memory

I've been reading back over my old entries and discovering to my chagrin that my writing resembles the way that I talk: all movement, no cohesion. There used to be a time, back in my term-paper days, that I would be able to start with a Beginning, move to a Middle, then triumphantly accept accolades at the End. I was Ritalin of the written word.

Meanwhile, verbally, I explored all the furthest boundaries of space and time, romping gaily through the distortions that accompany a White Hole spewing random fragments of linear progression out into the universe in odd and incoherent combinations.

Nowadays this is becoming a problem; more of a problem than it was when nobody around me listened anyway, back when I was working at Excite@Home. The people that I worked with were sharp, and English was their Friend. Now that I'm here at this new start-up, it's turning into a big deal. Of the people that work here, I can only name seven that speak English as a fluent language, and one of them is leaving for Yale come Friday.

I find it ironic that I'm more misunderstood now that I'm surrounded by Asians than I ever was surrounded by Caucasians and Indians.

O'course, we all know that the Japanese never got along with any other Asians. Damn foreigners kept trying to breathe our air.

THE GUY...

For the last two days now, the Guy has been floating around the apartment like a lacrymose muppet, flopping down every so often on a convenient piece of furniture to whimper, "I might die tomorrow."

And for whatever reason, probably because it's funny to watch a, let's face it, not-petite biker guy actually "waft" across one's field of vision, I've taken to biting him whenever he says it. Go figure.

Death makes my teeth itch. I have a whole new sympathy for cannibals.

"Kiss me?" he asked in the kitchen last night, "because I might die tomorrow."

"Be nice to me," he pleaded, when I made disparaging noises about his Medabots viewing habits and wanted to watch something -- anything -- else. "because I might die tomorrow."

"Make me some herbal tea?" he asked in a small voice, draped across my futon. "Because I might die tomorrow."

"You're not going to die tomorrow," I said patiently. I was busy on the computer. "Shut up with the dying thing. Your surgery isn't until Thursday. That's two whole days away."

"But I'm dating you," he pointed out, and whimpered a little more. "Anything could happen to me. The Hirata women are bad luck."

I dragged myself away from the computer long enough to leave him a nice, half-moon memento of my perfectly aligned teeth in his shoulder. "Shut up with the dying," I said firmly. "The clock only starts ticking if we're married."

FAMILY...

On Thursday my cousin from Japan, Toshiyuki (that's his name, not his origin), came into town for a three day stop-over on his way back home. For about a month he stayed at my mother's place in Seattle, sparing time from that maternal purgatory only long enough to visit our great-aunt in Chicago.

Mom adored him.

"I wish he was my child," she told me over the phone. "He washes the dishes, he cleans up after himself, he taught himself how to use the vacuum..."

"Is this going to be a guilt trip thing?"

"He's so wonderful," she cooed. "He's such an attentive, considerate boy. And smart, too."

"Hm."

"I wish my children...."

Masako picked him up at the youth hostel he'd found by Union Square, and drove him to meet me at one of the great tourist sites of San Francisco, The Stinking Rose.

We shook hands. He looked awkward. I considered hugging him -- he was family after all -- but decided against it after I realized he could quite possibly have died from the embarrassment.

"Huh," I thought. "I'm related to Milhouse."

My cousin turned out to be a stoop-shouldered young guy of about 27, midway between my sister and me, with wire-rim glasses and a haircut that was measured with a ruler. We learned over the course of the next day that he was a member of his chess club, he played clarinet, he liked drums, and he was intending to go into politics.

Friday, which I took off from work, was full of tourist pleasures with my sister firmly in tow. Early that morning she took him rock climbing in the Mission. Then we hit the Golden Gate Bridge (windy), Fisherman's Wharf (filling), then the Asian Tea Garden and Bison in Golden Gate Park.

That night I took him to Stomp, and treated him to his very first non-McDonalds (let's say it in Japanese altogether now, folks, "Ma-ku-do-na-ru-do!") hamburger.

He was baffled. Not by Stomp. By the hamburger.

