How to Fail at New Yorking

The plan was not set in stone, but there was a rather solid outline, or so I thought. My roommate Scott and I had separate bus tickets to New York last Saturday: his left at 8:15 in the morning, mine two hours later. My friend Martha was singing in an all-Renaissance concert that began at 2:30 that afternoon. It would be a race, but both Scott and I thought we could make it.

Jolly Green Giant + Princess Leia = Scott

The bus ride was uneventful, save the woman sitting next to me. She seemed friendly, and we didn’t exchange any harsh words—a feat facilitated by headphones firmly lodged in my ears, even if I had no music playing. However, she only had a single bus ticket. This was problematic, as she considerably exceeded the width of a single bus seat. Moreover, she compounded the problem by napping in a jagged, horizontal position that occupied the entirety of her seat and around half of mine.

She apologized, which I appreciated, but it wasn’t for her galactic girth. Rather, she apologized for her purse that she had casually tossed behind her, which was digging into my right thigh. After apologizing, she half-unconsciously ruffled her hand behind her, attempting to move it to a more convenient location. Trying to move the purse though was about as effective as trying to edit a Michael Bay-directed romantic comedy. Every time she moved the purse, it eventually settled right back to where it started, further digging into my leg, accompanied by a witty quip to win my love, a character flaw that tests the love, a change of heart that cements the love, and an exploding Range Rover. The annoyance was temporary though; a memoir on the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the Twilight movies, and a Britney Spears album later, I was in New York. The trip would have been especially appropriate if I were a dancing Soviet vampire.

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It was a few minutes before 2 o’clock, and making it uptown to Martha’s concert was doable. Unfortunately, the New York metro system is a labyrinth of one-way traps and confusing words like “via” and “Brooklyn,” and I initially boarded the wrong train. I did manage to realize my mistake quickly and arrive with Scott near the venue, but it was already past 3 o’clock by then. We had to choose between walking in 30 minutes late or waiting to see her afterwards. We chose the latter, out of respect to the performers and a persistent disquietude of arriving anywhere late. In retrospect, I regret that decision, but I had no idea how long the concert was. I’ve been on the other end of concert latecomers and have pulled every passive-aggressive trick I could conjure: the death-stare, the hushed gossiping, and the eye-roll-combined-with-an-obviously-dissatisfied-grimace.

Our decision was finalized once we resigned ourselves back to the metro and returned downtown. We decided to pass time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while Martha’s concert finished. I could have kicked myself when, a good bit past 3 o’clock, I received a text from Martha: “It’s intermission now! Come on back!” Clearly, the concert was plenty long to accommodate our tardy tomfoolery. We were a 15-minute metro ride away now though, and even with serendipitous timing, we would have been every bit as late to the second half as we were to the first. I apologized and felt as defeated as Charlie Sheen after his inaugural Detroit performance.

I hope Martha knows I love her at least as much as the that episode of Seinfeld where the bakery sells only muffin tops but nobody is willing to take all the muffin bottoms.

Not long after Scott and I had entered the museum, we decided to split up and see whichever exhibits best caught each of our individual interests. Scott probably looked at Greek art, European Realism, and other signs of culture. I was mostly interested in parking myself on a bench and playing the Which-Tourist-Is-the-Dumbest game. It’s a fun game, and there’s really no winner, but my life improves a little bit every time I see a middle-aged parent with a backpack and Disney World t-shirt walk an exaggerated arc around a large black man dressed in rainbows and pleather. Sadly, Scott interrupted my game when he called me about an hour after Martha’s text. “Richard, I screwed up. Our tickets for tomorrow are to New York, not from New York. And all bus tickets are sold out for tomorrow.”

Fortunately, when one subsists off leftover pizza and public transit, one excels at thrift. Scott and I collectively earn about 3 dollars a year, so when we buy bus tickets to New York, what we lack in detail we make up for in thoroughness. BoltBus, a Dallas-based bus company, offers the first available seat in every bus ride for one dollar. Scott receives updates when it releases new dates, and we go on a shopping spree. As part of our last binge, not only did we have incorrect tickets for the following day but we also had correct tickets for that evening. Our overnight trip became a day trip. This meant I had to call Morgan and Ari, two Brooklyn housemates who had agreed to house us, and let them know we no longer needed their apartment for the night. Once again, my life was an abject failure; they had planned a brunch-and-shopping date for the following morning.

