Whitney tells me I need to go to the bank to take out some cash, at least $250 for the presumed goodies we will be purchasing at some hellhole rag house today. I’m helping her with her vintage buying. Assuming that you don’t know what a rag house it is, allow me to explain. A rag house is a Costco-sized warehouse filled to the brim with used clothing. I’m not talking about a neatly – or even not so neatly – organized Goodwill. I’m talking about a place where clothing spills out of bins and compressed two-ton squares get shipped around with forklifts – all of it creating a veritable landscape of cotton, polyester, and blue jean denim.
Anyway, said hellhole only takes cash. I walk into my local bank and head straight for an ATM just vacated by a young woman. I notice that she has left her screen open with that “What do you want to do next?” question that means I have two minutes to steal all of her money. I’d like to think I’m a good person, one with her own means of providing for herself with the gains from sort-of-not-really-hard work. In other words, I don’t need her money, or yours for that matter.
I shut down her screen, pressing cancel. I assume when someone walks more than seven feet away from an ATM machine, they’re done using it. That, or they are moronically trusting: this is a bank accessible via Broadway by any asshole that just wants to wait for people like this to absentmindedly forget to close out their transactions. Thank me later.
Just as I have pulled my card out of the slot and started typed in my PIN for my own account, I see the girl come back out of my peripheral vision. I look up in her direction.
“Sorry, I thought you were done so I shut your session down.”
“Oh, okay…” she says.
Apparently she had walked away from her “Just Fucking Rob Me” ATM session to sign the back of a check. She looks a little confused that I have stepped in and is none too appreciative. She has pretty, blonde, Montauk beach hair and looks about my age but better put together, the way people have to be put together when they work in an office.
I request $260 liquidated from a checking account and she watches as I pocket a large fold of money into my wallet. I suppose this looks vaguely suspicious; who the hell takes out more than $60 at an ATM these days? Taking out more than that leaves you exposed to mugging and your own stupidity. The last time I carried around this much cash, it got stolen from me backstage at a show in Chicago. That wad of impolitely nipped three hundred dollars actually launched this blog [feel free go back to the 2008 archives and read “A Letter to a Thief”].
Like a responsible person, I end my session. As I turn around to leave, I am about to apologize for commandeering her ATM machine but she cuts me short.
“Are you sure you closed my account out?” she asks with the furrowed brow of someone who thinks they are being robbed right in front of their eyes.
Instead of telling her that she’s an naïve idiot and she should be thankful that I was the person who came up to the machine after her and not some fifteen year old high schooler who doesn’t want to work at Jamba Juice this year, I smile and yes, “Yeah, I’m sure.” I quell my irritation knowing that she’ll check her statement later and see that she’s rude and neurotic, although people generally lack such self-awareness. I walk out secretly wishing that I had used her money to fund my purchases in Brooklyn today. Jenny B Teaches You a Valuable Lesson.
Whitney and I meet in the subway station and start our trek into Brooklyn. She snacks on pistachios and talks about how she used to eat them in Milan all the time back in 2005. We talk about Restalyne and Botox and who we know that has done either. I feel Manhattan recede away from us as the train barrels full speed for what feels like a mile, at which point I know we are under the river.
We arrive at our destination and emerge from the depths of the subway into a scene that is galaxies away from anything I am routinely familiar with. We’re not in the Williamsburg varietal of Brooklyn. We are in the hood. The likelihood that this place will ever be gentrified by creative people “just looking for a little more space” or hip kids who bartend is highly unlikely.
The air seems thicker here and sunlight struggles to break through the haze of what was supposed to make for a day of thunderstorms that never come. The streets are treeless and men who cannot find gainful employment stand on corners soliciting drugs or conversation – I don’t know what else one does on a street corner. I’ve only ever been to places like this while watching The Wire from the comfort of my well-appointed apartment, drinking an evening latte.
Places like this exist. When forced into someone else’s abysmal reality, you fire up equal parts self-loathing and gratitude. It’s hard to imagine how different the circumstances of your life have been from the people who live here. You begin to understand why people deal drugs and kill people to get out of places like this.
Whitney wants to get something to eat before we spend the next four hours in a windowless box digging through the sartorial refuse of millions. She skips the bodega on the corner, populated with a few guys liberally dropping N-bombs and walks down the street a ways in favor of a place with “Grocery” written on a green awning.
Inside, the place is less like a grocery and more like, well, a bodega. She walks up to the sandwich counter and addresses the man behind it with, “You have turkey meat?” Her voice is loud and sort of Southern and I smile because Whitney’s questions always sound like veiled threats. Like if he didn’t have turkey meat she would feign vocal and loud-ish disappointment. I look behind the glass casing and the first thing my eyes fall on is a tube of spiced ham. It is marbled with circles of fat and is not pink in the slightest – something I usually associate with sandwich pork.
I walk away while Whitney starts assessing toppings and condiments. The man is already calling her “sweetheart.” The exchange some bizarre joke about incited by him asking Whitney, “I make you hot?” of course in reference to the sandwich. There’s a wall of various pork cracklings and the requisite gallons of soda. By the grace of God I find a bag of cashews and raisins. Whitney pays for her giant sub and tells the checkout woman, “No cambio.” I’m hoping that the woman actually speaks Spanish.
To get to the rag house we have to take a gypsy cab. Think unmarked, dented Lincoln town car. Enter at your own risk. That type of thing. We hop into one next to the bodega and drive a mile or so to the warehouse. I watch the streets pass by, pretending I know where the hell I am. Being a girl in a cab is generally one of the more nerve wracking experiences when you are unfamiliar with the area. There is no way to tell whether or not this person is actually headed to your destination or down to an alley somewhere and do bad things, most of which you will probably never recover from. The best you can do is keep chanting “Trust…trust…trust” in your head to drown out the sounds of “You’re going to die…This guy is going to rape you….I hope you called your mother recently…You’re totally going to die today.” Then, when you’ve inevitably made it in one piece without being physically harmed, you hand over your money and a “thank you” and chastise yourself for being a stereotyping bitch.