I've always taken hamburgers for granted, so it hadn't occurred to me that there are people out there -- people related to me -- that have never actually consumed a real quarter-pounder before. Max's serves a big burger because Max's believes in the redeeming factors of quantity when it comes to food. Like most sit-down restaurants, Max's also serves its hamburgers open-faced, with the patty on one half of the bun, while the other half is placed elsewhere on the plate with all the other toppings (lettuce, tomato, onion) on top of it. Pickles are separate; the ketchup and mustard are brought by the waiter.

Toshiyuki stared down at his meal with a look that I couldn't quite translate until he started picking up his hamburger layer by layer and nibbling on each of the pieces separately.

"Um," I said.

"You don't know how to eat a hamburger," I guessed.

That look slid across Toshiyuki's face again. He was baffled. "Ma-ku-do-na-ru-do hamburgers are different," he observed, parenthetically.

No joke.

WORK...

For the past six months I've been under the impression that the people in this company lack a sense of humor, a failing that has made me seriously consider unemployment again as a viable career choice for the future. It could have been my imagination; the majority of the staff here is Chinese, and the Japanese have always considered the Chinese race a dull, overly serious lot. No matter what I may think, I'm still a victim of cultural conditioning, after all.

Given the choice between being poor or being surrounded by people that don't laugh, poverty starts to look rather attractive. There're a lot of things to find funny in the impecunious state. If I'd been rich I would never have lived in the tenement, and if I'd never lived in the tenement, I'd never have had the chicken family next door, and if I'd never had the chicken family next door, think how dull my life would have been.

I was sitting in a cubicle with several engineers and a project manager -- all Chinese, all speaking English for my benefit -- when one of them abruptly fell silent and stared out the window at the parking lot.

"Look," he said, nudging one of his colleagues. "There are white people near your car, Ken."

I glanced out the window myself, startled, and discovered that there were, indeed, three white guys standing in a lazy, hanging-out sort of fashion by one of the cars. They were plainly from the software company next door; if nothing else, their computer yuppie uniforms (khaki pants, goaties, cigarettes and hush puppies) promised no very high order of threat.

The first speaker wandered to the window and stared at them gravely, blinking behind heavy glasses. "Are white people allowed out there?"

All the engineers very solemnly stood up and gathered at the window to stare at the three white guys. It must have been a shock to the white guys, harmless as they were, to glance up from their conversation and suddenly discover a row of round Chinese faces mooning them through the plate glass. One of them flicked his cigarette away and they made a hasty retreat, bunched together for safety.

"Maybe they were going to steal your car, Ken. We should call the police."

"White people," one of the Chinese engineers said with great disapproval.

And that's how I found out they have a sense of humor after all.

wheeled

There wasn't all that much that could be considered memorable about my last full day in New York. A thunderstorm that night, one that frizzed out the flawed, Comfort Inn satellite system so that all I was left with in viewing options were the menu items for the in-house Pay-Per-View movies ("Sexy Babes!" "Fornicator, Part XI!" "Dee-Dee Does the Dirty!") or a polite, remotely apologetic message informing me that the satellite was temporarily not receiving any signal and that any time now, if I'd just wait, just a few more minutes, that's right, just sit there and look vacuous, any time now the signal would come back and I could continue to watch television and thank you SO much for staying at Comfort Inn!

I turned off the television and watched the thunderstorm instead.

***

THE GUY...

Those that've read for a while know that the Guy has serious issues about his teeth, and I'm still not sure if this is because he's British or just because he's a guy. The purchase of the electric toothbrush several months ago is, I still believe, the only reason that he brushes his teeth regularly.

(Side note: I'm now totally incapable of brushing my teeth with a regular old manual $3.99 Colgate Medium Bristle toothbrush. The electric toothbrush buzzes for two minutes, then stutters to inform you that you're done brushing your teeth. The manual toothbrush doesn't do that. I was standing in my hotel bathroom brushing my teeth, staring blankly at my mirror and waiting for the little stutter to tell me to stop, when I realized that I'd been brushing my teeth for the last five minutes and the chances of my manual toothbrush telling me to quit was pretty damn remote.)

