Big Shitty

The city seemed like a good place to go. It was away. It was new. It was big. People had ideas and cared about ideas. And also it was close to home. Close enough to the bosom that I could take a quick train trip home for some good old-fashioned moms cooking. Far enough and lenient enough that I could smoke pot constantly and not nobody was gonna bother me. At least before Herr Guilianis’ rule. He really pricked things up. When I first arrived at NYU in 1996 I lived in a dorm right on the park, Hayden Hall. I rarely made it to class, that surely was a downfall. But I loved that I could drink a forty ounce of OE and smoke a blunt in front, in Washington Square Park, and if the police were any the wiser then they didn’t care. After Guilianis regime (aka the Disney brigade) there were video cameras (with people actually watching the video in real-time) and a stake-out trailer where the eyes were always upon you. Once in the late evening, on a quiet night with oddly few people around, my roomate and I, while living on the corner of Thompson and Bleeker, strolled over to the park with her puppy to enjoy a nice kind joint, when some non-descript middle-aged man with a conspicuous baseball cap came over, after seeing us smoke, to ask where had gotten the weed. I, still semi-retarded and not much the wiser would probably have given him the number to one of our delivery services, if...If he was younger and cuter; if he had taken the time to shoot the shit for a minute before deciding to make his move. But Sam took the lead from the get-go. She responded to his first question, which by the way was leading “so you two were just smoking a joint over here. Period. Question mark”. Sam says no, we weren’t and the way she’s looking at him is telltale fuck you buddy, the jigs already up might as well save your breath. But, sticking to his steno pad story, he tries to play it out a little longer, and finally, after a few painfully awkward minutes, wants the number to a delivery service. “You girls know they have these things, right? These ‘delivery services’ that you call, and they come to deliver you weed, right?!?”. Yea, no. We’ve gotta be going. Your number? I think we’ve got it. I, feeling sorry for the guy say “Why didn’t you just tell him we were smoking, give the guy the number?” Because Kat, that guy was totally an undercover. Alas and alack, the conspicuous baseball cap looked so for a reason.