I Totally Meant to Do That (5 page)

My God, the line was moving slowly. I started feeling fidgety, tweaking out. Teddy Ruxpin was bottling, sweating, about to explode.

But soon the man reached the front of the line. And then he left.

I’d done it: successfully silenced my urge to lick the face of everything that breathes. Although my heart hurt a little, I felt a sense of pride. There was no other choice: Old Yeller had to be shot.

But then I thought about the countless others at whom I’d unconsciously grinned during that first week. The ones who hadn’t recoiled. Most of them must have at least politely acknowledged me or I would have cottoned to my behavior sooner. Maybe some of them were even secretly glad to smile back.

So I struck a deal with my new home. I have hardened. I turn a lot of opportunities into ghosts. You have to; there is no other way. But sometimes, when the circumstances are right, say, a quiet block on a Sunday night or an empty subway stairwell, I’ll pick one approaching, unsuspecting pedestrian, wait until we’re within a few feet of each other, and then stick my hand out—not a limp-wristed, high-pitched, produce-aisle wag, but a commanding, decisive, palm-facing-forward call for a high five. And I’ll tell you this, contrary to whatever stereotypes you think you know about New Yorkers, I’ve never been denied contact.

had was with a total stranger. I love strangers. When I don’t know you, I don’t know your faults. And you don’t know mine. For the brief time we interact, we’re flawless.

The notion is similar to the way some grade-school teachers tabulate behavior scores by starting each student at a hundred and knocking off points for transgressions throughout the year. For instance, if my third-grade teacher had employed such a system, I might have lost ten points for talking during his tests, five for fomenting resistance to our monthly fluoride rinses, and twenty when I accidentally called him a whore.

“Do you know what that means?” he asked.

“A wild pig,” I responded.

He shook his head and handed me the dictionary.

My point is that, before the plummeting kinetic energy of our faults takes hold, our new relationship is full of potential. I don’t know that you’re the kind of person who pockets crackers from restaurants. Neither do you know that I sleep with a noise machine and also earplugs to drown out the noise machine.

As strangers, we are perfect. And will remain that way. Until I inevitably call you a whore.

So: this relationship. It happened in a bar on the Upper East Side one night toward the end of my first year in the city. In a place as diverse as New York, the bar scene uptown is surprisingly homogeneous, full of twenty-two-year-olds who come to the city for a postgrad degree in drinking and one-night stands.

Our parents encourage the journey, saying “Go and have fun!”—the silent supporting clause of that statement being “Before you settle down back here.” So coveys of college grads recycle themselves in overpriced adapted two-bedrooms on York Avenue. We treat our time in New York like a rite of passage, a year spent in the woods. The problem is that most of us hang out exclusively with other Southerners in frat bars on the Upper East Side. We don’t want to be in New York specifically; we just want to be somewhere else for a while.

This is “the plan.” It’s not the sort you set in advance, but rather, realize after the fact you’d unwittingly followed. No one says, “I’ll move to New York and procrastinate life.” Nevertheless, that’s precisely what we do. We say, and believe, that we came to the city to seek opportunity, take a chance. But mostly we’re just killing time until last call. Or, at least, that’s what I was doing.

But I didn’t know it until that night in the bar on the Upper East Side, when the DJ’s playlist—“Y.M.C.A.,” “I Will Survive,” “Like a Virgin”—sounded like a mix from a Phi Delt late night. That is
when this opaque plan revealed itself to me. Like many a revelation, it came after I’d gone into a bathroom to accidentally smoke half of a joint.

Upon exiting, and complaining to the next girl in line about the stoner who must have preceded me, I heard it: the song lyric that can make the ears of any American girl prick up.

“I got chiiiiiills, they’re multiplying. ”

Most young people in our country can’t find Kuwait on a map, but we all know the words and battle-of-the-sexes choreography to the penultimate song in
Grease
. I stood motionless, stunned by the marijuana, in an estrogen stampede. Responding to the song’s war cry, a brigade of calf-high black boots carried girls to the dance floor just in time to gather on one side, point an accusing finger at their testosterone-filled counterparts and croon with all the gravitas they could muster from a semester in poli sci,
“You better shape up!”

I circumnavigated the dance floor, enjoying the show and filling out the actors’ résumés. A girl in a pink cardigan was flipping her long hair from side to side on cue with the “ooh, ooh, ooh”s. She looked like an Allison.

Allison lived on Eighty-Second Street and York, I supposed. Although she’d wanted a job in fashion, she’d wound up in PR. The girl with whom she shimmied was definitely a boy name: a Blake or an Eason. Maybe Hadley, Tinsley, or Dabney. Southerners do this a lot. It sounds like a boy’s name but really it’s a last name, typically the mother’s maiden, and actually it’s the girl’s middle name.

It was harder to guess the guys’ names, as I assumed that several of them went by the nickname Chip or Trip. Of their jobs, I could be more certain: finance, finance, finance, money management, and finance. The three leaning against the column had been together all night, predominantly in that spot. This led me to believe they were fresh off the boat and probably living in what I’ve come to call
a Halfway Frat: an apartment that, like a halfway house, provides living quarters to recently deinstitutionalized persons, in this case college graduates who’ve moved to New York.