Since we've been dating, I've harped on about his dental care because I'm vaguely worried that we'll end up dating for ten years and at the end of that decade of love and bliss his teeth will have fallen out. While I've never actually kissed anybody who needs (and does not wear) dentures, I'm fairly certain it's an experience I want to postpone as long as possible.

"Go see a dentist," I'd usually start.

"When you go see a gyno," he'd say.

And so things stood until I actually saw a gyno back in, oh, November of last year.

"Go see a dentist," I told him.

"When you go see a gyno," he said.

"Hah. I did see a gyno," I said triumphantly. "Now you go see a dentist."

"La la la la la la la la," the Guy sang. "I can't hear you, la la la la la..."

Never have I met such a coward.

"When was the last time you went to see a dentist?" I demanded.

"A while," the Guy said evasively. He optimistically attempted to divert my attention. "Look at what I can do!"

"A year ago?" I asked.

The Guy waved his toy-of-the-moment about. "It's been a while. Look at this! Look at this!"

"Two years?"

"A while. Check out this neat thing it can do!"

"Four years?"

"A while. Oh, and look at this...!"

"Six years?"

"A while. I got it really cheap, too. I can hook it up to the TiVo..."

"More than six years?"

...at which point the Guy would usually disappear into another room, talking loudly to himself in a childish attempt not to hear the Yuhri.

So it's no surprise when he became very quiet one night last week and finally confessed to a soul-killing toothache. And this is where I failed the Good Girlfriend Acid Test.

"I told you to go to the dentist."

It turned out later on that he had an impacted wisdom tooth, which means surgery come Thursday and antibiotics every day until then. A teeth cleaning on the day after the initial inspection; a follow-up cleaning later on; a consult today for the surgery; and surgery itself on Thursday.

Obviously, I must make up for the Good Girlfriend Acid Test failure, a process that will require a great deal of pampering of the patient. I've already hit Google for good ideas. Is ice cream contra-indicated for tooth extraction cases?

***

THE CAR...

I finally have one.

My very first car.

On Wednesday last, the Guy and his friend came up from San Jose to finish the paperwork, leaving me with joint ownership of a bright red, 1997 Honda CR-V. "Joint" in that my partner for the purchase was PeopleFirst Loans, an amiable company that has fronted me the check for the purchase and will now be making its own back in increments of approximately $300 a month for the rest of my life. This is outside of the $450+ I will be paying every six months for car insurance, on top of the registration fees I will be paying to make it legal to drive my car.

But.

I have a car.

I've named it Pi-man, pronounced "PEE-mahn," a Japanese word meaning "Bell Pepper." In fact, tomorrow I have a meeting with my insurance agent so that said agent can take pictures of the car.

"Meet Pi-man," I'll say.

"What?" the insurance agent will say.

(I have this conversation all planned out in my head, see.)

***

Remind me to tell you guys about my cousin, sometime tomorrow.

brooklyn boobs

Thursday, it turned out, was the ringing of the bell for the cleanup at Ground Zero. I watched on the television while preparations for it began; a camera crew was interviewing one of the clean-up crew on a stand overlooking the eight-story pit where the World Trade Center used to be.

Me, my mind was on my dress and the fact that the hotel iron didn't work. Shallow is as shallow does.

The clinic I was going to spend the day at was only three blocks away, easily managed even in strappy high heels. I padded down the street, toting my laptop, and remembered a bit belatedly that New York gets muggy in the summer; not the ideal environment for full business attire. I turned left down 81st Street, and found myself on a residential block. Every single house was flying an American flag. Some of them flew more than that. This is where Patriotism lives between one year's July 4th and the next: somewhere between 3rd and 4th Ave.

Somehow in the act of packing, I'd neglected to include a few necessary toiletries. One of them, a razor for shaving, was a deliberate absentee; not entirely positive about the nitpicky-ness of airport security, I thought it best to avoid the question altogether by acquiring smooth, ladylike legs over a counter somewhere in Brooklyn. The toothbrush omission, I'll admit quite candidly, was entirely my own fault. Somewhere between the British boyfriend and the electric Braun toothbrush, I forgot to pack one.

