I was mugged three times on the subway. I wonder if that's a record. Three times, to one guy, in one summer? Nah, it's very hard to set records in this town. There's probably some guy walking around out there who's got six or seven under his belt. Maybe someone picked up four over a long weekend. Still, I'm proud of my three. They make up my New York City Scary Survival Story, a story which I'll admit I've used shamelessly to impress impressionable suburbanites who think the subway is a festering, lawless, criminal underworld and who wouldn't go down there for anything less than love or money. It's a story however whose details change with each telling, simply because there were very few details to work with in the first place. I've had to invent the gunpoint, and the eight-inch blade, and the five of them, and the grappling, and the struggling, and all that kind of stuff. For effect you know. What can I say? It's bullshitic license.

I blame my girlfriend for the muggings. Well, my ex-girlfriend that is, for this was five years ago, and we've both moved on since. I lived in the Bronx then and she lived in Queens, and together we socialized on Houston and Bleeker and Lafayette, and a bunch of other places south of 14th Street and north of Chinatown. We were both drinkers at the time, and after drinking in the city bars, we'd head back to Queens and have one or two more in The Copper Jug before walking the nine blocks to her place. You'd think that nine blocks wouldn't give a couple much of a chance to get into a heated argument, but we seemed to manage it, and on a fairly consistent basis, too. She had a way of driving me nuts like nobody else. At the best of times, we couldn't agree. Any situation was ripe for our radically different interpretations. We once had a row over Cadbury's chocolate, for God's sake. [More]