Courtesy

Laura and I sat down to eat a pizza at Koronet's tonight and took the only available two spots in the place, two barstools along a short counter against a mirrored wall. I sat down next to a boy who looked about fourteen or fifteen, who was regaling his neighbor with tales of sucking titties and loving titties. Titties this, suck that. It was pretty clear that he was trying to provoke me, because he kept staring at me in the mirror as he said this. Typical bullshit from the world's least deserving carbon-based lifeforms (pubescent boys, of course).

In a bemused and slightly irked state, I decided to flex my teacherly muscle on these two boys, who were very similar in age to the ones I taught last year. I have no problem with frank talk about sexuality. I'm not one of those abstinence-only-until-marriage self-deluders. But I am not interested in being the victim of an obnoxious child's power trip, and I wasn't going to be humiliated or silenced by his misogyny. Ever since I watched Ms. Hutchinson gently (and successfully) berate a boy who threw a half-full juice carton onto the platform of the 174-175th D train stop last year, I have increasingly felt it my adult responsibility to stop kids who are behaving badly. I know this welcomes accusations of condescension, naivete, or privilege, but I'll save that defense for another blog. Anyway, I thought it was time to show the tittie-talker who was boss.

In a polite but authoritative voice, I said, "Would you not talk about that? I am not interesting in hearing what you have to say, and I'm trying to eat." Or something else like that, consciously articulate and prudish.

The boy said, "I'll say what I want to say. This is America!" I shrugged, not quick-thinking enough to find the right answer.

There was more and more vociferous tittie talk. Then the tittie talk moved on to dick-sucking and then, curiously, to eating shit. He continued, "I saw this person take a shit the other day, and I just picked it up and ate it! I just ate this big piece of shit! Mm-mmm!"

After a few seconds of this, I said, "Wow, you eat shit. Tell me, what does that taste like?"

That was probably a mistake. I was trying so hard not to stay level, to think of ways to get him to leave. I wasn't going to lose a battle of wills to a little asshole who just wanted to piss people off.

"It tastes like that pizza!" he said, pointing to my slice.

But then I pointed to his slice and said, "You're eating the same thing." And I pretended to laugh heartily and turned away from him. I should have known then that I had taken exactly the wrong tack, and I had descended into this strange world where I was accusing him of having eaten shit, rather than just maintain a distant, teacherly, absolute authority.

The boy continued talking, and muttering something about me and Laura being lesbians, said, "Then there were these two lesbians, who sucked my dick, and then they sucked my crack..." and on and on.

Laura wanted to leave, though we weren't done eating. I wanted to stay and wait it out. But it was pleasant for no one, so we left. Upon leaving, I couldn't resist a final jab and I said, "You know, you should seek therapy for your shit-eating problem. I know people you could call."

We left with half-finished slices of lukewarm pizza leaking grease into our gloves. The boys followed us out. I stood my ground, pointed down Broadway and said, "You two can walk that way." They did, but then after ten feet turned around and the voluble one said, "We were going to walk this way anyway!" They bounded half a block downtown, turned and threw something in a cup at us--it landed at least twenty feet away, anyway--and then sprinted across the street in a frenzy. Laura and I went back inside and finished our pizza.

I was livid! I wanted to swing both of these boys by their feet into the building and stomp on their skulls and stuff my thumbs into their eyesockets. My thoughts ran from fucked-up to violent: I thought about calling the cops and filing assault charges against them for throwing a drink at me, which would have been an awful exercise of gentrifier privilege against two black boys; I wanted to wrestle the boy to the ground and break his wrists; I wanted to pulverize his misogynistic little testicles against the heels of my boots and the sidewalk.

So they had won. Laura and I were upset that two teenage boys could successfully harass two grown women--something that happens all the time--and that neither of us could have found a way to deal with them. Laura thought later that the proper thing to do would have been to shame them into better behavior. That might involve either

1. asking loudly in the pizza place for them to leave us alone; this probably wouldn't have worked because they were so derisive and hungry for attention that they would have relished the indignation of a roomful of Columbia-types;
2. creating a lie, a la "You don't know who I am. Somebody in my family just died and I'm coming from the funeral and I am in no mood to be listening to this." This is curious. Aside from all the bad death karma it engenders, it might actually work. It accuses the harassers of gross indecency without being direct, and it may call on some deeply buried reserve of shame.

Shaming rather than engaging would of course had been the better choice, but neither of us could think of anything to do. Also, I'm so cynical that sometimes I think shame won't work at all, because it offers an impossibly optimistic portrait of humans as compassionate beings capable of understanding their own mistakes. (My semi-permanent reference for this cynicism is the second Presidential debate, when George W. Bush found himself unable to think of any, let alone three, mistakes that he had made in the first four disastrous years of his presidency.)

It feels awful to be harassed by kids who just want to make people unhappy. It feels worse to be so disarmed by them that you can't even conceive of the right way to make them stop. Why do people do this?

This episode was quickly followed by three other events that fall into the "Reasons I Love to Hate This Shitty City" category:

1. Laura and I waited for the 1 train at 110th Street. When it came, a woman who was hugely pregnant--like 9 1/2 months pregnant--was trying to get out. Two massive men just squeezed right past her, jostling her and crushing her against a pillar on the platform.
2. The train was packed, and I was looking for a place to grab a pole. The guy next to me was reading a book and leaning the length of his body against the pole, so that I could lurch all I wanted to but not find a place to get a grip. I wedged my fingers right underneath his neck and made as big a fist as I could so that he would show some goddamn courtesy and lean his unctuous body elsewhere.
3. When I finally got a seat, the woman next to me--a early-twenties-ish hipster with an impractical and soon to be dated haircut and pre-torn jeans--propped her feet high up on the center pole. Which didn't inconvenience me in any way, but inconvenienced everyone who was trying to find space to stand on the train. And she had on a pair of white, knee-high boots swaddled in faux rabbit-fur. I just wanted to vomit all over them, or just bring my feet down in an ax-kick and snap all of her ligaments cleanly in half.

Being in this shit-sandwich makes me crazy. A tiny island with 8 million people and not nearly enough resources to make all of us comfortable. I start to think violent thoughts, and I lose so much faith in humanity.

And then I go back to Palo Alto and I realize that all the faith that I had in humanity was based on a vast web of delusions that my parents' hard-earned money so painstakingly bought. It's so easy to be polite when everyone around you has lots of disposable income, big roads and big cars, and all people who might be unsavory or unfamiliar just manicure your lawns with their hats pulled over their eyes and then shuffle back across Highway 101, where they will be safely invisible until the grass needs to be trimmed again.

What the hell am I saying? Goddamn it all.