The Ten-Star Vacationer
“What if someone started a non-profit that gave poor people scholarships to go to resorts like this?”
spotted at Grace Bay Club in the Providenciales, Turks and Caicos
The Daddy’s Boy
He was almost attractive, but his eyes were more grey than blue and his jaw line was hidden under baby soft skin. He was leaning back in his chair with his legs open as if he were as important as his Father. All he had that truly glistened was his trust fund, which beamed from his ill-fitting Cartier watch and Barton Perreira frames. Leaving out the Jr., he let the ring of his Father’s name tickle the girl with the beige Tom Ford shades and rail-straight blonde hair. Together they made a quiet couple, exchanging brief Italian phrases with little emotion. He tried to talk like his Father, but the expectedly gregarious Italian syllables came out too softly to imitate the almost rude confidence of the man that shared with him nothing more than blood and money.
spotted during Happy Hour in Antique Garage, an upscale Turkish restaurant in New York, NY
spotted at Dean & Deluca in the Upper East Side in New York, NY
spotted in his neighbor’s yard while walking his terrier in Maine
The Scratcher
She couldn’t stop scratching. The veins in her hand cringed and slithered to the surface of her tan, cracked skin. Her boy-cut, orange hair glowed like the shiny, red border of her Powerball lottery ticket. She kept blinking while her right leg vibrated rapidly with her breathing. She couldn’t stop moving. Her lips, her eyes, and her mind punched the card. She looked up. Her muscles released. The lottery ticket leaned back on the bench while she dropped to join the Orbit gum wrapper and O Magazine subscription on the floor of Grand Central.
spotted on a bench in Grand Central Station in New York, NY
spotted in a college class in Connecticut
The Yin Yang Couple
His eyes were black shooter marbles that never looked directly at me. He wore a tight black suit that made him different than the t-shirted students but the same as the clean-cut Elvis Costello everyone already knew. He had lanky, feminine hands, which he causally cracked and a hard jet-black helmet of combed back hair. His blond, stringy haired companion wore a pale oversized camisole tucked into Mink Pink jean shorts that hugged her waist like the corset of our generation. Her forehead consumed her heart-shaped face, and her sharp nose made anyone it pointed at, uncomfortable. She had sunken square eyes and hunched her back just enough to exude the ironically frightening severity of a high-end fashion model. Yin and Yang walked out of the bathroom as the same person. They were not holding hands, but they sniffed in unison.
spotted at a party in a college house in Middletown, CT
spotted at a furniture store in Connecticut
The Mortal Machine
Staring at the glossy screen of my MacBook Pro, I feel oddly nostalgic for the glorious, infinite qualities I once saw in this laptop. Before you left, Apple seemed unstoppable. There were no viruses. There was no death. No end, I thought. But that novel excitement I used to feel from clicking these keys is just a memory now. A memory of greatness that felt infinite due to the very immortality of your products. Yet I forgot that you are not immortal, and like you put it perfectly, you will be “cleared away” along with what you created to make room for the new. We cannot replace you, because like you said, “don’t live someone else’s life,” but we can surpass you.
spotted somewhere in my MacBook Pro
spotted on a subway car in Brooklyn in New York, NY
The Testosterone Room
Bah-bump-t-bump-bam. She typed against the rhythm of the ball, as it slapped the floor above her. The chiclet keys of her MacBook Pro shuddered while she whipped them with her fingers. Creakkkkk, Crrrh, Errr. The furniture skidded, and the ceiling whined for the third time that week. Her roommate and she didn’t understand why he rearranged his room, daily. Squeak-ah-squeak-ah-squeak. What she’d originally thought was a creaky door was a mattress shaking. The ball bounced again. She didn’t believe in God but wondered if this was what his wrath felt like. Her clammy hands were getting redder, as she slapped the keyboard, leaving each key moist and bothered.
spotted in the dorm room below the basketball players’ double.
spotted at a poetry reading in Connecticut
The Invisible New Yorker
He waved his gun at the window. Just enough so that the window washer would start to pick at the hangnail on his right thumb and the tweeting young men and women of the Flatiron building would write only about him. Although he was in his 80s with puckered dark circles under his eyes and a grey fuzzy head of hair, he was not the Italian cashmere wearing Upper-East-Side Jewish grandfather. He was the other old New Yorker. The one who wore t-shirts with ripped sleeves and didn’t leave his bedroom unless for more Q-tips to clean his ears after showering. His shirt advertised Tim Allen’s For Richer or Poorer and almost completely hid his cutoff shorts. Every gossiping tweeter who realized he had not in fact held up a teashop or anything at all, laughed and re-tweeted his baggy appearance from gawker.com. What they didn’t realize though was that he didn’t have their bleeping shiny smart phones that binged frequently and reminded them they were needed. What they didn’t realize was that he wasn’t crazy at all. He was just another forgotten New Yorker, sitting by himself in a pale yellow, low-ceilinged bedroom with a large poster of Tim Allen dressed as Santa Claus, surrounded by a million other noticed New Yorkers. While they called him insane, they never realized that he was happy they were laughing at him. They had tweeted and texted only about him for a whole forty-five minutes before he quietly let go of his moment of attention and turned himself in to go back to a room of invisibility.
spotted on gawker.com
spotted walking down the street in Union Square in New York, NY
The Checklister
There is a fine line between the creative man and the business man. It usually goes unnoticed. This man vacillated between his journal and his notes. The notes had checklists, the journal had stories. Sometimes he wrote down his thoughts and other days he thought about his thoughts, wondering if they were valid or necessary for what he wanted to accomplish. He loved when his checklists made sense, and when he could cross something out. But the more he crossed off, the less he wrote in his journal until his entries stopped at May 12, 2011. And even though he always dedicated one line of every checklist he made to remind himself to write in his journal, he never crossed it off.
spotted in Apthorp Cleaners on the Upper West Side in New York, NY
