Don't Get Too Comfortable (7 page)

The blonde takes the microphone. “Good morning everybody. [It is 7:45 in the evening.] I'm Heather and this is Jennifer. We're your Hooters Girls. See you once we're airborne!” The flight attendants prepare the cabin for takeoff while Heather and Jennifer chatter together in the front seat, having no training, safety or otherwise, for this gig. They work at the Colonial Mall Hooters in Myrtle Beach. Heather sees the Staten Island girl's engagement ring, and swoops down to take her hand and exclaim with unselfconscious awe over the diamond. It's congenial and casual here, from the piece of green gum stuck to the back of my stowed and secured tray table staring at me at eye level, to the fact that the flight attendants and the Hooters Girls all have the same song stuck in their heads. They repeatedly sing the refrain “One More Ti-yime,” and break up laughing.

Normally, once we had reached cruising altitude, the Hooters Girls would be taking charge to lead a trivia contest, with Hooters-related questions, such as how many sauces do they have for their wings? (Six: mild, medium, hot, Spicy Jack, Three Mile, and 911.) Or, how many Hooters are there in Myrtle Beach? (Four.) Sadly, the airline just inaugurated its service from Baltimore that very day, so every available piece of schwag—golf balls, caps, etc.—that might have served as our prizes was pressed into service for the mucky-mucks on that maiden voyage.

Instead, they announce that Hooters T-shirts are for sale. The Vin Diesel guy gets up to model one of them. “What's your name?” Heather asks him.

“Mitch.”

She looks scandalized. “Bitch?” she asks.

“Mitch.”

Working a flight is preferable to a shift in the restaurant. It's easier, for one thing, and they get $13.50 an hour. The wage for waiting tables is paltry: less than $3.00 an hour plus tips, although a Hooters Girl can make a tidy sum at certain times of the year, like Harley-Davidson Week, for example. Although she cannot be more than twenty, and is half dressed and pneumatically constructed in precisely the way that ogling crowds of hairy bikers go for in a big way, Jennifer talks about serving these Hell's Angels with no trace of fear or trepidation. She even proudly but casually mentions that, with the exception of Hooters, most businesses in Myrtle Beach close down during Black Bike Week (not black bikes, but African American bikers).

“Why do you think that is?” I ask.

“They're rude,” she replies, although I'm not sure if she means the bikers or the area merchants.

Jennifer is from West Virginia and attends Carolina Coastal College. She is curious about my notebook, but cannot read my scrawl. She takes my pen to write: “I love Hooters [smiley face].” Not to be outdone, Heather writes, “Roses are red / Violets are blue / the shorter the shorts / the better the view.”

I have swallowed all the signifiers of their presentation, so it comes as a bit of a shock—and a good dose of medicine—when I ask them what they do when not waiting tables. Heather has been accepted into a nursing program. To bide her time over the summer before it starts, she's taking microbiology again, just to keep up on it. She passed it once already. Jennifer is in marine sciences, studying sharks and planning on doing graduate work in Australia.

“Wow, marine biology,” I say.

“Uh-uh. Marine
sciences
,” she corrects me. “Biology's just part of it.”

I briefly wonder if they're having me on, trafficking in that old take-down-the-hair-remove-the-horn-rims, “Miss Jones, you're beautiful” fantasy. But I don't suspect grad school plans are a turn-on for most guys. Besides, the hair is already down and the glasses are nowhere in sight.

The three flight attendants are in the back of the plane, as they have been for most of the flight, kneeling on the seats and leaning over the back to talk and laugh with the other passengers. One guy stands in the aisle with a bottle of beer. It's all very
Coffee, Tea or Me,
a hearkening back to those cusp-of-the-sexual-revolution days when “stews” were good-time gals and flying was largely the province of men. The party in the rear stays that way until about seven minutes to the end, when one of the attendants finally comes up front. “Carole!” she calls to the back.
We're landing!
she mouths, as if to hide the fact from the rest of us, even though the plane has been pitched downward in a descending pattern for the last half hour. It pleases me to find out that it in no way affects the safety of a plane if it lands with a tray table down and seat not in the upright position. My can of seltzer and cup are still in front of me as we touch down in the stifling, Prell-thick air of a South Carolina evening.

