I Got Crossed and Went to Taco Bell on Valentine’s Day
or, Orthodox Modes of Transportation
I just tried to buy weed with my Columbia ID card. I smoked the remains of my last roach on the way down to the smoke shop and, as a consequence, mistook cultural capital for the real thing when the weed guy put the card reader in front of me.
“What are you doing my boy?” the weed guy asks, holding back a laugh.
“It’s ‘girl’, sorry. And I’m not sure. I’m sorry.”
I slide my CUID back into my wallet and tap my debit card on the reader. Three pre-rolls for twenty dollars on the Upper West Side. I light one as I step outside and take a fat hit that lasts maybe ten seconds. Like Proust’s madeleine, it returns me to the last time that I took a hit this fat.
It was Valentine’s Day evening and we were toking up outside the Checkers by Myrtle-Broadway. I chiefed the jay I was sharing with this white Maoist guy Leo while he and my girlfriend and I waited for our friend Felicity to come meet us. Leo was wearing a bandana. He appeared to have a large black screw stuck through his right earlobe. At first I thought that he’d actually stuck a screw in his ear, but when I asked about it he showed me that it was divided into two parts which were connected through a piercing hole by a more comfortably middle-class looking wire apparatus. Leo, like me, is a Columbia student. His dad is a professor of managerial accounting at Baruch.
Felicity, also a professor’s kid, showed up eventually with two of her friends Lacuna and M, neither of whom I knew. Felicity has a habit of showing up to things with friends that I don’t know. She’s relatively popular around the Bushwick/Ridgewood area, which means that she was almost certainly a loser in high school. The things that make her ‘cool’ as a twenty-something around here are precisely the things that would have made her a ‘gay nerd’ as a teenager. (She’s in more than one Capital reading group. She gets through 104 books in a year and dreams of becoming a copy editor. She wears adult braces, and she hasn’t stood up to pee in maybe fourteen years. She’s in Paris right now going on a Feeld date with another transsexual and they’re planning to visit Jean-François Lyotard’s grave at le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.)
Felicity and her friends took us to a nearby, newly-renovated apartment which was crowded with white trans people who, for the record, smelled pretty much fine. Apparently, not a single person there actually lived in the apartment. Most of them were getting ready to go to this 18+ show at Rabbit Hole, and tickets were something like twenty dollars. There was no way that my Jewish girlfriend was paying for that shit, though, so she, Leo, and I resolved to pregame at a deli and go to Happyfun Hideaway instead.
Still, I tried to interact with the people there while I had the chance, and Felicity worked admirably to introduce us to some other hot trans women she knew, but things were too hectic and people were too self-conscious for any good conversation to emerge. The only person I ended up speaking to was this transmasc (I think?) from Sarah Lawrence who didn’t really appreciate my jokes about them going to Sarah Lawrence. My girlfriend noticed that there was a dirty mattress on the floor in the kitchen and asked if it was for humans.
Eventually, we parted ways with the crowd, and Felicity decided to come with us to Happyfun instead of going to Rabbit Hole, which was nice of her. She seemed bummed about us not entirely clicking with her Bushwick friends. I assured her that it was probably a matter of circumstance and that I could see myself getting along with those people if we crossed paths again. To tell the truth, there has been at least one instance of Felicity introducing us to her ‘friends in the area’ and me finding them entirely insufferable on account of how many cigarettes they took pictures of themselves smoking and how many times they went on their phones to tweet about the party we were currently at, but these people were nothing like that. (I’ll refrain from any further speculation on this point; I wouldn’t want to make a cultural critic of myself.)
Nothing especially interesting happened at Happyfun Hideaway (nothing ever does), except that on a few occasions we were approached by this one dangerously wasted cis white woman with millennial glasses and eventually we had to alert the bartender about her. We avoided getting anything from the bar by getting drunk off of Fireball shooters, ‘Buzz Balls’, and other repugnant late-stage concoctions from the deli next door. At some point, a few of our transsexual friends from Columbia came down to join us, but other than that we didn’t really meet anyone or enjoy anyone else’s company there. Pretty quickly, we got bored and wasted a few hours bar hopping and wondering why we had come all the way down to Bushwick and what the point of it all was; by one, there were maybe four of us still sticking around to see if anything good might happen. We decided to bite the bullet and go to that twenty dollar Rabbit Hole thing.
The Rabbit Hole thing was kind of gay. We had to walk about twenty-five minutes to get there from Carmelo’s, and the DJ-ing definitely wasn’t good enough to justify being out in the cold for that long. Fortunately, my phone died right before I could pay, so I got one of my richer friends to cover me and promised to ‘Venmo her back’, which I’m of course never doing. To be fair, the first set we saw wasn’t bad, actually. But things got acutely unbearable once this moody he/they got on the decks and started playing a nightcore remix of “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place”. He/they DJs are never good, in my experience, and they’ll almost always kill the dance floor — though Leo’s sworn that he saw a good he/they DJ in Queens once.
After that fucker’s set, Felicity called it a night and went home with two friends who lived in the same direction as her, at which point I looked around me and realized that I was in a completely alien environment. To my left were a bunch of nonbinary people dressed as anime characters. To my right was an aging East Asian guy wearing LED-soled sneakers, LED bracelets, and an LED necklace.
“Alright,” I said to Leo. “Let's smoke some weed and get out of here.”
