From Chippendale's to the Javitz Center

I was not paying much attention to the older black man with the graying beard sitting next to me on the train with a book in his lap until he slid closer to me to let a young woman sit down on his other side. There wasn’t enough room for her friend to sit down too, but there was an empty seat on the other side of the pole next to me so I stood up and took that seat, the man shifted over and the other young woman sat down. By then he was smiling broadly, a striking smile. “I just went to the comedy club with a friend I haven’t seen in 30 years he told me,” pulling up a photo of himself posing with three women against a Harlem Comedy Club backdrop. Pointing out one he said, “she used to work at the Javitz Center with me, but she left in 1991, and those are her friends.” The photo blinked off the screen and was replaced by his screen saver, a photo of himself, much younger, posing with two women for a Newport cigarette ad. The glasses and grey beard were gone, but it was the same broad smile. "You’re a stranger so I’ll tell you the story about this ad," he said. I didn’t know what to expect with a beginning like that. “I was nervous, and my stomach was not feeling well, but I was sharing a trailer and I was too shy to use the bathroom. This woman, he said pointing to the woman on the left, asked me what was wrong, so I told her, and she told me not to worry about it but I just couldn’t so she told the other woman and then they told the photographer. The photographer said, "we have all kinds of scents and everything in there, you’re next and I want to you to be ok," so I went in the bathroom and then after that we took this picture. “Why did you leave modeling?” I asked him. “Was it too unstable to keep going from gig to gig?” “Yes, it was too unstable and also my father told me to get out of it. There were too many things going on, and men who wanted certain things. I auditioned for Chippendale’s and everything. I shouldn’t have stopped I could have been-" the name he named was not familiar to me, but the implication of success and wealth was clear. “Instead I got a job at the Javitz Center and I just retired last year after 30 years." He pulls up another photo, this one from some kind of brochure, a more recent image of himself and another man in uniform outside the Javitz center. "This was just a couple years ago, and they used it in the brochure." “You must have seen some interesting things,” I said. “My friend is a toy designer and he always told me about the toy fair.” “One time, two people came dressed as Batman and Robin but they were protestors and they started climbing the infrastructure of the building and they climbed way up." “What were they protesting?” “One of the companies,” he said, “they said they used animals for testing and they were right, but…” “I’ve done a lot of protesting,” I said "but I have never climbed a building." "When I retired, the other guys said, you’re going to come right back to working. But now I wake up, I eat breakfast and I go back to bed! I’m heading out to Nostrand where I live. When all that snow happened, I was shoveling and shoveling, and I went to the hardware store and I said 'I want a torch to get rid of all the snow. I saw a man doing it on Facebook.' They said 'sir, that’s Facebook, you can’t do that in nyc. It’s illegal, you’ll get arrested.'" "I’m going to Bay Ridge," I tell him. "Oh, you’re switching at Jay Sreet," he says and I nod. "Where are you from?" he asks and I can tell from the flicker of surprise on his face whe I say "Red Hook" that he knows how rough Red Hook was in the 80s. We pull into a station and he says “my mother lives right above this station, on Cadman Plaza. She sued her building and won." Right at that moment, we get to Jay St. My listening self is disappointed about missing the rest of this story, but the rest of me that's tired from an evening of clients bouncing off the walls with the excitement of the first nice weather in ages just wants to get home.