The 100 Day Project

Day Four

Earlier tonight I was headed up Seventh Avenue in the weird bermuda triangle of the West Village, which is loud and bright on Friday nights with cool kids and pretty couples sitting outside cafes. I’d just spent a few hours with a friend from college, and I was feeling happy and charged with the energy that comes from having a real conversation after a week of office jargon —

I’ll circle back with you on that…
It’s really nice to get some face time with the team…
It’s almost Friday, am I right?

I came up to the intersection of Seventh and Greenwich, where there was a confusing array of scaffolding and blocked-off sidewalk that forced the group of people waiting to cross the street into an awkward cluster on the curb. I grouped myself with them, and noticed one man kept looking over his shoulder nervously. After each glance he’d shuffle forward a little, trying to distance himself from the shadowed corner under the scaffolding , until he was practically standing in traffic.

I followed his eyes and saw he was looking at another man who was hunched over in the shadows — it sounds like a cliche, hunched over in the shadows, but he actually was — he was small and unhealthy-looking, sallow skin and deep bags under his eyes, dark dirty hair, his shoulders slumped forward. He was wearing a tight, dirty red striped white shirt, and he was scrawny but with a protruding stomach — he looked like a cracked-out, overgrown baby. He was muttering under his breath and shooting eye-daggers at the man who kept looking at him over his shoulder.

My brain categorized this man as unpredictable. Unpredictable is different than bizarre but harmless, which is a category for the people who sing gospel songs on the subway or sit covered in pigeons in the park — unpredictable is what gets people slashed.

It’s best to distance yourself from this type immediately, as the man who was standing almost in the middle of Seventh Avenue had done. I think I stood for a beat too long, though, checking out the almost storybook creepiness of this guy in the shadows, and before I could take a big step out into the street, he spat on me.

I flinched but only out of reflex — I didn’t feel too grossed out. I figured I could have been slashed. I wiped the spit off my arm onto a poster plastered on the scaffolding and crossed the street at a quick clip.

Maybe there’s a metaphor here, I’m not sure — I mostly just wanted to talk about the first time I got spat on. I feel a little bit more like a New Yorker now.