Walked through the dragon's-tail end of Chinese New Year yesterday with a friend up from Dallas. Partly because he was legitimately curious about Chinatown, partly because after the last night of drinking, we needed to earn the next one. Good thing justification isn't expensive.
We were talking about divorce and mowing down infestations of javelina with helicopter-mounted M16s (both activities recently engaged in by various friends back home) when we ran across Warren, above bottom, an international conflict photographer in town teaching a few weeks before heading back to Afghanistan. I offered him my Coolpix for his imposing rig. He declined, but did tell us some stories from the front. Just a few of the events his camera clicked continuously through:
Having a Tamil Tiger rifle-butt his eye, then put a foot on his chest and a barrel in his face; wearing such an unruly beard that despite his pale English skin a busload of jittery Egyptians mistook him for a terrorist and texted the police, who led him off the bus at gunpoint; advising an inexcusably inexperienced photojournalist not to touch the rifle at his feet despite entreaties from the Palestinian kid who'd dropped it -- advice that was ignored when the guy kicked the rifle towards the kid, then immediately got his no-longer-neutral head blown “clean off”; taking a picture in Lebanon so existentially miserable it caused a thousands-strong protest back in London, where his own face appeared on some of the banners; taking his lawyer to a meeting with an int'l aid group to discuss the sale of an equally dismaying Darfur photo, an image that required six months of access-gaining preparation, and which he ultimately stashed in a vault despite the aid group's “blank check” offer, because he feared it would cause global race riots if mishandled by the media; spending six weeks on the streets with Norwegian heroin addicts; scary times in Jodhpur; mass Vietnamese mobilization on the Thailand border; in Cambodia, maybe or maybe not physically discouraging “ghosts” (amateurs, like the gun-kicker above, with fine digital cameras and no sense of politics, who shadow the pros and try to shoot what they shoot); more.
After thanking Warren for giving us far more than we'd expected from Chinatown (we'd expected meandering, and bubble tea), we headed north up Mulberry. A hipster-mustached rollerblader in a knit cap and caramel leather jacket aggressively slammed my shoulder as he sliced south through me and an older woman. I told him to fuck off. He bobbed-and-weaved another ten yards, then spun around.
"You got something to say to me, faggot?" he yelled, alarming the 20 tourists between us, plus any NYers learning for the first time that hipsters could be homophobic.
"I just told you to fuck off," I said. What other "something" is there? He lingered spitting epithets for a second, then wheeled off.
"Every time I come up, you almost get into a fight," said my friend (on his last trip, I love-tapped the car of a guy who looked like the wheelchair kid's dad from Malcolm in the Middle -- he was tubby, and I've got no gym membership, so if we'd brawled it would've been quick, and wheezy). As we turned back up the sidewalk, an elderly Chinese woman smiled and said, “New Yorkers. They're so crazy.”
But not really. Acting like you're in the Williamsburg chapter of that dickish rollerskating/overalls-wearing gang from The Warriors? That just makes you smugly eclectic.
The fact that a guy this smugly eclectic -- a mustachioed rollerblading sidewalk assaulter -- can make it through a day without getting hacked to death by a machete, is the reason Warren thankfully spends most of his time overseas. And the reason we can collect stories about almost-fights, and not worry about causing riots when we pull them out of the vault and use them to pay for a night of drinking.
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