So every time I visit Queens, I behold a spectacle that I have never before viewed in my life.
Admittedly, I get out to Queens a grand total of once a year, tops.
It was amazing to meet a woman who had grown up right in the heart of Queens - whose parents, no less, had grown up in the same water-bound confines of this neighbourhood. I quiz her avidly: "So have you been to the mechanic's store run by the naked parrot? Did you ever get shoes from the chained-up stores??"
The answer is no, never, and where exactly was I because it sure wasn't Queens.
'Oh,' I assure her. It was Queens alright.
An ex-roommate had been badgered into driving down into New York City, a joint effort between myself and her kind-of-boyfriend, a vigorous foodie, and his kind-of-boyfriend, a quiet sort who had a passion for obscure mail. I had the ultimate trump card of a parking spot - free!! - which we could use for 4 days. Said parking spot was, admittedly, in Queens.
Getting to Queens is always an adventure within itself. There's bridges with the quietly despairing toll-woman, and a stadium we circled thrice for good luck. And that's about how far we got. Stadium after stadium, well the same goddamn stadium to be perfectly honest. So as we rejoined traffic under the subway, I pointed out an auto shop. "They will definitely know where we're going. Okay, turn right. Right. RIGHT NOW."
The curious man at the hot dog truck may have known where we were going, but between the four of us we had zero words of Spanish. The ex-roommate and I left the kind-of-boyfriend and the other friend-kind-of-boyfriend standing outside the subway while we ducked behind two cars and entered the auto mechanic shop.
The attack was immediate and wildly successful. Pushed from behind by my unsuspecting friend, I was immediate in lunge-range of a rabid naked flapping monster. Screaming couldn't be enough. I immediately had to hit the deck and army-crawl towards freedom. I can't lie, I have to confess I left my friend as sacrifice. Luckily she too had the reflexes to launch her yoga-toned ass through the still open door.
"WHAT WHAT WAS THAT?" was the general shrieked consensus outside. The junior mechanic came outside, crying with laughter. He explained that his bosses' parrot had been stressed lately. Really stressed. And this parrot expressed his state of unsatisfaction by methodically pulling every single feather out of his body, until it was left with only a head of feathers to distinguish it from a live re-enactment of a rubber chicken joke.
"My boss is bringing him into work, to see if he is less stressed with company, but it turns out that he just hates people. That's why we have him chained!"
Our parking spot was less than 200 feet away.
Queens is an inextricable lodestone of strangeness for me - a strangeness that renders it unfamiliar even to this amazing woman who had grown up right there and somehow managed to miss the weekend with the flaming BBQ shopping carts wars. How is that possible??
