Getting There (a strike story)

"I'm sorry. It's awful, I know."

"It's- Yes."

"I tried four times. I can't write block letters. It's the reason kenan never let me draw the stadium posters. I was only allowed to color them in."

"Look, it's fine. Do you have a ruler we can use to hold it up?" He folded the piece of paper in half so that the lettering was more prominent and the crossed out M resembling a W was no longer visible underneath.

"But nobody will be able to understand what it says."

"It's ok. Anybody who sees two kids with a sign is going to know they want a ride and that they want a ride to Manhattan."

"Greatest city in the world."
Yesterday and the day before, some desperate drivers took us in through the tunnel to meet their quota. So our plan was to try to shorten our walk and get a ride TO the tunnel, or even better, to the bridge.

"Look, this time let's not get in just any old car that stops for us. Let's make sure it's an ok car first."

I looked at him, pulling my scarf tighter around my face. "That guy yesterday was safe."

"We almost got in an accident."

"I thought he was an excellent driver."


"You two going to Manhattan?"

"Woah, that was fast." He had barely,shyly stuck his arm out with my pitiful excuse for a sign when the black car slid over and a girl poked her head out the window.
Hurray!

We flew in, forgetting our own advice, breathless from the cold, thanking profusely, greg grinning ear to ear. Our little car zoomed past the other walkers, whizzing over the Pulaski at the amazing speed of thirty miles an hour which converts to one mile in two minutes, or rather, eight times faster than we could walk. But there was something terribly wrong with this car.

“It costs twelve dollars per person to go to Manhattan,” said the driver. Oooh, Brooklyn with its unmarked cabs. Five very uncomfortable minutes later we were back out on the street, holding our sign in Queens.

“You guys want a ride to the bridge?” A very nice lady with bags of playdough on the floor of her car and a wooden cross hanging from the mirror. We were smokin’! Another two miles covered in minutes!

At the base of the bridge, a yellow cab. But we were smarter this time. “We don’t have any money!” shouting to him from the intersection.

“No, free! Free!" he stuck his arm out the window and waved it desperately at us. "I need two more people before they let me on the bridge.”
We sat up straight in the cab, peering out the window at the view, no traffic, so it went by fast, gave him a little tip for his efforts, and piled out of the car at 60th street. Manhattan!

We made it! We made it! I looked at my watch: 8:17 am. We made it in TWENTY MINUTES!! We had shaved forty-five minutes off of our hike. Jumping up and down, hugging each other, hugging my perfect sign.

“I don’t have to be at work until nine! We do you want to do with our free time?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pocketing the sign for tomorrow. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

on the water

Image
     This is an old one- from last June- written as I remember it. I wasn’t going to post it, but then I changed my mind, so here it is, long after the event. The facts may have shifted a bit in their transport to the page, for which I apologize. Also, I changed a few of the names.     We were shooting a dolphin tour on a white catamaran off the coast of Hilton Head Island, the last shoot of a day that began at dawn. Just Chris, me, a camera, and a white binder filled with travel channel documents. We shot footage of everyone climbing aboard the boat, shot the tour guide’s introduction. Then we settled in to wait.     “When you did Semester At Sea, did the boat look like this?” I asked.     “Naw, it was a giant cruise ship.”     “Wait,” I said. “I always imagined a great big sailboat. And you had to raise the sails and swab the deck and stuff.”     He laughed. ...
Read more

Siren Song

Image
The Aged General heard it first.  When he was a boy, there had been stories told of such a thing, the kind of stories one whispers in the dark. Never in his long and illustrious career had he ever experienced one, but he was smart and quick  to understand. From the first note, he knew what was happening, and he jumped up to shout a warning and cover his ears. But his hands moved slowly, as if they were under water, and his voice lodged in his throat and came out as more of a strangled cry.  “It’s a si-“   was all he was able to manage – before the sound overwhelmed him.   Afterwards, no one was able to describe the exact melody.  A female voice, mournful, all could agree on that, a single voice sounding like multitudes of simultaneous voices.  The melody was unlike anything they had ever heard, with overlapping harmonic tones. The key was minor.  No, not minor, said the music theory experts, some sort of a variation on the A...
Read more

Kid Stuff

I suppose I should preface all this to say I am not Another Girl in Greenpoint anymore.   I have become Another Girl Priced Out of Greenpoint , and have flown nine miles south, to a little birdhouse with Michael.   Moving in with someone is a very adult thing to do.  It’s a time for plans. And cutlery. Discussions about duvet covers, and the arrangement of books on bookcases.         I’m not sure how it started.   Maybe it started with the prevalence of sidewalk chalk in our neighborhood, used not to ironically point out some over-priced artisanal sale, but to naturally draw out a map to the buried treasure, under the outlines of a hopscotch court, right next to a giant star and a hippo-person.   This was chalk that we tread on every day through the spring and summer.      Or maybe the mosquitoes started it?   One night in early spring, the mosquitoes found the holes in our screens, buzzing and biting us awak...
Read more