My bad.

My colleague had asked me to wait for her at a small place down the street called Bagel Boy. "You have to try their breakfasts," she urged over the cell phone. "You have to experience a New York City bagel with egg whites." As it happened, across that particular street there happened to be a tiny hole-in-the-wall grocer promising all the friendly food and service of your average 7-11, without any of the expensive floor room. I spied the cluttered windows with relief and popped inside, where I encountered a wizened little grey-haired man that looked like he had originally been stocked as part of the inventory back in the roaring '20s.

"Do you sell toothbrushes here?" I inquired.

His eyes lit up. Friendly folks, I thought. "Do you have toothbrushes back there?" he called out. Behind the cash register a clerk appeared, a middle-eastern man previously expertly camoflaged between Snapple signs and tobacco ads.

"Yeah," he grunted. He rustled about behind his counter, scrounging.

I beamed at both of them, left somewhat in the dark as to whether the little old man actually belonged there or not, and went to make my purchase.

Of course, it was while I was paying the suddenly friendly cashier that I realized my shoulder bag had somehow managed to pull my blouse apart and that, as a result, I was offering two of New York's finest citizens a freebie.

Brooklyn, meet my breasts. Breasts, meet Brooklyn.

There isn't much to be said about my first day on the field in New York. It was tiring, it was hectic, it was nerve-wracking, and at one point I caught myself chewing on my nails. On the other hand, it was oddly satisfying in that pleasant, masochistic way associated with papercuts and picking at scabs. Once more I encountered that refreshing New York bluntness, which said exactly what it thought, when it thought it, in exactly the way it thought it. It's easy to trust a nurse that stares at your scale reading and bluntly tells you, "Honey, you have to lose some weight or in a few years we're gonna be chiselling your tombstone." Once you've heard that from your nurse, you feel assured that you have found Diogenes' Honest Man, and to nobody's great surprise, he has a uterus. Here, you think to yourself, here is someone that won't lie to me to save my feelings. Must remember to ask her if this haircut suits me.

There's a vast difference between the New York attitude and Asian Tact Deficiency Syndrome (ATDS), though what that difference involves is rather difficult to pin down. Both have a tendency to make me grin. On the other hand, whereas one makes me grit my teeth, itch under my fingernails and rouse generations of xenophobic hatred, the other makes me laugh, embrace the strangeness, and compare the benefits of honesty over California's more Politically Correct leanings.

Afterwards, my colleague urged me to join her for dinner. "You lived in New York six years and you've never been in the city?" she asked, astonished. I muzzled a sigh and plodded along at her heels, up the street and down the subway entrance into subway cars that took us every which way. "I'll take you to the University," she promised. "Or ... we could have dinner in the Village."

Presumably, I was supposed to know what 'The Village' was. Everybody else in America did. I nodded obligingly -- 'The Village,' great; anyplace less likely to contain something that looked like a Village I'd never yet encountered -- and marched for another six thousand miles on my aching feet.

My coworker turned out to be a superlative tourguide; she knew New York like the back of her boyfriend's hand, which was precisely why she knew the city: he lived there, somewhere, and met us at the strange little bar that produced our dinner. It's was an oddity worth mentioning for me that the public places in New York allowed smoking. I eyed the profusion of little glass ashtrays with astonishment. (It's a measure of how rare the smoking habit has become in California that I couldn't even remember what ashtrays were called.)

"Haven't seen those in a while," I commented to my friend.

"What?" she asked.

I pointed. "Those ... things. The glass ones. With the smoking and the grooves ..."

"Ashtrays?"

"We use them for spoons."

Midway through dinner, my sister called. I trotted out of the smoke and the haze and dallied on the sidewalk, turning my head this way and that to experiment with the scarily strong signal I was picking up on my phone.

"Where are you?" she wanted to know.

"New York."

"You're WHAT?"

