Part Three Best Way to Smoke a Doob ...

Part Three

Best Way to Smoke a Doob in Public High Crimes. First of all, it's important to roll it so that it looks and burns like a cigarette. We tend to favor pin joints. At our advanced age, we find the concept of the blunt wasteful and decadent, and the quality of today's hybrid strains being what it is, it doesn't take much to get orbital. We use two papers and add a little tobacco for an even burn. There are two approaches to smoking in public: stationary and mobile. The stationary approach is best performed at a public phone, where one can remain attentive to approaching traffic without attracting attention. Faking a phone call is easy and concealing a joint in the modest shelter afforded by today's payphones is child's play. The mobile approach is probably safer. We simply stride purposefully down the street holding the reefer as one would hold a cigarette, walking against traffic so as to pick up on any approaching law enforcement difficulty before it arrives. Never carry more than you can eat.

Best Argument Against Cultural Literacy Poetry on the Subways

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue. Your Poetry Sucks, and So Do You. Poetry we like. A well-heeled Eliot quartet, Donne's metaphysics. The ramblings of Whitman can juice our bones, and we'll take up with the modern greats, Simic or Patchen or Strand, when the mood hits. We like Barnes & Noble for its magazines and its noblesse oblige. But if Leonard Riggio wants to punctuate the infomercials in our subway car with some verse, must it be with the ramblings of an Ingeborg Bachmann or a Linda Hogan? We've long known that our parents grow older and that it hurts when people die, or that hands can be very beautiful and expressive things. Even Gertrude Stein, who did our favorite things with language, is here preserved only in her Dr. Seuss-like "A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose." If we're going to be entertained with poetry on the 16-minute ride from Brooklyn, we expect something to make us work a little. Make us swoon, chuckle, something. But just as we refrain from putting posters of kitties declaring "Hang On" on our office walls, we try to avoid peddling in the kind of cliches that we're systematically assaulted by in our public spaces.

Best E-mail Scam "Urgent Transfer of Funds"

I'M RICH!! THOSE STUPID AFRICANS!! THE INSTANT THAT MONEY CLEARS IT'S ADIOS, DUMBASSES!! HA HA HA HA HA!!!! An e-mail made the rounds a few weeks ago. One of the oldest scams in the book has been transferred to the Internet:

URGENT TRANSFER OF FUNDS

DEAR SIR,

I am making this contact with you based on trust and confidence irrespective of the fact that we have not met before and because of the nature of the business I am about to introduce, I want to remain positive having the faith and the will and convincing myself that you will be capable to do business with me. I am extending this proposal to you in my capacity as the chief Auditor of the Review/Audit committee scrutinizing all records covering executed contracts awarded by the previous Military Government of Nigeria. My colleagues and I have uncovered a floating amount of US$30 Million without any beneficiary owing to a deliberate act of over-invoicing and illegal inflation of contract value by some ex-Government officials who are now retired.

TO SUCCESSFULLY TRANSFER THIS FUND WITHOUT ANY ENCUMBRANCE, WE NEED THE FOLLOWING FROM YOU IMMEDIATELY;

1. YOUR BANK NAME AND ADDRESS

2. YOUR BANK TELEPHONE, FAX AND TELEX NUMBERS

3. YOUR ACCOUNT NAME/BENEFICIARY

4. YOUR PRIVATE TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS FOR CONFIDENTIAL MESSAGES

5. YOUR COMPANY ADDRESS.

This money has already been approved for payment by Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and is secured under contract No: FGN/NNPC/022996/CB/96. As top civil servants, our code of conduct strictly prohibits us from operating Foreign Bank Account and this is why we want to use your bank account to transfer this money outside Nigeria for investment purposes. We have accepted you as our Foreign Partner and will now regularize the approvals to reflect you as the true beneficiary of the contract sum. We have resolved to give you 20% of the total sum for your assistance. As I also guarantee 100% risk-free in the transaction. If you are interested in this deal, please contact me as soon as you receive this message. I am anxiously waiting for your urgent response by phone or mail.

BEST REGARDS

Best Defusing of an Ugly Urban Confrontation It Makes the World Go Round. The subway car was packed when it pulled into W. 4th St. It must've been the announcement over the p.a. that roused the old bum from his slumber there on the bench. Once awake, he leapt to his feet and began charging through the crowded car, swinging his arms, knocking commuters out of his way while screaming, "Ex-cuse me! Ex-cuse me!" He was a strong bastard for someone his age. Finally, just before he reached the open doors, he slammed hard into a middle-aged woman with two armloads of shopping bags.

"Jesus Christ!" she spat at him in a fury.

The old man stopped short in the doorway, turned and glared back at her. "Hey lady, don't go givin' me none o' your shit?" then he smiled broadly through his thick white beard?"because I love you."