There are two categories of HalfFrats. The first is a “Willing.” Year after year, a lease is passed down, or willed, from last year’s alums to this year’s graduating seniors—who must still pay real-estate agents their finder’s fees. Such was the case with my first place in the city. I moved into, with two college roommates, an Upper West Side apartment, which had previously been occupied by three girls who’d just graduated from Carolina, which had previously been occupied by three girls who’d just graduated from Carolina. Farther west along the block was a literal halfway home, one of many in a program designed to sprinkle low-income housing throughout the city in brownstones and town houses. If its residents saved their wine corks for future craft projects, then we had a lot in common indeed.

The second breed of HalfFrat I call a “Revolving Door.” This is generally a one-in-one-out system. Whenever one roommate moves, a graduating friend replaces him, which means that the lease need not change hands. However, in accordance with the friend-in-need maxim, and also the drunk-dude-sleeps-anywhere theorem, Revolving Doors typically feature more tenants than bedrooms. When my friend Sammy moved up from Chapel Hill, he took up residence with several of his older Phi Delt brothers in a closet in their East Village Revolving Door. Although it was a three-bedroom, at any time, four to five people were passing out there.

And every weekend they had a party, frequently with a keg and almost always with KC and the Sunshine Band playing while the television was on but muted. I know because I was usually there. I “knew” those people in the Upper East Side bar because I am them. For example, my sister has a boy name: Tucker. It’s my mother’s
maiden name, and actually, Tucker is her middle, but my parents chose to call her by it because her first name is Russell. So really she has two boy names. And technically, the third Borden sister, although it is short for Louisa, goes by Lou, which is a man’s name too—or, at least, all others going by it, excluding my grandmother, have either been male or a fixture in a bathroom. I’m surprised my parents didn’t name me Tom. Or Sink.

What I didn’t yet know about my college crowd—there were a couple dozen of us in the city at the time—is that after a year, most of them would be gone. They’d start saying they were tired: tired of hangovers, piles of garbage, and the stench of urine; tired of screaming neighbors and the constant rumbling of trucks in their dreams. Tired of New York. So they’d leave. Budweiser is cheaper in Raleigh.

Then the halfway-home bar would fill with their replacements.

But on the night in question, I didn’t know this yet. Or, I guess I was starting to figure it out. Let’s put it this way: I’d been getting chills, and they were multiplying.

I moved around among the dancers unnoticed, or so I thought. While counting the number of chinos twisting in rhythm, I noticed a pair that was still. I raised my gaze and locked eyes with a young man standing on the other side of the dance floor, my perfect stranger.

I must have inadvertently swayed my head, as I’m wont to do, because he began to mimic it. I put my hands on my hips. He put his hands on his hips. Testing the commitment level, I squatted into an elaborate plié.

Oh, he was game.

Before I had the chance to safely distance myself from the situation by mocking it, he thrust one pointed index finger into the air and we disco-walked to the center of the floor. The ensuing minutes
of dance were fantastically elaborate and completely in sync. Without speaking or planning, we knew the routine.

He spun me with his right arm and at the end of my revolution, I dropped my left hand to my side, catching his, which was waiting to lead me through a side-by-side shimmy.

While I pretended to check an invisible watch, and blow imaginary bangs from my eyes, he circled me, flicking fingers like guns on either side of his waist.

When I inflicted only the slightest bit of pressure on his shoulder, he intuited that he was to kneel so I could split-leg leapfrog over him.

By this point we’d attracted attention. The crowd was also in sync; it parted just in time to witness the most successful
Dirty Dancing
jump I’ve ever tried. I’m not saying he carried me, but I did catch air. And then, suddenly, it became clear that this particular sock hop would culminate in lip lock, as if that had been the point all along. So as the final chords reverberated through the bar’s cheap sound system, he spun me one more time and led me into the portended dip. Then he leaned in and kissed me. It didn’t occur to me to resist. It wasn’t awkward and it wasn’t a joke, but it wasn’t sexual, either. We were professional Sandys and Dannys, and this was just part of the act.

But I hadn’t thought beyond that point. What would happen when he pulled me up? I knew that my John Travolta and I wouldn’t get into a car that inexplicably takes flight. But I feared we might embark on a journey with an even higher crash incidence: conversation. I was terrified of sullying our otherwise perfect exchange. What if he wanted to know my name, or worse, my number? What if he were gay—what straight guy knows
Dirty Dancing
choreography?

This was a fight-or-flight moment … except I was trapped prone in his arms two feet from the floor, so both fight and flight
would have ended in concussion. I closed my eyes, a ridiculous tactic, I know. But I didn’t want to see with whom I’d swapped spit. I wanted him to remain forever frozen in suspended animation, like a woman in a dip or a chapter in a book on a shelf.

Then he did the unexpected. He pulled me up, released my hand, stepped backward, and silently bowed. I bent my left knee, pointed my right foot out in front of me, and, with all of the gravitas garnered from debutante-ball training, curtsied. Then we both turned and walked in opposite directions.

Apparently I didn’t know those people at all. Which made me wonder, What else do I not know? So I grabbed my coat, hailed a cab, and never went back.