Rich vs. Poor

Don’t let the title fool you this isn’t a class war rage.  It’s more of an understanding how people grow up in different areas with different resources and as much as I’d like to think that we can over come these financial and therefore cultural differences, I’m not so sure.

Our story begins with me meeting someone through a mutual friend, who had just moved to town.  She had come to New York via Paris but was originally from a wealthy suburb of San Francisco.  She was smart, accomplished, well traveled, well educated and easy on the eyes.  She had me after she finished the sentence, “I was a journalist for a Parisian newspaper but there’s something about New York City.”  Oh and one more thing about this girl, for all intents and purposes she was engaged.  Engaged in that way when people have been in a relationship for a long time and the next step should have happened by now but it hasn’t so let’s just get engaged even though we both know it’s a huge mistake.  You know, that kind.  In any case, I don’t meet women like this often.  Actually, I never meet women like this.  For a long time I started thinking that women like this didn’t exist, so finding one in the wild, even if she was engaged, was quite the reassuring prospect.  The world was filled with hope again.  I made a promise to myself that if she ever becomes single I would ask her out immediately for a few reasons.  The first being to get out of my comfort zone of only thinking about talking to women of that caliber.  The second being that I was positive that there would be a line of dudes who were also going to be vying for her attention and lastly, rebound relationships usually have at least a pretty good run before they end in a dismal pile of tears, booze and harassment. 

So let’s fast forward through the months of her living with her fiancé and move right to the part where she leaves him.  This story is so old that I Myspaced this girl when I found out about her moving to Upper West Side.  That’s right, I said Myspaced.  For some unbeknownst reason see agreed to go out with me.  I often think it was because she either felt like she owed our mutual friend, or there was a strong sense of pity in my general direction, or she figured let’s get this over with.  Having come out of a long relationship  she was very upfront about not being interested in being in one any time soon, which I completely understood and respected.   I was so excited to spend time with her that I would have happily paid for anything and everything date related, even if it meant three and a half hours of her verbally and physically berating and abusing me.  I would have taken out a loan to make that happen.  Happily.

We agreed to go for coffee at a place that she loved in Paris that also had a location not too far from where she was crashing.  Crashing isn’t exactly the right word here but I’m blanking on what would be.  The reason crashing isn’t appropriate is because people don’t crash at apartments with full time doorman who have seen enough to know that I’m not the quality of person to be allowed entrance in the lobby let alone the multimillion dollar apartments.  Staying also doesn’t quite work either. 

For my own therapy, looking back I should have noticed the chink in the armor when we went to La Pain Quidien for coffee.  An upscale chain coffee place for a fake date?  I’m not sure about that move.  There are far too many coffee places in New York with charm and character that I would have chosen before La Pain Quidien.  I know I was so overcome with joy at the prospect of sitting down with this woman that at the time I wouldn’t have minded if we were in an old man bar surrounded by people projectile vomiting onto the floor and walls, but I digress. 

The anecdote that has stayed with me these five or six years which is sort of the point of this article? Entry? Post? Whatever this thing is, is this. We were both removed from college by only a few years and she was going to go back for a master’s, so it was natural to discuss those rather formative years.  She regaled me with a tale of walking into her suitemate’s room while the radio was playing and asked who was on the radio. 

The roommate replied, “Santana.”  Mind you this would have been around 1999 or 2000 when “Smooth” was released and took over every radio station.

She replies in an overtly sarcastic tone with, “Who Carlos Santana?”  One of those goofy, adoy, tones.  A tone so deliberate that it’s used only in absolute certainty. 

The suitemate replies, “Yeah, Carlos Santana.”  I image she had a quizzical look on her face during and after her reply. 

You see, dear reader, the girl sitting across from me drinking her tea and nibbling on her croissant had lived next door from one Carlos Santana.  You must be thinking well, Carlos Santana must be a fairly common name and this girl just has a strange sense of humor, which would be two very reasonable thoughts and you shouldn’t feel badly about the fact that you are 100% incorrect.  The truth is that she not only lived next to a Carlos Santana for her entire life up until she had gone away to college that year, but that she lived next to THE Carlos Santana.  That’s right, THE Carlos Santana.  Having no idea what he did for a living, despite, I may add, that he took her backstage to the Grammy’s a few years before that. 

