I was walking my dog on a tony side street of the Upper West Side, and as I neared the corner, Crazy Bitch squatted and left a huge pile of excrement on the sidewalk. Crazy Bitch weights only 50 pounds, but this heap looked like the leavings of a Clydesdale. I began to worry, because the plastic poop-bag dispenser on my leash was empty, so I didn’t have anything to clean up with.
To be honest, I’ve been in this situation before. Normally, I would just make a run for it, but this was the Upper West Side. The residents here are so wealthy and resourceful they might hire a detective to track me down and hold me to account, so from a lamppost, I detached a flyer advertising guitar lessons (sorry Dan) and I picked a paper bag from the gutter, and with these items I wiped the pavement and tossed the wadded mess into a trashcan. The trashcan was only three feet to my right, but it was this tiny throw that caused my doom.
Somehow a spec of poop separated from the greater mess and flew past the trashcan to land on the shoulder of a little girl waiting to cross Columbus Avenue with her mother.
Both of them were dressed in immaculate beige outfits. For a moment they examined the poop on the girl’s shoulder, then stared at me like regents signaling to a henchman before an execution.
Of course, I felt terrible. Who throws poop at a little girl? Nobody who can look at themselves in the mirror. Nobody who hopes to get into heaven. I cleaned off the girl’s shoulder with a scrape of newspaper, and then I was begging on my hands and knees.
“Please forgive me. I’ll do anything,” I said.
“Are you willing to put that in writing,” said the little girl.
She spoke with a slight lisp. She was no more than eight years old, big chubby cheeks and blond curly hair. From her Louie Vuitton book bag, she produced a pack of crayons and on the back of a coloring book she wrote out a contract committing me to seven months of servitude. I signed with a pink Crayola.
“Mummy, can we have this notarized?”
“That’s an excellent idea sweetheart.”
All this happened in February, so for the last three months I’ve been acting as manservant to an eight-year-old. I answer the door when the other eight-year-old girls visit after school. I hang up their coats. I pick up dry cleaning, wash windows and take notes on events the children are planning for the spring. You’d think the parents would object to their daughter keeping a slave, but no, both mother and father take photos of me kowtowing to their little one, and show the pictures to friends as a point of pride. I’m not complaining. In another three months, I’ll have my freedom back, and my dignity, but I will say this: the people of the Upper West Side are not like other people.
