Some years back I ordered a book online that was written by a friend of mine, a humorist named Robert Lanham. (Rob's first book, The Hipster Handbook, was a small cultural sensation, and an unfortunate one if your zip code happened to be 11211.) I can't be sure which of his books it was, but it was either Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, and Other Creatures Unique to the Republic, or The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right. I'm leaning toward the latter, though either title would do my story plenty of good.Leaving my house in a hurry a few days later, I saw a yellow envelope on my front stoop, grabbed it and stuffed it into a bike pannier on my way out to wherever I was going. I forgot about the package until the next day when I was leaving a friend's place in Queens, again, heading who knows where (a reality of my freelance status is that I have no routine in my life), when I remembered the book in the bike bag. I took it out of the pannier, and removed the book from the envelope, tossing the now empty, yellow (manila?), mini-bubble-wrap-stuffed envelope into a municipal New York City trash can (a tall green metal affair with a small hole on top, designed to prevent people from dumping their household trash in city garbage cans—even though the same agency collects both kinds of trash and brings both kinds to the same place) on the corner of Queens Boulevard and Forty-Seventh Street.
Let me tell you about the corner of Queens Boulevard and Forty-Seventh Street in Sunnyside, Queens. There is now a fancy Korean deli there, called, simply, Jonathan Market (perhaps a distant cousin of Susan Laundromat, the Chinese laundry near my house in Brooklyn). Thank God for Jonathan Market. For years, the corner "store" at Forty-Seventh & Queens was an establishment nobody in their right mind would ever want to enter. They "sold" or rented "videos"—not DVDs, but VHS tapes inside boxes so dusty you couldn't read the titles. I only know this from glancing in the windows when I walked by. I never went in there, as there are enough dusty items at my place already. But there was something else in there—a collection of items several notches below dusty, used VHS tapes on the desirability scale. On the shelves of a tall metal rack--the kind you'd expect to find reading material on in a church narthex—against one side wall were displayed packages of ladies' nylons from 1960 or thereabouts, or so I would guess. (Do I need to mention dust again?) These were not your L’Eggs variety of packaging, but nylon stockings folded around a very thin, flat cardboard insert, nestled inside a clear plastic sleeve.
Around the time my Lanham book had arrived and I was leaving my friend's place and was opening the yellow (manila?) envelope on the corner of Queens Boulevard and Forty-Seventh Street, the corner store was starting to undergo the transformation from un-shopped in, dusty VHS tape and ancient ladies' nylons hot-spot to the aforementioned and glorious Jonathan Market. The metal rack with the flat packages of nylons had been hefted out to the corner where it now sat, a sidewalk relic to fifty year old "fashion". The rack was ten feet away from the municipal green garbage can with the narrow opening on top. (I'd be lying if I said that I paid more than a glance's worth of attention to any of this. That's a great thing about New York City: so much happens all the time that it's as if nothing does. The two things that draw crowds are 1] heinous crimes and 2] crowds themselves. Just yesterday, on my way to a meeting, I witnessed a crowd of people gathered on Prince Street in Soho. A mixture of tourists and locals stood in concerned clumps, variously glancing west, reacting to something--or so it seemed. I had to investigate. I steered my bicycle over there to see what had happened. [Please, not another dead bicyclist.] I reached the space in front of the mass and finally saw... nothing. Like street fish, New Yorkers collect in schools for no other reason than that they saw others standing there looking at... nothing.) Seconds after passing the rack of nylons I tossed the empty envelope into the garbage can.
Three days later I walked into my house and noticed a thin yellow envelope at the bottom of the small piles of bills and other junk my landlord had kindly left for me on the stairs up to my apartment. The envelope looked familiar—and upon further inspection, I saw that the return address was the same as had been on the envelope when Rob’s book arrived earlier in the week. Indeed, it was the same envelope, and it was still open where I had torn off the cardboard strip on one end. Inside was a dusty old package of ladies’ nylons.
