I was eating lunch yesterday in Soho. As I was by myself I sat in the corner of the restaurant, at the bar. The bar is backed up to a small hallway that ends in the only bathroom in the place. I call it a hallway but it in fact only seems like a hallway because the bar is there. The bar ends at the the wall where the bathroom is. A man who was also eating there at the restaurant with a few people walks towards the bathroom with a baby in his hands, tries the door, finds it locked, immediately sets his baby down on the floor in the corner and begins to change its diaper. I was having a grilled chicken salad with added avocado slices. They make a creamy mustard dressing that tastes much richer than it actually is, though I use that sparingly and augment the dressing with a little bit of balsamic vinegar and oil. I always use more pepper than anybody I know on salads. The one thing that I don't normally add to my salad is infant feces, or the smell of it.
As it is my friend's restaurant, and he happened to not be there, I didn't want to make a scene and subsequently have that scene relayed to my friend in my absence. So I suffered through and said nothing. I was almost finished with my lunch anyway. There were other things that I wanted to do in the short amount of time that I had. In truth I never even smelled the little child's by-product, thankfully. Shortly after he had begun the process the person who was using the bathroom exited and left the bathroom open, though he had no real use for it any longer as he was already elbow-deep in the changing of the specially designed dooky-diaper. I thought about my wife and I wanting to have a child of our own, and I asked myself if maybe one day soon I will change my attitude so much that I will also be wafting baby shit across the restaurants of this city at my convenience. I thought: No, no I wouldn't. I sat there and wondered about New Yorkers, their crazed sense of assumed inheritance and disaffection. That imbalanced mixture of assertion and anxiety. I thought about how so many of them are assholes. I thought about that poor child.
As I was leaving my friend was walking in. I was thankful that I hadn't screamed at the man, that even if he was buying my lunch I'd appreciate it if there wasn't a layer of baby-crap garnishing the top of it. We stopped to hug and say hello where the tables separate and also make an imaginary walkway that leads towards the door. I stopped with my back facing the table where daddy-infant-excrement was, so that I wouldn't be tempted to stare. My friend asked how long I had been there, and did I have to run right now, and did I have time for a glass of wine? I answered all the questions with the best answers I could muster and then that's when it dawned on me... I had to fart. I asked how his wife was and when were they going to Europe. It was Italy. That's what I thought. And were they going to Israel too? How long would they be gone? Hadn't they just gone to Italy last year. Of course, she has family there. Any other inane question I could think of. It was brewing. I was preparing my response. Soon it would be ready.
I smiled and we hugged, breathing in almost imperceptibly as we embraced in departing. As he turned and walked into the restaurant I held my breath just enough to allow for the abdominal pressure that forced the evacuation of gas, freely filling any space available. At first I hoped for silence, but as the excitement and joy overtook me I squeezed perhaps more than I should have, or would have otherwise, and the unmistakable sound of a lone gaseous emission made itself known, announced its entering the world with an almost jazz-like sadness, never truly deciding on a single key or note, but rather a portamento drifting from one note towards its final.
I was in New York, after all. The birth of the cool, and all of that. I was Miles Fucking Davis.
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