New York Story

Wednesday, April 29th (The Bronx)
Attendees: Robert Aguilar, Four or five of Robert's (Bobby's) friends whose names are vague because I am old

A summary:
Zoo!
Fat boys and tigers and aging homosexuals
Cappuccinos are better with cinnamon


Wednesday... I got on the train and headed to the Bronx Zoo.
Now, after reading The Life of Pi, I'd decided that zoos were not the depressing, necessarily cruel and oppressive places I'd always suspected them to be. The argument being that animals only increase the size of their habitats and travel long distances out of necessity - to gather the nutrients needed to survive. Maybe the water is a mile west of the antelope... but if it were all in one place a tiger could... you know, get his sleep on.

And then I met Sasha. The fat tiger.

At 11:30, 1:30 and 3:30 each day one can witness the 'tiger enrichment program' at Tiger Mountain on the NE side of the Bronx zoo. What this means is that a bored, khaki-clad woman with some alarming scarring on her arms and neck that looks distinctly like the result of an animal attack shows up with an old feed bag, a chunk of horse meat and a few new bottles of perfume from the gift shop. She puts the meat in the bag, sprays it with the new scents the tiger has never experienced, opens a gate and hucks the bag at the tiger. Sasha takes the bag to his favorite corner, bullies it a bit with some petulant nudging, tears the shit out of it with some business-meaning teeth, swallows the meat without pause or ceremony, pisses on the whole mess with a faraway look in his eye.... and then...
he lies down again to get some more sleep.
He sleeps, the khaki woman says, at least 20 hours a day. And he's a fatty.
Depressing.

Before the 'enrichment', Sasha has made a little showing of his flanks, his impressive claws, his fangs - which we only see because he is yawning- while he has a lazy stroll around his pen. He clearly knows the horsemeat is nigh. There's a moment when he walks up to the glass and displays himself- all these dangerous elements made innocuous by the tiger flab and the the insuperable barrier between us. He's doing what he can to look majestically off into the 'distance' (no more than 20 yards in any direction). His teeth are dangerous, his claws are bared, but you look down and his tail is tucked between his hind legs and I catch him surreptitiously glancing toward the crowd. "Is anybody looking?" "Am I still me?"

The monkeys cheered me up a bit, the World of Birds was kind of magical, and the lemurs! Man, I love a lemur.

I said my goodbyes and walked out by myself on the West side near the Children's Zoo. East on 183rd, about 7 or 8 blocks (of old black men sharing beers on front stoops and children running you down on kick scooters) you intersect with Arthur Avenue, where, if you head north, you find yourself in this anomalous wonderland called Little Italy in the Bronx. Bakeries, restaurants, meat shops, delis, pastry shops, pasta shops, gelato shops, all things Italian you could possibly desire. I haggled with a street vendor, claiming I only had $4 cash (a lie I'm happy to claim) and bought the wallet I've been meaning to replace since I got robbed some weeks back. I wandered through bakeries and pastry shops inhaling deeply and then I found Tino's - between 187th and 188th on Arthur Ave. This place is gorgeous, full of specialty Italian foods. They make fresh sandwiches and deli goods. It's a family business and when I went to pay for my coffee, the man behind the counter nodded to his son in a gesture of 'you take this one'. The boy was nervous and pudgy fingered and charged me $3.52 instead of $3.25 with adorable dyslexia. I sat down at a table outside with a fantastic cappuccino, sprinkled with cinnamon to watch old Italian women with scarves on their heads greet smiling old men with canes. Little Tino- aka. pudgy fingers at the register- came out with a soccer ball and kicked it around with an older fellow in a shiny jumpsuit and a lanyard. Coach? Uncle? Little Tino looked a lot like JT (Tony Soprano Jr.) on the season where he was kind of a chunker... but boy could do some fancy footwork with a soccer ball.

I asked the woman inside where I could go to buy fresh pasta and she directed me to Bergatti's on 187th. Also a family run place, Father and Son are behind the counter doing impressions of each other as I check out the sauces on the rack to the right. The pasta is all hand rolled and cut and the place smells fresh like flour and salt. I order a pound of the spinach fettuccine and the son cranks down this big wooden drying rack with a rope pulley tied to the wall behind the register. The pasta is laid out in long twisted loops and he untangles a pound of it easily, barely bothering to look at the scale when he weighs it, knowing he has just enough.

On the train home there's this old queen on the train. One of these toughed up, elder homosexuals with tattoos on his hands and jewelry meant to leave dents in other people's faces. He's mumbling to himself, glaring at the man opposite him... but you look down and his feet are positively dainty. Tucked jauntily under him, stacked one atop the other in tight-laced, black hightop Reeboks circa 1982. He stops twirling the skull ring on his finger for a moment and nervously tugs at one earring, glances around the train car. "Is anybody looking? Am I still me?"




Of note:
Fresh Tortilla (207 and Broadway) Very tasty black bean tacos which I made the bad choice of washing down with a red apple Snapple - like sweet, watery Robotussin

La Sala (111 Dyckman-Inwood) The 'Hot Avocado' was delicious and messy... find yourself a veteran and study his methods

The roof of my building at night. Pigeon shit aside. Beautiful.

Tino's (between 187th and 188th on Arthur Ave.) www.tinosdeli.com

Bergatti's (187th W. of Arthur Ave.) So worth the journey

Patsy's (Union Sq. area) pretty decent pizza- fresh mozzarella, basil and garlic

The Irish Brigade (4716 Broadway) Old man dive bar extraordinaire. The five people in this bar make up for the sparse clientele by Shouting at the top of their lungs to each other. The bartender, Laura, is scrappy and friendly and will introduce you to her Mom (the older version of her yelling top volume at the other end of the bar).

SEE (312 Bleecker- W.Village) Eyeglasses, exams on the cheap. The doctor looks weirdly like Sarah Silverman and I found myself chuckling inappropriately. "Which is clearer? One or Two?" " Hahahaha... oh, um One?" Unique and affordable frames. The fellow working there was very helpful... then again, I think he may have been hitting on me. I'm a little slow, but when someone says "I could sit across from you for five or six hours and look at you if you were wearing those" ... that's a pick-up line, right?


Song of the week: Ballantines: Aimee Mann
Fun discovery: Look at this fucking hipster- www.latfh.com

The image below was this bizarre moment where some mutual understanding excited all the lemurs at once and they all went tearing down to one end of their enclosure (which, by the by, is not enclosed, but open to the viewing walkway - why I don't have a lemur in my hair is a mystery). I kind of love this shot. It looks like a Michael Sowa painting, but I swear it's just a snapshot on a low light, micro setting on my little Canon Powershot (I'd been taking photographs of these bright red, leaf-shaped insects I'll have to ask my Entymologist Papa about).