Somewhere on the Lower East Side, July 14, 2004
 
I was by myself, standing outside some bar, smoking. Happy hour had just ended. The street was quiet, except for the sound of traffic. There was another guy out there smoking too. He was lurching to and fro the way drunk people sometimes do, taking furtive looks at me and mumbling to himself. I was trying to suck down my cigarette quickly, so as to avoid any potential for chitchat. I wasn't in the mood. You know how it is. But I wasn't quick enough.
 
He came up to me, just as I smashed the butt under my heel. He stamped his foot on the sidewalk, almost losing his balance. He set his hands on his hips and swiveled his head very close to mine, in a sassy-hoola-hoopy- Mick Jagger-esque roundabout. It was a surprising feat of coordination and balance.
 
“Tell me!” he said on his first pass. It was a put-on high falsetto, ala Little Richard.
 
“Please!” he said on his second pass, but this time he stopped and held my stare. His eyes were floating around like a poaching egg. He seemed to be losing focus. I was too confused to say anything. But as it happened, I didn't have to.
 
Just then a small ceramic figurine flew out of a window above the bar and crashed on the street just behind him. A woman's voice shrieked: "You wanna fucking die asshole?"
 
He stopped swiveling and walked out into the middle of the street and raised his arms with fists clenched in fury:
 
“Fuck you!” he screamed. “Fuck you motherfucker! This is what the smoking ban gets you! Write your goddam congressman you fucking jackass bastard! You sonofabitch!” 
   
He started humming a song and hopping around in the street with his back hunched over, like a hipster goblin:
 
“Fire and brimstone outside your cute little windows lady!” he sang. “He-he-he! Ha-ha-ha! Gobbeldy gook and flobbeldy fook! Ha! Fuck your mother! Get used to it! Ha-ha-ha! Catch me if you ca-aaaan!”
 
Then he started spinning around with his arms held out like propellers.
 
“I’m a’comin’ ta git you! You motherfuckers!” he snarled, his voice oscillating as he spun. “I’ll smoke a whole fuckin’ carton out here if I have to! Get old moneybags Bloomberg down here and I’ll stick a big cigar right up his polished ass where it belongs! Haha!”
 
There was no response from above.
 
He stopped and turned to face me, or tried to. He gripped his head between his hands and staggered back to the sidewalk. When he regained a steady gaze he said:
“Can you fuckin’ believe these people?”
 
His voice rose to a whiny, believably sincere tone and he scrunched his face up real sweet and looked like he might start to cry. “This is what I say: This country has really got to take a good … hard … look … at …itself! Ya’ know what ah’m sayin’? Well do ya? Chicky-pie?”
 
“Sure,” I said.
 
“Can I call you chicky-pie?”
 
“If you must,” I said.
 
“Atta girl!” he said. “Ya’ see!”
 
He flopped his arm around my shoulder. “Now here’s a lady who understands what ah’m tryin’ ta say here! Not like you mutherfuckers!”
 
He gestured broadly to the empty street, as if to introduce me to his regular audience. I was a guest player, it seemed, in his own theatrical production. And for some reason, his defiance of the empty street seemed poignant to me, just then.
 
“Yeah!” I said, a little too forcefully, to the empty street. “Give ‘em hell man!”
 
I made a jabbing motion with my arm and furrowed my brow.
 
“You show those motherfuckers!” I shouted.
 
I find drunks difficult to read, and even more difficult to play with. Though I really did try. But he must have sensed some measure of insincerity because he promptly pulled his arm off my shoulder and squinted at me and shook his head and said:
 
“Who’re you talking to, Chickey-pie?”
 
“Same person you are,” I quipped.
 
“An’ who might that be?” he asked.
 
"You know! Them," and I pointed out to the empty street like an idiot.
 
He peered off into the street and I noticed just how ragged he was: bleary-eyed, sweaty and dressed in smudged tatters with a week-old beard. I wondered if maybe I'd finally lost all sense of propriety and mistaken a mentally ill homeless man for a harmless fashion-climbing LES hipster. But his shoes betrayed him. They were new Adidas, the kind you get at the SoHo outlet. He was either a slumming hipster or a superior bum. It's hard to tell sometimes.
 
