Quiet SoHo

It was late and quiet at Spring Lounge the other night. I sat with my short, fat, gay, Indian companion at the bar. He was drunk. We'd been drinking Rebel Yell and trading jokes with Dermot, the bartender. He'd just put one into the universe that would send him straight to Hell, if he believed in it. I didn't, and was trying to think of something equally foul, when my companion, who had been near dozing, snapped awake and asked us what the best thing about having sex with twenty nine year olds was*.

My companion rebounded after visiting the bathroom. I asked him if he'd heard of the girl in the East Village with the X-ray eyes. He said something disgusting, then apologized. I wasn't joking. She's Ukrainian and lives on Eleventh and Second on the fourth floor of a walk-up. She's a child. People come from all over and wait in lines down the hall and stairs to see her. She sits on her couch and inspects you. Her grandmother translates. She can see your organs.

"There is a girl in New York City," said my companion, "who calls herself the human trampoline. And when I'm falling, flying, tumbling in turmoil..."

Dermot ambled back over and said some terrible things. He let them sink in and ambled back away. My companion asked me about the lines down the hall. "Why do people believe?" I said I thought it was the nature of this city. Maybe the country. You can invent yourself here. If you say you're something, then you are that thing as long as you want. You don't even really have to back yourself up. If you can convince the people you meet that you're an art dealer, or a writer, or a music producer, then it doesn't matter that you work at David Z. People want to believe.

We agreed that there are exceptions. My companion asked how I'd heard of the Ukrainian girl who can see you from the inside. "I saw her," I said. "She said I was fine."

(*There are twenty of them.)