Later that night, walking along the highway from the Burger King back to my motel, I hug the shoulder of the road, clutching my Double Whopper with Cheese to my chest, careful not to let the bag be ripped from my arms by the powerful wakes kicked up by the eighteen-wheelers and semis roaring by. The grassy verge along the driveway to my lodgings is damp with humidity, my T-shirt is soaked through from my three-minute walk. Passing through the automatic doors, I am greeted with a blast of air-conditioning as salutary as a blood transfusion. The vending machines by the reception desk—the motel's version of a restaurant—blaze with a stained-glass opulence. I feed a dollar into the slot and in turn I am graced with a frosty bottle of Gatorade the color of the Caribbean Sea.

IT
'
S STILL CAUSE
for wonder, this being in one place on the globe in the morning and somewhere else entirely by evening. Even if it is only here, sitting on my motel bed watching CNN, with the curtains illuminated by the glow of the splash pool outside. It's still lit up, though it's already close to midnight. I guess they keep it turned on just because they can.

J.D.V., M.I.A.

T
hey say New York is a Twenty-Four-Hour Town. I suppose that's true, if by Twenty-Four-Hour Town they mean you can probably get a plate of eggs somewhere or wander bleeding into an emergency room for suturing. But in the wee, small hours, it can be a very quiet affair. It is not the round-the-clock party it purports to be. That's why stories about staying up late in New York so often seem imbued with a gin-soaked wistfulness, even this one about an exuberant late-night scavenger hunt through the streets of lower Manhattan. Or maybe it's just the memory of it that makes me want to reach for the bottle.

This escapade is called Midnight Madness, named after an apparently crummy 1980 movie about a scavenger hunt starring David Naughton of Dr Pepper commercial fame. A sporadically annual affair, it is the brainchild of Mat Laibowitz, a monomaniacally brilliant young electrical engineer who has seen the film dozens if not hundreds of times.

I am part of the White Team, an apt color for us, since in comparison to our thirty-odd, twenty something opponents, we are snowy-locked geriatrics. Jaime, our team captain, reads the preliminary instructions for how the hunt will work: “Each clue will lead you to the location where the next clue is hidden, and so on. When you find one, call into HQ immediately. This starts a one-hour timer. If you haven't found the next clue after one hour, you can call again for a hint.
One hour!?!?
Oh my god . . .” His voice trails off with a what-have-we-gotten-ourselves-into weariness. Or perhaps I am projecting. Anything that calls itself Midnight Madness by definition means we won't be going home anytime soon. It is scarcely eight o'clock in the evening. It has been a good while since 12:00 a.m. held much attraction for me beyond being a perfectly lovely time to be ensconced in the comfort of my own home, sitting in my underpants, contentedly worrying about something.

Our playing field is the eastern half of downtown Manhattan, a vast area comprising Battery Park, Wall Street, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, the Bowery, Little Italy, and NoLiTa, a term used to describe the neighborhood to the north of Little Italy, a few city blocks positively metastatic with handbag stores. It will be an evening of more than seven hours' duration and two hard-won insights, the first of which is that I am not a facile puzzler. Scratch that: it goes deeper than that. I both suck and blow at puzzles, riddles, and games of all sorts. I am a reasonably intelligent guy, but when called upon to bring to bear strategic thinking, a competitive nature, and smarts all at the same time, I don't show myself to be just an idiot but the very worst kind: the voluble dolt who has no idea how stupid he is. Case in point, the first clue that kicks off the game:

