Magic Jewball

How much would you pay to get into your apartment? No, really. Oh, me first? Well, I’d pay $230 and I just did the other night. And that was only the half of it. See, I came home to find my lock busted (that was the technical term the locksmith used: “your lock is busted”). I don’t mean someone tried to break in or anything, just that it spontaneously broke down in a fashion that meant the key turned but nothing happened. As a matter of fact, that’s what I kept thinking in my head, “the key is turning! but nothing’s happening! what the fuck!” When they say New York is the “city that never sleeps,” what they mean is, there will always be someone at any hour willing to take advantage of the fact that it is late in order to charge you five times as much as the thing costs in the daytime. And that is in fact how it played out.

I knew there was a locksmith shop down the street and so I went there and called the number in the window. Within 15 minutes two cheerful guys showed up. If you imagine that they were cheerful because I looked like an easy mark, you would be correct. I mean, what could be more desperate than a person at night who just wants to actually get inside their home? These guys were Israeli and I pretended like I didn’t understand them as they talked amongst themselves so that if they discussed how much they could get away with charging me I could act like I wasn’t in on the whole thing. But naturally that idea collapsed once they saw the mezuzah on the door and one of them asked, “are you Jooweesh?” Then I had to say miserably in Hebrew, “yes, yes, I can understand you.” So I switched my strategy to try to get friendly and I bantered back and forth with them about where they were from (Tel Aviv) and where I’d been in Israel (lots of places) and where I got my mezuzah (my sister made it) and why my lock was busted (cheap). But of course none of this saved me and the fee turned out to be $65 for service and $165 for emergency entry.

“What’s that second one?” I asked.
“That’s to get you into your apartment.”
“I thought that was the service”
“No, that’s just to come here.”
“Yofi.” *

They weren’t even all that bright. One of them said, “let me ask you something. You’re smart and Jewish and nice [at this point I thought he was about to ask me out, seriously], why don’t you leave a key with a friend?”
“I do. I had my key. My lock is busted, remember?”
“Oh right.”

Then the hard-sell of expensive new locks came. When the figure of another $225 was mentioned, I think I just lost it. “No thanks,” I said. They were baffled. “You’re just going to have no lock?” But, you see, I have two locks, and the second one is better than the first. The busted one. As a matter of fact, I once had my nieces from the suburbs come over and they said, “why do you have two locks?” I didn’t even know how to answer that. It’s kind of like asking why we breathe air or why the sun shines. Plus it would have been hard to explain without making them fear someone was coming to kill us.

And so I shooed them away despite their ominous warning that another locksmith would charge me the $65 “just to show up” charge all over again whereas they and their expensive replacement locks were already here! But no, shalom, l’hitraot **… not. Then I taped over the hole in my door and left a message at my office that I’d be late the next day. It was kind of freaky sleeping with a hole in my door, no matter how impossible it would be for anyone to look in or get in or whatever. The next day I called around and guess what? A new lock was $225. Everywhere. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. What wasn’t universal was the $230 emergency visit cost, but it was too late to get out of that without canceling my check and, y’know, these guys kind of know where I live.

To make a long story short, Donovan the Jamaican guy came the next day (I got about ten minutes of work done before I had to turn around and go home to await him - but hey, the subway is a lot less crowded in the middle of the day!) and did a fab job. And he didn’t even charge me the $65 “pay me, I showed up” charge, just the $225 lock cost. And unlike the emergency guys, he didn’t try to push a lock even better than that one on me. When he offered and I turned him down, he just said, “it’s OK, your deadbolt is good enough anyway.” Go Donovan! His verdict on the busted lock, “well, naturally… see this? Made in China.” Oh right, no Chinese toothpaste or locks, check. “You know where this new one I’m giving you is from? Israel.” Oh, the irony. But at least they do know a thing or two about security.

So, final damage with tax? $471. And all I have to show for it is… exactly the same thing I had before. But at least I can see it from inside my apartment.

*beautiful, great
**see you later

Crowded House - Locked Out (Live)

Yesterday, I got up at 7am, which as you probably know, is just not the sort of thing I do naturally on a Sunday. But this was different! It was the NYC Triathlon and it was right here on the Upper West Side. You see, nothing happens on the UWS. Parades, the marathon, everything happens on the East Side, which I’m told is a good thing but I still feel left out. If you’re thinking that’s still not enough to make me get up at 7, you would be correct. I went because Bob was running/swimming/biking the triathlon! You remember my good friend Bob, of course. Lots of people do these charity things and I respect them but I have never really seen anyone train the way Bob has. Every day she would run for miles or swim in the Hudson (ew, I know) or bike for two hours. If I would say, “God, it’s hot, I don’t think I’m going to do my walk today,” Bob would say, “I’m running six miles today.”

