The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters With Strangers by Eric Hansen

Author:Eric Hansen [Hansen, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Special Interest, Adventure
ISBN: 9780525433453
Google: jVMKDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01LZ3K1JR
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2016-09-20T23:00:00+00:00

COOKING WITH MADAME ZOYA

THE FIRST AFTERNOON I went to call on Madame Zoya, I had only a vague idea of where I was going. I set off thinking the journey to her apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan was going to be a simple matter of picking up several platters of Russian food from her for a friend’s birthday party. But the further I drove uptown, the more uneasy I became. I arrived at the front of a badly deteriorated apartment building on a dead-end street strewn with garbage. I was certain I had written down the wrong address, but when I checked the street and number I realized, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, that I had the right place. Young men wielding baseball bats leaned against battered cars and a chain-link fence. I stepped out of my car but before I could lock the door behind me, a man was at my side offering drugs and sex. I told him I wasn’t interested. He looked me in the eye and said real slow, “You need someone protect yo’ car.” It wasn’t a question.

There was no intercom or security system at the front of Madame Zoya’s building and when I opened the front door, I stopped short because an unchained pit bull was standing at the side of the small lobby. The dog bared his teeth, then lifted his leg and pissed on the tile wall. A man was squatting on the lobby floor eating spaghetti and meatballs with his fingers off a piece of crumpled aluminum foil. He took a brief look at me and then shouted “SPOOKY!” and the animal backed off.

The doorman on his lunch break, I thought to myself.

The corridors were strewn with empty bottles and the building smelled of rotting garbage and cigarette butts. I didn’t have the nerve to take the elevator because of the possibility of being trapped there by someone with a baseball bat and a need for the contents of my pockets, which unfortunately contained $600 in cash for Madame Zoya. I climbed a darkened stairway, but before I reached the second floor I stuffed the money into my right sock. On the fourth floor, at the end of a deserted hallway, I knocked on a door. I identified myself, then heard the distinctive thud and clank and rattle of locks and security chains being manipulated. The door opened.

“You hat no trouble finding me?” Madame Zoya said.

Madame Zoya appeared to be in her mid-eighties. Her hair had turned white, yet she had the complexion and demeanor of a woman thirty years younger. Her sly flirtatious laugh and deep-green Slavic eyes attracted me at once and provided a clue as to what a beauty she must have been in her youth.

I walked through the door and entered a time warp. With a single step I moved from the mean streets and crack cocaine dealers of Washington Heights to the cozy comfort of an apartment in St. Petersburg in 1930.

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