Caine Blog

Have you ever been to a bar or a club or a music festival, hanging out and minding your own business, when suddenly some rando comes up to you and just starts talking and chilling? He’s going on and on, and you’re thinking what is happening why is this person talking to me will he stop soon? He holds his hand out to yours and introduces himself.

“Hi, I’m ____,” he says, and then follows it up with a nice little “and what did you say your name was, again?”

“Umm, I’m Paul?”

“Cool man, so what’s your story, where are you headed, where’s the party at?”

“How do I know you?”

Right. Not to be a complete misanthrope - believe me, I like meeting new people, sort of - but in the past 24 hours I’ve had two “encounters” and the double whammy is leaving me at a loss. Last night I came back home way too late after a night out to find six high school-age kids from the Bed-Stuy projects hanging out on my deck. Two random dudes from Williamsburg had tagged along. What were these people doing there, on my property, in the early morn? Turns out my roommate had met a bunch of these guys on the subway and brought them back(?!?!?); when I arrived they were hanging out and all was well - although, really, what the fuck? - but getting them out of the place took too much cajoling. And asking my roommate for money to buy a sandwich? Absurd. Never, ever to be repeated.

Today I was walking back from the pool with various folks, and this guy who’d helped one of my friends fold up a picnic blanket was walking alongside us. And like clockwork: “Hi, I’m Erik, what’s your name?” followed by the inevitable “so where are we headed?” It was way antisocial, but he didn’t seem to notice that he’d suddenly jumped in with a group of people he’d never met. He confused people’s names, and at one point shouted, “Wait, where’s Nick?” while Nick was standing next to him. He asked me if the people at our destination “would beat him up.” Umm, no.

He spouted gibberish, half to himself and half to the rest of us (who were really only half-listening, so it all evens out), and so for 30 minutes we were entertained by talk of Lao Tzu, semiotics, something ‘Dickensonian’, and so on. He seemed a little bit crazy, like he’d been inside for a while. He said he was from Flushing, right near where I was living a few weeks ago. He’d driven into Brooklyn, alone. We walked into the apartment and I held the door open for him, but he didn’t follow; he looked at me and then walked away. We didn’t exactly go to great lengths to invite him in, but we certainly didn’t say he couldn’t come. Our ambivalence was evident in our response upon reaching the front door - we’ll hold open the door, but we won’t actually invite you in. You’ll have to invite yourself in, and who does that? - and I suppose he finally figured it out.

But I’ve injected the above story with a fair bit of melodrama. In point of fact he should have left, not because I’m an asshole but because you can’t just make friends with people off the street. As alluring and utopian as it is - Williamsburg! Where everybody is young and lovely and friends with everyone else! - it’s also annoying and imposing, and simply not how things are done. And that seems pretty legit to me. Meet people at bars, at film screenings, and maybe - maybe - at bookstores, and keep everything reciprocal. Okay, enough preaching.