beetrock

Having wine and cheese in Central Park has become one of my favorite NYC activities. After loading up appropriately at Trader Joe’s, I met up with Jo-Anne – the wine-in-the-park originator – and we headed northward on the B train. We entered the park near Strawberry Fields and plopped ourselves on the slightly wet grass in a perfect spot to be viewing runners and bicyclists and reminding ourselves of our own unhealthy indulgences. In three hours, our meal of cheese, chocolate and crackers finished, and our moods lifted by two bottles of cheap wine (props to Trader Joe’s Black Mountain Pinot Noir), we were ready to head home.

To even further fulfill our detrimental activity for the night, we were in a dire need of a cigarette. At an apparent loss in the quickly darkened Central Park, we appealed to runners, dog walkers and finally a lone biker. The man, possibly in his mid-thirties and with a shaved head, to our surprise stopped and in an extremely calm voice attacked first, the heightened tone of our conversation and then my laughter to which he referred to as “cackling”. Sweet!

As I continued to cackle and Jo tried to maintain her calm and get a cigarette out of the man, Jesus was slipped into our conversation along with a revelation that both Jo and I were living in sin. My rowdy drunken attempts to diminish the man’s born-again logic were interrupted by Jo hitting my legs with her umbrella (the much needed at this point cigarette was still not obtained) and by the man’s urgent anti-gay comment. The umbrella abuse stopped momentarily as both Jo and I contemplated whether or not we cold tie the god-loving hypocrite to a tree and beat him with his bike. The man, suddenly, offered us to sit down and converse with him while we were smoking. With cries of “You are lying to yourself because smoking is a fucking sin!” and “I am not going to sit down next to you, I am a Jew!” which barely concerned the man but earned me another umbrella poke from Jo, I walked over to the benches and faced our head-shaven brother.

Oh, the things were we to find out about this man! From runaway teenager turned prostitute, to suffering from drug abuse, to finally finding God’s word (this always accompanied by three taps on his thigh pocket, where he carries his Bible) the man was a cocktail of psychosomatic symptoms- a chain-smoker, he twitched randomly and offered us to come out for a drink with him. Hell no, said the sinners! I mean, seriously, what is God going to think? Despite all of our LSAT-worthy logical reasoning, the man kept preaching the word of God (tap, tap, tap) and blast the secret vices of the gay community. Perhaps our excessive drinking prevented us from clearly deducing that one never argues with an obsessively religious person, even while making a case for the teachings of Jesus.

Things we learned: When in New York – have your own pack!