Stranger in the Night

New York Observed
Stranger in the Night

By MAURA KELLY
Published: January 23, 2009
The New York Times


I was brushing my teeth around 11 o’clock the other Sunday night when someone rang my doorbell.

The digitized chime approximates the booming gong that might sound in an old horror movie at the moment the innocent girl dashes into the haunted mansion in the middle of a terrible storm after her car runs out of gas.

Which is to say the sound can be pretty spooky under the best of circumstances, and hearing it so late at night sent a chill down my spine.

I wasn’t expecting anyone. The U.P.S. man would never come at that time, and it was far too inappropriate an hour for any of the religious proselytizers who sometimes stop by my building urging me to find God.

I crept to my bedroom window, which overlooks the street, being careful to leave the light off as I peeked through the curtain. In the darkness, I saw a strange man in a white baseball hat looking up at me. I shrank back in terror, wondering whether he had seen me. A moment later, I seemed to have gotten my answer: The bell rang again.

If the person was someone who knew me, wouldn’t he have called out something like “Hey, Maura, it’s me! I need to talk!” But really, who would be looking for me at 11 p.m.? Many wonderful people populate my neighborhood in deep Brooklyn, but they are largely family types, and none are in the habit of coming by for a chat, especially not unannounced late at night.

The mysterious visitor also could not have been my incredibly sweet landlord, who would have tried my cellphone if he needed to reach me. He lives just below me, in a brownstone where I enjoy the best apartment by far I’ve ever had in New York, a floor-through with two skylights and four huge windows, trees visible from every one of them. Even better, at $1,075 a month, it is the cheapest one-bedroom I’ve rented in the five boroughs.

I had taken the place under duress. The lease on my old apartment was up, and I had no other options. My main concern was the area. I’d never even lived in Brooklyn before — only Manhattan and, very briefly, the other “safe” borough, Queens. Could I really live in a neighborhood full of liquor stores and dollar shops?

The streets seemed peaceful enough when I walked around to check out the environs. I saw people with friendly faces sitting on the stoops, window boxes filled with flowers, cheerful-looking children riding bikes through the local park. But would I feel O.K. walking home from the subway at night?

I voiced my concerns to my landlord, who promised that if I really didn’t like the area, he’d be lenient about letting me out of my yearlong lease, adding that he was sure I’d feel perfectly safe.

And I had. Maybe a little too safe, because as I grew more comfortable in the neighborhood, I did all sorts of irresponsible things. I strolled home way past midnight on weekends. I wore low-cut tops and short skirts. Sometimes I even ran from the shower to my bedroom with no clothes on. Granted, the curtains were usually closed, but not always.

It was no wonder a rapist was after me!

Telling myself I was probably overreacting, I called my landlord, who promptly went outside to see if the suspect was still around. No dice. I asked him if there was a note on my door, or any sign that Jack-the-Ringer had decent intentions. There was nothing.

My landlord told me someone probably just had the wrong address. But if that had been the case, wouldn’t the person have called up to me and said something like, “Hey, is this the right place?”

I telephoned the local police, hoping, really, that they’d tell me I was being ridiculous. No such luck. “Fifty percent chance it was nothing,” said the officer on the other end of the line. “Fifty percent chance it was a psycho looking for trouble. You know what the neighborhood is like.”

“Yes!” I replied. “And I’ve never felt a bit unsafe in a year living here!”

“Come on down to the precinct any time if you want to see the stats on assaults, murders, rapes,” he said. “All that fun stuff.”

It was true that just months earlier someone had been randomly shot only a few blocks from my apartment, and at least two people in the area had been murdered. Man, was I an idiot!

A few hours later, having removed both my air-conditioners and locked all my windows, I fell asleep — or didn’t — clutching a pen knife and thinking that the rapist must have had his eye on me for a while. Why else would he have rung my apartment and not my landlord’s? Clearly, I was going to have to move, I told myself grimly.
* * *
I WOKE up the next morning in desperate need of a little human contact and strong coffee. As I began packing up my things for a trip to the great little coffee shop around the corner so I could search the real estate ads over an espresso, I discovered that my wallet was missing.

A light bulb went on in my head. I ran down to mailbox, and there it was — my black leather billfold, which had apparently fallen out of my bag and been run over by a car. My credit card had broken into two pieces, along with my library ID, but everything was there, down to the $27 in cash that I had left when I’d last opened my wallet at the corner market.

I was so thrilled that I told a few of my neighbors, including a couple of older men who work at the laundromat down the street. “That was Jesus, returning it to you,” one of them said.

His buddy gave him a funny look, then winked at me and smiled, flashing a gold tooth. “Nah, not Jesus,” he said. “But someone very close to him.”

For all my heathen ways, I couldn’t disagree.

Maura Kelly’s personal essays have appeared in The New York Observer, The Washington Post and Salon, among other publications.

Crashes, Big and Small

Wednesday, December 31,2008
8 Million Stories: From Wall Street to Main Street - or the Sidewalk
MAURA KELLY worried about one crash but found another

The stock market is crashing, the sky is falling and the wheel of fortune keeps turning.

Was the little morality play I got swept up in a couple months ago a reflection of the heightened economic tension in the city? Or just another iteration of the age-old war between the classes? I myself can relate to both the white collars and the blues. Back in the day, I did some time as a wage slave—most memorably in my hometown’s K-Mart—before becoming an office type after I graduated college.

Since I left my full-time job a few years ago to write a novel, however, I’ve been making a hand-to-mouth living on the fringes of the magazine world. And given the dour financial situation—which is translating into fewer ad pages, slashed budgets and smaller staffs—I fear that, soon enough, I’ll no longer get enough writing assignments to survive and I’ll be forced to consider retail. Or phone sex.

