Rich Mintz  

For the second time in five years, someone tried the “You broke my glasses” hustle on me yesterday. This time, I was emotionally prepared, although it still really pissed me off.

This can’t be unique to New York City, but in case it is, and/or for those who are just joining us, here’s how you do it:

• Dress like you’re pitiful and you don’t have much to lose; alternatively, puff yourself up to look bigger and more menacing than you actually are. Your choice.
• Find a pair of broken eyeglasses. (Alternative: find a pair of unbroken eyeglasses, then step on them.)
• Stand on 20th Street near a busy sidewalk — busy enough that you can pretend to have been jostled, but not so busy that you will actually be jostled.
• Scope out your quarry — ideally a man (because they’re more likely to be willing to pay you to go away) in a hurry, of apparent means, ideally someone distracted, preferably a rube (which makes me wonder why I was chosen, but let’s not dwell on that). Bonus points for choosing someone who is smaller than you, weaker than you, or has vague interethnic or interclass unease around you. With practice, you’ll learn how to watch your prey and respond to his signals to get the most money out of each rube you roll.
• As your quarry approaches, hold the pair of glasses in your hand. Pretend to be wiping or adjusting them, then at the last second, bump him on the shoulder and toss the glasses in his path.
• When he steps on (or near) them, cry out in horror. Say, “You broke my glasses!” Demand and collect payment, and be on your way. (Don’t forget the glasses — you’ll need them to try this again over on 7th Avenue in a few minutes.)

Now, this is obviously, patently, clearly a hustle. I know this not just because my common sense tells me so, but because it’s happened to me before on the streets of New York, back in 2005 right after I arrived. (That time, I’m pretty sure I could have been pegged as a rube from 2 blocks away.) I can’t remember the details, other than that (1) I really felt intense emotional/social pressure to pay up; (2) I don’t think I paid up; and (3) I felt angry, frustrated, and a little dirty after the experience — I had a very strong sense that I was being rolled, but I couldn’t prove it. Robert Cialdini could probably explain where the social pressure to pay comes from (and some of it certainly comes from the New Yorker’s determination not to “make a scene”). But it doesn’t really matter; obviously the scam works, or it wouldn’t keep happening.

It didn’t work on me this time, though. At all. I was really pissed, and showed it. (It wasn’t a great day. I’d left the house without an umbrella, and was in the process of being drenched by cold sideways rain for the third time in six hours.) I picked up the glasses I’d “broken,” looked him in the eye, and handed them to him. “Hey,” he exclaimed, his timing all off, “you broke my glasses!” I think what I said was “Dude, this is a hustle. Do you think I just got off the boat?” before I turned around and resumed walking in the direction I’d been heading. He came after me, halfheartedly, for about 50 yards, calling “Hey! Hey!, then moved on to try it again somewhere else.

What is wrong with people?

I’m on the train back from Philadelphia after a very short business trip (3 hours 10 minutes on the ground). I must say that based on what I’ve experienced in the dozen or so times I’ve visited it over the years, I love love love Philadelphia and am sure I could easily live there. The entire central core of the city seems more vibrant every time I visit, the arts scene is obviously great, there’s a friendliness toward and respect for tourists and flaneurs that you don’t see in Washington or New York — and you don’t seem to have to pay that inconvenience tax that we’ve got in New York, where everything is unnecessarily complicated and schleppy and you get home at the end of the day covered with a thin film of grease. It’s kind of like New York, but after an attitudectomy, and shrunken by 40%.

The parochialism would grate eventually (as it did when I lived in Atlanta, Washington, and for that matter San Francisco), but then in Philadelphia you’re so close to so many other interesting places, including New York, that I don’t think it would matter as much.

Coming later today: bonus pic of me on a park bench with Ben Franklin.

I spoke too soon. By page 82, she’s skipping down the sidewalk singing loudly, trying not to step on cracks, observed by startled passers-by.

Reading Stephen Benatar’s Wish Her Safe at Home. Protagonist is supposed to be going crazy (in the intro, John Carey said it was one of the most disturbing books he had ever read, and was blackballed by the 1982 Booker Prize committee), but I’m already on page 76 and so far she hasn’t. There are signs she’s a little off, to be sure (on page 56, waiting in a drugstore, she says “I executed a few unobtrusive dance-steps which scarcely moved me from the spot”), but so far nothing particularly disturbing. But I’m ready…

Here’s a map, via Ryan J. Davis’ blog and CitizeNYC, of exactly what’s going to happen when the V train goes away and the M train changes from brown to orange. (The map’s a little out of date, since if I recall correctly the MTA bowed to pressure and decided to use the much more historic designation of M for the train, and do away with the V — but the proposed routing didn’t change, just the name.)

Ryan points out that for many people in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Ridgewood, life will actually improve, because they’ll now have a one-train route into Manhattan.

(Warning: if you read past the third paragraph or so, you may feel you’re seeing a spoiler or two; although I’m not saying anything here that the author didn’t say out loud in his lecture before I read the book, and it didn’t bother me none.)

In Even the Dogs, Jon McGregor has done something remarkable: he’s written a novel about heroin addicts, and heroin addiction, that I’ve actually read through to the end. And I read it through not in small doses, but in one sitting (with, admittedly, a long break to sleep, wake up, and spend a day at work).

Addiction is not a literary topic I have ever thought I was particularly interested in, especially because most fictional treatments of addiction and other conditions of mental illness are so untrue to life. They’re either mawkish or romantic, or they’re unrealistically redemptive, or they fail to capture the mundane lived reality that underpins the life of even a “crazy” person.

Compare Next to Normal, last year’s “acclaimed, groundbreaking musical” with a “thrilling contemporary score” that “pushes Broadway in new directions.” NtN, of course, is “about” bipolar disorder, and it (apparently, and I say this because I couldn’t bring myself to sit through it, although I endured endless plot summary from my excitable friends and on the Internet, and saw the production number at the Tonys) celebrates — nay, fetishizes — the condition and the “conflict” it causes and the “consequences” in its wake. Forgive the grumpy-old-manitude, but as one of the people I know who lives with a chemical imbalance said to me, more or less, “I can’t imagine feeling anything other than anger and frustration as a result of seeing that show.” People living with untreated or untreatable mental illness don’t romanticize it at all, as far as I can tell; it’s just there, an unavoidable pain in the ass, an inconvenient handicap that insists on being reckoned with just as you’ve finally managed to put it out of your mind, an inhibitor and complicator of social functioning, a monkey on your back that you never adjust to and will never get rid of. People with mental illness of course come to terms with the way God made them, and learn as best they can to accept themselves the way they are (what else can you do)?… but their success in building happy lives, if they’re lucky, doesn’t eliminate or even neutralize the pain and dislocation that they feel; it’s all jumbled up together.

Ditto with addiction. And McGregor (whom I heard speaking about the book here in New York at the Center for Fiction) has told a very clear, plain, believable, and not at all romantic story about addiction and addicts on the street — about their pain, their realism, and above all the daily schlep that is their lives. This despite a narrative form that is unusual, experimental, even a bit magical. As the characters remark time and again, it takes a lot of work, daily grinding work, to hold yourself together if you’re addicted to heroin and living on the street, and these people (and they are very much fully realized people) plod through it (each in his or her own style) with a determination that is to their credit. A bleak novel, a novel whose protagonists are largely unsophisticated and one that does not resolve in a satisfactory way; but I laughed out loud at least a dozen times, and was gripped through to the end.