Authors: Zack Love
“You mean you don’t speak subway intercomese?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you mean.”
“It’s one of the hardest languages to grasp phonetically.”
“You mean what they say on the subway speakers?”
“Yes, it’s really the only foreign language I speak. My friend Evan speaks some Czech. My friend Titus speaks some Hebrew. My buddy Narc is fluent in Chinese. And I speak subway intercomese…It’s actually very useful. They say formal instruction isn’t enough and that you really have to live in New York for at least five years to become fully conversant in it, so I’m still learning it.”
“You’re funny,” she said, with an innocent smile.
“I’m totally serious. I was thinking of opening up a school for people who are new to New York and need a crash course in better understanding subway announcements.”
“Well, can you tell me what they said?”
“Oh yes, I’m sorry. They said that they were skipping the Brooklyn Bridge stop because of repair work. I mean, New York just wouldn’t be the same adventure if it had a truly reliable subway system. So you just have to embrace the fun surprises as they come.”
“But that’s the stop I need,” she said, with a girlish frown.
“I’m sorry. Well I guess you’ll have to get out with me at the next stop, which is Fulton.”
“OK.” She frowned again. “Thanks for your help,” she said, and looked away so that he again saw only her profile.
Heeb took that as his cue to leave her alone, and a vital reminder that he needed to get back to preparing for his presentation.
As he began to look back towards his notes, he noticed that just beyond her stood two muscular youths, covered with tattoos and gold jewelry. They each looked down at Heeb, as if to mock his inferior height and chubby physique. They looked him in the eye, daring him to keep staring.
Heeb moved his eyes back down to his work, but a few minutes later, he heard them laughing obnoxiously. Seconds later, he snuck a peek and saw that they were whispering some kind of tasteless comment about the petite woman next to him. Unable to concentrate on his work, he let his eyes shift about the subway car for a neutral spot that still gave him a peripheral view’s warning of whatever they were up to.
They continued their rude and rowdy joking amongst themselves until the subway train stopped at the Fulton station.
“You should get off here,” Heeb reminded the small woman.
She turned towards him and smiled. “Thank you…Can you just help me off the train?” she asked.
Heeb noticed her walking cane for the first time and his heart sank a little. “Of course. Come this way,” he said, taking her arm and helping her to step down from the train and onto the platform.
“Do you know the way to get back to Chambers Street?” she asked.
Sammy looked anxiously at his watch. He had to be at his presentation in exactly ten minutes. He was about to ask someone else to help her out for him, because he was so running late, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Sammy took a hard swallow and resigned himself to fate.
“So where are you from?” Heeb asked, trying to make friendly conversation as he walked her to the platform for the uptown train. He knew that he was too linguistically challenged to accurately place a foreign accent.
“I’m from Israel,” she answered, as they walked, with her cane tapping the floor a few feet ahead of them. “That’s where my funny accent is from.”
Heeb took another hard swallow.
“Very cool,” he finally said. “You know, in addition to speaking subway intercomese I can actually say two things in Hebrew. My blind friend Titus taught me.”
“What can you say?” she asked.
And then, in Hebrew, with an atrocious American accent, Heeb said, “You’re a beautiful woman.” And then, after a moment’s pause, he added, “Can I kiss you?”
“Hey that’s pretty good!” she exclaimed. “I see you tried to learn the important stuff.”
“Yeah, well this is the first time I’ve actually used those phrases with anyone other than Titus,” he admitted, somewhat embarrassed.
“My name is Hila, by the way,” she said, with a timid smile.
“Oh. Nice to meet you, Hila. My name is Sammy. But you can call me Heeb,” he replied, all too eager to report his common ethnicity.
“Heeb? How did you go from Sammy to Heeb?” she asked, amused.
“Heeb is short for Hebrew. My friends used to tease me with the name ‘Heeb’ when they learned that I wanted to date only non-Jewish women until I turned twenty-eight, at which point I was going to date only Jewish women, so that I could be married to a Jewish woman by thirty.”
“Really? And how old are you now?”
“I actually turned twenty-eight last week…”
“So no more shiksas now?” she asked in amusement.