Like I said earlier, I’ve thought about this story a lot over the years.  I don’t have a satisfactory answer as to why she felt the need to share it.  My best guess is that I was very into music at the time and she thought it might be a cute story that I would appreciate.  Or it could very well be her way of showing how not cool she was by being so ignorant about her surroundings and what popular culture society expects us to know.  I’m not sure if it’s even either of those things.  The one thing that I did know immediately after hearing the story was how out of my league this girl was.  Not only out of my league but how we came from different worlds.  Worlds not separate by physical distance, nor economy but what rather what that money can do and give a person.  Whether the story was supposed to be cute and telling about her personality or something unrelated, it won’t change where we come from.  In that instant it became very clear to me that there wouldn’t be a Hollywood ending in the cards for us.  The two worlds we came from were entirely too different. 

That last line has depressed me as I typed it, so I’m going to pull a 180.  Come to think of it, I have no idea what old Mr. Fitzgerald our neighbor did for a living.  I’m pretty sure he didn’t play Woodstock but I might be wrong about that.

Fencing

I was on the NYU fencing team during the first semester of my freshman year.  It’s one of those things, at least to me that sounds impressive when in reality it wasn’t at all.  I walked onto the team and I don’t know if there was a mandate to let any one join if they wanted or if I was barely acceptable enough to make it on my merits.  I had gotten into fencing a few years before that in high school, where I was a starter on the varsity team, a team that went on to win the city championship in my senior year.  I was either the worst or second worst starter on that team but due to my high self-confidence and recent medal, I figured I would try out.  A few guys from the high school team the year before (and the year after) ended up with scholarships and when they came back to visit they warned how very different the landscape was.  It shifted from the team-oriented environment that we all embraced to a very individual event.  For the layman, fencing had three different types of weapons and each has different areas on the body where points can be scored and first person to 5 wins.  There are only two fencers on the strip at a time.  The total number of bouts won determines the winner of the overall match.  So it’s an interesting mix of individual and team. Enough exposition. 

I remember finding out about the team after they had already started practicing.  I made a terrifying phone call to the coach, Steve at his day job, a civil war antique store in New Jersey.  Former Olympian, coach of a division 1 fencing team, owns and runs a civil war antique shop; you can’t script life.  He told me to come down on Tuesday and the normal practice schedule was Tuesdays, Thursdays at 6:30- 9 and on Saturdays at 9am for practice.   I showed up full of smiles and nervous energy expecting to find a familiar positive atmosphere like what my last team had been.  I couldn’t have been more off base.  Looking back on it now, it what I’d imagine training for the Olympics is like.  The three coaches ran us through the most intense workouts I had ever been a part of.  They were broken up into stretching, running, calisthenics and finally fencing.  Thankfully after each section there was a 2-3 minute water break.  I would spend the entire time with my mouth around the spigot and breathing heavily through my nose.  When we got to my first fencing portion the coach for foil took me to the equipment room and handed me some gear.  There are different types of handles on the foils and in high school I had always used a French grip but he had handed me a pistol grip.  I asked for a French grip and was curtly told in a Russian accent, no French only pistol.  I was off to a wonderful start!

The actual fencing practice was round robin tournament style where you’d fence about 6 bouts throughout the rest of practice.  I don’t remember exactly how did my first time but I think I ended up winning a few bouts but definitely losing more than I had won.  Those couple of wins justified me being there at I least I thought so.  They didn’t tell me to not come back, which I took as a positive.

I was in a serious amount of pain from being so out of shape after the first practice.  After the second practice, walking on stairs in any direction was not a possibility.  After the first Saturday practice, the third practice overall, I took the E train from West 4^th to 42^nd Street to catch the 7 train to get to Flushing.  If you aren’t familiar with the walk from the E to the 7 at 42^nd, there are/were a series of ramps with an incline deemed not safe for wheelchairs.  There’s a gradient that’s not that steep but steep enough to make you wonder how much fun it would be to on rollerblades.  Anyway, after that 3^rd practice of the week I started walking down the first ramp and quickly had the realization that the muscles in my legs had betrayed me and refused to follow any more orders.  Gravity had grabbed me and was pushing quickly down the ramp towards the wall where you would turn and descend another ramp.  There a flat area to make this turn around approximately 6 feet from the end of the ramp.  At each and every one of the 8 landings I was able to come to stop about a foot from the wall.  I was completely convinced that I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself and end up with a broken nose from slamming into any of the walls. 

