The Wink and Other Survival Skills

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The Wink and Other Survival Skills

“Do you have a gun?” An interesting conversation starter, but not something you expect to hear at the beginning of your honeymoon.

I can imagine any number of scenarios where it might be reasonable to ask such a question. Let's say you made a wrong turn during a brisk stroll the day after Thanksgiving, and you find yourself in a Walmart parking lot. It might be prudent to take stock of your defense capabilities in such a scenario, and if you come up short, bartering for a piece with a Black Friday troglodyte is entirely acceptable.

Or maybe your house has become the site of a bat infestation, and the only thing between your family and a rabies infection is your son's trusty knock-off Red Ryder BB gun.

Or perhaps that one friend suckered you into attending a Bitcoin Enthusiast seminar.

Or maybe you stepped into an elevator on the 107th floor, headed down, and you heard someone say, “Hold, please.” And you do because you want to be polite to your fellow man, but it is not your fellow man—it's a dummy that looks like your creepy neighbor, Alvin, and it’s held by an amateur ventriloquist, and he's got the same glint in his eye as your second cousin who talks too much after she took one to the head in a rogue game of horseshoes.

Or perhaps you made the wildly risky and soul-crushing choice to have five kids, and you go to church not because you're necessarily religious, but because the church provides Sunday School, which you interpret as free daycare and a license to watch the game or go to a bottomless-mimosa brunch, and the Sunday School director is an overzealous theater arts major who insists on performing a 3-hour interpretation of the birth of Christ at every grade level, and your kids demand that you provide thoughtful and supportive reviews for every showing.

Any of these scenarios justify an arms-related inquiry, but we were not in such a scenario. 

“I said, ‘Do you have a gun?’ Hey, little girl. I’m talking to you.” The little girl he was referring to was my wife. I was sitting right beside her on a train in Grand Central, but for some reason he thought he would have better luck getting a gun from her than from me. It was after midnight, and we had just finished walking all over New York City in flip flops. We boarded the train to head back to my wife’s uncle’s house in Connecticut before continuing on our shenanigans-laden honeymoon to Europe where we backpacked for two months. 

You’d think a strange man asking my wife if she had a gun would unnerve us a bit. But it didn’t. The guy was drunk, like sloppy dysfunctional-dad-at-his-disappointing-son’s-wedding drunk. Also, he spoke in an accent that was vaguely Scandinavian, and frankly, a Norwegian or a Swede asking for a gun just doesn't inspire fear the way a German or a Luxembourgian might. So we just ignored him. And that’s when he offered up a little exposition. 

“Are you sure you don’t have a gun?” he asked again. “If you have a gun, you should shoot me…because…because I don’t have a gun.” 

This is a fairly accurate illustration of his inner turmoil.

 And then he passed out and continued farting as the train left the station. I guess the city did what the city does to some people. It turned this guy inside out, and left him desperate, begging for a pair of wide-eyed newlyweds to put him out of his misery with a gun they didn’t have. 

My kind of city. 

To hell with trigger warnings and safe spaces. Keep your parental advisories and your viewer discretion warnings. Give me a place that tells you exactly who you are and exactly who you are not.

Since that first leg of our honeymoon, my wife and I have returned to the city several times for work and fun. Just last year, we took our kids there for the first time. My wife put together an itinerary that matched the city’s energy. The first half of the week, we stayed at the Essex House in Midtown, right on the park. For the second half, we stayed in the Village at a friend’s house. To get from Midtown to Downtown, we hailed a cab. Until this point, we’d mostly been walking or taking the subway so the kids could really see the city, but with all our luggage, the cab made sense.

New York City cab stories are their own genre, and I think this little anecdote is a nice contribution to the canon. My wife and kids got in the back, and I sat in the front. There was a plexiglass partition between us, so it felt more like a cop car than a cab. I’m 6'2" and was wearing boots, so even a little taller than normal, and squeezing myself into the front seat felt like what I imagine women experience when they’re in stirrups for a pap smear.

When I looked at the cab driver, I thought putting large men in vulnerable physical positions might have been intentional. Which is to say, the cab driver was a woman. I’ve had plenty of women drivers in Ubers and Lyfts, and they’ve all been delightful, but I can’t remember being in a cab with a female driver before. A quick internet search told me that somewhere between 1% and 4% of cab drivers in New York City are women. It’s rare, and that in itself felt very New York-ish.

This woman was in her 50s. She wore fingerless leather gloves, had shoulder-length dark hair, and made a toothpick dance from one side of her mouth to the other, as if the toothpick were auditioning to be a Rockette. Her cab smelled of bergamot and vanilla, unusual for a New York City cab. I gave her the address. She shifted into drive, stomped on the accelerator, and I felt my prostate fly up into my throat.

