol of uncertainty. And uncertainty is kind of the theme of your life right now.”

The wisdom you achieve at 30,000 feet.

After hauling Goliath and $25 baseball bat off the baggage claim, I assume that is the end of Fallen Angel. But lo and behold, when I drag my sorry ass across the street to the passenger pick-up, there he is, leaning against the railing, wearing sunglasses. When my mom finally comes to retrieve me, he helps her lift Goliath into the trunk. “The problem with pretty girls,” he roguishly jokes with my mom, “is that they need a lot of pretty things.”

Mildly sexist comment aside, Fallen Angel might have been my soulmate. He might have been some cad with a girlfriend. Or a wife. He might have stopped existing after we drove away. Or he might have read my luggage tag when he hauled Goliath into the car, and he plans on coming to find me.

We might never know.