Darling Nicky

Last night, on one of my roaming adventures in Manhattan, I got on the M7 bus to get to the Village. I walk from 9th street (the bus driver recognized me and asked me where I was going to and took me as far he could take me on the route) down 8th then Waverly Pl when I passed two people, one butch lesbian and one I’m guessing is a gay man. The woma, who sees me coming from a mile away, says how pretty I am and wishes me a “Happy Thanksgiving”. I smile and say, “Thank you! You, too!” but kept it moving. The woman did not want to stop there. She chased me down the block and wanted to keep talking to me. She asks me how old I am. I tell her I’m in my 20s. She then says, “If you’re 20 you’re okay, but if you’re 18, listen to your parents!” and laughed. I still don’t get the punchline…

She asked me where I was going, and told her I was looking for a store to play the lotto in. One thing about the Village, there are plenty of stores but not all of them are corner stores. It’s in this order: Starbucks, cafes, LGBT hangouts, sex shops, and then delis/corner stores with lotto. On the way to the store, she bumps into a transvestite friend of hers and they chat a bit. Then she stops and talks to a cop who gave her a ticket for having open liquor (she was drinking when I ran into her). So, while she was talking to the officer in his cruiser, I took the opportunity to escape but when I walked down the block her man friend who was standing with her from before was at the corner and asked me what she was doing. I said she talking the officer. He walks back to get her. I cross the street and she’s hollering after me.

I stop and she catches up to me. We stand at the corner waiting for the light when she takes off her skull cap to reveal a faid with salt and pepper hair and says, “I like a straight up dude, right?!” I smile politely and say nothing while thinking, “No. You like a butch lesbian.” To continues to yammer on loudly, much of which I’ve tuned out so I don’t remember what she said. We get to a tobacco store with lotto just off Christopher street. I get a game and we head out. On our way out, she bumps into a couple of older men (gay, of course) and starts chatting with them. One of them men says to me in a very saucy voice, “You know, one day, she asked me ‘What’s your swag like?’ I said ‘You know nothin’ about my swag!’ and then I dust that bitch off!” brushing off his right shoulder with his left hand while his rigt holds a bottle in a brown paper bag. I laughed becaused I never would’ve imagined the way that man talked to come from him. He didn’t look like your average older gay gentleman, whatever that is.

She walks off to the corner with the men, and take this second opportunity to make a get away. I take turn around and there’s her man friend from before again. He asks me what she’s doing and I say she’s talking to some friends. And walks off to get her, and I make off quickly into the mixed crowd of NYU students and neighborhood locals never to see them again, or at least that night, but in a perfect world I will never see them again. I don’t know what their motive was for wanting to keep me around. Money? Drugs? Booze? Sex? All of the above? What was the relationship between the man and the lesbian? Was he her pimp, or just her friend? I know she was drunk but was she also high? They were certainly weird and I definitely wouldn’t have gone anywhere with them that wasn’t safe.

::Crosses fingers for a perfect world::

 Oral sex has been linked to throat cancer. Please, protect yourselves out there. No matter what typed of sex your having, it’s very important to use condoms.

Jim Jones and Maria Davis

On Saturday, the neighborhood bakery Make My Cake held a “Client Appreciation Day” fair right outside its doors to honor it patrons for the great business they’ve been getting. There was cupcakes, hamburgers, hot dogs, voter registration, community groups, and music. I talk at length to a few people, not including neighbors, and the one person that really impressed me was a woman who told me she is an HIV survivor just past me asking what she had set up a table for and then asked me. Her name is Maria Davis and she was advocating safe sex for LIFEbeat. She was a music promoter in the ’90s when she contracted the virus from her ex-boyfriend who kept his status hidden from her and even his family. She is very serious about speaking up on people knowing about protecting themselves and knowing about AIDS. She even grilled me on my status, what HIV meant, what AIDS meant, and how would I know if I had AIDS? I aced the pop quiz, by the way!

After finishing up at Make My Cake’s street fair, she was setting up to drive out to Long Island to promote condom use, getting tested, and knowing your status at a Latin music concert. She was very well prepared with condoms and sex education literature in Spanish and she met a woman who works at a voters registration office in Harlem that has Spanish language voter registration forms she could pass out. I expressed to Ms. Davis that I am interested in interviewing her and she gave her card. I am very excited to talk to her, especially since the HIV/AIDS rate among African-American women is is higest due to unprotected sex and many still believing that HIV/AIDS is a homosexual disease. I can’t wait to interview her, although I don’t know where I’ll send the article to. It’s still a very important issue that needs to be stressed – that HIV/AIDS and other UTIs do not discriminate, anyone can get sick and that if you are sick you need to get help and treat your illness and not get bitter and angry.

Kids have always been known to throw snowballs at buses, which is pretty harmless; but it takes a special Latarian Milton type Bebe kid to throw a rock at a bus hard enough that the glass shatters. That is exactly what happened while I rode the bus home one night last week. The sound of the rock hitting the glass scared everyone so bad. The woman who was sitting where the glass broke had to move, and the bus driver had to stop the bus and make a police report. This incident reminds me of a time I was on the bus with a friend of mine and she asked me if the windows were bullet proof. My stomach got a little tight, and I could only say to her, “I don’t know. I just don’t want to be the one to find out.” Of course, it would be expensive to make the windows on buses bullet proof, but the next a glass shatters (and there will be a next time) it could be an actual bullet coming through the window with no chance of it missing a passenger.