Survival of the Outfittest

On the crosstown bus the other day I found myself not just thinking but actually mouthing the words ‘fucking bastard’. Like I am caught in this verbal crossfire/defensive pissed-off poor-schmuck-commuter mode and I am adapting. Do you ever find yourself talking to a black person and you start coming out with things like ‘ hey, brothah… ' and you say it with quotations around it, but it is coming out of your mouth.

Or my friend from Tennessee.. When I’m on the phone saying hi to his Mom, I can sense the slightest hint of extra diphthong coming out of my mouth. Now I am supposed to be an individual, a fairly well-baked New Yorker at this point, twice removed. But here I am, succumbing to the atmosphere, trying on another one of the zillion self-styled uniforms of my fellow MTA riders…like the evolutionary species to which I belong, doing what we humans do best…adapting.

Is this a form of ‘selling out’? A manifestation of my old Dad’s favorite proverb “Lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas”? I always thought it was an oblique warning to practice safe sex. But now I appreciate the resonance of this old proverb. Lie down with dogs long enough, you begin to develop a sort of bark. So is this my excuse for the ‘edge’ I find these days slipping off my tongue like liquid razor?

We New Yorkers are known for being pissed off. Also for being incredibly hardy, tough, yet neighborly and heroic when we want to. The fact is, we’re exposed so much variety in constant barrage, there’s ample space in any given day to tune into any number of wavelengths, to try on any one of a million fashion statements.

So maybe on the bus I was doing the construction guys who’ve been working in my courtyard, whose every single expletive is decibally equivalent to the music on my apartment stereo. Funny how every single club I play can’t seem to manage anything close to an adequate sound system, and right here, out my back windows, we have Carnegie Hall-worthy acoustics.
Anyway, their personal lives have begun to seep into my consciousness, and their verbal style is beginning to slip off my tongue. I pass them sometimes, coming from the subway or on their way home, talking that macho guy-talk with the ‘fucking’ punctuating nearly every word. They have no idea who I am, even though I know all about the bald one’s extra-marital sexlife and another guy’s debt and someone’s ‘fucking cunt’ of a mother-in-law. I recognize them by their voices. I gave up trying to drown them out, along with the incessant banging and sawing that has now exceeded the reasonable renovation time-frame of a 12-story building with no power tools from the ground up.

Their soundtrack, over Charlie Parker and Miles and the trendy bands I review, are bleeding into my life—slowly and consistently like an IV drip. In fact the whole city is in my veins by now. I even have the rotten wet cold of the OR nurse who sat next to me last Tuesday, generously sharing her inner virus with every sneeze and cough.

Maybe it is my musical ‘ear’ that picks up and plays back the audio with more finesse than I am able to cop a tough bassline these days. Maybe…but it’s also become kind of ‘second nature’. My way of ‘adapting’. Urban camouflage. Survival. It also feels good sometimes, to let loose these expletives like ammunition. Thank God most New Yorkers don’t read lips. Or aren’t looking anyway. I could dis a black man’s mother at 12 inches and he wouldn’t notice because his ipod is blasting and he is in his zone. And tell me, if insulting bad language comes like a Tourette’s impulse, and everyone in the room has their earbuds in, am I going to get my face kicked in?

Maybe I’d better spend the evening listening to Shakespeare on PBS. Or barking.
Sayonara.

Gymblog

The way you can tell you’re getting pathetic and old is if you actually begin talking to people at your gym. I mean, young people occasionally meet each other this way, although since literally everyone under 50 has earbuds in, 24/7, this is currently more difficult. But there are these middle-aged women whose kids are now old enough to have their own life, and they meet there-- some earnestly trying to hold onto their youth with the botox and facelifts, but mostly the average middle-class ones in Manhattan have given up and are half-heartedly cycling their legs and exercising primarily their tongue.

I am losing interest in the ever-decreasing efficacy of exercise as a motivator, and I detest even the word earbuds, so I have reluctantly begun to engage in conversation. Some of these women past prime-time at night are actually politicians and writers and are interesting. Others want to talk about vitamins and teenagers and apartment renovations. I have noticed lately that I rarely sweat in the gym. TV is boring me, especially since they have deleted Bravo from the menu. I don’t quite need reading glasses and placing books on the machine is far enough away to blur the print. So, besides the chatter, I look around and practice being an old person. Occasionally I seethe.

Seriously, there should be a manual on gym etiquette. We are paying for this time which is a premium in Manhattan. Driving is free, but there are traffic laws, penalties for violations. Not so at the gym; no consequences.

Besides the smelly old men who lust after young girls, and I don’t mean young women, I mean girls my kids’ age who wear their two-piece with the low-slung shorts which conceal little. To their credit, they sweat, these girls. Ditto the old lusty men. Who smell bad. I mean, as you get older your senses are supposed to dull; my eyes are bugging me, but my nose, unlike these people, is still fairly accurate. If you are going to pant and wheeze contiguously to other humans, have the courtesy a. to refrain from binging on garlic until after the workout b. to use deodorant or wash regularly and c. to wear clean gym clothes because the smell of sweaty old-man enhanced by stale locker-fermented T-shirt and shorts is more than I can bear. And everyone has their own personal scent: more information than one wants. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, some women over-perfume, and the occasional freshly-manicured girl with the toxic polish smell can make you dizzy enough to fall off the machine.

Okay…let’s move on to the audio-offenses. Because they have their ipods turned to the max or are listening to TV, some people are not aware that they are literally screaming to their neighbor….or talking on their cellphone to their maid about what to cook for dinner and which kids have which homework due. I’d like to punch them. There is one guy at my gym who has the nerve to tell giggling kids to keep quiet, but when there is a cute girl 3 machines away, he’ll engage in a shouting exchange to chat her up. And of course the ones that abuse their machine time-privileges mercilessly are the most vocal when they are waiting for your 30 seconds on the Ab-machine to be up so they can press on for another 6 interminable smelly minutes. Then there are the elephants—the usually young men who press the treadmill to the limit and are maybe having a military marching fantasy because every stride is an explosion. They can keep this up for 60 minutes, at a pace of 8-9 mph. Can’t they actually run in the park, on a road? Do they require a captive audience?

Okay—the visual. I realize I am a gym eyesore but this insures that they will never-ever photograph me for their brochures which they are constantly revamping. I wear my sons’ old clothes and hide beneath huge stained old T-shirts and old-fashioned headphones. But strutting around are middle-aged men who obviously don’t have mirrors, because they are wearing Lance Armstrong’s bicycle pants with no butt and their old-man package somehow stashed in. And the bare legs with the veins and the wrinkled skin. Again, more information. Older women who let their arm flab hang and some even baring extremely unappetizing midriffs. This helps the rest of us curb our calorie intake because it is positively nauseating.

Touch. Okay, there are never enough cleaners in these places which are like a bacterial paradise. But the sweatiest guys seem to think towels are accessories for their neck… or they have a maid at home constantly following them around with windex and a cloth (not!) and they sit on these cybex machines, leave their imprint in perspiration and don’t even look back. There ought to be a major fine for this. It is disgusting.

So here I am covered neck-to-toe with clothing that conceals everything but my face like a Muslim woman, my eyes and ears and nose regretfully open and I find myself occasionally using my mouth to engage with others, which distracts me from seething and being annoyed by the etiquette violations. I forget that fully half of these people find my demeanor and habits, opinions and outsider fashion downright intolerable. At this point in life I, too, avoid mirrors. And God forbid they should notice my choice of music or literature. So I gratefully pay my fees and try my best to shut the hell up.