The coaches would work individually with the fencers during practices.  I was never quite sure what the criteria was for being selected.  The team captain, I think was named Glen, I found out wasn’t chosen out of merit but because the guy who had the same seniority had gotten into a fist fight at the last tournament.   I kept my head down, showed up to all the practices and worked as hard as I could.  After about a month or so I had become pretty good and was consistently finishing between 4-2 and 6-0 during the round robin portion of practice.  Coach Steve had announced that there would be two events in the next few weeks.  The first was an out of state tournament and the second was a public practice to get alumni to come and see the team in an effort to raise some money. 

In one of my first disappointments on the team I was told that I would be going to the tournament only to be cut because of budgetary reasons a few days beforehand.  Not so much of a disappointment but more of an eye opening experience, was the open practice.  Apparently the people that were recruited for the team and received scholarships weren’t expected to show up to the normal practices and instead were to use that time to keep their grades up.  They were given a free ride, housing, and tutors.  I remember being incredibly bitter about all of it because I was up at 5:30 every morning, traveling at least an hour and a half each way (closer to 3 hours on practice nights) to and from school, working 5 hours a day, keeping my grades up and not receiving the time of day from the coaches.  So when the open practice came around, I was pumped. I had a chip on my shoulder and I had something to prove.  I was doing well against the rest of the team so this was my moment.  I went up against a few of the regulars before being called to fence, Alex (his name might not have been Alex).  Alex was a freshman like me but he was one of the team’s stars.  He had the privilege of the full ride and he had never come to a single practice. 

I came out with a quick attack, which he parried and hit me for a point.  1-0. Ok, I thought, stay aggressive.  I went back at him toying with his foil a little before going in. 2-0.  Ok, ok, time to dial it back and play a little defense.  I laid back waiting to see what he’d do. 3-0.  Defense has never been my strong suit, back to offense as I explode forward. 4-0.  Fencing masks are made of a metallic mesh that you can see through.  I’m pretty sure I saw Alex yawn during our exchange before he scored the fourth point.  At that point I was cooked.  I charged again and it was 5-0.    These guys didn’t have to come to practice because they were so far out of our league that it would be a waste of their time.  I never found out if they had their own practice time or if they had worked with the coaches individually. 

After going to one match at Yale, never getting any attention from the coaches and getting offered a promotion at work, I quit the fencing team with about a month to go in the season.  I remember feeling like I was wasting my time but looking back at all the time that I’ve wasted since then it’s something that I regret.  

Crazy I&S Professors

I had to take 3 semesters of a hybrid philosophy/humanities class in college called “Individual in Society” or something like that since we all referred to it as I&S.  For whatever reason I&S seemed to attract the quirky professors.  There were two incidents that I’ll never forget the level of awkwardness.  They were moments where you could feel the air getting sucked out of the room in an instant.

The first two semesters of I&S I had was with Professor Shippey, I must have the spelling wrong since he’s not coming up on any google searches.  Professor Shippey looked like if Mr. Roberts was a philosophy professor.  Button down shirt covered by a v-neck sweater, khaki pants, sensible shoes, coke bottle glasses, salt & pepper hair that went a little bit of everywhere and a propensity for keeping the chalk between both hands and shaking it.  If memory serves, he was a good professor who was diligent, kept things on track and stuck to the syllabus, except for this one time.

