Strangers and Feeling Strange in New York

(NB: This is NOT a Carrie Bradshaw-esque tribute to a night of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll in NYC. My shoes aren’t Manolos—they’re Payless.)

It was last Friday, and I was out helping P. celebrate her birthday with some of her close lady friends. After a disappointing meal at Barrio Chino and giggling with some loud gay boys at the neighboring table, consensus took us rambling to another bar close by. Spitzer’s Corner, on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow, was fairly packed, but we managed to find some sitting room along the back wall by the bar. As we drank our wine and shouted over the din of drinkers, in walked a gaggle of very tall, very blonde Euro-looking men.

I interrupt P’s banter about cookies and dating, and point to the tall-blonde gaggle, and my eyes narrow. While some people profess to have an acute ability to suss out “the gays” from “the straights” (aka gaydar), I guess I’d have to say that I’ve got an acute sense of Euro-dar. Both terms based on gross generalities, it’s hard to put into exact words how I can spot a Euro from others, so acknowledging it’s no science, I’d say: generally tall, generally white, generally thin, and generally wearing tight jeans. With lots of exceptions.

They’re Euro, I say to my friend matter-of-factly. P, who is Indian, and I debate as to which European country they might be from. French? German? Maybe Dutch. But these guys are too good looking and well, with such a stark lack of diversity among them, they could all even be related to each other.

“Scandinavian, fo’shizzle,” I say. Bring’em on.  

As if on cue, one of the group—an older man, not as tall, not as blonde—walks over to us. “Is there room to sit here?” he asks us. We pile our coats and bags onto one another to make room. He sits down. We pounce. “So where are you guys from?” we nearly ask at once. “From Denmark,” he replies. Ah, yes, of course, Denmark. Land of Muslim cartoons, herring sandwiches, Hans Christian Andersen and lots of tall, blonde people. Within a few minutes, the whole crew of them had gathered by our side. One of them, particularly handsome, I must admit, sits down to talk to me. We trade some remarks about what he’s seen in New York so far, but architects seems to speak their own language and so I divert the topic to something I am always curious about: race.

Thanks to some of my own Danish friends, I know enough to know that, while Denmark isn’t exactly bereft of racial diversity, it isn’t exactly frothing over either. Sure, there are the Chinese take-away owners and surprisingly, a good number of Koreans adopted by white Danes (thanks to J for that tidbit)—but it’s probably a lot like finding stray poppy seeds on an otherwise plain bagel: random, spartan and obvious. Armed with this knowledge, I asked Jannes (Particularly Handsome Architect Boy, PHAB) if he had any Asian friends in Copenhagen. He said he had one friend. Then I asked him if he would ever talk to Asian women at a bar in his home city, he said probably not. When I pressed him as to why, he just shrugged and said, “Because Danes are not as friendly, they just don’t want to bother.”

But here we were, sitting in this packed bar in the Lower East Side—plenty of women milling about, looking ample and willing to talk to some attractive foreigners (Americans are suckers for Euro accents). So why me, then, why us?

Having done quite a bit of research on how human behaviour changes while on holiday, I know enough to know that what is taboo at home becomes exotic and desirable on holiday. One study that looked at female white tourists from Canada and the U.S. and their interactions with local black men in the Caribbean showed that many of these women admitted they they would never date a black man at home. Why? Well this was rationalized by dismissing them as crass—black men up North don’t know how to treat women, they said, but their counterparts down south, however, were idealized as great lovers, romantic and tender. And so these women eroticize these men who they wouldn’t give the time of day to back home. Many of these female frollickers have sex with their exoticized lovers, some even fall in love. What often happens after is a complicated tale. I should know, I dedictaed 60 pages of my master’s thesis to the dern topic.

Another architect swooped in after PHAB left to take a jaunt to the loo. He said, nodding at us, ”We are surrounded by beautiful women.” Well I guess that meant me and P. Their wide-eyed curiosity and our mildly leery curiosity—like groups of dogs sniffing each other—took us just a little bit further to another bar down the block. We all walked over to the Pink Pony, a bar on Ludlow, and nestled into the back room, which had emptied out by the time we arrived. I looked around the table at this band of Danish brothers and suddenly felt very obvious and very invisible all at once. Sixteen years in New York City, and yet I felt like a total stranger—a little like an alien on a foreign planet, a lot like that stray poppy seed on an othewise beige bagel. And then it dawned me: I was the exoticized local on their holiday. Just a plane ride away from from home, the forbidden fruit becomes daily bread. It was time for this alien to board the mothership and high-tail it out of Dodge.

It seemed the Pink Pony wasn’t enough to capture the young Danes’ attention either, so after a while, everyone got up to leave. Outside, the sky was black and the rain was pouring in nearly opaque curtains. In the melee to rush for safety, I ditched PHAB and the other architects—and darted for Houston Street, skipping over puddles and whistling in the rain.