Tracking Shot by Colin Campbell (i can read book club .txt) 📗

the narrow bleachers and found myself with an even better view of the whole area. My body was vibrating as I tried to decide what to do next. There were all the restaurant chains and store chains we had at malls back home but that seemed like a waste of the energy of Times Square. I was hungry again and thought about getting something from one of the food carts, but I was paralyzed by excitement and couldn’t move so I stared for a while longer. When my senses were so overloaded that they blew me back to reality, I exited the bleachers to go and see what was around back.

I was in New York City for my stage debut but the truth was I had never seen a play before—well, nothing beyond the odd community theater massacre of Rodgers and Hammerstein—and I figured it was about time. My budget was limited so I couldn’t afford any of the big ticket shows but while I was staring at the big electronic board listing all of the shows waiting for a sign, someone handed me a flyer for a play called Perfect Crime offering tickets for twenty-five dollars. I bought a ticket for the two p.m. matinee that started in fifteen minutes, watched the show, and halfway through figured out what I was going to do with Dutchy.

The play was awful, but I loved the experience. The theater was a few blocks up from the TKTS booth across from another giant Applebee’s and next to a closed strip club called Bare Essence and an open sex toy store called Mixed Emotion. I was disappointed by the lack of imagination in the naming but excited to be in one of the last vestiges of Times Square’s grimy peep show era that had been immortalized in my mind from too many viewings of Taxi Driver and NYPD Blue. There was a group of us standing just outside of the theater waiting to be called back in after the intermission was over. Some were smoking, some were analyzing the clues from the play, and a few of us were fidgeting, wondering how best to walk away without looking rude. One of them was a girl I guessed to be about my age dressed casually, not like part of the theater crowd. We’d made eye contact a few times before the show started. The front row of the theater, where all the discount ticket holders were put, had the feeling of a freshman campus mixer because we were bonded together and different from the rest of the folks around us. When she caught my gaze again, she came over to me.

“New York Fucking City,” she said, waving her hand in the air.

“Aren’t you New Yorkers all supposed to be jaded and cynical?”

“I’m from Michigan. Just moved here last week to be a writer.”

“Huh,” I said.

A year ago I would have been jealous of her. I would have rambled endlessly about my own Michigan background and my own writing dreams and my own writing projects. But right then I just hoped to god she wouldn’t ask me where I was from and what I was doing in the city. Lucky for me she seemed content to continue talking about herself.

“I work at a different theater, over in Brooklyn, doing accounting work believe it or not. I know that may seem like a silly job for a writer, but I’m good with numbers and who wants to be another cog at some shitty online magazine or get coffee for some bullshit publisher in Brooklyn, right?”

“Yeah. Sure. I get it,” I said.

I waited until the office manager called us back in and broke off from the crowd right before entering, but as I turned, I saw the girl I’d been talking to following me.

“Hey, I’m Bianca,” she said, holding her hand out as she sped up her pace to catch up with me. “You’re not one of the regulars here are you?”

“Regulars?”

I stopped walking, but she continued toward me tripping on the sidewalk and falling into me so hard she knocked us both into the wall. As she pushed off of me, her mouth was close enough to my face that I could smell wintergreen gum on her breath. Her hands pushed off of my waist and crotch in a way that I was almost certain was supposed to be seductive, but before I could respond, she had been absorbed by a passing crowd and I headed back toward Times Square, confused and exhilarated.

There was so much more I wanted to look at and to experience, but the first half of the play and my conversation with Dutchy had shaken loose my devious side, and I wanted to get to work. Just as I reached the subway station to head back to Queens, it started pouring rain and I noticed my phone and my wallet were gone. I rushed back to the theater to see if they’d fallen out of my pocket during the show, but that seemed silly. My wallet had been in my back pocket despite my mother’s paranoid warning before I left, and I would never, ever, live that down. In her long and rambling pre-trip lecture she had recommended I keep my wallet in my front pocket so no one could pickpocket me and that I keep my wad of emergency cash in my shoe because muggers never ask anyone to take off their shoes to check for money.

It was still raining when I got off the train. I remembered seeing a cyber café nearby and was able to find the place just before the rain soaked me completely through. I gave the cashier a five-dollar bill from my sock emergency fund in exchange for three hours of internet access and thought I might have overpaid until I realized how slow the computers were and that it could take the entire three hours for me to log into my email.

I could have logged