free lunch

i am going to ban smiling. i am also considering putting a ban on men. not all men as i may have at some point in life threatened. just the type that recently seem to keep running me out of restaurants.

i've noticed their lecherous 'better-to-eat-you-with'-my-dear' smiles; with teeth the size and shape and shade of white chiclets. the painfully tan skin that registers somewhere between rotisserie chicken brown and mexican pottery orange, and hair so slicked with gel it its nearly reflective except for a swatch of sophisticated gray at the temples. they may or may not be wearing a gold chain. they may or may not be on 10th avenue. they are almost always trying to surreptitiously look down my shirt.



as a result, i am going to stop smiling at people. this is new york -a place where nobody smiles at you unless they are trying to con you. or sometimes they smile while pushing their shopping cart full of trash to yell at aliens or pick cigarette butts out of the cracks in the sidewalk. smiling at people here usually makes them nervous. not so with mr. greasy mystic tan. he makes eye contact. i smile out of service-industry job habit. he smiles back because he is about to try to con me.

when he smiles the sun glints off of his shiny chiclet teeth and off of his shiny understated but extremely expensive watch and he's hoping i will be blinded and not notice that he is old enough to date my mother. or at least my sister who has at least 10 years on me.



i laugh (shame on me) at the inane thing he has said post eye contact teeth-blinding and he's hoping that i won't notice the third thing he is about to say is a mostly inappropriate joke. the fourth thing is either "do you come here often?" or "i've seen you here before". around this point i am resigned to my fate of a conversation that will go on far too long and undoubtedly lead up to come on by a grossly inappropriate person.



i am a creature of habit without an expense account and there is an unfortunate lack of places to eat lunch on this section of 10th for under $8 so if i find one i'm there every day. usually it's me and the old man reading the new york times or playing sudoku. and sometimes its grandpa coppertone asking me out.

of course he's seen me before. there's no way around this question and there's no way to lie. if he sees me again there's nothing, absolutely nothing worse than an angry pushy person. or else he may think i'm there a 'second' time in order to see him.



i don't care if he does own the restaurant i am sitting in, or the doctors office next door or a villa off the coast of a semi-private island near bali. there's no such thing as a free lunch.



i've been run out of 3 delis and a counter service bodega this way.