"Oh," said I. "Did I forget to mention I was going to New York?"

Apparently I had. "Crap," she sighed. "I was going to ask if you wanted to go to dinner."

***

We -- my coworker and I -- parted ways at the subway station. "Take the N or the R," she instructed. "Are you going to be okay?"

"Sure." I smiled optimistically, and Californian-like, didn't add the thought that bubbled up promptly after my reassurances. ("I'll just flip a coin to figure out which direction to go in. How hard could it be?")

It would be sitcom-perfect to say that I got on the wrong train and ended up in Queens before I finally realized what was going on. I darted out of the subway at Queens Plaza and huddled in a round-eyed, alarmed ball of tourist terror before getting on the proper subway going the proper way. By this point, it was half past ten, and my mind was beginning to focus on my bladder in a fashion I thought unnecessarily obsessive.

Despite the hour, there were still plenty of people taking the subway, and a few stops after my Crap-I'm-In-Queens? station, a small group of African-American women plumped down around me in the comfortable, settling-in fashion of old friends gathering for a good gossip. The subway car was fairly full; despite an NPR report I'd heard earlier in the month about obnoxious new "friendly" subway announcements, I hadn't heard a single thing that scared me more than Elmo asking me to put on my seatbelt in the taxi ride down.

One of the women wiggled her butt into a comfortable position that seemed to involve half of my seat as well, and from that point forward all of my body heat radiated from that single contact point on my hip, right next to -- damn. My bladder again.

"So I axed her, which should I do for the prom?" the youngest of the trio said, "and she sez, go comfor'ble."

The other two women made approving sounds and settled into peaceable conversation about the girl's forthcoming prom. It was an archetype for the 21st century. Three black women in a New York subway: Clotho, a working teen with a grown-up's mind; Lachesis, a middle-aged woman looking tired and wistful for her youth; and Astropos, a plump grandmotherly type in the blithe, bright colors of Africa, listening with half an ear and dreaming about orthopedic shoes and hot tea.

Of the three, it was the youngest that was the most confident. Lachesis hung on her lips with the sort of admiration that used to be Clotho's at her elder's feet. In this myth it was the children that were wiser than the adults. Astropos looked on with detached interest, already floating on her own tributary. "Who'll you go with, hon?" asked Lachesis, inching into the dream of the Prom, like a middle-aged Cinderella longing after her glory years.

"I'm gonna go with my cousin," Clotho said unselfconsciously. She said it without emphasis, completely free of the need to defend the incest of a relative doubling as prom date. "We're gonna go with a whole bunch of people. It's out on this boat, and then it casts off after like one o'clock so then it turns into this moonlight cruise."

At one of the station stops, a wandering minstrel boarded with a cardboard sign, a tin can, and a guitar clumsily strapped around his neck with a frayed rope. (I only noticed that detail later, as I did his race; catch a glimpse while he disembarks for the next car, because I stubbornly refuse to turn and look at him.) Clotho stopped mid-sentence to watch, attention caught by the first awkward chords of what eventually turned into a popular song from the '80s. The other two women turned to look because Clotho turned to look, and for this subway ride -- like most subway rides, I imagine -- she held the eye for the three of them.

It was excrutiatingly painful to listen to the man sing. In my mind I built him up as a weedy, long-haired hippy-type, in Salvation Army clothes with a scraggy beard and Old Glory stitched somewhere on his clothes. "I love this song," Clotho announced, and dug through her belongings for a dollar.

When he left, I caught a glimpse of his profile and discovered he was Asian, or at least Hispanic, clean-shaven, clean-cut, the very antithesis of the hippy I had envisioned.

A few minutes later we slowed down for a station and did not stop. There was security tape everywhere, and signs boldly written for the subway conductor: DO NOT STOP HERE. An abandoned station, though it looked perfectly serviceable. The three women fell silent and stared out the window with me, then shook themselves as one.

"It makes me sad every time we go through that," said Lachesis, her first original thought.

