Introducing Stepek - NYC Snapshots °3

I‘d been standing on the corner of Broadway and 101, waiting for a Polish girl I had met earlier that afternoon. Realizing she wasn’t going to show, I began looking up at an open window on the third floor behind me, a window from which music had been blaring from as I waited. Music and squeals of laughter – party.

Fuck it, I’m drunk enough to blend in seamlessly, I seem to remember thinking.

A group of five kids/teenagers who could, for all I know, have actually been The Strokes arrived, spoke into the intercom and headed inside. I slipped in behind them, laughed at their jokes and nodded in accordance when one of them asked me if I was going to Stepek’s party as well … Ha! Of course I am going to Stepek’s party!

... and the apartment was as full as the party was terrible. I spent all night bullshitting everyone about who I was and what I did for a living, telling them all the things I plan to do rather than what I really do. Not only did everyone buy this, but they seemed quite into it and I found myself engaged in all sorts of creative conversations.

It was long into the morning before I found myself talking to Stepek himself; he was treated like royalty, and kept at arms length by most of the drunks and stoners. To me, at that hour, his head and neck resembled a tightly tied, over filled balloon. His eyes seemed large and round yet flat also, like a photocopy of someone’s face plastered to the big balloon head. He swayed forwards and backwards, and sometimes as we stumbled through our conversation his nose poked uncomfortably against my face, a sharp triangular nose like a corner of cardboard.

At one point I began crying and then told Stepek that I was upset because I came from a country where the government forced me to sell vacuum cleaners to the rich in their own homes. I sell them with lies and manipulation, I said. This was after lying and manipulating my way through the whole evening.

Last thing I remember was watching Stepek snort some coke from the end of a brass key a beautiful Indian girl (who had been telling me about auto-manufacturing in Mumbai while I began to pass out) had given to him.

Anyway … here’s a picture of his cab the day we went to buy it.