I walk to work every morning, from the Village to midtown. It takes me about forty minutes. Some find this odd, but it’s a nice way to start the day. Every morning, my trek uptown takes me up Broadway to 23rd street and then straight up Fifth Avenue. Being that I keep a fairly regular schedule, I tend to see a lot of the same folks each day. One such person is “the business dude,” a short, balding man who carries a briefcase and frequently wears a brown suit. He must live somewhere in Chelsea and work somewhere in the West 40’s. I saw him today, and we found ourselves virtually racing each other up Fifth Avenue. We don’t speak or even acknowledge one another’s presence, but we seem to operate in the same orbit every morning.
About twenty minutes into the walk, I tend to reach the mid-30s. The sidewalk in front of the Empire State Building and its surrounding environs are dependably peppered by a phalanx of orange-shirted tour-guides, eager to lure tourists into their sight-seeing schemes. Since the scaffolding has come down, their numbers have seemingly doubled. They spread out like a gauntlet, targeting fleece-swaddled North Dakotans, corpulent Canadians and too-short-shorted Germans. The orange shirts never accost me, though. I’d like to think it’s because I don’t look or behave like a tourist. With a purposeful stride, a clichéd preponderance of black in my wardrobe, pupil-obscuring Ray Bans fixed to my face in homage to the Sisters and the Velvets and a head permanently apostrophed by headphones, I’m not regularly mistaken for a foreigner (although possibly a refugee from 1985). I breezily weave through the throng unimpeded.
Today, however, as the business dude and I stealthily walked neck & neck towards the Rubicon of 34th street, my opponent’s trajectory was suddenly obstructed by a wide-smiling gentleman in an orange shirt. I casually looked back to catch a taste of the exchange. The business dude, evidently outraged at being both delayed and – more importantly – mistaken for an out-of-towner, barked angrily. “Do I look like a fuckin’ tourist?”
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