"I was in school when it happened," said Clotho. "My friend's mom, she worked on like the fourth or fifth floor. You know, it was my birthday. I was wearin' this new outfit, like, with this new blouse and jeans. We was gonna cut class and go to the Trade Center, do some shopping, since it was my birthday, and my mom was workin' on the first floor. I swear, for the longest time, I thought God was punishing me."

Oh, I thought. It's that station.

The women were gossiping around me, like I was the fourth wall in the mythos: null and void. "I was so mad at the school, the way they tol' us," Clotho informed the others. Astropos roused herself enough to listen, dreamy expression focusing just for the length of the story. "There was some kinda list they had in the front office, and they just went bang, straight down that list. Everybody that's parents worked in the Trade Center, they pulled out of their classes and tol' them their parents might be dead. My friend showed up outside my classroom door, she was crying so hard you couldn't see anything of her from the eyes down, she was crying so hard.

I tol' my teacher, I gotta go. I di'n't believe it when they tol' us. I thought it was some kinda joke. It looked like a movie."

"Did her mother die?" asked Lachesis, wanting closure.

Clotho shook her head decidedly. "No. She got out in time. So'd my mom."

"Pore chil'," said Astropos anyway, sympathizing with the trauma absent the loss.

"Every time I think of my birthday now, that'll be what I remember," prophesized Clotho.

They got off the train. My hip missed the extra warmth, and I shivered the rest of the way back to 86th Street.

I got back to my hotel room at eleven-thirty and pondered the priority arguments of my bladder and my aching feet.

[Next time: The sky is falling...!]

new new york

For a rare change, there's nothing to do at work. That is, either I have nothing to do, or my work hasn't caught up to me yet. The fact that I've been switching cubes every two days seems to be having an effect; every time people get used to me in one cube, I move to another and then they all get disoriented again. Bow down to me. I am the Disappearing Asian Monkey Mole. ("What happened to, oh, what's her name, the round-headed Asian girl." "Which one?")

Thus, flying low under the radar, I bring to you another belated installment of Faulty Vision, where humor is just another excuse to dance around in someone else's underwear.

In case you haven't guessed it, I'm a little tired, due in part to the fact that I had an exhausting four days in New York. I promised to write journal entries while I was there, and to a certain extent I did. That is to say, I jotted notes. Want to see them?

New York.


  Brooklyn. Dark. Lightening. Boom! 

    Scary doctor. ### is biting her nails again.

  Bagels!

         ...hate these shoes...

   ..sneakers are my friends. I hate everybody.

Oh. PMS. 

  Bagels!

    People keep calling me "dear"? 

Aww. Wet delivery man. Big tip!!

	I'm cute.

		Queens ugly.

I arrived late on Wednesday night, the day before the firebell tolled on Ground Zero: clean-up finished, or at least moved somewhere else. Too tired to do much in the way of sightseeing, and too smart to wander around Brooklyn on my own at eleven o'clock at night, I struck up conversation with the front desk clerk and revelled in his accent. The fact that I kept grinning at him was, I think, beginning to perturb him. There was a positive look of relief on his face when I finally wobbled my way up to my room.

Something about New York made me chatty with every random stranger I met, whether that be over the phone or across a desk. The fact that most men I spoke to persisted in callig me "hon" or "dear" did a lot to dispel the scariness of being in a strange big city all by my fragile feminine flower lonesome. Starving as I was, I plodded back down to the front desk and interrogated the clerk and the doorman about eating facilities nearby.

"At this hour?" the clerk said dubiously.

I was instantly disappointed; wasn't New York supposed to be the City that Never Sleeps?

"You're thinking about the weekends," the valet said kindly. "This is Wednesday."

It was hit-or-miss that I would make it to the hotel at all; treated to a barrage of stories about the dangers of getting into limos by both the person in front and the person in back of me in the taxi line, I prepared myself for my ride by carefully hiding a quarter inside the palm of my hand. What I was thinking I would do with the quarter is anybody's guess. I was, after all, looped out of my mind with tiredness and sheer nervousness.

"Give me all of your money or I will ravish your plump and oddly appealing feminine body!"

"Take that!"