Best Subway Letch Move Look, Don't Touch. If you ever want to master the art of letching, there is no finer place to practice than the New York subway. One thing right away: letching is not the same as hassling women on the street. It's not catcalls and not howling "Mami!" from your little bicycle and not acting like a testosterone-drunk chimpanzee every time some female dares wear something more revealing than a chador. Great letching is a pleasant?and harmless?admiring glance from behind a pair of sunglasses. It's a sneaky peek down a low-cut shirt while straphanging. It's about a stolen glimpse of a pair of legs getting up from a seat. It's about appreciation, not aggression. And since we live in a city with the most beautiful women in the world (a statement of fact, not politics) who also happen to take public transportation, the MTA is the world's best letchateria.

One of the most innocent letches requires a crowded flight of subway stairs. With the crowds packed and moving slowly, it's the perfect opportunity to walk behind the discreet object of your 40-second love affair. The delicate curve of an admirable rump hiking up the stairs, if timed right, can be just millimeters away from your admiring eyes. Leave exactly two steps between rear and eyes. Since this only really works when you're leaving the train, good stairway letching will brighten your morning commute to work and perk up your return home. So what if you didn't get a seat on the D train? The subway has benefits that they don't tell you about at the token booth.

Best Option for Scrip-Deprived New Yorkers Visiting Tijuana

¡Tequila Sexo Marijuana! A recent early-Sunday-morning meth hangover sees us bouncing off the walls of our San Diego Best Western hotel room, itching to kill time before the departure of our flight back to La Guardia. What's that? Meds available south of the border sans scrip? Really? For real? Nah, c'mon. Really?

Thanks Dateline NBC!

It only takes 20 minutes to reach the border by foot (no need for a Cheech-and-Chong style car-search on our way back), and then another five-minute taxi ride to the border of T-city, and holy guacamole! What a scene! Precisely the circus we'd always heard about. Out on squalid Revolution Blvd., donkeys painted with black and white stripes are being pawned off as real, live African-imported zebras?available for rides or a casual stroke?five pesos. We pass fire-eaters and brazen hookers. Dusty-faced beggar children who work us with remarkable vigor while we stride purposefully into the scrum for a little pharmacy surfing. After a few minutes, we suss out the scene and target a suitable farmacia off the beaten beaten path.

"Hey, hey. Que onda, amigo? You folks carry Vicodin?"

"Sorry, friend!"

Ouch!

Before we can grab our jaw and scream abscess! another Mexican appears on the spot to correct his coworker ever so politely.

"Forget that asshole, amigo. Of course we got! Seven-fifties, a buck-fifty apiece. Includes the prescription."

Prescription? Prescription for what, we wonder. No time for introspection, though.

"Do you carry Valium?"

"Sí!"

"We'll take 30."

We're on a roll now, trying to recall names for pharmaceutical speed; unfortunately, our last two brain cells aren't working in concert.

"Ah, fuck it! Got any speed?"

"Dollar apiece."

"We'll take 30."

Two hours till departure. On our way out our new pharmacist/doctor slips us the flier.

"We deliver to the States."

(Oh goodie! And how about free transportation to Betty Ford while yer at it?)

"Whaddaya mean, Doc? Like through the mail?"

"Sí. Just call the number, amigo. Place your order, send cash only and we mail it to you."

(We've since done business. It's for real and no, we're not gonna publish the number.)

We load up our squeaky-clean-looking wife's pockets, buy a giant stuffed donkey-zebra for the hell of it and beat it back to San Diego. Five hours, two vikeys, one Valium, one phentermine and a 16-ounce Guinness later and we're pulling in over Manhattan?our besotted spines tingling with the hum and rattle of the twin Rolls-Royce turbines. The low-slung rays of afternoon sun are glinting flash silvers off the skyscrapers down on Wall Street. We peer out at the cool azure blue on the eastern horizon, the warm wisps of streaky pink cloudlets that give way to the deep magenta of the altitudes. One lid goes down, the other follows, wife slips her hand into ours and it's night-night, baby.

Best Way to Get Hit By a Car Biking over the Brooklyn Bridge

Vehicular Insult. In retrospect, maybe biking wasn't the best idea for someone like us. We catapult around like an addled starlet, anxious, with all this energy, and we're constantly looking for things to take the pressure off. We're like those little dumplings you see with the fat arms who like themselves so much. So we've got to keep moving to ensure we don't take ourselves too seriously. Trouble is, we forget to pay attention. Have no patience for it. But this time we really did have the right of way.

Two days after we discovered cycling?what fun, and what a convenient way to get around the city, we thought?we were summarily smacked to the ground near the Brooklyn Bridge by a car that seemed, from our privileged vantage point, as if it were directly aiming to hit us. We were making that curve, about to press our front wheel over the first demarcating line of concrete, and the car simply kept going. We were hit and, not knowing what to do, we screamed and banged the roof of the car, our fight-or-flight coming as something of a surprise to our desultory assailant. He drove off. The traffic cop rushed over (where were you 10 minutes ago? we wanted to know) to ask us why we didn't take down the guy's number. Well, you know, we were under the car.

