The Next Time the Street Slows Down
The Balloon Saloon sits five blocks away from my house. Cornering West Broadway and Duane Street, the store marks the beginning of that slow blend from Tribeca proper into the eddies of Chambers and Church, and then into FiDi; the music school that made me; my Jamba Juice graveyard. The Balloon Saloon has existed since my parents moved into the neighborhood — watched its neighbors birth and die in awe and at the hand of the decade, and bore subtle witness to restaurants beguiling your wallet into $27 niçoise and still ask that you hold on for just a moment, your table will be ready shortly.
The Balloon Saloon realized me as a kid; introduced me to those crucial societal whats that inevitably lead us to ask how or why. When you first walk in, you’re met with colors you didn’t know existed, toys you never knew you needed, and every balloon in the world holding a town hall, crowding any semblance of ceiling. At the Balloon Saloon I learned what wanting meant: leaving the store without the World’s Smallest Rubik's Cube, or mini erasers that looked like Japanese food, or stress-balls shaped like boogers that smelled of lemon, it was a hate crime, fucking bedlam. Because of my little tantrums outside the store my mom stopped taking me to the Saloon unless we needed something for a birthday, but my dad loved the poop section, so we’d go in and come out snickering with 3 different sizes of whoopie cushion to prank my younger sister. In later years, I’d walk past the store and take in the sheer consumerism of it all: I really paid $11.99 for a piece of plastic that resembles Theodore Roosevelt taking a shit. The Balloon Saloon came to represent vulgar American excess for a slowly self-radicalizing 13 year old Sage; a home of jokes and tricks and toys whose very existence taunted the futures of the children they advertised themselves to; a real life Thneedville. After a certain point I stopped keeping track of what the Saloon meant to me, and it just became the scene where all of those whats played themselves out and led to this how and why of a Sage — it is the coalescence of those childhood memories, constantly rechallenged and redefined by the spaces between those perceptions and my growing distance from those spaces.
The Balloon Saloon was also the site of a bad bad recurring dream I had as a child (I wasn’t a huge dreamer as a kid, so the fact that I remember this dream at all is striking). I’m walking towards the Saloon on West Broadway and there is a crocodile chained to the outside of the store, specifically the metal grating exterior. The crocodile is as big as it really is, and mean, and hungry, and I am young, and dreaming, and sweaty and fat, and there is a metaphysical problem with my West Broadway sidewalk, carrier of thousands. The problem slows me down. I can’t run, only walk. I am quickly and concedingly consigned to a matrix of unwanted slo-mo, a New Jersey stroll with Lower East Side legs. The crocodile, however, is not, and it approaches and I want to scream and I try to run and my legs are moving fast but the ground is moving slower and it approaches and I want to scream and I try to run and it reaches me and I wake up. I had that dream about fifteen times, about fifteen years ago. It still freaks me out.
Last night, I had that dream about myself here on campus. Except there was no crocodile, and there was no Saloon, and I’m older, so it was scarier. I was crossing College Street and a car turns from Elm onto College, and I’m listening to music. The ground starts working against me as Donald Fagen voices a gentle reminder to
Throw out your gold teeth
And see how they roll
The answer they reveal
Life is unreal (1)
And of course the car rolls down its window to tell me something or ask or look or beg or touch or desecrate. And I flip him off because he looks at me with teeth, because he is hungry, and mean. Well, I am grown now, so I am mean too. But that middle finger was a terrible mistake because the ground is suddenly and once again perverted catwalk, slow and simmering and thick like mud. I am once more catapulted into the appearance of ease, a whole fifteen years later — like some $11.99 sick joke from the Saloon — is this gooey street that same American excess? And he approaches and I want to scream and I try to run and my legs are moving fast but the ground is moving slower and he approaches and I want to scream and I try to run and he reaches me and I’m not waking up. My sprint is walk and now I am runway model, raccoon found in trash, niçoise, a quick bite. And this man is much worse than the crocodile, because I’ve since known what it is like to be eaten.
The anxieties of living in a new city with new men are myriad, and their amalgamate street harassment is a smart animal. It reminds me where/when/who/what I am, with a whistle or a bark or even just the up-and-down. Street harassment in turn almost animalizes me — hitches the leash like I’m getting too close to the curb, keeps me in check, shocks the collar. Maybe I need it: maybe if it wasn’t on such close watch I’d be too free. What that looks like, I’d be the last to know.
My self-perception is inevitably affected by all of this. Street harassment hyper-individualizes me, affirming that solipsistic self-pity that’s too easy to sink into and impossible to shake; my main character complex is empirically proven on the walk from Old Campus to Silliman:
If you're feeling lucky
You best not refuse
It's your game the rules
Are your own win or lose
So I romanticize it. What else can I do when everyone stares? I’ve learned that music (I recommend Steely Dan) can blanket the heat rushing to my face when a Motorcycle Man™ zips through New Haven traffic like a blade, revs his heavy engine at a red, and asks me to be his girlfriend as I stand in a loose pack of other students. I’ve learned to employ the new yorker walk when I’m alone and it’s late, slicing past the smokers and the workers and the cyclists and the bus-stop-sitters who stare at me like I’m their long-lost-lover when I’m young enough to be their long-lost-daughter. I’ve learned to actually appreciate my mask outdoors, because if I shove my hair in front of my eyes enough then there’s less to see, less to lick at. I have learned that cold weather is a double-edged sword; an excuse for more layers means less visible boob or leg, less meat to tear off bone, less cause for mouth-watering, or bemoaning hunger. But fall and winter also means more night, more dark, world of blindspots. So I stomp and I glare and I let the airpods scream in my ears and I ignore the hunger that I pass, and these things work, like, eighty percent of the time. And it’s fine, and it’s familiar, but it’s not, because I’m in fucking Connecticut at fucking college, where I’m supposed to feel fucking safe, but my heart is always beating at me.
It sucks that this topic — street harassment, feeling physically unsafe on any sidewalk — feels overdone: even as a woman who experiences it on a daily basis, I can’t shake the fact that this essay feels like plagiarism, or is boring, or is only interesting because I’m black, or because I started with a vignette about a balloon store. I want to make a deeper point about these fears; to say that it’s more than just kidnap or rape or murder. But it’s exactly those three words. That’s it. That’s all I’m scared of.
Coda:
I want to destroy the easy-to-digest notion of womanhood as standalone, as never having been, at any one point or another, girlhood, or even, less distinctly/more innocently, childhood. I am still of the Balloon Saloon, those tantrums and sick jokes. That girl, wide-eyed at the town hall on the ceiling, is still me. And though we have grown apart, those crucial whats and hows and whys from the Saloon are foundational to who I am; what’s more, those whats and hows and whys are now forced to fuse with newer, scarier, toothier whats and hows and whys, breeding a woman that is child, or a crocodile that is man. So this essay isn’t an argument for anything. I have no action items. I have no solution to putting down that smart animal other than what I’ve said: stomp, and glare, and let the music scream, and dream it into glamour, and cover your eyes, nose, and mouth, and maybe you’ll wake up the next time the street slows down.
(1) Steely Dan, Your Gold Teeth II, released March 1975, lyrics: https://www.steelydan.com/#!/releases/15314
By Sage Friedman.
