Entertainment Wherever You Can Find It—NYC Style

Issue 2 - July 2020

by Dorian Yeager ~ Wordsmith in residence

So, I’m sitting on my stoop. Responsibly distancing from my best friend while we drink Corona beer out of brown paper bags—me, because in my perverse nature I find it amusing to drink a beer named after a virus and my friend because she likes the stuff. We are having a deep, intellectual discussion of how the neighborhood has changed since the 80s, idly pointing to trees and recycling bins. Not much happening in your average apocalypse these days.

That’s right. We are bored out of minds. I keep my mind sort of busy watching the rats play tag around the black plastic trash bags lined like soldiers by the gutter. I admit to having a fondness for rats. My friend, not so much.

Then, like a miracle, a woman from the building directly across from  mine comes out of her door carrying a collapsible chair and trailed by her son. I was guessing about fourteen-years-old. Not much to see, really, but the rats were getting boring and after more than 100 days of lockdown, better than staring at my fish beg for food.

Then, to my utter delight, she gets in her car and pulls out of the parking space.

Okay, my delight didn’t get truly utter until her angelic looking boy pulled out a book, flipped open the chair and took possession of the pavement. “Boy,” I commented to my friend, “in the olden days, some other car would pull up and back right over that kid. Remember?” She did.

And then, like manna from heaven, an SUV with a 40ish man behind the wheel pulls up deliberately to back into the spot.

Boy turns page of book nonchalantly and settles back in the chair for a good read.

Man hunches down and sends the car backward. My attention has ben caught. Two neighbors stop for a good look, holding takeout, groceries and the errant 6-pack. This is more excitement than any of us has seen since the Christmas Tree went up at Rockefeller Center. Steve, the opera singer from two doors down says, “Just like the good old days.” I agree. My friend nods sagely and pops another beer.

With steely determination, the man backs up further, bumper to armrest. The boy remains nonplussed. I am seized with admiration for such adolescent indolence. He turns another page. The SUV nudges the chair again. The boy looks up and stares forward like a liberal arts student who finds himself tasked with listening to an organic chemistry professor. Dogged. Comatose. The SUV jostles the chair. The boy repositions himself slightly. My pothead neighbor of about 20 years from the next building wearing a weed-embossed face mask shouts over his boom box, “Hey, Man. It’s just a parking space!” The most coherent things he’s said in distant memory.

SUV and boy remain locked in battle. The man shouts something but I can’t hear over the damned boom box. I am reminded that if you can’t hum it, it ain’t music. I’m that old. Spotty traffic carefully edges past the catty-corner car, drivers slowly shaking their heads. The man pokes his head fully out the window and stares at the boy just as though that would do any good, which it didn’t. I am filled with admiration. And another beer.

Across the street, neighbors start spilling out of apartment doors and start congregating to catch the only live show they’ve seen since Broadway shut down. Two men in their 30s approach the car. I can discern reasoning happening here. The driver stared daggers at the boy and completely ignores the interlopers. The boy blandly goes back to his book. I cannot wait for the mother to return for the next installment of the poor man’s “Brideshead Revisited.”

And then, just when I thought the cast of characters was complete, the dear, old handyman who has been suffering from dementia for several decades enters the fray. I bum a cigarette, wishing offhandedly for a bag of popcorn with extra “golden flavor.” He and the other two peacekeepers lean into the car. The man will not take his eyes off the chair and the infuriatingly self-possessed boy and eases the big black car further into the chair. The chair tilts. Just a little but still…

The pothead starts yelling “C’mon, Man. C’mon, Man” over and over like a Gregorian chant on blow.

By then passersby are no longer passing. They’ve lined up next to each other like people waiting on line at the Zabar’s fish counter. Social distancing has gone with the Dodo. The neighborhood is uniting in vicarious hostility. After months inside arguing with our cats, who could blame us? Except perhaps the Secret Service.

Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get better, the mother pulls up in her midsize beige sedan. We all look at each other for the next move. There isn’t one. Both cars are stuck to the pavement like gum. The standoff reaches about ten, long minutes before the woman gets out of her car and approaches the man’s window. Damned boom box. Can’t hear anything except the kind of horrific music choices played at top volume by the North Koreans at the South Koreans during a border face-off. The man’s gaze is locked on his nemesis: a fourteen-year-old boy in a folding chair. The boy turns another page. Rapt. Immovable.

The good Samaritans join the woman for what appears to be a rational conversation. There is much pointing toward Amsterdam Avenue and what just might yield up an alternative parking space or two. Seems like a reasonable solution to the problem to me. Neighbors nodded in silent, consolidated agreement.

Alas, the woman got back in her car and pulled away. Disappointment shone in the blackness of what appeared to be surrender. But, yes, the boy remained unmoved. Stolid. Like the bus-and-truck of “Braveheart.” The crowd sighed a barely audible sigh of relief that the show was not quite over. I would have said that the fat lady had not yet sung, but in deference to my opera singing neighbor, did not. He is a tenor and therefore has delicate sensibilities.

The, voila! The mother returns and pokes the nose of her sedan to the left of her son’s territory. A rather boring end to the second act. Or so I thought

Except, enter the police! They saunter confidently to the SUV. The woman gets out of her car and joins them. A hush falls over the audience. The boom box droned out what I was certain was Aaron Sorkin dialogue. I hoped so, anyway.

Our pothead friend immediately and without shame switched sides. “C’mon Kid. It’s just a parking spot, Kid. Do you always do what your mother tells you to do? Huh? Huh?”

Being the snarky chick I am, I turned to my friend and the nearest of the onlookers and said, “I’ll put a dollar on the guy’s winning this one.” Technically speaking, holding a parking space isn’t exactly kosher, after all. Several people chorused, “I’ll take that bet!” I remained confident in my vast experience as an observer of human nature.

In an anticlimactic moment, one of the cars pulled away. My friend and I put our empties in the recycle bin.

I lost eleven dollars. It was worth every penny.