You might have thought he’d insulted Ali’s grandmother. Ali sent that young man on his way.
“What, they think I’m going to bargain with them just because I have an accent?” he said to no one in particular, in his best indignant voice. Then he laughed. I did, too.
The store is called a smoke shop but, let’s face it, it’s a head shop: Hundreds of pipes and bongs line the shelves. There are rolling papers, booze, condoms, lube, pseudo-poppers, lotto tickets, junk food, you name it. It’s so full of vices that, paradoxically, it’s a vice-free zone. I hardly ever indulged in potato chips before, but that’s changed since I started buying my New Yorkers there. I threw in a bag of salt-and-vinegar ones this time—what the heck.
“Eight dollars,” he said, “eight dollars, my friend.”
I pulled the bills from my wallet while doing the math in my head. Suddenly it hit me: “It’s always right on the dollar, isn’t it? Eight, not $7.98. Or three dollars, not $2.95 with tax, or whatever?”
Ali smiled. “I round it off. Less change; it’s good.”
Ali kept the shop open during Hurricane Sandy, as unfazed by the storm as he is by the crazies he sometimes contends with on weekends. I went in on the second night of no power, lights, or water with Oliver. The shop counter was lit like an altar with a few well-placed candles; Ali looked like an oracle. In the semidarkness, one would never have known there’s a ton of porn for sale in the back: gay, straight, and everything in between, and at every extreme.
We bought water and a flashlight and chatted for a while. He told us when to come back if we needed more—he had a bottled-water connection of some sort.
It felt nice to emerge from our dark, trapped apartments and connect with the formerly normal. We then stepped into the bar next door and had a warm beer by candlelight and toasted with fellow neighborhood drinkers, “To surviving Sandy and to being New Yorkers.”
Even under normal circumstances, one would never find Ali in there—say, having a drink at the end of a night. In fact, Ali would never partake of almost anything for sale in the shop.
“I don’t touch any of it,” he has told me. “I don’t do any of it. I drink Sprite. I go home to my family in Queens.”
Even so, he doesn’t seem to pass judgment on those who partake, or if he does, he’s got quite a poker face. I think he gets that some of us may need a little something extra to distract us, to take the edge off, to gamble on the remote chance that we might win big in the lottery and get to leave this place.
I’ve lived in New York long enough to understand why some people hate it here: the crowds, the noise, the traffic, the expense, the rents; the messed-up sidewalks and pothole-pocked streets; the weather that brings hurricanes named after girls that break your heart and take away everything.
It requires a certain kind of unconditional love to love living here. But New York repays you in time in memorable encounters, at the very least. Just remember: Ask first, don’t grab, be fair, say please and thank you, always say thank you—even if you don’t get something back right away. You will.
Woman Having a Bad Day
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
6-2-13:
I visited Ali at the smoke shop this evening. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, two months or so. “My friend,” he immediately greeted me, with a smile.
I said I’d been away for a while and he immediately interjected, “So have I—one, two, three, four”—counting on his fingers—“twelve days, I go: Pakistan: back home. See my family: first time in long time: my wedding, the last time: nineteen years ago, it’s been.”
I told him that was absolutely wonderful. “Took your family? Your kids?”
“No, no, just me. I surprise my brother.” He then went on to tell me in elaborate detail about how he had done it, arriving four days earlier than planned. He told me about each plane ride, how long each layover was, where he stayed, up until the final moment when he stepped out from behind a door and surprised his brother, “who almost fall down.” His three other brothers and his sister were in on it. Ali smiled with great pleasure as he told me this story. As did I. I was touched: that he was talking about his siblings, not his parents, or his own wife and kids—about the special bond between siblings. I get that.
As Ali and I were talking, a tall and very built black man came into the store to buy lotto tickets. He overheard us as he was studying the lotto sheets. “That’s nothing,” he couldn’t help commenting, “I’m one of fifteen kids. Fifteen!” Then he said, sort of under his breath, “My daddy couldn’t help himself, always out prowling, probably had lots more kids that I don’t even know about—Haiti, you know.”
Ali cut in: “That’s the thing about third-world countries: There no TV, no movies, no video games—nothing to do—so people have babies.”