As we were toking up outside, someone crept up behind us. It was the East Asian guy with all the LED stuff. “Hey,” he said. “mind if I join?”
“Yeah, sure. I love your outfit,” I lied.
“Yeah isn’t it cool? Do you folks like nightcore music?”
“I’m more of a techno guy,” Leo said. “But this stuff wasn’t bad.”
“Yeah, it’s not really my thing, but I don’t mind it,” I lied again.
We learned a little more about him. He was thirty-one years old, cisgender, and a former mechanical engineering major who had a job with the EPA. I almost burst into laughter. I couldn’t believe that we had come all the way down from Columbia just to meet this guy.
He said that he would accompany us to the train station, and Leo struck up a conversation with him about taking engineering classes in college. They talked about math and shit. Then the guy started going on about how hard the real world is and how lucky we were to still be in school.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “My only ambition in life is to be a graduate student for as long as possible.”
“That’s mostly why I’m becoming a math teacher,” Leo said. “Summers off from the real world.”
The guy decided to change the subject. “Have you folks noticed that New York is retarded now?”
“Hm?”
“New York — it’s retarded. Have you noticed? Look at the buildings.”
I looked at the buildings.
“What are these buildings for?” he asked. I wasn’t sure. “Back in the day, you would look at a building and think: ‘I know what that building’s for. I might go into that building someday.’ New York was a place full of buildings that you might want to go into. If you wanted to do something — buy something, receive a service or something, hang out — there would be a building in New York that you could go inside of and do it.”
“Nowadays you can’t do that?”
“Yeah. Nowadays New York is retarded, no?”
“I guess so.”
“Nowadays, there’s all these buildings and you don’t know what the fuck goes on in them. They aren’t stores. They aren’t apartments. They aren’t bars. What the fuck are all these buildings for?”
“I’m pretty sure that most of these are residential buildings.”
“Not these buildings, no. These buildings are retarded.”
“If you say so.”
“At the very least, you have to admit: New York City is retarded.”
“Yeah fair enough. That’s actually a pretty good point.”
We walked in silence for a bit. The train station was still a ways away. I wondered what New York was like before it was retarded. When did it get retarded? 2012? 2022? It was certainly retarded before 2022. Did it happen when I moved here? When was that? Was I the retard?
“So what’s it like working for the federal government?” Leo asked.
“It’s fine,” the guy said, dismissively. “What’s really interesting is working for the City. That’s where the real secrets are. Not the Fed. The City.”
“Like what secrets?”
The guy took a deep breath. He peeked over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “You know the tunnels?”
“Like- like the Jewish tunnels? From a few years ago?”
“Yeah of course the Jewish tunnels,” he whispered. “If you work for the City, you gotta work on the tunnels. The Federal Government has nothing to do with that.”
“Are you sure those are real?” I asked. “What was the deal with those?”
“Of course they’re fucking real. Where do you think these guys go? How do they get around?”
“Like Orthodox guys?”
“Yeah, Orthodox guys. You go out around here at night, you can’t walk a block without seeing a bunch of fuckin Orthodox guys. Then you go to Manhattan, Queens, they got Orthodox guys there too. They’re everywhere — everywhere except?”
He looked at us like we knew the answer.
“Everywhere except where?”
“The train,” he said. “Have you ever seen one of these fucking guys on the train?”
“Hm… I guess I haven’t. But I don’t know. Maybe I have.”
“You haven’t, and you know why?”
“Why?”
“They get around in the tunnels.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe they drive, or something.”
“Nah,” he said. “I’ve lived in New York my whole life. Never seen an Orthodox guy in a car. Never seen an Orthodox guy on the train. But I see Orthodox guys everywhere. They’re using the tunnels. Case closed.”
“I’m pretty sure,” Leo interjected, “that the tunnels were just, like, a thing beneath a few synagogues. And Orthodox culture can be insular and stuff, so they didn’t, like, publicize these things, but they weren’t these nefarious, secretive means of traversing the city at large.”
“I’m just saying,” the guy said. “I’ve never seen an Orthodox guy take the train.”
We got to the station, and, to be fair, there were no Orthodox guys on the platform. The train arrived after about fifteen minutes. Leo and the guy kept a conversation going about something or another, but I wasn’t following along. At some point Leo turned to me and asked if I wanted to stop by Taco Bell before heading home.
“Leo, I’m crossed. Of course I want to go to Taco Bell.”
The guy got off at Lorimer Street. Someone came in from the next car. He was carrying a shopping cart. “Listen,” he announced. “I’m not here to beg. I’m not homeless. I have a job, and I have an apartment. The only thing I need is a train ticket to Jersey. All I need is a little help, just one last time, and then I’ll be on my feet. Can any of y’all spare a dollar? Food? Anything?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have anything on me.”
“You don’t have anything on you?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have any cash. I can check, but I don’t have anything.”
I legitimately didn’t, though it might have been inaccurate to say that I didn’t have anything. I certainly had plenty of things, just nothing that it would be convenient for me to give.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m not homeless. I’m not begging, right now. I’m not a beggar. All I need is a little money to get back on my feet, and then I’ll be fine. I’m not one of those people who comes in from the other car and starts begging for shit because I don’t want to work. I have a job. I’m not begging. Please, if you could just spare anything…”
“I’m sorry.”
He threw his hands up. “Ah fuck it. Whatever.”
We got off at 14th Street. Taco Bell was a block and a half away. I wondered what the point was in lying about anything.