Best Advice to Receive in a Men's Room Do Knot Fear. We'd just finished an excellent meal and polished off a couple bottles of wine in an enormous Midtown restaurant well-known for its, um, clientele. After paying the check, we figured it might be wise to stop into the bathroom before heading out. The night was young still, we were drunk and there was no telling how long it would be until we'd have easy access to a men's room again.

After we finished our business, and while we were washing our hands, we noticed that our right shoelace had come untied. So before stepping back out into the narrow hallway to tie it, or trying to maneuver through the crowded eatery to get outside before tying it, we just leaned back against the wall for balance and bent over.

Just then, the door to the men's room opened and a heavyset, impeccably dressed man entered. He looked like he broke legs for a living. We ignored him and kept tying. It was no big deal.

But then he stopped directly in front of us.

"You know," he said, his gravelly voice full of veiled threat, "if you double-knot those, that'll never happen again."

We thanked him, and left.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't the most profound nugget of advice, but the way we see it, it could've been a hell of a lot worse.

Best Pathetically Ubiquitous Fashion Accessory (This Year) The Messenger Bag

When We See a Messenger Bag, We Reach for Our Uzi. Why is it that twentysomethings in New York are such pitiful fashion lemmings? We see this year after year after year, one stupid, ephemeral fad replacing another in an endless conga line of lameness. You live in New York City, the best city in the world, a city that champions free thought and celebrates its eccentrics. You're positioned to conquer the universe. You didn't ALL have to wear backpacks last year, did you. You don't ALL have to wear messenger bags this year either. It's not that it's such a terrible fashion statement?it certainly beats that white-guy head-rag thing of some years back, and rollerblades. It's less likely to have us wanting to knock you on your ass in a crowded subway car than a stuffed backpack. But Jesus, kids, would you have an independent thought for once in your lives? Do you all HAVE to be such pathetic conformists?

Best Corporate Weasels American Airlines

Something Sleazy in the Air. It was our first time bringing our sweet little puppy overseas, and we went out of our way to make sure it'd go smoothly. In the weeks prior to departure we called American Airlines four times to be certain her space was reserved and all was copacetic.

"Everything's a go," they told us each time. "We've got her space. Just bring her health records and all's good."

So departure day comes. We get to JFK, empty our luggage onto the sidewalk amidst the typical glaring-cop, car-jam insanity and within seconds a dour-looking skycap approaches.

"You ain't planning to take your dog along?" he says.

"Uh, well as a matter of?"

"Cuz there's a pet embargo!"

"A wha??"

"A pet embargo."

Weren't embargoes reserved for Cuba and terrorist nation-states in the Middle East? What did they have against our dog? And why the hell didn't they call us ahead of time to inform us?

"When it gets too hot, we don't fly pets."

"Why didn't anyone call us?"

"Dunno. Take it up with a ticketing agent."

So, leaving the luggage with our wonderful Delancey Street Car Service driver (a candidate for sainthood!), we and the dog hunt down a ticketing agent.

"Gee, I dunno about this," says the ticketing agent. Not reassuring. "Let me take it up with my supervisor." Returning 20 minutes later, she hands us a different ticket and says we've been placed on an Air France flight leaving three hours later. No explanation, no apology. Still, we're not ones to complain. As long as we and the dog are on a Paris-bound flight, we're happy.

But here's where it gets tricky. At Air France our reservations are confirmed, all right, but then we're told we'll need to pay the difference in ticket price, almost $500.

"But American screwed up!" we scream. "Shouldn't they cover the cost?"

"Dunno, take it up with American."

Now we're fuming. What? Did they just happen to forget to tell us this, too? We and the dog hop in a shuttle and haul it back over to the American terminal. There, the supervisor who arranged our ticket attempts to skinny out of responsibility.

"Show me the ticket for your dog," she says, knowing full well that, unlike regular passengers, tickets for pets can only be purchased at the airport on the day of travel. It's the very last thing you do after you've been confirmed on your flight.

"If you don't have a ticket for your dog," she snips, "then we have no way of knowing you were bringing her in the first place."

Given all the precautions we've taken, this really smarts.

"But, but?"

Like a seasoned pro, she works the bureaucratic conundrum on us and we turn mute with rage. And then it hits us?phone calls, records. We pull out our cellphone and dial American's reservation number in Dallas. They confirm every one of our phone calls, the date and time we made our dog's reservation, the follow-up calls. (Thank God for recorded lines!) They give us a record locator so that the supervisor can pull up the info on her computer, and we watch with delight as her smug little maw puckers with comeuppance. She changes our ticket without saying a word.

And that's it. We return to the Air France terminal, exhausted, satisfied, but with a grudge as thick as a 747. After all, an airline that isn't competent enough to inform us of a schedule change, that won't apologize for its error and that has the gall to try to make us pay for its mistake doesn't deserve our business, and certainly doesn't deserve yours.

Best Explanation for the Mess We're In A Boy Named Sue. When the man hit the bottom of the steps at the 23rd St. PATH station, his right foot landed in a shallow puddle. He yelped and dropped to one knee. In a second, he was up again, fuming and limping.