“I know…I know what you want to say. That it’s a totally crazy idea.”
“No, that’s not what I wanted to say.”
“Oh. So what did you want to say?”
“It’s not the idea that’s crazy, Heeb, it’s you,” she said, giggling.
“Yes. I know. I’m finally beginning to accept my own wackiness.”
She laughed.
“So what brings you to New York, Hila?”
“I’m going to see a world-famous eye doctor. I was blinded six months ago in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem.”
“Oh…I’m so sorry to hear that.”
There was an uncomfortable silence as they kept walking. The only sound Heeb could hear was Hila’s cane, rhythmically tapping the ground ahead of them like a metronome in synch with the slow and rhythmic swing of his right arm carrying his large, heavy briefcase.
Hila finally broke the silence. “Well I was lucky, you know…I could have been on the bus….Then I would be dead…I was just nearby, so some of the exploding glass injured my eyes.”
“I guess that’s looking at the bright side of things,” Heeb said meekly, feeling terribly ashamed at every complaint he had ever uttered about his own life.
“Well, it’s been difficult to learn how to live without eyes,” she said. She stopped for a moment and turned her face towards Heeb at an angle that was slightly off. “But what choice do I have?” she said. “There is still much to live for, you know,” she added, with a small smile.
Heeb swallowed again, harder this time.
“And you came all the way here from Jerusalem by yourself? Without any help?”
“No, my aunt came with me, so that made the travel much easier. But she got really sick and had to stay in bed today.”
“You’re staying in a hotel?”
“No, hotels are really expensive here. She found us a sublet for two weeks.”
“And you couldn’t change your appointment until she got better and could take you?”
“I tried. But the next appointment with this doctor was in four months, so I had to go on my own today.”
They walked in silence for a bit. Heeb’s eyes were now watering and he wasn’t thinking much about where they were going or his presentation or any other particular detail. His thoughts flitted about uncontrollably to a thousand sad, angry, ashamed, and confused places, as they continued walking.
Suddenly, their private moment was awakened by the hubbub of the two youths from the subway, laughing and yelling wildly as they ran towards Heeb and Hila.
For a moment, Heeb thought that they would just dash past them on their boisterous, immature way, but the shorter one skidded to the floor mischievously, about a foot in front of the next tap of Hila’s cane. His coconspirator approached Hila from her left side, with a callous, lewd look in his eyes. Heeb, who was walking on her right side, stopped her from walking over the stumbling block that the youth on the floor was about to become.
But the hoodlum coming at Hila from the left side grabbed her arm and began feeling up her chest, saying “Come here little ho’! I’m gonna give you a taste of Brooklyn’s finest!” while his coconspirator rose from the floor to participate in the crime.
At that moment, Heeb forgot about his important work presentation. He forgot about the important papers in his hand that went falling to the floor. He forgot about the fact that he was shorter and weaker than the two cruel thugs in his midst. He forgot about the fact that he had no practice whatsoever in physical combat. He forgot about all of these things as he instinctively slammed his heavy briefcase across the head of the hoodlum who had gotten up from the floor, so that he was knocked back down to the ground, where he remained, badly dazed and bleeding.
Seconds later, the larger ruffian groping Hila landed a solid, powerful punch in Heeb’s nose, sending him stumbling backwards, as blood started to gush down his mouth and chin and all over his nice suit. Leaving Hila for later, the thug advanced towards Heeb, who was still recovering. As he approached for a second punch, Heeb landed the hardest kick he could muster in the youth’s groin, making him buckle over. Blood still dripping all over himself and his whole face swollen and stinging, he thrashed the hoodlum hard on the head with his briefcase, so that he too fell to the subway floor, writhing in pain.
Heeb could hear Hila crying and afraid behind him, but he wasn’t finished.
“Listen, you piece of shit,” Heeb began, with a solid kick into the larger youth’s ribs; the youth groaned in pain. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to place stumbling blocks in front of the blind? What’s your fuckin’ problem, asshole? Is this what makes you feel tough?” Heeb kicked him again in the ribs. “You feel tough now, asshole?”
