Ozzie’s Seventh Ave and Lincoln Pl., Park Slope I’m sipping a soy latte (milk makes me gassy) and looking for names I recognize in the “Sunday Styles” weddings section when a mom and her young son sit down next to me. She’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 and wearing yoga pants, a tattered Kraftwerk t-shirt and a ponytail. She reminds me of my first girlfriend, who kinda resembled Catherine Deneuve, believe it or not. She isn’t eating or drinking anything, just watching Junior slobber over his bottle of organic lingonberry nectar. She catches me eyeing her and does the look-away-look-back thing. I pretend to read about the joyful union of Kit Merriweather III and Caroline Van Der Wyk while reminding myself that this woman has a child, for chrissake. I pull out the “Week in Review” and resolve to give a shit about instability in Pakistan. The only reason I’m at Ozzie’s is because Gorilla Coffee (Fifth Avenue and Park Place) was packed and I hate standing around waiting for a table. Ozzie’s is nothing to write home about—the coffee, décor and clientele are uniformly innocuous, a real-life version of the coffee shop on Friends—but you can always get a seat, which is no small thing at the freelancer’s ball known as Brooklyn. It isn’t long before Junior is making unpleasant noises and the woman is rummaging through a Whole Foods tote bag. I glimpse a tasteful diamond solitaire on her left ring finger and turn back to the paper, thoroughly disgusted with myself. “ ‘At the far end of town, where the Grickle-grass grows and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows and no birds ever sing excepting old crows… is the Street of the Lifted Lorax.’ ” She turns the page and I can’t resist leaning over and looking at the pictures, which are spookier than I remember. “Pretty hard to resist, huh?” She’s smiling at me. “Yeah, I used to love The Lorax. Still do, apparently.” “This one practically has the whole thing memorized,” she says. Junior grabs the book and starts flipping through the pages. “My favorite were the little bear guys. What were they called?” “Brown Bar-ba-loots. He likes those, too.” “Part of me wants to have kids just for the excuse to re-read all of those great books,” I lie. “Yeah, it’s pretty great. But don’t rush yourself—sometimes I really miss the single life,” she says, and I swear to God she winks. I’m still blushing when a forty-something guy bends over and gives her a kiss on the cheek. He is wearing a pair of those bulky sport sandals that are practically boots. “Sorry, babe—the FreshDirect guy was late.” He starts looking around for a seat. “I’m actually leaving. You can sit here,” I say, folding up my paper. “Truffula trees!” Junior shouts, out of the blue. “Which everyone wants because everyone needs,” I say. I’d wink at her if I was better at it, but instead I keep my head down and walk out, accidentally leaving behind the “Automobiles” section. If hubby values his marriage he better lose the sport sandals.
Hope and Anchor Van Brunt and Dikeman, Red Hook I have the tattoo, cut-off shorts, boat shoes, aviators, v-neck, bike helmet and stubble, but based on her aggressively bored tableside manner I know she sees through all that. Nope, to her I’m just another yuppie slumming down Van Brunt, hoping to pick up some old-tyme Breukelen grit along with smoked Gouda from Fairway and a Horup lamp from Ikea. She’s wrong on the details but right in essence. Hope and Anchor is a restaurant, not a coffee shop, but on Saturday afternoons they’ll let you fuck around on your laptop until the bar crowd shows up. I like to sit by the plate glass windows by the street—if you pay close attention, you can actually see the neighborhood slowly gentrifying, despite the looming housing projects and lack of subway access. The restaurant’s design motif is dockyard tattoo shop, and it feels respectably gritty despite the fact that the menu includes a tofu scramble. In terms of getting some work done, Baked—which is located down the block (Van Brunt and Wolcott) and features free wi-fi and electric outlets at every table—is the best thing going in Red Hook. In terms of mind-blowing waitresses, Hope and Anchor wins in a mercy rule blowout. I’m gonna try to describe her without staring. She’s relatively tall, with short black hair that screws up into ringlets. I don’t know how large her breasts are, which is not a dealbreaker for me either way. OK, I looked. They’re not very big. Which is fine. She’s wearing denim wedge heels, mid-length khaki shorts, a paisleyish top, and a long dookie rope with nautical medallions. It works on her. How frequently does a hot waitress get hit on? Twice per shift? More importantly, does it ever work? Probably not, but the bloody mary/iced coffee tandem I’ve been gulping down has me feeling dangerously brave. I catch her eye. “You want the check?” she asks in a slightly different shade of boredom that kindles a small spark of hope. “Uh, no. Do you need me to leave? I can leave. The last thing I wanna be is a mooch. Seriously, it’s like my greatest fear, behind Alzheimer’s.” Like I said, dangerously brave. “No, you can stay.” She smiles and the spark cackles in a brushfire. When you can’t fake bravado, go for neurotic—there’s a reason Woody Allen used to date Diane Keaton. “Good. I have one question,” I say. She tilts her head and shoots me an indulgent look. “How frequently do guys hit on you? Twice per shift?” Her smile is frozen and about to crack, but I hurtle on. “I’m asking because I’ve never tried, as you can tell, and I’m genuinely curious.” She doesn’t say anything and I can tell she’s sizing me up. We’ve reached a critical juncture in our flirtation. “I promise not to ask when you get off tonight—I’m not that corny—but I might just leave my number on a napkin when I leave.” She stares at me, completely inscrutable, sphinx-like. Finally she speaks: “Your napkin’s dirty.” I look down at my hollandaise-stained napkin and have nothing to say in reply, suddenly out of steam. At least I tried. But then she snatches a clean napkin from an empty table and hands it to me with the check before turning away and striding into the kitchen. I jot down my name, phone number, and email address on the napkin and leave it there alongside a very generous tip. She never calls or writes. A few weeks later I walk by and she isn’t there. Maybe she got fired and had to leave the City, I tell myself. But on a sweltering Saturday in August I literally run into her while she’s standing on line for an empanada at the ball fields. She clearly doesn’t recognize me, and I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.