"I twisted my ankle! No?no, I broke my ankle! Christ, this place is dangerous. Even when you try to be careful, this place'll kill ya!"

This was all fine and good?we've all been in the same situation. But then, in a voice that sounded like he's had experience in this sort of thing, he bellowed, "I broke my fuckin' ankle! I'm going to sue PATH, I'm going to sue the M-T-A, I'm going to sue the city, I'm going to sue the Mayor, I'm going to sue the guy in the booth, I'm gonna sue...!" His voice trailed down the corridor toward the train platform, the litany stretching until we couldn't hear him anymore.

And we wonder why the MTA is considering another fare hike?

Best Chump The Dot-Commer

You Can Still Apply to B-School, Whitey. Not like we didn't see this one coming. The ride was hot for all the little sharks in their earth-tones, rehearsing their phony-ass Sierra Club values. But now many of those same smug, fast-talking IPO moguls are scratching their bankrupt dicks eyeing that two-year management program up at Tuck. All that stupid lingo?"stickiness," "fat pipes," "digital penetration." Who got penetrated digitally? Investors, that's who. Earnings? Screw 'em.

But guess again, Whitey. Some considerable downsizing by the likes of CMGI and Reel.com and many Chapter 11 filings later and it's all looking very 1987 for your Dot-commer now. Still, is he chastened? His swagger, reined in by humility? Is he aware that anyone with three brain cells to rub together can spot him for the chump that he is? On the coasts, yes, though evidence suggests he's still BMOC in the heartland?it's probably relatively easy to still impress the secretarial pool in some fern bar in Cleveland.

But there's more pain on the way. For everyone. By this time next year, scar tissue will be forming and standards will be established. A dozen consumer e-commerce businesses with actual, God-honest profits will squeeze out the last of the supposed e-vanguard. Wall Street and the individual investor will be ruthless in their demand for earnings (and rational p/e ratios). And all across the country, the dot-commer will be about as popular as a plastic surgeon at a Christian Scientist convention.

Best Honoring of a Pedophile Bench Unwarranted. Manhattan media is an upside-down establishment. It's where The New York Times runs editorials suggesting that the government step in to suppress the release of documents that might embarrass a politician?as long as that politician is Hillary Clinton. It's where the major gossip columnists help cover up a big-time producer's role in a young girl's drug overdose?since that television producer has a record for developing columnists' work into television series. And it's where Vogue magazine runs a big story about how women are no longer wearing their hair long?but only after ordering all the models to go get their hair cut short.

You have to wonder why we don't just perch statues on top of our pigeons.

Instead, we settle for using Central Park to mourn pathetic sleazebuckets. Yoko Ono isn't open-minded enough to help Mark David Chapman make his parole, but she hasn't bothered to protest the park bench dedicated to Michael McMorrow in Strawberry Fields. She probably even thought it was kind of sweet, since a New York Post article dwelled on how the 44-year-old real estate agent had been murdered by two 15-year-olds during a "booze-fueled rampage."

What the Post failed to mention was that McMorrow had helped fuel that rampage by buying more alcohol for young Daphne Abdela and Christopher Vasquez. Now, why would a gentleman?especially a gentleman nicknamed "Irish"?ever do such a thing? Well, we don't usually buy the explanations of young murderers. But, considering careful examination of the events, it seems that McMorrow didn't know that Vasquez was the kind of young idiot who would carry a knife, or that the kid would step in when McMorrow forced himself on a drunken Daphne. And he certainly couldn't have known that Daphne was the kind of riot grrl who would then help Christopher dump McMorrow's disemboweled body into the Central Park lake. Now two young alkies are in jail, a pedophile alkie is dead, and the air seems fresher than ever in this stinking town. A plaque still needs to be vandalized, but that's only a matter of time. It's been a busy summer.

Best Pick-Up Line By a Homeless Man Play Footsie For Me. He was crooning Sinatra for all the ladies who passed the corner of 7th Ave. and 21st St., where he was slouching against a mailbox. We could hear the last bit of "Come Fly with Me" when he saw us approaching and suddenly stopped his singing. "Smell my feet for 25 dollars," he suggested. What? We waited for an explanation. "I'm new in town," he says.

(A "Best of" within a "Best of" that may be worth mentioning: We're at a roof party, everyone's naked in a hot tub, and the guy across from us asks us if he may place his foot on our "pudenda." Why? "For the tactility." We consult our copy of Psychopathia Sexualis to see if we've seized on "Best New Deviance": a foot fetish where the fetish is his foot, not ours.)

Best Subway Sign Modification Jingo A-Go-Go. Way at the far end of the downtown side of the 23rd St. F stop, there's a big ad sponsored by the PBA, encouraging kindhearted types with a sense of community to apply to the police academy. In the picture, a smiling female cop is warmly embracing a small, smiling Asian girl.

"She will hug the neighborhood," the ad reads, "the way she hugs me."

Beneath the photo, someone has added his own catchphrase. In much larger, more prominent neat block letters (it actually took us a second to realize that it wasn't part of the sign), it reads, "Got Dumplings?"