Clearly this means that we are to hie ourselves immediately to Manhattan's nearest outdoor Frida Kahlo painting. Even though I have never seen anything in the city that might remotely fit this description, and a Frida Kahlo painting would more fittingly have “One Eyebrow” as its clue, I say it like only a moron wouldn't know this, as though the slip of paper actually had “Go to the Frida Kahlo painting!” written on it. My voice is almost exasperated at how much time we're wasting just standing there
discussing
. One of our team members—thankfully a mathematician who does this sort of thing for a living—steps in and points out that the shape of the clue, the way it is written, might indicate something. Could it be referring to a street corner? Also, the shared “E” probably suggests that rather than looking to the meaning of the words themselves, perhaps we should look to the letters. An anagram, maybe, of Bowery and Hester? It takes him as long to solve it as it took you to read the preceding four sentences. But he is kind in addition to being clever. “Or we could,” he says, looking at me politely, “go looking for a Frida Kahlo painting . . .” He trails off. The very air itself is embarrassed to carry the sound of his diplomacy.

It's a tight fit for all the teams on the corner of Bowery and Hester. We jostle up against one another benignly, like apples in a bathtub. A young man spies the message slipped between the metal grates of a shuttered jewelry store and hurriedly whispers to his teammates. But once a clue is found, it's essentially impossible to keep it from the other teams. All forty of us pick up on it within a matter of seconds. “Free Mumia Jamal Zealots” it reads.

“To the Tombs!” I cry, ready to lead the charge to the jail connected to the courthouse. My teammates indulge me by walking down there. It's a short stroll and it buys them some time away from the eyes of the other teams to come up with the true solution. They are very gentle with me as they try to get me to see beyond the obvious and look at things a little more obliquely, the meaning behind the meaning. That's the difference, say, between overt directions and a puzzle. “Yes, yes,” I say, waving them off, picking up the pace. “We'd better get to the jail before the others.”

They flash one another concerned looks, like the March sisters in
Little Women,
and I am Beth, the youngest, chattering brightly at Christmas about the piano recital I shall give that spring when it is clear to everyone else that I will surely be dead before they even run out of eggnog. I am a goner as far as being of any use in concerned, and still they sweetly make me feel as if I had some part in figuring out that it is the phrase's initials—F, M, J, Z and the subways they represent—that lead us to the Delancey Street subway station, the only hub of those four trains.

A TASK HAS
to be just challenging enough to be engaging. A complicated model of Chartres cathedral might be rigorous and fun to try and put together, but not if the instructions suddenly switch over into Norwegian without warning. I am finding all this far too difficult, and batting zero is starting to wear me down. By 11:30, I am the walking illustration of Why Johnny Can't Read: I am frustrated and angry and no longer interested in even trying. I am the physical, as well as the intellectual, deadweight of the White Team, sitting on the subway stairs as the rest of them find and solve the clue. I am the sullen fourteen-year-old child none of my teammates knew they had or wanted. I dawdle behind as we climb the steps back above ground and over to a disused pissoir on the traffic median of a Lower East Side boulevard.

I shine my flashlight through the barred window of the small pavilion. The beam glances off the tiled, graffitied walls and old urinals, coming to rest on the floor where I see two photographs of the Artist Formerly Known As and the Queen of England. (How did the puzzlemaster even get in there, I wonder? The doors to the toilet are bricked shut.) The mere fact of finally getting a clue right shoots through me like an ampoule of adrenaline. I am suddenly energized and awake as we race over to the intersection of Prince and Elizabeth. But my good mood burns off like morning fog as we stand around for an hour near a restaurant called Peasant. (
Darling, have you been? Their gruel? Simply too delicious. We ate our entire meal languishing in their adorable little debtor's prison in the basement, and then the children died of rickets! Divine!
)

None of the teams has any idea. The most avid puzzlers among us are stumped. We walk up and down the sidewalk, pressing our faces through the iron bars of the fence of the tombstone manufacturer, scanning for the umpteenth time the wheat-pasted broadside of Jerry Garcia stuck to the mailbox. Sleepiness and a congenital simplemindedness have me using my already flimsy powers of deduction on analyzing garbage. I study a drippy soda can for messages like it was the Rosetta stone.