I’ve been in some crazy cab rides. One in Tijuana comes to mind, when the driver said that his cab could no longer shift into first, so he would have to drive us the last mile to the bar in reverse. I was all of 18-years old and just said, “Uh…okay.” He shifted into reverse, leaned half his body out the driver side window to shake his fist at other conductores, and we sailed down Revolution Street in an automotive moonwalk. To call a cab ride crazy is to be redundant. 

Your standard cab ride in any major metropolitan area.

This woman didn't feel crazy, though. There was something about her confidence—it reminded me of the Mexican cowboys that live on my street. When you watch them ride, there’s no distinction between man and horse; they become one. This woman was one with her cab.

She flew down Park Avenue, weaving through traffic. Garbage trucks, buses, horse-drawn carriages—she slipped past them all. Mopeds, motorcycles, pedestrians—most with two legs, some with one, a few with none. And hand to God, even cop cars. She flew past all of them with a margin of error you could measure in centimeters. All the while, her toothpick whirled and twirled and pirouetted about her mouth, as if it were a conductor’s baton, and the city streets were her orchestra. 

I looked back through the plexiglass partition and saw half a dozen eyes the size of billiard balls—my wife and kids, wearing the same expression I’d seen before on roller coasters or when clinging to door jambs during Southern California earthquakes. We were in that sweet spot where danger and fun are perfectly balanced, and you know you’re going to have one hell of a story to tell. Whether you’re telling it here on this mortal coil or saving it for whoever’s manning the Pearly Gates is another question.

We were still barreling down Park Avenue, driving like we were in a high-speed chase. If you already have gray hair, or if you're going gray, just know that it felt like we were in The French Connection. If you don’t have gray hair, then just know that it felt like we were in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. 

She slid into the right lane as we approached Broadway, flicking on her blinker. Just then, a man stepped off the curb to cross the street. His tawny loafers matched his tawny briefcase, and his seersucker suit was accessorized with an ascot, a pocket square, chunky gold rings, and a braided gold bracelet.

He had this energy.

How did I note all this detail? Because at the last moment, she thought better of making that right turn at 50 miles an hour and slammed on the brakes to respect the red light. The man in the seersucker suit hopped back, panicked—I’m confident he hadn’t moved that quickly—or that gymnastically—in decades. He scrambled up to her driver’s side window, hunched over, his pulse practically audible, and unleashed a storm of obscenities, insults, and curse words, punctuated by a frothy, “You fucking asshole!”

She watched him deliver his tirade with something close to respect, as if she acknowledged he was entitled to throw his fit. After he spat out that final “You fucking asshole!” she let the silence linger, the toothpick dancing from one side of her mouth to the other. Then she slowly turned to look at me, her eyes stoic and cool, and she winked. 

My kind of city.

I used to think about the guy on the train a lot, the guy who asked my wife for a gun. What happened? At what point did he go this way instead of that? Which choice did he make that proved too much? Did that husky brunette in the office break his heart, the one with the gap in her teeth that just did it for him? Were his dreams of becoming a concert accordionist crushed by some snooty culture critic?

All good questions, but I realize I could ask the same of the cab driver who likely had her own string of heartbreaks and expired dreams. The difference is that she could look this cruel world in the eye, this soul-crushing existence that never ceases to remind us that we are fucking assholes—and she could wink. 

There are over 800 languages spoken in New York City: Romance languages, Germanic and Slavic languages, Indo-Iranian, Sino-Tibetan, and so many more. All beautiful, all culturally rich in their own ways—but completely worthless if you don’t know how to wink.

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Unrelated, a narrative podcast I wrote and produced with my kids just broke the 25,000 downloads mark. If you like your adventure with heart and humor, you might enjoy it.

Fair warning: As a visitor to Cobbler’s Gulch, there’s a better than even chance that you will encounter the following: pirates, circus folk, roughnecks, dwarves of various sizes and temperaments, dragon slayers, and a menagerie of monsters including goblins, tuxedo-wearing frogs, screaming scarecrows, witches, and many others that have yet to be properly named. If the above list makes you feel uncomfortable, please know there will also be adventure, whimsy, magic, bold acts of derring-do, and lots and lots and lots of goats. So many goats. Consider yourself warned!

If you're still wondering if this show is for you, know this: The story is a celebration of adventure and fantasy, of fiction and storytelling, of gut-busting laughs and the occasional spooky turn. It's about friendship and turning your flaws into a force with which to be reckoned. It's for kids, yes. Or children if you're puttin' on airs. But it's also for those of us in charge of kids or children, particularly those of us who may have forgotten how much adventure is still out there. We of Cobbler's Gulch hope this story helps you remember. We hope you join us. Either way, we offer you this: never let a goblin get your goat.

Here’s a link to the trailer! Available wherever you get your podcasts!

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And if you haven’t picked up my dark crime comedy novella Dig…