Today's TONYblog 1 Thing

Culture jam

Greetings, my little string beans. I had a particularly disgusting weekend as I was the victim of a pernicious new wave of street crime. Little shits on bikes spit loogies at me! I suffered a ride-by phlegming! Allow me to recount for you: So there I was, walking unawares down Avenue B. It was around 9:40pm. I heard the sound of bikes to my left and I also heard the sound of phlegm collection which is that dry-to-wet kind of throat clearing, coughing up sound which is not unlike when your hard drive is doing something loud and you realize there's something wrong with your computer. I greeted this sound with slight trepidation and a bit of nausea, as I have a real visceral reaction to street loogies glistening on the sidewalk like so much throat snot. Actually, it's not just visceral, it's intellectual too, because just thinking about it right now is turning my stomach. (I've been loogie hostile for years now. I'll never forget watching, in high school, as a guy I'd had a crush on hawked a dangler into a nearby bush. This is the same lothario who at lunch one day announced, to a friend who'd been eating watermelon messily, "Dude, you look like you've been chowin' box!" He was charming.)

Now where was I? Oh yes, so I'm hearing the pre-loog and I'm thinking that I need to be careful where I step because there's about to be a shiny street deposit somewhere in my vicinity. I wait to hear the splatter but I just hear the launching followed by laughter—a kind I haven't heard since grade school. Very slowly it starts to dawn on me that perhaps the laughter is directed at me, and I don't really know how or why this occurred to me except that some vestigial grade-school survival skill set was trying hard to push through the fog of confusion about where the loogie went. So I turn to look at the little shits and the last one, the slowest, weakest and most vile of the bunch, apparently unable to coax enough lung juice from his still succulent windpipes, simply spits in my direction. And it wasn't the kind of spitting one does when they get a little shampoo in their mouth in the shower, it was contemptuous and hate-filled and sadly, better aimed than its loogie compatriots. While the phlegm blobs never hit me, the spit grazed my cheek. I look forward to Hep B or some kind of boil or pustule in six to eight weeks.

Now where was I? Oh yes, you need some plans this evening. How about you go to S.O.B's to hear the Tito Puente Orchestra with Ronnie Puente? Swell, it's a plan.