Heeb took a pen out of his shirt pocket and pressed it painfully up against the youth’s neck, right on the jugular, until any further pressure might puncture it.
“You think you’re a real badass because you and your asshole friend can attack a blind women half your size, when she’s accompanied by a nerd like me, eh? Well watch the fuck out, punk, because this is that movie called ‘White Collar Warrior Strikes Back.’” The thug was still groaning in pain and now raising his hands as if to surrender so that Heeb would stop pushing the pen into his neck.
“Oh does that hurt? Well it’s gonna hurt even more if you don’t apologize to that lady for what you just fuckin’ did.”
The ruffian squirmed a bit and then said, “Sorry M’am.”
“That’s not enough,” Heeb yelled, pushing the pen a little harder into his neck. “Say sorry I was such a brutish and inhumane asshole to you.”
“Sorry I was such a brutish and inhumane asshole to you.”
Heeb got up, picked up his papers, and walked Hila out of the subway system and into a cab. There was no way he was going to make it to that presentation. He was now quite late, his face was a mess, and his suit was stained with blood and subway dirt.
But it didn’t much matter, because he needed to take his wife to the eye doctor.
Chapter 38
The Posse Dissolves
Later that night, Evan showed up at Heeb’s apartment to see him in person for the first time in about a month.
“What happened to you?” he exclaimed, seeing Heeb’s swollen, broken-looking nose.
“I’m taking Kung Fu now…You know, to defend myself against the hazards of actuarial work.”
“You got into a fight?” Evan asked, surprised.
“Yeah. But there’s a bright side.”
“What? You get a nose job now?”
“Even better. I met a woman who doesn’t think I need one.”
“Wow. That is better…Are you serious?” Evan asked, genuinely happy for his friend.
Heeb smiled. “More serious than you can imagine… Her name is Hila…And she may be the only gorgeous woman who can’t see how scarred my dick is, how bald my head is, or how short my height is. And even if she could, I don’t think she’d care.”
“Really?” Evan said, in disbelief. “So this one doesn’t care about SQ?”
“Oh, she still cares about SQ, but I think she weights the factors very differently than most.”
“Wow…”
“Crazy, huh? In fact, I may end up losing my job, but I found my future.”
“Really?”
“Evan, I’ve finally experienced love at first sight – with a blind woman, ironically enough.…”
“A blind woman? Doesn’t that mean she has a seeing eye dog?”
“She needs to get one. I think she wants a Labrador retriever.”
“But that’ll never work! Look what happened the last time you slept in a room with an animal.”
“Don’t be silly. That was a cat. This is a dog.”
“But you wouldn’t even take the Afghan Hound.”
“This is totally different, Evan.”
“It’s beginning to sound like it.”
“The whole thing’s really one big miracle that would have never happened if any one of a million details had played itself out any differently.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that I was getting off at a different station today. The fact that she couldn’t get off at her station because of train problems and had to exit at my station. The fact that I decided to help her and miss my presentation. The fact that she’s here from Israel to see some top eye specialist. And then, on top of all of that, the fact that she happens to be Jewish when I’m in the Jews-only phase of my dating life.”
“You’re crazy, Heeb.”
“That’s what she said. And you know what else? I realize that I don’t really like tall women…I don’t care what all of the damn fashion hype says. I like a short, petite woman. Like Hila.”
“Really?”
“I feel like more of a man around her…And I guess that’s another thing that’s so perfect about Hila and me: I feel like she needs me at least as much as I need her.”
“You’ve had a rather deep and insightful day, haven’t you Heeb?”
“I definitely have…But what about you? I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages…”
“I’ll tell you. But I need a beer.”
Over a cold six-pack in Heeb’s living room, Evan told Heeb all about his torturous three weeks with Delilah Nakova and how they ended.
“You took relationship advice from a porn star?” Sammy asked in shock.
“Well, not exactly. I mean, I tried to ignore what Narc said for a while but it kept creeping back into my thoughts when I realized that I’m completely insecure about this woman.”
“But I thought one of the reasons you’re so in love with her is that she doesn’t have a Hollywood A-list ego.”
“She doesn’t. But she still has a Hollywood A-list life.”