Morgan and Ari

Scott and I finished our day with a walk through Central Park and cheeseburgers around 71st street. It was a stretch from our original plans, but enjoyable nonetheless. After dinner, we made our way back down to where the bus picks us up and returns to Baltimore. My seating companion on the ride back, while considerably fitter than my morning neighbor, was icier than the Aletsch Glacier. I sat down and began the ride by being friendly: “Would you like me to put any of your stuff in the overhead compartment?” Usually, the response is either “yes, please” or “no, thank you.” I was not expecting Queen Frostine to reply, “why, is it bothering you?” It was time to isolate myself in a world of former presidents and vampire-werewolf clashes.

The bus stopped once at a rest stop in Delaware. The bus driver only granted us 10 minutes, but that was all I needed to witness a uniquely American brand of stupidity. I wanted to snack on some frozen yogurt from TCBY, and there was an 11- or 12-year old boy in front of me in line. He wore his hair in an aimlessly gelled bob, ensured all his clothes had ostentatious designer labels embroidered on them, and spoke in uncomfortable sentence fragments that reeked of a misplaced sense of superiority. God, this kid annoyed me. Clearly, he was superior to no one, seeing as how he was in Delaware. Nobody has an excuse to be in Delaware besides Joe Biden and that struggling writer from Melrose Place.

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He pointed to a sign behind the cashier and barked, “Can I have that?” It was a thin waffle cone filled just to the brim with chocolate frozen yogurt. The cashier pointed to a display of cones behind him, somewhat resembling the one in the picture, and asked if that would suffice.

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” the child slumped.
“What flavor do you want? Chocolate or vanilla?”
“Do you have twist?”

The cashier nodded yes, and the boy insisted on rainbow sprinkles on top. The cashier dutifully opened the display case, removed one of the cones, and slathered a generous swirl of chocolate-and-vanilla yogurt into it, easily overflowing past the top of the cone. He spooned a heap of multicolored sprinkles on top, crafting a concoction sure to please anyone with operational taste buds. Personally, I would have put in a teaspoon of yogurt, added a single sprinkle, preferably green, the color of poison, and handed it back to him, saying, “Here, this one’s on me. Now use those 5 dollars to pay a tailor to tear the knockoff Dolce & Gabbana label off your ill-fitting jeans.” In case you don’t share my hatred yet, this was the actual conversation that followed.

“Are you kidding me?” the boy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“This looks nothing like the picture.”
“You said you wanted that cone.”
“But yeah, this is so… so big. Look how much less is in the picture.”

Let me reiterate that, in case you missed it. A preteen boy, whose metabolism inherently runs faster than Timothy Leary running from an imaginary purple tiger, is upset because the ice cream man gave him too much ice cream. There is no way I could eat this, he thought. I will grant this kid the benefit of the doubt . Maybe a former TCBY employee molested him when he was younger, and he has turned frivolously throwing away the company’s resources into some lifetime revenge plot. Or, maybe he believed that through some past health reform bill, United States legislation obligates its citizens to eat everything they purchase. I can think of no other explanation for his next utterance: “I can’t eat all this. Can you make another?”

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For a moment, I witnessed a genuine reaction in the cashier. Something along the lines of, “Is this really worth 8 bucks an hour?” But he was a loyal employee—a much more loyal one than I would have been. After the initial shock, he responded as if this brat actually had a point.

“Oh? Oh! I see. Sure, I can try again.”

He tossed the entire confection into the trash, retrieved another cone, and filled it again, only this time with slightly less ice cream. He spooned another heap of sprinkles on top and offered it back to the boy.

“Is this better?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess.”

In this boy’s mind, he was running a multinational corporation and demanding nothing but perfection for his hurting shareholders. He handed the cashier his credit card—scratch that, his daddy’s credit card—and made sure he drove his point home.

“This really is false advertising,” he sighed loudly.

The cashier smiled, his eyes likely glazed over from recreational drugs he nestled before going to work at a truck stop ice cream shop. He swiped the card, watched the budding CEO humph and grump about while the system read it, and then handed it back. I was next in line. “I’ll, uh, just have a cup of chocolate please.” And even though I didn’t, I wish I had continued, “and can you make it look exactly like that other picture over there, please?”

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