"Aaargh! You have a quarter! I am foiled!"

Contrary to all my expectations, the taxi driver was a very timid man struggling with the basics of the English language. He was, if possible, more alarmed by his passenger than his passenger was by her driver.

"You talk too fast," he said plaintively after I'd explained my destination to him for the fourth time. He'd set out before asking me where I was headed, out of some dubious cabby logic: if I'm moving, I'm getting closer. "You want ... where?"

In the movie Shanghai Noon, there's a scene where Jackie Chan attempts to ask directions to Carson City from a group of American Indians. His hosts nod obligingly, and one of them leans across him to say to another, "And now he's talking louder, like that'll make a difference."

"Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn," I said loudly and slowly. "Comfort Inn. 8315..."

"What?"

Elmo began squeaking to me in the backseat, reminding me to put on my seatbelt. Just for safety's sake, I added a nickel to my quarter: one coin in each hand. Take that, Elmo.

We drove across the freeway, and the New York skyline was pressed in lights against the sky. I craned my head to see, but for all the talk about the missing World Trade Center towers nagging people with their absence, I didn't even notice. I couldn't even remember where they were supposed to be.

Dinner was purchased from a twenty-four hour diner/restaurant that promised on its menu to deliver to the Comfort Inn. The price on all the items was reasonable, which posed a bit of a problem when the hearty Brooklynite on the other end of the phone informed me that "the minimum for delivery's $15 bucks, hun."

'Hon.' Imagine if you will, Rocky Balboa pouring tea and handling the crumpets. "Would you like one lumps or two with that, hun?"

Out of sheer desperation, I finally ended up ordering enough food for four people: a roast beef sandwich I could eat the following day, some sort of dinner item I'm utterly incapable of remembering now, and dessert. I called the Guy to inform him of my dietary decisions -- he was thrilled, needless to say -- then plodded through the limited offerings of my hotel room cable system before answering the door for the delivery man.

"I need the receipt," I explained to him.

He nodded and pointed at it, then gestured to himself. He wanted the receipt. What for? I handed it to him. He made gestures: going away now.

I understood that.

"Not with my receipt you don't," I announced, and opened my hand for it.

He plopped it back into my hand and stared at me expectantly.

I gave him a larger tip. He beamed. Then he wanted the receipt again.

"But I need it," I whined. "I need to get reimbursed, and in order to get reimbursed, I need the receipt."

He nodded brightly and pointed at the receipt. Gimme.

Y'all, he couldn't speak English. Not one word. We stared at each other, mutually frustrated, grinning with the pure stupidity of the situation (that is, I presume it was the stupidity of the situation that he was grinning at). It was a scene out of an old, bad Tarzan flick. Me Tarzan, you Jane. -- Can you say 'expense report,' Tarzan?

We finally agreed through the universal language of desperation -- ("You don't happen to speak any Japanese, do you? French? Francais? German? Deutsch? Just Spanish? Er...Espagnol? Crrrrrap.") -- to go on a field trip downstairs to the lobby. If he couldn't speak English, then it stood to reason that the people downstairs would speak some Spanish. No, I know it didn't really stand to reason, but it was eleven-thirty and I wanted to eat my rapidly cooling whatever-it-was, dammit.

The guy at the front desk had changed, and he wasn't fun like the last guy. We stood in front of his high desk and stared at him while he dealt with some future reservation on the telephone. Our mournful gazes irritated him; when he was finished dealing with his telephone pest, he directed a glower at the pair of us. "Can I help you?" he said in that yummy Brooklyn accent. Almost against his will, he added, "hon?"

The deliveryman began talking to him in Spanish. I began talking to him in English.

"I don't understand what he's saying," said I.

"... ... ... ... ...," said he.

"...need a receipt for my expenses..." said I.

"... ... ... ...!" said he.

We stopped talking, stared at the front desk clerk again, and watched his arteries starting to swell with pure rage. The deliveryman and I drew closer together for protection.

Ah, New York. There you are at last.

Next installment: Meet My Breasts, Brooklyn!