Played Red Hooky again today. The fact that these pictures match up even a little bit is an accident

On Friday night I went to yoga with Vanessa and Johnny and their pretty German friend and after class we decided to go to Moto for dinner. Were it warmer and and Johnny’s bag (which was filled with meat and cheese for the restaurant) lighter, maybe we would have taken the subway. But it felt easier, at least initally, to take a cab, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. We were in Soho on a Friday night. It was twenty-five degrees out. We were headed to Williamsburg, and none of the cab drivers had any interest in heading across the bridge. There were just so many things that were wrong at once.

We split up for a while, three of us on opposite corners. I stayed put with Johnny and the bag of meat and cheese. To someone on a planet far, far away watching us with a super-powered spy telescope we must have looked like lunatics, jumping around, waving our arms in the air, cursing the weather, like it’s the weather’s fault it’s that way. Like it’s anyone’s fault you can’t get a cab in Soho on a Friday night in December.

Just when whatever blissful state we had achieved in yoga class had almost entirely disappeared, Vannesa got a cab, and we all ran from our respective corners and hopped inside. I was so happy to be somewhere warm that I sat in the front with the driver, a seating arrangement I usually avoid because sometimes you learn things you don’t want to know about your driver. Someone older and wiser than myself recently told me, “I try to ignore the things I have no control over,” which sounds exactly correct to me.

But there I was, sitting with the cab driver, and on the very first stop light, goddamn if he didn’t fall asleep. The light turned green, and the car didn’t move. I finally looked at him and noticed his eyes were shut, and I said, gently, “Sir, you’ve got the green.” He woke up and kept driving.

“Have you been working a long shift?” I said.

“No, I’m just really tired,” he said, and he looked so sad.

I won’t lie: another time, I might have freaked out a little bit. But I was fresh from yoga and feeling calm. And we were never ever going to find another cab. And he seemed like a nice man. He was just tired. He was having a moment, and it was not a good one.

So I decided to talk to him all the way until we got to Moto. Primarily what we discussed was how awful all of the other drivers were on the road. We got stuck behind one car for a while leading up to the bridge, and then when we finally passed them, we saw that the drivers were probably in their 70s.

“Oh, they’re old,” I said.

“Ohhh,” he said.

When we got to Moto I made him promise to get a coffee and he swore he would.

The front seat of the car smelled like cigars.

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At the movie theater yesterday we had all ordered our tickets in advance, so when we arrived, we were all clutching print-outs in our hands. Our tickets told us to go to a theater in the basement. My friends went to the bathroom while I bought popcorn. There was no ticket taker, just a guy at the concessions stand. We chatted for a minute, he sold me some popcorn and a soda, and then he said, “Do you have a ticket?”

“Are you the ticket taker too?” I said. He nodded. I gave him my printout, and then, without looking at it, he ripped it in half, keeping one half for himself, and handing the other back to me.

My friends picked me up at the popcorn stand and then we wandered around the theaters until we realized the movie wasn’t showing on that floor. We went back to the popcorn guy, and he looked at a list, and then instructed us to go up to the top floor.

“That was so strange,” I said.

Upstairs the ticket taker said, “Where’s the other half of your ticket?” And I said, “I don’t know, the dude downstairs ripped it in half,” and I kind of blustered my way past the kid.

It all slowly dawned on me. The popcorn guy was just sitting around ripping people’s tickets in half for no reason. He was so bored in the basement, he had to do something to entertain himself. He was feeling his power.

Maybe he dreamed one day of being a ticket taker, and he watched them from afar dreamily. They only had one responsibility and he had so many! There was popcorn and soda and nachos and hot dogs and ice cream and he had to restock the napkins and straws at the end of every shift, not to mention replenish the squirt-your-own-butter stations. Maybe he just wanted a simpler life for himself.

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Last night I walked through Manhattan in the rain with Renata and Ryan. I was drunk on egg nog and cider and whiskey. Ryan wasn’t carrying an umbrella, and he was getting drenched. I was making him sing Christmas songs, and then Renata revealed Ryan knew songs in Japanese, and he sang this song about cherry blossoms, which was basically just the same words over and over. I made them stop at Artichoke so I could get a slice. (I was extremely pushy all day yesterday, more so than usual.) They were playing a Beatles song in the pizza place – now I can’t even remember which song anymore – and everyone was singing along: the customers, the guys making the pizza, the counter girl, Renata, and me. Why wasn’t Ryan singing along? Maybe he was tired of all the singing by then.

Downstairs in the subway a crazy homeless guy channeled the forces of the universe loudly. He swung his arms around. “He’s just having a moment,” I said. All of his shit was in a big blue Ikea bag. “I respect people having their moments,” I said.

At the Bedford stop, I exited the train singing.

There are moments after moments after moments in this life, and all you have to do is keep your head on straight to see them.

(12/13/10) | 1 Comment »