August 1, Day 2 of My NYC Trip
“Are you just going to stand there and look cute are or you going to help me?” The bellman at the W Times Square asks the taxi driver. I’m in line for a taxi, and one has just pulled up to unload a passenger with luggage. The bellman is trying to pull suitcases from the trunk while the driver stares passively.
A young thin woman cuts in front of me.
“Excuse me,” I say. She turns and looks at me like I’m lunchmeat.
“I’m next.”
She says something in Spanish. She must be from Latin America. I’ve decided long along, from experience, that they are famous for cutting in line.
The bellman notices the occurance, though, and he motions me to take my rightful place in the empty taxi. I look back at the woman, who is looking away, as if she is trying to ignore not only me, but also her guilt and her etiquette crime.
I arrive at my destination. The Javitz Center. There is a trade show going on. I walk up to registration where a minor line has begun. I’m talking to someone I know as we wait to get our badges. It’s a man who has been in our industry for thirty years. I am complaining about the humidity in New York. Before walking inside the trade show, I could see a bank of moisture, barely visible, hanging above the street, an almost translucent cloud.
“Toughen up,” he tells me. He is trying to be nice in the way New Yorkers try to be nice. It is obvious he does not want to hear my complaints. There is an awful lot of humidity in the air. That much is obvious. Why belabor the subject?
I have been facing him and when I turn back for a moment in line, I see that a man has cut in front of me. He does not appear to be with the person who was in front of me, as she is in deep conversation with someone else. And frankly, it’s obvious by looking at the two of them that they aren’t together. She wears a hair band in her blonde pageboy and is dressed in lots of primary colors. She wears chunky gold jewelry, and speaks with a slow drawl. This woman is from the South somewhere. The man wears a white shirt, black pants, and a yarmulke. He stares off into nothing particular, as if he is avoiding eye contact.
“This man just cut in line,” I say to my friend, loud enough for the offender to hear.
“That happens all the time,” he says. “Israeli,” he whispers.
What is it with foreigners? Americans take cutting in line to be a vital sin. It’s right below cheating on your wife and right above running a red light. Everywhere I go in NYC, someone is cutting in line, and they aren’t American. Has the rest of the world banded together and decided that the way they will get back at us for whatever ill we’ve caused on their country is by cutting in front of us in line?
I can jus see a secret session at the UN – minus the American delegation. “Forget war,” some foreign diplomat says, “you know what would really piss them off? Cutting in front of them in line at the airport.”
I remember once, I accidentally cut in line in San Jose, California at the Winchester Mystery House. I cut in front of a woman with blonde wash and wear hair. You would have thought I had spit on her child. She berated me up and down. The reason I inadvertently cut is because she had been standing off to the side and a few feet back from the person ahead of her. I thought that person was the last person in line.
“Honest,” I said, after explaining the situation to her.
She gave me a look, suggesting I was not a skilled liar, which I’m not. Evidently, I’m not skilled at telling the truth either. I exist somewhere in between, in a world of half-truths, due to my own inability to see things as they are. Rather than call a spade a spade, I tend to call it a metal thing you can use to dig or to hit someone over the head with.
I learned a lesson that day. Scope out the line. If you see someone who might be next but you are unsure due to their stance, ask this question. “Excuse me, are you in line?”
Life is often gray. Some things are certain, such as death and taxes, some things are not, like: is that guy across the bar looking at you or is he looking at the hunky guy standing next to you? One thing we all have in common, at least in America, is that we at least want our rightful place in line.