"I don't see anybody," he said.
 
"Are you trying to fuck with me?" I asked.
 
"You're crazy girl," he said. "Like a cuckoo."
 
My face suddenly went all ruddy and clammy, and my mouth filled with tear-like fluid. I don't exactly know why, but I felt very ill and guilty, and not just ephemeral guilty, like I-didn’t-give-up-my-subway-seat-to-the-old-lady guilt. No, it was something else, something much deeper and nastier, something hid away in my psychic underbelly. I had that feeling like a piano or an anvil was about to fall on my head, like the next step I took could be into a deep hole, full of rats or snakes raw sewage. 
 
The only thing I can call it was a drunken pang of conscience, and a grave one at that, because anybody who drinks heavy and regular knows that the walls of inebriation are meaty and almost always impenetrable, except by sheer force of physical blows, death or police.
 
And I looked at the guy laughing at me, and I thought: Mom and Dad warned me about this kind of thing, about being had, about letting my guard down, about playing the game with all the fucking lunatics and getting sucked into the fray, away from the cleanliness, the trustworthy, upstanding compass of the Midwest. And here I was doing just that.
 
“Who was it you said you were talkin' to chicky?” he said.
 
I searched his patchy face for some glimmer of amusement, some time tested cue with which I could trip my own bullshit detector and open a way out.
 
I’ve met a lot of bullshit artists in my day and there’s always a way out: the crooked eyebrow, the cheek twitch, the eyelash flutter, the half-smile, the bobbing throat, the raised shoulder, the hand-wring, but there was nothing with him, no way out.
 
Wield the mighty saber of bullshit with much trepidation, I thought, for one can never know when the toilet of believability will get clogged and leave you to clean up your own mess.
 
"What's that chickey-pie?" he snarled, his face now twisting and steaming and bubbling up like melting plastic under the street lights. "I couldn't hear ya'?"
 
And that was when it happened: my New Yorkization. It was like a snap in the head and all the filth and clamor of the city flooded in and set up shop: a scale model, a snow globe of New York City, complete with trains roaring and buses farting and people throwing down on my streets, sleeping in my beds, cooking in my kitchen – and this person standing in front of me, trying to fuck with me, was a crumb, a speck, a nothing, less, even.
 
And for the first time, I thought: if this motherfucker thinks he’s going to ruin my $30 vodka buzz, he’s got another thing coming.
 
"You sonofabitch," I said, clear like a ringing bell. "Go back to Texas."
 
And this felt good folks. So fucking good that if I tried to explain, you probably wouldn't believe me.
 
"Wha?" he said. "Wha'd you jus' say to me?"
 
“I said, go back to Texas – you know, where you’re miserable parents probably conceived you on a potato sack in the back of the Cracker Barrel during a smoke break.”
 
I turned to go back into the bar.
 
“Wait!” he said. “Question! One fuckin’ question fer you, young lady!”
 
Then he began speaking, very deliberately, and taking much care to elucidate the perfect sentiment with his choice of words.
 
“Do … you? No, no all wrong,” he said, coming toward me. “Will ya’ just gimme a fucking’ minute? Jesus Fucking Lord! You New York girls have got a real problem with listening when a guy …”
 
"That's right, I am a New York girl," I said. "Now hurry up and speak your peace, you goddamn hillbilly."
 
“Aww, fug it. You’re all the same you lousy … ah geez,” he said. 
  
He closed his eyes. “Ah Jeezuz, of all the lousy fuggin’ … Ah, ah’m sorry,” he said, flinching like I might break his nose. “I don’ mean ta be such a mutherfucker, it’s jest that ah ..”
 
"Your time is up," I said, looking at my watch.
 
Then I smacked him on the head with my umbrella and made my way back inside, with a big smile on my face and a smoggy, muggy, sweaty sort of New York City warmth in my heart.