Best Bikeway Riverside Park, North of 96th St.

Path of Least Resistance. First it's some moron in an SUV the size of Parsippany muscling us off 34th St. Then it's the taxi that clipped us on 3rd Ave., knocking us down, bloodying our elbow and knee and raising a baseball-sized lump on our hip. Then there's that pissy, overprivileged Upper West Side matron with the dumpy ass and frizzy hair dealing out some schoolmarmish lecture on how to ride legally through intersections. As any city biker can tell you, if it's not a car door opening in your path or a cabbie cutting you off, it's a suicidal pedestrian defying you not to hit them.

The whole idea of riding a bike is escape: escape your apartment, your work. Other people. That madding crowd pisses us off more and more every day. When we get on the bike, our destination is always the same: a flat, paved route free of rollerbladers, joggers and three-abreast walkers where we can pedal our asses off. We don't get it, but it's possible to come close.

Now, far be it from us to praise anything that happened under Giuliani's watch, but the growth of bikeways along the waterfront is one of the bright spots to come out of Rudy's otherwise grim tenure. Generations of New Yorkers past let the Hudson and East Rivers die deaths that no great city rivers should. But times are different. The economy doesn't need the docks anymore, and these days the Mafia dumps bodies in New Jersey. It's easy to piece together stretches of riverfront bike paths that are a joy to ride on (when not clogged with slow-walkers and tsk-tsking New York Times readers).

To get away from the world on two wheels, find a stretch of asphalt nobody else particularly wants: the 2-foot wide path from 96th to 125th on the Hudson. Riding uptown, you're only one boulder away from the water, and on your right is the zooming traffic of the West Side Hwy. The farther you get away from the sclerotic Riverside Park and closer to Harlem, the fewer people you see. It may not be the most picturesque stretch of bikeway, but it is flat and it's invariably vacant. For the avid NYC biker, this humanity-free path is Nirvana on a seat.

Best Hip Intoxicant Absinthe

Makes the Heart Grow Fonder. Sure does. But man, that burns going down! "Mean, green and back in fashion." That's the gospel, according to certain hipster acquaintances out in Cobble Hill who've been brewing their own absinthe for about a year now. There's clean stuff out there, but be careful. If someone you don't know tries to sell you a bottle of absinthe, you're likely to get injured or ripped off. According to our brewer friends, taken in high doses, thujone, the psychoactive ingredient found in wormwood, can cause convulsions, kidney failure and rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal affliction that causes destruction or degeneration of muscle fiber. Put simply, absinthe can kill you. But then again, so can that Macy Gray album if taken in high doses.

No, the bigger risk is that you'll buy a bottle from one of those British importation outfits and it'll be brewed from diluted wormwood oil; you'll wind up drinking a brew that's about 80 percent ethanol (drinking alcohol), with only trace amounts of thujone. You'll get nasty drunk, but your buzz'll lack the psychedelic effect for which this bitter libation is so well known. Then you'll be forced to lie to your friends about the warm, ecstatic, joyous visions you experienced. (Hardly accurate modifiers to describe your dark night of wretch-and-heave, wouldn't you say?)

Still, if your grasping, alterna-artstar tendencies require you to emulate the likes of Verlaine and Van Gogh right down to the addiction, then be smart and order an absinthe starter kit at www.rain.org/~philfear/absinthe.html. It comes with basic brewing instructions, mixology tips, herbs, spices and wormwood. Bottoms up!

Best Gratuitous Nudity P.S. 1's "Warm Up"

Naked as Olympians. P.S. 1's been hosting this summer series for the past three years, but for the first two we were wary. The thought that all those LES/L.I.C. folk moving around to electronic music was enough to keep us away. Lured by the promise of public nudity, though, we finally checked it out this summer. The space was fitted with a cabana, a "beach" and a working sauna, which was free to the public under the stipulation that one would bear one's gonads to those in the nearby beerstand lines. We're game. Why not? We ran Naked Mile in college.

We slide off our pants, underwear and bra, are led into one of two corrugated metal rectangles and let the steam knead pockets of tightness that have worked our backs, necks, shoulders. The sauna proprietor knocks for us. Are we ready? We're ready. We walk out, stand straight, stare out at those clogged beer lines to our left and right and let her douse us with cold water from a spigot she holds up to our heads. Only after we've stood up straight does the lady give us a towel to wrap around our bottom half or both halves (not like our actress friend at the gym, who waves her muscular tits at us like they're going out of style). We wait for our friend to bring us a beer on the bench. It's excellent...drum 'n' bass over the fabricated wall to our left and a fake beach contracted out by the Columbia School of Architecture alumni facing front... Everyone's European anyway, and no one cares about a pair of tits... Also there's the exhilaration of being naked in front of people who aren't. When we're relaxed we head inside, lie on a "bed of sound," dip our feet in paint, swing.