Eventually, a collective “uncle” is declared, and someone calls in to Midnight Madness HQ on behalf of all of us. “Look at your feet,” we are told, and there, suspended from a sidewalk grating by colored tabs, are envelopes hanging down into the sewer. We fish them out and find locker keys and a clue that leads us to our next location: the South Ferry terminal.

It is now well after 2:00 a.m. as we scramble for cabs to take us to the bottom of the island.
This taxi is going the wrong way,
I think, as block by block my apartment becomes ever more distant. Looking out the windows to my left and right, I see that we are a fleet ten vehicles strong, almost the only cars on the road right now. For all my innate incapacity to actually enjoy myself, I am at least able to grasp just how impressive this entire enterprise is. It's beautifully organized and even more beautiful in its execution. Some of the clues are complete works of art. The one waiting for us in the Delancey Street subway station was a perfect replica of one of those official “change in service” notices routinely posted by the transit authority. We walked by it at least ten times. I also have to give it to Mat, the game master who put this together: spending a Saturday night in New York engaged in an actual activity that doesn't involve the usual $30 restaurant expenditure is a very nice change. There's something inherently cool about Midnight Madness, even though this is among the geekiest things I've ever done.

Mat—whose almost parodic nerdiness is only amplified by the fact that he is as lovely as Montgomery Clift and seems to have no idea—fully agrees: “Geek, when used correctly, is usually a compliment. It means eccentric, skilled, quirky, unique.” Mat is constantly building something. For as long as he can remember, he has taken apart everything he has ever owned and reassembled it into something else. The intricate problems associated with coordinating Midnight Madness make him happy. It's no great revelation that he and I might have different ideas of what constitutes a good time, but the intrinsically
Rash
mon
quality of almost all shared experience never fails to surprise me. When Jaime complains at one point of sore feet and says how there isn't a chance in hell he would ever do this again, I feel a deep and throbbing love for him. But when he gets his second wind not twenty minutes later, the keen knife blade of betrayal slices through me and I hate no one on this earth as much as horrible, turncoat Jaime. People are rarely in sync. I know what my favorite moment of the night is. I ask Mat to tell me his.

“Battery Park,” he says. “I got to see everyone at that time and walk around. That to me was really nice.”

He is not entirely wrong. It was an enormous relief to get out of the bus-station-bright fluorescence of the deserted ferry terminal, and a bonus that the park was just a short walk across the street into the velvet darkness of the trees with the lapping of the Hudson River nearby. We all gathered at the World War II memorial. It's a starkly beautiful plaza right by the water with about a dozen huge concrete slabs, easily twenty feet square, engraved with the names of the dead. Players shone their flashlights over the tablets like archaeologists in the Valley of the Kings. The clues—dredged up from the opaque depths of the river, kept dry in ziplock bags, their presence in the black water indicated by those fluorescent Glow Sticks teenagers wave at rock concerts—were complex acrostics with letter and number combinations corresponding to the names and dates on the monuments. This was the final clue of the evening, which would lead us to the secret location of the Midnight Madness wrap party.

It was probably great fun for Mat to emerge from the command center and see the fruits of his labor after a long night of fielding calls. I might even agree with him had it been during the day. But it was close to four in the morning at that point. Rats were audibly, fearlessly scurrying through the bushes nearby, and mosquitoes—their thoraxes no doubt full to bursting with West Nile virus—buzzed incessantly about our ears. That was also when Jaime ran into a friend of his. This friend was not part of our game. He was there for other reasons. Gentle reader, I will let you in on something: if you are a gay man strolling of a summer's night through a dark New York City park sometime after 3:30 a.m., there is a reason for it and that reason is not so you will run into someone you know. In fact, the last person you want to run into is someone you know. Let me amend that: the second-to-last person you want to run into is someone you know. The truly
very
last person you want to run into is someone you know accompanied by dozens of jolly amateur sleuths.