“Excuse me, sir.” The man in pink hoodie approached me when I stepped out of the subway. His eyes got greener and creepier up close, and he looked shorter than most others on the platform, bordering on dwarfism. “May I ask you something?”
In that split second of hearing and not-hearing, I considered pretending to vibe along with my headphones but then nodded away out of compassion. What can I say? I guess I have a soft spot for kindness.
“You’ve got, like, seventy cents to spare?”
It was an oddly specific number. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the man was sus or anything but he just spilled the fishiest figure out there like it was nothing.
“Why seventy?” I asked. My mind was swirling with possibilities.
“Why what?” He looked genuinely confused.
“Why seventy?” I repeated. “Why not fifty? Eighty?”
The man’s eyes brightened with wonder. “You’ve got eighty cents?”
“That’s not the point.” I shook my head. “I’m just curious what made you stop at seventy.”
He shrugged like he’d never really given it much thought. If it were for my father, he would have given this man a good life lesson there and then on never to use his words lightly again. But I wasn’t my father. And this man was surely not me.
“Look, man. You’ve got the dime or not?” He sighed like an engine dying in an old car. “I’ve got places to be.”
People these days. But it was true that I, too, had to be somewhere else, or at least should have long been heading that way, to please the indomitable bully I had the misfortune of calling my boss by showing up at work on time. If he knew I was spending away my billable minutes out on the street like this, trying to talk some sense into a stranger, more so a beggar, he would have probably fired me on the spot.
“Okay, okay.” I slid my wallet from the chest pocket of my jacket with a sigh. Yet, as soon as I clipped the wallet open, I had the shock of my life. In the silky cave that would have otherwise contained some wad of bills now stood a dollar-sized nothing. No greens, no clinks.
I glanced up at the man inadvertently.
“Are you fucking with me, player?” The lines on his face took sharper turns.
My eyes skimmed the platform, considering all the ways I could turn this around in my favor. People on the platform looked equally clueless, milling about like souls stuck in limbo. I remembered this trick Mom taught me all those years ago, after I got expelled from high school and before she left home for a Vinyasa yoga bootcamp she never returned from. She’d told me to draw three quick breaths in the face of stress and then focus on the very first thought that came to my mind. She told me to never panic, that it was the whole trick. That there was a solution for everything.
“Look,” I folded my wallet back where it belonged, messing up the breathing part of Mom’s doctrine, “if you give me your Venmo or something, I promise I can wire you the money as soon as I’m back in the office.”
He gave me a once-over as if to make sure I wasn’t fucking with him.
“My office,” I said, pointing at the fluff of high-rise buildings behind me to validate my claim. “It’s just around the corner, really.”
Against my candor, his face eased into a different kind of aloofness. I could tell he didn’t particularly like me better but at least he was no longer hating me.
“I’ll walk you there,” he said, then stepped ahead on the platform.
So there we went, moseying through the industrial waste that was this city together, passing by a succession of free huggers and hotdog vendors along the way. My office wasn’t exactly around the corner as I’d first claimed, but I doubted he would mind the extra distance.
“So what brings you out here?” I asked him just when we nodded a wordless hello to a Steven Seagal lookalike on the corner of Fitzpatrick and Ave. I regretted my question immediately after. What can I say? Small talk had never really been my thing.
Yet, the man scoffed and said, “Politics,” as if he not only took my question quite naturally but also appreciated my asking. “The new mayor up and put me and my homies out on the street just like that.”
I nodded although I was clueless as to what he was talking about. I slid my hands back into my jacket pockets and thought about the last time I had any kind of struggle, monetary or otherwise, but not much really came to my mind. There was a time when Dad threatened to cut me off the fund shortly after I graduated but I knew it was just his usual diversion tactics. I knew Mom had come from a totally different background, though I couldn’t go as far to claim she had it rough or anything.
“You vote blue or red?” the man suddenly asked me as we took the corner to my office.
I hated it when people asked me about my politics like it was nothing. Like they were asking about weather, or picking apples over carrots.
“I vote green,” I said after a moment of silence.
He gave me one of his signature once-overs.
Soon after, we reached at the brink of a scraper that looked taller and duller than most others on the block. It had been three years since I first stood in front of this building, freshly graduated and full of hope. Only now that I stood alongside this man, the building, too, looked different somehow, like the manifestation of a collective bad breath. Even the windows struck a grayer shade of light that morning, dulling down the world around me.
“Well,” I said. “I guess this is it.”
A comfortable silence landed on the moment as if we were two old friends saying goodbye.
“You know where to find me,” he said as I made for the front gates.
Inside, I nodded a hesitant hello to the security guard’s changeless face as he went about scanning my jacket. I didn’t even know the name of this man, and I highly doubted he knew mine. Fancy-looking bags changed hands around me in the meantime and the security gates bleeped in a jingle-like harmony. Elevators puked out scores of similar-looking people as randomly as a broken printer would white sheets. Everyone seemed to have found their tribe amid this farce and folly and they all spoke of some bleak future that I didn’t particularly feel a part of. It was all ridiculous, really. Where were those people going to and from? Did they even exist when I wasn’t looking? Did they like each other? Did they love others? Hate it when it became unbearable? Feel lonely even for a moment?
Thoughts piled into one black cloud behind my eyes and started throbbing violently under the surface of my skin like a second pulse. Beads of sweat came to fruition through all the pores on my face. I closed my eyes and drew three quick breaths. In: it is passing. Out: it passed. In: it is passing. Out: it passed.
When I finally looked back up, I found the security guard staring at me as if to decide whether I was of any danger to the society. People seemed to have scrambled into a line behind him, watching us watch each other like some edgy cowboys in a spaghetti flick. After a few beats of silence, I slowly raised my hands in defeat and then lowered them to leave my pass on the counter.
I sprinted back toward the gates with a heave of panic piling behind my chest.
When I walked out of the building after what could be two or twenty minutes, the man in pink hoodie was still standing where I’d left him, kicking at some compressed soda can on the ground as if to make sure it was dead. He looked so carefree, so unselfconscious, with the kind of ease to his moves that reminded me of Mom.
He slipped out a nearly inaudible “Huh?” when he saw me approaching.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said the first thing.
He took his time with the can for a while longer and then slowly raised his head up. He stared at me and I stared back.
“Why seventy?” I said.
He sighed, then nodded bleakly. The whole time his head lolled, I watched the birthmark on the corner of his upper lip shifting from one shape to another like some ghosts in the pandora’s box. Like those weird-ass wrinkles I found in my bed linens after a rough night’s sleep. Like the shapes that Mom’s hand took when she was waving at me from the other end of the driveway. From the end of something I never really truly grasped.
“Places, man,” the man said to me when I finally tuned back in. His face looked visibly calmer than before, like he was no longer in need of something, like he and I had just settled into a new understanding. “We’ve all got places to be.”