The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

The most concise explanation I have read this morning of why New York is sometimes called Gotham is from a letter to the editor of the Times from 1989, shortly after Michael Keaton first put the badass into Batman (honestly, Adam West’s Batman seems like a total wuss by comparison). Basically, Gotham is a reference to the wisdom and cunning of New York residents, which I referred to in Part 1 of this series.

One of the ways this attitude manifested itself on our trip was in the shocking ambivalence of the city’s service workers. Our hotel’s ‘concierge’ was a pretty blond woman who’s accent sounded Russian. When I asked where I could find a wine shop and a good pizza place, she turned to her laptop and searched the Web. The desk clerks were even less helpful; they barely spoke and just kind of looked at us expectantly. At least the concierge had the right attitude: she was trying to be helpful.

The best example is probably from Zabar’s Cafe on the Upper West Side. We walked up to the counter to order, and Danielle was told, ‘We’re not toasting bagels right now.’ OK, so then we’ll just get coffee and an OJ. We shuffled down the line and waited for someone to help us. There were three people behind the line: one on the cash register, two engaged in miscellaneous tasks, but not helping customers, of whom there were several. One man just stood at the counter looking back and forth at the workers who were ignoring him. Finally, the young man with the dew rag who was at the register yelled down the line to a young woman who was restocking coffee-making supplies (or something). She looked up with an expression that said, ‘What?’ and he replied silently with an exaggerated shrug and a wave of his arm to the customer waiting at the counter. She rolled her eyes and went to help him. Then it was our turn. We asked for two coffees in Zabar’s mugs, which were on special. With no sense of urgency, he filled two to-go cups with coffee, and slowly collected the mugs from some cabinet, and slowly packaged it all up. I didn’t think he had understood that we wanted to take advantage of the promotion, but I couldn’t say anything because he was distracted by another customer.

The other customer was a blond haired girl of 15 or 16. She walked straight to the front of the line and asked if there was a pen she could borrow. Dew Rag pointed out the obviously placed pens right in front of her, but these were attached to the counter by lengths of string. ‘Can I have one that’s not, like, attached to the counter?’ Dew Rag walked over to her and silently picked up one of the pens, a simple Bic, and plucked the pen out of the cap, which was what the string was attached to, and handed her the pen. She walked away, sneering.

Danielle and I watched all of this with bemused smirks. We had each silently elected to let the situation play out, accepting our coffee in whatever container it came in, paying whatever price appeared on the register. As it turned out, he gave us the promotional price. We ate some rugelach and drank our coffees on the steps of a church.

I think this is all captured pretty well in this exchange between Martin Weir (Danny DeVito) and Chili Palmer (John Travolta) in Get Shorty (snipped from Scott Frank’s screenplay:

MARTIN: A few weeks before shooting, I went back to Bensonhurst, just to listen to you guys. See, I’m Italian, but I grew up in Tarzana. So I wanted to pick up your rhythms of speech.
CHILI: We talk different?
MARTIN: It’s more like your attitude. Your tone, your speech patterns demonstrate a certain confidence in yourselves, in your opinions, your indifference to conventional views.
CHILI: You mean like we don’t give a shit.