It was the second semester and I distinctly remember that we were talking about Plato’s idea forms and how there are certain forms for everything.  The professor was stuck on the notion of the forms for trees and dogs.  He was hammering the point home over and over again listing different types of dogs and trees, and how they shared some unique thing that tied them to their respective category.  I think these classes lasted an hour and fifteen minutes and we were about an hour in.  For some reason that to this day makes my head hurt, Professor Shippey doesn’t even go on a tangent as much as he stops the lecture to tell an anecdote about graduating college and back packing through Europe in the late 70’s early 80’s.  Mind you this class was in the spring of 1999 so he was probably in his early to mid 40’s.  I had always wanted to back pack through Europe after college or maybe because I was a highly conscientious student, I was actively listening to his story.  I remember wondering how he was going to relate it back to Plato as he started.  He started by laying out his route, France then heading East through Belgium and Holland on his way to Germany and then finally Italy.  He quickly guided us past the exposition of the first few countries and really the story began in Germany.  It was most likely the early 80’s and the Cold War was in full swing.  I’m not sure how travel between West and East Germany was for Americans but he said that he went over to East Germany for a bit where he met a woman and quickly fell in love.  He was so smitten that he gave up on going to Italy and spent the rest of his time with her.  I think they ended up getting married such that she could leave the country but it’s been a while and some of the details have been muddled over time.  Professor Shippey’s visa expires and he has to return home.  They write each other constantly with some of her letters never making through or they make it through redacted.  He goes through channel after channel trying to get her over to the US but the bureaucracy on the East Germany side is either holds things up or outwardly dismisses them.  This process of letter writing, bureaucratic undermining and trips to East Germany goes on for years; years of frustration, years of love, years of holding on to hope.  After all these years, she begins to waiver.  She doesn’t waiver with another man, but rather She waivers in her belief that her government will ever let her leave.  She decided to take matters into her own hands and escape the country in the most direct way possible, the Berlin Wall.  She decides to climb over the Berlin Wall under the cover of darkness only to be gunned down by the guards.  There might have been a long pause here in his story or very possibly the moment that it took for Professor Shippey to take a breathe felt like an eternity for every single person in the room.  Then without missing a beat, he starts shaking the chalk and goes right back into Plato’s forms.  It feels like no one has taken breathe in the last two minutes.  The air is stale and our eyes darted from the clock to each other for any hint as to how to react to this heart wrenching, out of place love story.  I remember thinking not to stare at the clock but at the same time making eye contact with the professor was out of the question.  The ten remaining minutes were dead silent from the student side.  Professor Shippey continued with his lesson without tying anything from the anecdote back into it, nor did his flow or cadence change.  If you had walked into that classroom as soon as his story finished, you’d have no idea that anything was different from when you left to go the bathroom.  The eternity that was those last ten minutes ended and everyone in the class had the wherewithal to not say a word about what just happened as we crossed the threshold.  We all took the stairs down  trying to wrap our minds around it and how to react.

My third and final semester in I&S was with Professor Tenywa, who I learned today died almost ten years ago in his native Uganda which puts a damper on this story.  At the very first class Professor Tenywa with his ear-to-ear grin informs us of his basic tenant, punctuality is key and lateness to his class or on assignments will not be tolerated.   Professor Tenywa liked suits and tweed jackets and he was always smiling this enormous smile.  There was a string of bad weather in NYC the first few weeks of class and on our very next class the professor was late.  He explained and apologized for his lateness by informing us that he was an adjunct and was working at another college directly beforehand.  I remember having a hard time reconciling his personnel lateness with his policy concerning our lateness but I didn’t give it much thought since every once in a while we are all late.  On the third class day the professor is late again but this time there is no explanation and he sticks by how important it is that we the students be on time all the while showing off his pearly whites.  On the fourth day of classes the professor is late again, this time later than before.  There’s an unwritten college rule that if the professor doesn’t show up after fifteen minutes then class is cancelled, it’s the fifteen minute rule.  Now on this fourth day of class the troops are getting restless at the hypocrisy and at the thought of a cancelled class.  We were at or about the twelve minute mark when he walks through the door smiling.  The room deflated.  After class there was a sentiment rallied by a few students that we should report his perennial lateness.  To my knowledge it never came to that.  On the fifth day of classes, he was late again.  Now the class had basically had it.  It should be noted that Professor Tenywa was a nice man but he wasn’t what you’d call friendly, he was more authoritative which didn’t sit well with some.  Five minutes went by and the murmurs of the fifteen minute rule started.  Seven minutes went by and people started planning on how to handle the situation.  Ten minutes went by and the class is divided between walking out early and waiting until the full fifteen.  Twelve minutes went by and the conversation had degraded into whether or not to leave a note.  At the fifteen minute mark the class has reached its fever pitch and a student walks up to the board to write that the class has left since he was more than 15 minutes late.  As the chalk hit the blackboard Professor Tenywa walks through the door with his ear-to-ear.  The class looks around for its vocal leaders of dissent against the hypocrisy to say their piece.  Just then Professor Tenywa says, “I’m sorry for my lateness.  My wife died.”  He paused as everyone in the room felt like the worst person on the planet.  Here we were an angry mob ready to tear into this man and we were all very quickly put in our place by human understanding.  “Next class is cancelled as well since I have her wake. Thank you.”  Then he walked out with that same smile but this time you knew he was faking.