Not surprisingly, like so many other New Yorkers, I was fretting about money on Oct. 16. The Dow had taken another huge hit—losing 733 points in one of its worst days in history— and the full-time freelance gig I’d been doing was about to end. I didn’t have much else lined up. After checking the headlines one last time, I shut off my computer, left my cubicle and headed over to Ess-A-Bagel for a snack before an evening session with my shrink.

As I ordered, I kibitzed with the baby-faced Bangladeshi man who works there. The talk was about our recent run-ins with the law: He’d gotten a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt while waiting for his wife outside a grocery store. I’d gotten a summons for riding my bike on the sidewalk in Bumblefudge, Brooklyn.

I’d clearly been doing something wrong. My friend’s situation was a bit more Orwellian: He’d been innocently idling in his car when one traffic cop told him he couldn’t be parked in that particular spot; and it was as he was moving a few hundred feet forward at five miles per hour that a different cop pulled him over.

We’d finished trading tales of woe and my friend had just popped a multi-grain carb-ring into the toaster for me when some young woman wandered in, mumbling into an iPhone. Though she was wearing casual clothes—Mick Jagger–inspired spandex and a hoodie—her shearling boots and monogrammed Vuitton purse made it clear she had dough. My friend asked if he could help her. She seemed somewhat irritated that he’d interrupted her call and even more put out by the tiresome task of actually having to communicate what she wanted. (The expression on her face as she looked at my friend seemed to say: When are you people going to learn to read minds?) But—good sport that she was—she managed to bark out some kind of barely discernible order regarding “salad” before returning to her very important conversation.

My friend held up a small plastic container and pointed to it. “Do you mean something this size?” he said quietly. “Or on a sandwich? “I want a sal-ad!” the woman shouted, in a way that seemed to indicate she assumed he had trouble understanding English. He doesn’t. “With tuna!” “Oh, I see,” said my friend, polite as ever. “You want tuna salad on greens?” His attempt at clarification sent her over the edge. “You know what?” she said. “Forget it. Just forget it. I don’t have time for this.” And out the door she stormed.

The whole thing went down so quickly— and I was so shocked by her unexpected torrent of rudeness—that I didn’t have time to tell her what I thought of her behavior. But as soon as I managed to shut my gaping jaw, I apologized to my friend on behalf of humanity. He brushed it off. Clearly, he’d seen that kind of thing before.

The incident was still fresh in my mind the following evening as I headed off to a party at the Paris Review. I was supposed to meet a friend on the steps of the literary journal’s office, and I was running—or, rather, biking— late. At the intersection of Park and E. 19th, I pulled up to a red light, vaguely aware that another biker was on the other side of the street.

When I stopped, my attention was drawn more sharply to him—a Latino delivery dude with a thermal food bag in his basket. An altercation was beginning on the opposite corner between him and an unnaturally tan guy in a navy Polo. There was a frat-boy arrogance about the prep as he grabbed the delivery dude’s handlebars and said, “Think you’re going to get away with that?” Though the delivery dude was more muscular, he backed away, hands up. He could’ve taken the prep easily, I thought, but was trying to avoid trouble.

The prep shouted a few unattractive things and threw more shadow-punches—only because it was so clear the delivery-dude would never actually pummel him—before calling the cops to report that a biker had crashed into him. Upon hanging up, he announced smugly that the NYPD was on its way.

“The poor guy’s just trying to make a living,” I shouted over to the prep.

“I can’t just let it go. D’you see what he did to me?”

“No,” I admitted. “But you don’t seem hurt. And I know he wasn’t going fast.”

“But how many times am I supposed to let them get away this?” the prep asked.

“'Them'? There’s only one of him.”

“Nah, but these guys’re always running people over.” He was slurring his words ever so slightly. “I can’t let ‘em get away with it.”

The delivery dude, who did not seem to speak English, turned to me and put his hands together prayerfully. He was nodding his head like he agreed with what I was doing.

I pressed on, asking the prep. “How many times have you let this guy get away with anything?”

“Look,” the prep said, “I know where you’re coming from … But do you pay taxes in this city?”

People who bring up taxes in the midst of any kind of street altercation always seem slightly deranged to me. “Of course I do,” I replied. “And I’d like it if the police whose salaries I theoretically contribute to concentrate on fighting criminals, rather than wasting time pestering some hard-working guy.”

“Sorry, but no deal.”The prep shook his head. “They’ve got to learn a lesson.”

We seemed to be at an impasse when an attractive man in a suit approached. “Hey buddy,” he said, addressing the prep. “You ever done anything you shouldn’t have done--like, I don’t know, jaywalking?”

“Of course,” the prep said. “But come on.You know where I’m coming from.”

“Have you been drinking tonight?” Mr. Suit continued.

“Of course. But you know how it is.”

Mr. Suit lifted the bottom flap of his jacket to reveal a shiny badge attached to his belt. Waving his hand like he was shooing a pigeon, he said to the prep, “Why don’t you be on your way?”

The prep walked off, head held low, and Mr. Suit dismissed the delivery dude too. “Thank you!” I called out. He waved at me, and I biked off, pleased with myself.

About three minutes later, I was biking down Broadway when a well-groomed young woman darted into the road without looking. “Watch out!” I screamed as I braked. It was no good: On impact, she was thrown to the pavement.

“My goodness, I’m so sorry!” I circled back to her. “Are you OK?”

Without answering me, she picked up her iPod—which must have prevented her from hearing my warning—and walked off with scraped palms and wounded dignity. She’d been in the wrong, technically, for crossing willy-nilly like she had. But in a city like New York, where the rules aren’t always reliably enforced and we so often have to make our own in order to survive, I couldn’t blame her.