Union Square

Joanna recently joined us in the Union Square Greenmarket to help you.

Finding a men's room at the Union Square Greenmarket is never easy.  I usually steal my way into a nearby bar, weaving through the clientele without buying a drink under the watchful stare of the cocktail waitress who knows I'm not a drinker.  I give her a smile that says I need a bathroom more than I  need a beer, but waitresses are runway models in New York and she thinks I smiled at her Sam Edelman boots and how hot she looks in them—she smiles back—I’m amused at this New York narcissism, of my own imagining, but she turns away to take an order and doesn't see my genuine side.

Across from the market, on Union Square West, there are three rest room choices: Toasties which usually has a line, the urinals are too close together in The Coffee Shop and the men's room at the Heartland is often empty but it is the furthest from the stand. The day was sunny and cool so I walked to the Heartland.  Upon entering nothing happened; at 3 PM the bar was almost empty, the waitress ignored me.  The bar is long, almost 200 feet in length, there is a partition, about 8 feet from the bar and about 6 feet high that separates a seating area from the bar and stools.  The bar feels like it's in a hallway.  At the end is the men's room and it was empty.  I pissed and left.  The light coming back out was blinding; walking toward the bright windows, all the faces were backlit and in shadow.  I thought of Camus' Meursault, sun blind on the white beach, in L'Etranger.  It was a relief to be out in the fresh air again, to be rid of the yeasty beer smell and the fuzzy pounding bass music: ahh...the street, the sunlight, the horns, the confusion; it calmed me.

I turned south and took several steps before I heard a meek voice behind me, "Excuse me".  I stopped and turned.  A short,  non-descript woman in her late 20's wearing sunglasses that gave her a bug-like look in a depressing prussian blue crepe dress was speaking to me.  She was accompanied by a peering shaved male with a salt and pepper goatee a little older and taller than she appeared to be.

"Excuse me," she continued.  “Yes?” my manner said.

"You touched my ass in the bar and you didn't say you were sorry."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"What did you say?"

"You touched my ass when you left the bar and didn't say you were sorry."

Had she followed me from the bar and stopped me to say this?

"I didn't touch you."

"Are you sure?" said the male.

Ignoring him rather than killing him, I looked at her directly. 

"Well, if I did touch you, it was an accident and I'm very, very sorry." 

But I meant a different kind of "sorry" than the sorry that she understood.  Her intimate and  common word in that meek, begging tone of voice was scatological to me, a stranger,  as if her body were unclean.  I was accused of a crime—but where was the cop—I began to angrily wonder why she was putting us through this.  I felt helpless.  I wanted language to protect me with its formality from someone I didn't know; I didn't want to see her body, much less touch it. Her words  forced it upon me;  I felt embarassed for being present at a bad performance and I was more sorry for her, standing there saying what she was saying, than if I'd touched her.

Did she simply want to be noticed and was this a way to have her existence acknowleged?  Was she that self impoverished? 

My saying that I was sorry seemed to mollify her.  That meant it was OK to  touch her in sorrow…horrors.

Recovering somewhat as she started to turn away, I asked,

"But where were you anyway?” 

"At the bar," she said.

I shrugged and said.

"I didn't see you."

New York City's annual Dance Parade (2009), so proclaimed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, came down Broadway and passed Union Square last Saturday.  This year there were 5,291 dancers in 60 dance styles from Algerian to Zydeco.   I kept my eye on the belly dancers.

I worried that Fatima from Astoria would be in the parade still nursing a grudge—awhile back, Tasting Table NYC had proclaimed a new "hottest belly in town": lamb bacon—and I feared she might hold my sheep responsible for such disrespect and try to get even by terrorizing my customers with her "nihilistic belly rampage" in and around the stand.  Stranger things have happened in Union Square.

In 1916 anarchist Emma Goldman rallied a crowd of garment workers for birth control in the North Plaza of the Square, long set aside for political gatherings, and now where Greenmarket farmers unpack their produce 4 days a week. 

Behind Emma, in the very rear of the photo, you can see the Decker Building (2nd from the left) where, in the 70's, Andy Warhol made art inspired by tomato soup cans in The Factory which was located on the 6th floor.  The building is directly across the street (which the dancers paraded down) from where I set up my stand on Saturdays.  Ghosts are everywhere in Union Square.