Best Despicable New Mode of Transportation Those Fold-Up Scooters

Mean, Mean Ride. We don't know where the hell they came from. We don't even know what they're called, officially. But quite suddenly, as of a few months ago, they were everywhere. In every neighborhood, on every sidewalk, rolling unsteadily beneath the planted foot of every goddamn kid in New York City. They're like the mayflies of transportation.

We aren't exactly sure why these things annoy us the way they do, apart from their ubiquity, and the fact that they keep getting in our way. The turning point may have been last June. We were walking across 28th St., through the makeshift jungle set up by the plant wholesalers, when suddenly, heading straight toward us, came this 40-year-old fuckstick in a suit and tie, cellphone planted to one ear, sweating, huffing, kicking his ungainly bulk along on one of those monstrosities. It was a horrifying vision?and worse yet, we had to dive into the plants to avoid being struck.

We hated skateboards too, when they were everywhere five years ago, but nowadays, seeing a kid on a skateboard is actually a relief. At least skateboards can be customized and given a little personality. At least there was a culture around skateboarding, with its own music and lingo. These metal jobs are all exactly the same. There's nothing unique about them, nothing unique about the people who use them. They're the Tommy Gear of transportation. They're the cellphones of transportation. And what's more, they don't, so far as we can determine, seem to work very well.

So much the better.

Best Proof That NYC Is Dead Saturday Night at Sound Factory

618 W. 46th St. (betw. 11th & 12th Aves.)

489-0001

Pretty Vacant. An ongoing argument with our friend revolves around the statement that New York City is dead. Dead as in irrelevant. She posits in the affirmative, noting the changed clientele in many of her favorite haunts. The loss of Times Square. The homogenization and sterilization. Et cetera. Predictably contrarian, we claim that the city's supposed demise is quite likely in the eye of the beholder. We argue that her opinion is a reflection of her own changes. Oh sure, like the rest of this country, New York City now has enough Starbucks to host every family of five in from Iowa. And there are more tie-over-the-shoulder handjob types chugging at the pub than ever before. But the dirt is still there. Not in Times Square, granted, but just because the Greeks no longer rule half a hemisphere doesn't mean there's no more assfucking in the world.

And speaking of assfucking: that's what we were looking for that night. Well, not assfucking specifically. We weren't cruising. Rather, assfucking as a metaphor, as a symbol of hedonistic indulgence, of danger in the city. And it could be anyone's ass being fucked. Male or female. We just wanted to see something a little wicked.

Swinging over to Sound Factory at 2 a.m. certainly wasn't our idea, but that of a friend of a friend from Queens (of course). We'd been absent from all sorts of NYC clubs for years, so her description of Sound Factory as a decadent, sex-infused den of sin piqued us. We like sin. We're still a bit decadent, especially when the pack provokes and/or inspires us. We're game, we said. Bring it on.

Half an hour on line outside: fine. Invasive frisk: fine. $35 cover: fine, fine, fine. A club's a club, and a certain amount of hassle is required to lend the appropriate air of exclusivity. Inside, there was hope: at the end of the bar on the topmost floor was a 3/4-naked woman, squatting atop the counter, surrounded by a gang of slackjawed, wide-eyed yahoos standing shoulder to shoulder, packed box-of-straws tight. We expected to see a stream of ping-pong balls come flying from an unseen pussy. (And because this is the Age of Branding, maybe her pubic mound would be shaved into the Sound Factory logo. Or maybe the name of her website.) This was going to fucking rule! A barrage of glistening ping-pong balls, glowing under all the goddamn blacklight, popping over the heads of fat-pupiled, rolling Jersey meatballs.

No such luck. Her crotch was concealed by pleather. Her tits the same, even. She was simply posing with boys while they waited to be served at the juice bar. But fuck it: fine, fine, fine. We expected too much too soon. Maybe downstairs...

Where we found...nothing interesting. More sweaty assholes. More pounding beats. The skanks leading each other around in collars were just run-of-the-mill cokewhores. The buff, waxed boys with studded collars and nipple rings were just Chelsea fags playing dress-up. No golden showers on a platform. No bloody fisting on the bar. No good-natured degradation and mild, temporary damage. No assfucking for the crowd's pleasure. Even the bathrooms were fairly tame: some doubling up in the stalls, but that was strictly coke?no obnoxious, loud rutting like we've heard even in places as tame as Mars Bar.

We're sure there are plenty of interesting and dangerous clubs out there. S&M. Degradation. Assfucking. But those clubs aren't just around. Clubs like Sound Factory are around. That's where people go. It's their destination because they don't know where else to go. Let the bridge-and-tunnel pussies go to those places because they're easy to find. Let them think they're actually in New York City. That they're crazy.

So, um, sure, New York City is dead. Whatever it takes to make you believe it ain't worth the trip across the river.

