“That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two…” -
(THE LITTLE PRINCE)
Honestly, it could have been Prince Street, but for the sake of an easy pun based on BLEECKER St., I’ve chosen to title this downtown vignette otherwise.
Sometimes, I too, feel like at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter, or poet, and it is these times I take great care to pick a precise shade to paint my nails in a little salon downtown, exactly above Melvin’s Juice Bar, buzz "tenoverten” to get up. I went with Chanel “Sargasso” a dark shade some might call black, but it’s really a sort of green, named for the Sargasso Sea, according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -
The Sargasso Sea (/sɑːrˈɡæsoʊ/) is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean bounded by four currents forming an ocean gyre.[1] Unlike all other regions called seas, it has no land boundaries.[2][3][4] It is distinguished from other parts of the Atlantic Ocean by its characteristic brown Sargassum seaweed and often calm blue water.[1] …All of the currents deposit the marine plants and refuse which they are carrying into this sea, yet the ocean water in the Sargasso Sea is distinctive for its deep blue color and exceptional clarity, with underwater visibility of up to 61 m (200 ft).[8] It is also a body of water that has captured the public imagination, and so is seen in a wide variety of literary and artistic works and in popular culture.[9]
The poet inside, whose words I swallow down most days until I have a stomach-ache, was momentarily satiated by this pretty name. And so was the eating, breathing, hungry thing that the green fingernails now belonged to… She walked 3 blocks into the cold before being drawn into the bright lights of a well-stocked bodega for a snack. For obvious reasons, little poet be damned, we were keeping it low-cal. So I chose a papery stack of olive oil seaweed snacks (the ones with the shoe salts inside) and was on my way. Avoiding eye contact with Friday hoards outside bars as nibbled my snack laced with cuticle oil.
“Can I get one?”
I wasn’t paying attention and apparently had been walking and snacking lock step with a couple of Max Fish- looking kids. I hesitated for a second (I had like one airpod** in) and not even because I didn't want to share my food. I had been embarrassed earlier in the week when I happily and absent-mindedly offered a half-eaten Ben and Jerry’s pint slice (so good by the way) to the concierge at the Greenwich Hyatt.
“You’re not like a germaphobe, right, go on!'“
“Oh, I totally would but there are cameras everywhere”
Greenwich, right? I can’t remember exactly who on the train dryly commented on an unsolved murder case in neighboring New Canaan, that it wouldn’t have been possible in Greenwich because of the cameras everywhere…
I ate the rest of the pint slice even though I was full. This was Tuesday night. I still had some lingering embarrassment from this interaction, but I wasn’t in Greenwich now, I was in the Village. The immortal words of Marsha P. Johnson come to mind- “You’re in the village, be free! live!”.
“Yeah for sure!”
I said what I wanted to.
The Shaun-Johnson looking guy and his beanie-clad guy dug right into my seaweed snacks. I suppressed imagining if they had washed their hands or not. Meeting people this way, as a coldly sober loner minding your own business on the way to the subway station, is exactly like meeting horses, which you do by lightly blowing air into their big old nostrils. It’s a little weird and not very dialogue heavy. The less you say the better, you’re only there to observe the situation and tell the truth.
“What are you doing”
“I just got my nails done!”
“They’re kind of the color of seaweed..”
And then at least I had something to do on Friday night, jam into a booth at a sushi place and show my blog to these kids with Basquiat hair, comic impressions to spare, and enough heart to identify as painters and writers past the tender age of six…
And I felt for a second like like maybe I didn’t have to get this dumb literary inspired tattoo I was contemplating to find people to talk to about boa constrictors, primeval forests and stars.
A simple polish change and brisk walk with at least one airpod out will do.
** A bit of fiction hear, I lost my AirPods 2 weeks ago so have been using the wire ones. But “AirPod” is kind of cool sounding and as result “Ear Buds” (which always kind of sounded like a potato/staph infection to me anyway) sounds even worse, so I’m just using this word to describe the one of the two little speakers you shove in your ears in cities, even if its not technically correct