4. Gangbusters

The moment I saw her, I knew she was different.

On Tuesday I waited for Chin in front of her Wall St office, but I didn't know whether we were supposed to meet at six or six-thirty. While leaning against the aboveground wall of the subway station, I almost impaled myself on the spiky rail. For a while I woman-watched. Though I like to look at men, the Wall St tomcats are known for their ruthless efficiency and pinstriped suits. They jack my heart rate, make me feel guilty for simply sitting on my impaled ass; it's not worth it.

But the women are a little less kinetic. They sashay in thin pencil skirts. They teeter on their heels. And maybe they are worse than the dudes. Like walking jumper-cables, the pinstriped men feed on my innate restlessness and guilt, but the women stab me. They look so put together. Their precise hair and eyebrows resemble war paint. Every one of them walks with confidence. They're fit-as-fiddle mini-cabooses engineered to tastefully jiggle teaspoons of well-placed rack and ass fat. When they laugh, they show off fluorescent white teeth. I knew similar girls both in high school and college, girls who did their homework and smiled at the right people and stabbed their perfect heels in the carpet as if they knew what they were doing. Future Female Business Leaders of America. They live the dream. Underemployed bums like me are the wreckage that sags beneath the crushing force of their success.

After a few minutes of this, I saw a thin woman in a wrinkled white shirt and gray pants. She wore almond loafers. Her outfit relaxed me. She could stretch her legs, too, and bent them in a Cleese-like Silly Walk fashion. On the phone, her voice was both smooth and excited. Something had been going well for her. I leaned on my fists and hung on her every word. As she stood in the middle of her street, leaning on her toes, all went well. Then she began wondering if so-and-so wanted to meet her at Cipriani. I could save up for a thousand years and still not be able to afford an appetizer at Cipriani's.

(The rich, they are not like you or I.)

Do I sound bitter?

I can blame the recession for making me hate the Wall St goddesses who warrant a mass discovery by some talent agency. And I wonder if they are familiar with the crushing stress of a scattered mind and grueling stretches of unemployment. Bitterness shortens lives and gives you ulcers. I'm too damn young to get ulcers.

But it's so hard to feel good in a field of bland perfection. I saw some heart-stopping beauties that made me feel jealous in my potato-sack shirt with the turmeric stain. One of them paused in front of me long enough to finalize a rollicking Hamptons timeshare. I don't know whether or not the Hamptons is a rollicking place, but I imagine that the rich know better than to sit in front of the water all day, tanning into burnt crustaceans. She's now due for a few months on end of coked-out clubbing, on laughter and enjoyment with friends. Good friends, friends who would drive her home covered in vomit from the hard partying. I don't understand it, but for a few sick (nano)-seconds I wanted that life.

I turned to my left. At that moment, our eyes met. And I thought, woah, she looks gangbusters. Sure, gangbusters is an adjective from the fifties. It may belong with the silverfish that live between the pages of quietly rotting books. But I rescue it from obscurity from time to time, if only to myself. ("Man," I might say, as I pass by a set of thick antique world atlases or cigars or funky Tiffany lamps, "that looks gangbusters.")

Gangbusters stood in the middle of the street. My first thought: someone cast the next H. Rider Haggard heroine, and she's Asian!

She wore a pair of ripped jeans. Big holes exposed the her unabashed legs. Her boots had flat soles and laced up to her thighs. Her hair, rambunctious and not manicured, fell on her back.  To me, it was un-whispered poetry, waiting for gusts of wind to shove it straight back into her face.

All of the women who passed her on the street felt much less bright by comparison. They noticed, too. One other woman even stopped and glared at her feet.  Betches love to glare.

Gangbusters then put a phone to her ear and said something while leaning against the marble wall two feet away from a very interested security guard. She rifled through a battered Strand bag. At first I was afraid she would look for cigarettes but she took out a Nintendo DS and started swooping her forearms to accommodate a few hungry turns. I wondered if she liked to race cars. A few minutes later she put the DS back and extracted her phone. My heart exploded when I found it was not an iPhone (or an Android or a Blackberry), but an old-school dumbphone. A dumb-as-nails phone. Dumber than my own dumbphone, which I inherited from my younger brother.

After she hung up her phone, she then folded it into her palm and launched herself from the wall. And then -- you won't believe this -- she performed a ten-point el perfecto karate kick. Right in the middle of the damned sidewalk. In those jeans. Her helicopter hair stabbed her in the face like blades.

Nothing about her fit. Her hair did not fit. Her eyes, covered in dark shadow, stayed hard and open. My notions of prettiness and jealousy don't fly well in the real world. The odd heroine prevailed over the groomed masses.

She left the way she came. I turned to stretch my neck. By the time I looked back, she'd left.

It's hard to feel jealous of the glittering prosaic. Well, not hard. But it should be. Moments like these remind me of true grace.