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05/10/2005: "City That Never Sleeps"
I assume that the two girls wearing Bubba Gump Shrimp Company sweatshirts were waitresses at said restaurant in Times Square and were getting off work at the same time as me, and therefore getting off the N train at the same time as I just arrived home.
Anyway, here's what I heard:
"If this neighborhood was in California, it would be a ghetto. But we're in New York, so it's not a ghetto. I guess that's OK, then."
They proceeded to talk about Nick, who they think lives in Brooklyn, making booty calls in Queens, and trying to get Octavia her thumb ring back, but she wouldn't pick up her phone.
I passed them somewhere on Broadway, but when I heard the conversation, and it's total banality, I was transfixed and slowed my walk to continue eavesdropping. You don't come into contact with very many people at 3 AM in Astoria -- pretty much just people coming out of bars and the occasional tired folks on their way home from work, but almost never people engaged in conversation.
They kept walking, and crossed the street. I wound up back behind them because my native New Yorker jaywalking meant that I had to dodge a livery cab. I guess sometimes it does pay to cross at the light.
They turned the corner onto my block, and I was about two footsteps behind, ready to pass again, drop the eavesdrop and walk the rest of the way home. But one of them noticed me, rather large gentleman that I am.
I was briefly mortified, thinking that I had been caught listening to their conversation, which would have been awkward enough with two strangers, but the look in her eye -- this was the one who had been talking about Astoria as a California ghetto -- said that she was about two seconds from screaming and sprinting.
I was worse than an eavesdropper -- I was a potential rapist, and this poor girl was going to run home, call her family and immediately fly back to whatever California suburb she came from, terrified of New York and the dude with the vest and two-day stubble whose assault she so narrowly avoided.
So, I quickly blurted out, "I'm sorry, I'm not following you, I'm not some creepy guy. I live on this block, right there across the street. I'm just walking home from work."
I could see her brain processing this information and transforming her face back into getting-home-from-work-herself mode, almost into happiness to find out that other people live right on the same block who get home from work late at night aside from cab drivers, newsstand owners and that guy who sells shishkebabs on the corner.
I'd like to think that thanks to my social faux pas of eavesdropping on strangers, there's now one or two more people who are comfortable living in a place where the subway runs all night, OK Fruit and Vegetable is open 24 hours and your life is a little less sheltered because you walk instead of driving everywhere.
Not bad for a place that would be a ghetto if it was in California.
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