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Sex in the City©2003 David Boyne
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You know how people are always mistaking me for someone who has money? It happened again. Yesterday.
I’m having my breakfast, around noon, in the restaurant on the big balcony overlooking the huge main room of Grand Central Station. Remember Tony? He manages the lunch and dinner there. Long as I slip in before the hungry mobs from the office towers descend for their lunch hour, I can relax and enjoy my espresso and croissant, gratis. And Fridays, when I’m tending bar at The Palmetto, Tony can swing by, relax with a couple after-work martinis, gratis, and his commute on the Long Island Rail Road becomes a happy blur.
I like to sit at the small tables along the stone balustrade of the balcony so I can look down at the thousands of scurrying people below. All right, so maybe I’m not watching all the people, just the women. Even before we dated, when we were "just good friends", you always told me I was a typical guy, right? So I'm a typical guy. I’ve got the standard-issue built-in automatic radar, like an air traffic controller at LaGuardia, that instantly picks out and tracks the good looking women in any crowd. And you know how I’m a little extra horny in the mornings. So yeah I like to just lazily watch all these women walking fast across the station and out of my life forever, again and again and again. Why would I even think of living someplace where they weren’t so many women?
Anyhow Tony sends this cute Puerto Rican waitress over with my espresso and croissant because he knows I’ve got a thing for her. I see him grinning from behind the oval bar in the center of the place, shaking his head while he uses a calculator, probably remembering when he was single like me. Married guys remember getting laid when they were single, but they forget the empty times, the times when it’s like being adrift on a wooden raft under a burning sun. They’ve got wives to go home to, which is sort of like every night after your eight-hour shift on the raft, the goddamn Coast Guard swings by and picks you up.
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This story will appear in Velocity Nine Stories of People In Motion Autumn 2008 Published by Green Flash Publishing |