Does This Ever Happen To You?

(This is a chapter from the book of short-stories I'm currently working on, "Everyday I Write The Book")

You’re on the Subway or doing whatever the fuck you do all day. You sit down, examine your surroundings and maybe you notice somebody slightly attractive or interesting looking. You find yourself looking at a young woman sitting across from you on the G train who is both kinda pretty and wearing anshoulder bag that you identify as a piece of merchandise from the indie rock band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. You wonder why the fuck anyone would like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah especially all these pretty girls, specifically this one.You wonder if the fact that you are wearing a Pixies shirt makes you somehow appealing to the pretty girl. In the indie rock hierarchy, the Pixies are like the Beatles of the genre, totally groundbreaking and archetypal (especially Doolittle, my favorite record of all time). CYHSY are a band that are supposedly “from Brooklyn” who were a flavor-of-the month at least a year before this incident, and make their living playing music that attempts a goofy marginal contemporary version of bands like the Pixies. “Does this Pixies shirt make me cool to the Clap Your Hands girl?” This is the kind of conundrum that goes with living in Brooklyn nowadays, or at least Williamsburg, East Williamsburg and every area that has been eaten by Williamsburg and it’s well-dressed, good-looking, condo-building gentrifi-nation. “Hey, you appear to be vaguely interested in indie rock, have you ever heard of the fucking Pixies?”

After you’ve had this conversation with yourself for a while, you realize you’ve been staring at this poor girl for at least fifteen seconds and she is now looking at you and may very well be uncomfortable about the whole thing. You swiftly look away and try to find anything you can do with your hands that will make it seem as if your mind is not occupied with the girl across the train. You calculate that at this juncture she is five percent likely to be interested in you and ninety-five percent likely to think that you are a super-creep-potential Subway-masturbator-rapist-fellow-fan-of-indie-rock. Maybe she thinks I’m gonna buy her a soda and molest her in the parking lot-yip-yip. While you’ve only looked at the girl for what seemed like a brief moment, a spell of guilt comes over you and you want nothing more than to validate that you’re not acreep and this girl is not scared of you and that you are Ice Cold, not afraid to look an attractive stranger in the eye. You look at everyone else in the train to make it seem like you’re just interested in looking at people, which dosen’t really make any sense. You wonder if now the whole train sees you as a potential rapist.

You get off the train, but you use a different exit than the pretty girl does. Soon, you will be on the L train where you will undoubtably meet a circus of people dressed like they are interested in indie rock, with judging eyes and overzealous haircuts. You will stare at them like they are the creeps. The pretty girl is free from your mind until you once again, notice that there is an attractive person in front of you and it is the same girl with long dark hair, long legs, sad eyes and the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah bag from two minutes ago. You are walking right behind her, and you wonder if she thinks you are following her, even though you innocently also need to transfer. You wonder if she has increased her speed to get further away from you, or if she is just in a rush. You also wonder if the girl was even looking back at you in the first place and discuss the possibility that, like most pretty girls, she wouldn’t even touch you in a Dionysian orgy. You get to the train platform and decide to stop and wait a healthy five feet from her. You decide you have gotten this far, you may as well make some healthy, confident eye contact, just to show you’re not nervous.

“Pardon me, but didn’t I just see you on the train four minutes ago? You don’t happen to like indie rock, do you?”

You are now wondering if you’re having eye sex or if you are going to get sued for sexual harassment. You look away again, and then get off the train a stop early to prove once and for all that you have not being following the girl the whole time. Now, you will never see her again, unless you encounter her MySpace page. You also need a cigarette. You wonder if Midwesterners have these type of issues. You think these type of non-confrontations are why people hate New York, too many pairs of eyes. There are new attractive people to access everywhere you go. There are so many people, you can see someone once and never again.

This bird has flown, but there are more pretty girls in band tee shirts, as far as the eye can see. Sometimes the city becomes a big show, everyone’s in costume, or in character, or both, and it’s impossible to figure anybody out. You wonder if maybe the girl wasn’t that pretty, and are confused by the fact that you were intrigued by somebody who likes a band that you hate and think is shitty. You wonder if you are attracted to things that you hate. You wonder if you have too much integrity to get laid in this modern world. You wonder if any of these hipster chicks are as cool as they look, or alternately as annoying as they look (Cookie, I think you’re TAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!) You think it would have been another story if she was wearing a piece of Journey merchandise. “Hey, baby, you like Journey? I like Journey.”