Best Shameless Poseur Accessory Dickweed Phony World Tour 2000. We're on the L train at 3 a.m. when something on the t-shirt on the guy across from us jabs at our brain. It's definitely the t-shirt, not the guy himself, since he's one of those pale, gaunt, deliberately scruffy early 20s hipsters who seem to breed like mushrooms in the city's dank spots, constituting a plague of sorts. The shirt is one of those antique thrift-store jobs, and we can tell there's some musician's image silkscreened on it, but we don't recognize the picture. We keep stealing glances at the shirt, partially hidden behind a denim jacket, until finally we make out all the words: Bill Graham Presents Live at Zellerbach Auditorium Graham Parker and the Rumour. And immediately we wonder: Does this guy even know who Graham Parker is? Does he even know who Bill Graham was? Graham Parker just played a concert up at Woodstock?what d'you think are the odds this diehard was there? Can someone tell us when fake became cool?

Best New Jersey Transit Moment The Guitarist and the Dwarf

Human Dwarf-Box. This was great: a moment of eccentric fellowship on the Train of the Lost as it wriggled under the Styx and into Penn Station's toxic gut.

And actually, the guitarist could sort of play, couldn't he? Late 30s, early 40s, skinny mulatto guy, resembling in his flyaway hair and wisps of facial hair a Caucasoid/Negroid Carlos Santana, standing near the door in a sleeveless t-shirt with an acoustic guitar slung over his chest, scratching out "Voodoo Chile"-sounding chords all wocka wocka wocka and bouncing on his feet to his own quiet falsetto. It was nice. On commuter trains the impulse is to keep your head down against the possibility that the gentleman from Short Hills will brain you with his briefcase for disturbing his inhalation of the morning's Financial Times; or, worse, against every suburbanite's fear that, when the train doors open in Newark, some frothing soldier of the underclass will board and riddle the carriage with bullets. But here was this aging hippie straight out of the Berkeley 70s, without compunctions, amusing himself with his bouncing and his falsetto and his shicka shicka shicka.

Then, as the train pulled into Penn, the scene was augmented. A dwarf (or was he a midget?) materialized from somewhere in the train's depths. Perhaps, we surmised, he had an engagement with a Manhattan carnival; or he'd been contracted by the MTA to toddle from car to car, blacking boots. And not your run-of-the-mill dwarf, either, but a fierce representative of his tribe, his dwarf-feet jammed into stout dwarf-booties, his big old dwarf-head belligerent under watch cap and dwarf-piratical beard. A dwarf's dwarf, in other words.

And one who stopped in front of the musician, raised his arms and, instead of shoving his instrument up his ass?as the odds dictated he'd do?cupped his hands against his mouth and, unsolicited, started laying down a beat-box rhythm under the guy's percussive strumming.

It sounded cool. It was cool. The guitarist didn't bat an eyelash; just threw back his head and continued his crooning as he scratched at his strings chucka chucka chucka and the beat-box dwarf bopped and beat-boxed about. Two strangers who, in the context of a commuter train, could only have been considered out of place, finding each other and?yes?making what you could call beautiful music.

The doors opened, the dwarf and the guitarist exchanged a soul handshake?"Arright, bro," said the guitarist; the dwarf said nothing; maybe, we surmised, he communicates only in beat-box Morse code?and they spilled out into the station, the guitarist presumably to play a streetcorner, the dwarf to get himself shot out of a circus cannon, or whatever it is dwarves do to make a living in a town where consumers seek novel thrills.

Best Excuse for Midsummer Depression July's Triple Eclipses

We'll Take That. A sweet friend of ours once wrote a list of characteristics he loved about us. Besides noting our penchant for dorky hats, he observed that we were Usually in a Good Mood. Which is true: we are, usually, in a Good Mood.

But this summer's been different. We've been melancholy. Pensive. Unsure. We couldn't explain it: working at a kickass job, living in a cute Brooklyn apartment with our girlfriends. Enough money for drinks. What could be wrong? It must be something beyond our control: fate, or God, or something.

And then, during a phone conversation, a friend provided the answer after listening to a rant about our underlying unhappiness: "You know," she said, "there were three eclipses in July. It's messing everyone up. People are experiencing abnormal amounts of fear and anxiety. Everyone feels this way. It's natural." After testing this theory out on coworkers and friends, we realized that it rang true: everyone?or, at least, everyone we knew?was feeling unduly fearful and anxious. We suddenly developed a belief in astrology. That must be it, we thought. And if it's not, at least it's something to blame. We'd rather believe in that than waste money on therapy, or time on, you know, thinking. We're glad it's autumn. It'll all be better.

Best Breach of Gentrified Quality-of-Life Showboating Asshole Rollerbladers at Hudson River Park

At Least They Aren't Using Those Scooters. Hudson River Park has always been kind of a weird place?that creepy, surreal bronze sculpture installation with the feet and the faces and the stylized animals, the pristine ambience surrounded by slums. All the fat people without shirts. Still, if you make the trek all the way over to the west side and down, it's a nice place to spend a sunny afternoon?the water, the lawn, the boats. It's quite tranquil.

Except.