So I was anxious to support Bob and, frankly, to see all that training in action. Bob actually started at 6:40 am with that fun swim in the Hudson (you don’t need shots! said the website) and then the bike ride. But I have my limits and so I decided to cheer her on at the last leg, the 72nd St. run on the way to another five miles in the park. Before I left I checked to see how Bob was doing. Pretty good! I’d better get moving. (Click to enlarge and see where Bob was when I left my apartment).

Speaking of training, Bob was part of a group called “Team in Training” whose supporters would call out every time one of the team came by and say “Go T.I.T.!” And then I would laugh. Because I’m twelve. But I have to say, it was a glorious scene. The world looks different at that hour, I can tell you. Plus it was a gorgeous day and a parade of really, really fit people kept coming by. In the marathon, most people are thin and wiry, but these folks had muscles like cartoon superheroes. And it was so peaceful. All the cars were kept away and it was just runners and, uh, athletic supporters.

Look! I’m standing right in the middle of 72nd Street. As you can see, it was runners to the left, chatty pedestrians to the right, crazy photographer lady in the middle. As far as I could tell, most of the people standing near me were tourists there to cheer on a loved one. I think this was the conversation that made me teeheehee the most:

Woman, shouting down street at her daughter: “Wait, do you want to eat here? There’s a place with bagels and stuff.”
Daughter, shouting back down street: “I want to check out Starbucks first!”
Me, thinking in my head: Better eat here, lady, you never know where you’ll find a place with bagels and stuff again in NY. And to your teenager, I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s the same stuff they have in your Starbucks at home.

Ha! Wait on, suckers.

And then, finally there was Bob. Bob looked really, really tired. I called out, “you can do it!” And by you, I meant her because, personally, I couldn’t have done it. Besides, Bob raised lots of money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. So basically, she’s already done it. But after running my own triathlon (Fairway, H&H Bagels, and Zabar’s) I went back home and checked my computer again. Bob had indeed done it. Rock on, Bob!

This one’s for you, Bob.
The Commodores - Three Times A Lady

Naturally, you have a photographic memory of what I write in the J-Ball and you’ve been reading for a year or more, so you’ll remember that tomorrow is Martin Gore’s birthday (get it? photographic? never mind), informally known as “play all of Depeche Mode’s catalog in an exhaustive, completist effort.” But that’s a little unwieldy.

Anyway, despite the fact that I try to go with something at least a bit obscure for the iSotW, owing to the original mission to turn you on to or remind you of songs that you might want to add to your iPod, it’s hard for me to think of DM that way simply because I have listened to every one of their songs so many times that they are tattooed on my brain. So I’m going to go in the opposite direction and pick a popular one, and, who knows, maybe it’s obscure to you.

Recently, on another website, the question was asked, “what’s your favorite song?” I can never answer that question because I have way too many. When I was a kid it seemed easier and changed all the time but now I don’t even know what criteria to use. But lately, it has begun to dawn on me that without knowing it I have had a favorite song all this time. It’s the song that comes unbidden into my head with regularity and is often the soundtrack to my thoughts. See, that was the problem: I was trying to find a song that when I heard it my eyes widened and my heart beat faster, and I have a lot of those. But if songs like that are foie gras, then this song is mac n’ cheese, the song that will always make me happy, that is so familiar to me that it can’t possibly excite me because it’s in my mind way too often, that I could have every day and not get sick of it. It didn’t even make my Top 5 DM songs last year! And yet, I would argue that if I were launched into space for a year, away from all music, and were allowed one song, this would be it. I can hear the riff in my head right now, in all its unassuming glory. Ba dum ba dum buuuuuuuum.

Napster:
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts

Streaming audio available on the iPod Song of the Week page.

You may have heard we had an explosion this week. I heard that too. Mostly because I wasn’t anywhere near it, although, being that Manhattan is a tiny island, that may be relatively speaking. But luckily it didn’t affect me in any way except that the subway took three times as long to arrive and four times as long to get to my destination and it seemed even longer than that because I had five people pressed against me. I’m now pregnant. Oh, I kid.

But the question has been asked of me, why the hell are there steam pipes underneath the streets, anyway? What exactly does New York need steam for? If you have heard my clanking radiator (you can even hear it over the phone sometimes) then you already know the answer to this question. But for the rest of you… well, I’ll let Lois Griffin take this one.

Maybe it was a will to remain ignorant that kept me from updating Where in the World is David Nalbandian?. Because I know what the answer is: who cares, because wherever it is, he’ll be out really quickly. And lo and behold, when I skimmed down the list of sports stories in the online edition of today’s Times and caught Nalby’s name, I knew it couldn’t be good.

These two sentences encompass all of the NY Times’ tennis reporting for the day.

Igor Kunitsyn? Even I don’t know who the hell that is. Things are looking pretty grim. Nalbandian will never catch the Red Sox now.

The Wrens - Hopeless