Dave(yes, OUR dave) showed me nothing but love from the moment we met that Friday evening, roughly six weeks into my Obama Campaign exile. I started that week living on a couch in Detroit, slept on a park bench in Pittsburgh Wednesday, and ended it in Midtown, Manhattan by Friday.


�What do you make of the city?� Dave asked a few days into my stay. From what I could tell, his life consisted of waking up every morning at 9, hopping on a handful of conference calls, maintaining excel sheets on one of his many laptops, walking around SoHo for a few hours, and ending it at a nightclub or bougie bar to find a tall, blonde woman to make a housewife out of.

�It�s a weird place, Dave. It seems like this city has a million different worlds in one � worlds that seemingly never interact while existing side-by-side.�

�What do you mean?�

�Take your doorman, for example.�

I don�t remember dude�s name, but I remember his voice. It was a real deep baritone, beautified by a real lush Nigerian accent. He was a gruff guy, and was mighty suspicious of me the first time we met. When I first arrived in Manhattan, Dave told me to wait for him inside his apartment and that if I had any trouble, just ask the doorman to let me in.

�Excuse me, sir, may I help you?� the doorman asked as I walked past him in the lobby

�Nah, I�m good.�

�Do you live here?� I�d like to feign indignation � and I reckon I probably am a bit that he�d ask me that question, but I did look a little suspect. Then again, you try to spend one night sleeping on a megabus and another on a park bench and still be pretty.

I waited in the lobby til Dave got back.


�You live here, in the Olivia, and you see him what, four, five times a week for months? What do you know about his life? His family, kids, all that shit?�

�I don�t really know him at all.�

�Yeah, that�s what I mean.. you two spend so much time side by side every day and neither of y�all know nothing about the other.�

�That is weird.�

�Yep.�

�What do you think of that one?� He says to me with a nod toward a tall, blonde woman across the street from us.

�All you.�

You know, I like the idea of becoming familiar with people who work in service jobs, but I've never been around someone in that position often enough for that kind of familiarity to develop.
» randomjunk on 2013-10-25 02:34:27

I've become familiar with Adrian, the homeless guy who hangs out outside my door. He's pretty nice but now every time I leave I have to have a conversation with him and tell him where I'm going and when I'll be back. He always wants to kiss me like six times to say hello like they do in the old country, and he can't speak enough French or English for me to explain why that makes me uncomfortable, so while before I felt awkward walking by him and saying nothing, now I feel like a prisoner in my own building. It's nice to see him but I feel a huge amount of relief when I walk out and he's not there.

You know sometimes I think that you don't even give people a chance to be nice to you, didi. If I walked into a place like that looking like I'd just been sleeping on a park bench, you bet the doorman would ask me if I belonged there. That's his job. But I would then explain to him that I was a guest of Dave's, that'd I'd had an all-night bus so that I was feeling pretty groggy, but that Dave told me to wait for him in his apartment. ("I think a shower would do me good, right? ::laughter::") If he was hesitant, I'd say something about how I totally understood his hesitation but that he could call Dave if he wanted to verify that I was who I said I was. Are you afraid that the guy wouldn't believe you?

btw when are you going to graduate?
» Zanzibar on 2013-10-25 05:52:28

It seems to be that way in pretty much every city. There's people that you see at work every day for years and still have no idea what their name is or where in the building they work. Then at the same time, you meet certain people and feel like you know them instantly. It's crazy how stuff like that happens and no one realizes it until it's brought up in conversation.
» LostSoul13 on 2013-10-26 01:32:13

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