Yes, except for those goddamn flamboyant rollerbladers. We thought they were an extinct species, but we were wrong. If you get it in your head to take a quiet stroll down the brick-paved walk along the river, you'd better be on your guard. Before you know it, you'll be surrounded by hairy, shirtless men in fluorescent short shorts careening toward you, backwards, as they try to show the world how fucking graceful they are. Pirouetting this way and that, not looking, lost in the moment, swinging their legs around like some hormonal reject from the Bolshoi. Even more than simply being a danger to the elderly and the infirmed out there to enjoy the day, they're embarrassing to the rest of us. Swishy little showoffs, apparently anxious to churn the guts of anyone who'll look?and there are too many of them not to.

This is why we've written to the City Parks commissioner, urging him to equip every normal person who enters the park with a long, sharp stick.

Best Reason Not to Buy McNeil Stock Pull "The Daisy." If you watch CNN Headline News at 9 a.m. weekdays, you've seen it: "The Daisy," a commercial for Tylenol Allergy Sinus pills. It comes on about 9:11; you know the one. An isolated couple is sitting on a vast expanse of grass that could belong to an institution (it's too big and empty to be a park, private lawn or school grounds). He?let's call him David?is a slightly hydrocephalic-looking twentysomething, and is pulling petals off a daisy while droning: "She loves me. She loves me not." He's actually explaining the game, it appears, to his companion?say, Lisa?who, to put it gently, has a look of simplicity about her. Bad haircut, easily amused, twentysomething herself and doesn't know the daisy game. At the end of the spot, David pulls the last petal and says?what luck!?"She loves me." Now Lisa, unbeknownst to either David or us viewers, is a quick study and has caught on so well that she can make a joke: "NOT! Huh huh huh huh," she giggles giddily, through big teeth.

Here's the especially annoying part: "The Daisy" (whose voiceover tells us that you can sit on grass and not sneeze if you use the Tylenol product) has been running for months and months and months. We've seen it literally every weekday since last spring at least.

Which inspires no consumer confidence in the McNeil Consumer Products Co., parent company of Tylenol (Motrin, too). This has to be a huge company, with profits no doubt in the gazillions, and all they can afford is one measly Tylenol commercial? We e-mailed them to ask them to put another spot into rotation. They got right back to us: "...Although we were sorry to learn of your disappointment with our TYLENOL (TM) Allergy Sinus commercial, we appreciate the confidence in our company that prompted you to contact us..." To which we replied: "...we never said we were 'disappointed' with the commercial, we said you've been running it forever, and that a big corporate giant like Tylenol should be able to afford more than one spot."

We never heard back. And "The Daisy"'s still running. If the McNeil/ Tylenol honchos can only afford one commercial, then they've grossly mismanaged the company profits; else, they have no understanding of marketing and advertising. Does either scenario make you want to invest in the company?

Best Target for Vandalism CowParade Cows

Beef. Graffiti is someone else's idea of art on public property. It's usually some esthetically challenged individual's crude, self-aggrandizing mark, placed more or less indelibly where an entire population has little choice but to notice. Aerosol scribble on a subway train is one instance; knife etchings in a park bench are another. Some more prominent examples are the hundreds of lifesize fiberglass cows planted on sidewalks all over NYC this summer. Of course, if this bovine graffiti looks good to you, Sharpie embellishments upon their molded hides are most unwelcome.

But don't try to tell us this represents any more of an insult to the body politic than the stupid cows being put there in the first place. At least you don't have to step around spray paint, or weave through herds of tourists photographing park-bench carvings. Whoever decided to further crowd Manhattan's walking spaces with plastic cows doesn't own the damn sidewalks any more than we do. And we don't like the stupid fucking cows.

Best New Plants in Town Westway/West Side Hwy.

They Brought Us a Shrubbery. The new roads are finally being finished along the Westway, to replace the part of the West Side Hwy. that simply fell down. As part of the work there have been sweet trees and shrubs planted to relieve the violent aridity of the old road. The vegetation provides great pleasure and visual relief. And the traffic pattern may actually work?it seems to have been thought out very carefully.

Best Con Artists Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche

Actually, She Was Hoping for Sinead. The dream may be over, but there are still plenty of reasons to hate Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche. Consider this pathetic testament from doting mom Betty DeGeneres, the real estate broker who's now trying to convince us that a carpet-munching offspring makes her the Virgin Mary by association. It seems that Betty was with Ellen and Anne in Manhattan, and they actually found a poor young woman standing in the rain, wearing nothing but a trash bag. Mother Betty picks up the story from there, as told in The Advocate: "We were all horrified, but Anne and Ellen were affected more than any of us. They both had tears in their eyes, and Anne was saying, 'No! No!'"

Actually, Anne was probably arguing with the radio transmissions from her mother ship. Anyway, the two gals?being more affected than any of us?ran into a nearby Disney Store and bought the poor lady some clothes. They also handed over $10. As Betty reminds us, "They care so much?for all mankind."

That's damn inclusive of them. The only problem is that we see this dame in the garbage bag all the time, usually working the Broadway area. We used to call her "Tawana." Given her ability to impress an actress who's actually worked with the likes of David Schwimmer, however, we've now decided to call her "Miss Tawana."