Ftrain, by Paul Ford

At a coffeeshop on 20th St. Where I have been stood up for a half-hour, giving me time to wait and watch.

This population is universally slender. The women have tiny stomachs if any; the men none at all. If 60 percent of America is obese, 0 percent of Manhattan on 20th St. between 7th and 8th is. Real estate trumps hunger here. If you are thinner your apartment is bigger.

That connects to a theory: the key to living in New York City is to be always aware that someone wants to occupy the space you're in. If you are on your bike cars want to be there. If you are walking someone on a bike wants to get by. If you are leaning on a mailbox someone has a letter to mail, or they want to lean there themselves. Park benches, subway seats. And someone wants your job, your office, your cup of coffee, your chair, your seat at the movies.

Right now someone--not some abstract someone, but a body within 100 yards of me--wants me out so that they can occupy my area. That person thinks I should disappear. I would love to oblige them. I am very obliging.

But not to the point of nullification. That is where it all starts to backfire: after decades of guilt that you might be given things that others might want, the endless signal picked up on your antennae that you are in my spot loses all meaning. You become of necessity a dick, yelling at the cabs, shrugging, sighing, rolling eyes. Boundaries of race and gender melt away in a festival of intermingled loathing, and somewhere it is always raining, garbage sailing down the gutter, endless honking, bodegas on fire, lobsters on all the subway seats, bears, in town for a convention, in all the cabs, fish working the token booths, snakes peering out from below the grates, and the streetlamps hung with old cloth and rotten sausages.

I was out for a walk with a coworker. He grew up here. "Chinatown is a pain in the ass," I said.

"You got to use your elbows," he said.

"I don't want to use my elbows," I said.