This is Mitch Epstein’s, via Jen Bekman
When I was a nanny, a few times a week I’d need to drive the kid around town to various extra-curricular activities, listening to Tom Waits on a tape deck while we drove over the Williamsburg Bridge, me terrified I would kill us both, he threatening to kill me if I didn’t buy him a hot dog before his acrobatics class.
Conquering my fear of the parking garage was perhaps one of my greatest personal victories- there wasn’t too much room for growth in nannying, as you can imagine; one focused mostly on things like, “Cut up apple for after school snack quite dextorously today. What symmetry! I think I am improving!” or, “Fed the fish before mom came home! Things are looking up!”
After a few weeks of wrangling 9 year olds, a troupe of us usually, with me as their unlikely leader, donning leggings and converse and bleached hair to match whatever they had at Forever 21 that week, ignorant until just now of the mythology of play dates and Regent’s exams and parents who were once drug dealers and punk rockers that were now all sleeping together and pushing their children to learn Mandarin— I was separate from the parents, though; I’d stride up to the courtyard in whatever outfit I peeled off of the floor in the last minutes of Tyra and regretted already on the way over, chanting, ‘they must hate me because i am young,’ the whole way in for confidence— and the kids would yell out to me and grab my hands and I’d argue with them over how much money I had to buy them candy and we’d all sing and yell and shout obscenities at people crossing the street, the kid laughing with glee the more vulgar my protests, me saying, “Don’t repeat that!” with a thrill as we took on bends in street corners and came up against the park whenever it was least expected.
The Lower East Side will always feel like an inherently sad place to me, like living somewhere you can’t quite get a handle on, can’t quite seem to be happy in despite the charm— like flying kites on a too-windy day or horseback riding or Geometry. You want to get an A in Geometry because you always get As in everything and if other people can why not you? I used to always want to feel like I was having the best experience of a place, the most lived-in version of it, the most interesting story, and it turned out the story of living there was contained mostly in funny moments on park benches on very sad days. I think of walking around on Rivington during the day, listless, pacing on corners talking on the phone, sometimes hopping on the F train for fun, reading and writing there because it was just warm, but I also think of all the crazy idiots who sustained me, when a mom from school asked me why I dyed my hair that color or the kid forgot his homework once again, when all I wanted to do was take a nap or have a drink or meet a boy to distract me, people who called me Snowflake and Goldilocks would offer me sips of their Colt 45 and get down on their knees in the middle of the street to kiss my hand and tell me that if I was with them and got pregnant they would of course let me keep the baby.
I think of the man who, when I showed up a year or so later to buy a Diet Coke, asked me why I wasn’t buying cigarettes and I grinned and shouted that I quit and we cheered together. I think of all the mornings this city fought against my heavy heart, handing it over to me and then smoothing it over, through puddles and piles of trash and too-hot days and no money. And I think of those terrified afternoons spent at the parking garage, the men so inappropriately over the moon for me, all grins and elbows and fighting over who would take the elevator up and begin the great untangling of quadruple-parked cars, winking in my direction while I fiddled for Tom Waits to assuage my fear. And after awhile, these men, these nobody men, with their smiles and their fuzzy English, how they learned my empty, tired schedule, learned when they would see me and what time I would need them, and how on the hardest, saddest days, I would always find the car waiting in the aisle, ready to drive away.
