Queens, the first time

I did live in this borough before.

I was a different person. I was single. I was thin. I ate chips and salsa for dinner. I obsessed over men.

It was Astoria, the Greek neighborhood just inside Queens. In the early 1990s, I lived there with my old boyfriend, first in a big apartment with his friends from film school; then just the two of us, in a small apartment, playing house. It didn’t work out. The relationship didn’t work out. Queens was fine.

I liked that it was safe. Big men in their undershirts sat on their front porches and watched people go by, listening to the game on transistor radios. Fine by me after Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where I was robbed and chased down the street. Please keep watching, men of Astoria.

My old boyfriend and I had a very cheap apartment near the elevated train line and we could hear the train rumble and screech by every 20 minutes or so, waking us up sometimes. Gus, the manager of the apartment building, said before we moved in, “You won’t mind the train noise after a while. It will be like music.”

Gus, it was never music.

I’m so different now. Still neurotic, but not about men. About whether I’m raising my children right. And my career. And my writing.

Back then I cared mostly about boyfriends. Getting one, keeping one, recovering from being dumped by one.

My Astoria experience did leave a cinematic legacy. One of my boyfriend’s friends became a big screenwriter in the 1990s. Wrote “Seven,” with Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow. They fell in love making that picture. They play a devoted young couple living near an elevated train line in New York City.

Get it?

The Gwyneth Paltrow character is based a little bit on me.

I didn’t know this until I saw “Seven,” because the old boyfriend hated me after the breakup and I lost touch with his friends. I saw the movie all alone in a big theater in Manhattan when it was released, and felt flattered about the Gwyneth/Brad similarities. I am not blonde and aristocratic and gorgeous. But there are glimmers of me in the character. It was fun.

Until Kevin Spacey, uncredited serial killer, decapitated Gwyneth and sent her head to Brad.

Let me tell you, seeing someone based on you getting decapitated is a very strange experience.

But I still picked Queens over Brooklyn.

I Thought Queens was Supposed to be Cheap

The bottom lock broke to our apartment door. My husband waited for the locksmith while I took the kids out to Pizzeria Uno.

I’m tired. The Magazine demanded much of my brain today. But I have to take two kids across Queens Boulevard (a near-highway from hell) to the pizzeria. It’s 62 degrees and lightly raining.

Why did I move here?

The pizza is fine except I am gaining weight since I got to The Magazine when I desperately need to be losing. It’s like Gattaca at The Magazine. All these gorgeous lissome young things (in the movie, Uma Thurman and Jude Law). I am the god child trying to pass (Ethan Hawke).

I gobble two pieces of deep dish and drink a Stella Artois.

Then the kids beg to go to Haagen Daaz. It’s still raining. We go to Austin Street, the “cool” street in downtown Forest Hills. There’s a sign on the locked door to Haagen Daaz: “Be Back in a Minute.”

Why did I move here?

A 30ish man with a shaved head comes up to wait with us. He has a vaguely Russian accent, as do so many people around here.

A little man appears on the sidewalk, unlocks the door to Haagen Daaz, does not apologize. My kids each order chocolate with rainbow sprinkle cones. I don’t order anything. Enough calorie damage has been done.

The bill: $9.07.

WHAT? I can buy two cartons of ice cream at Key Food for that. I sputter over the price.

The Haagen Daaz man tells me, “We sell a quality product.”

I don’t have $9.07. I have four dollars and quarters. I try to give him a debit card. He only accepts cash. I don’t know what to do. I start fishing for all the quarters.

Man with shaved head and vaguely Russian accent insists on giving me $5. No one in Manhattan would ever do that. He says, “I am around the neighborhood. You will see me again.”

When we get back, the locksmith has come and gone. Opened the apartment. I clean up the kids, brush teeth, they go to sleep. Max and I watch “Enter the Dragon” on Encore.

Maybe this will be OK.

overheard on Express Bus to Midtown

For $2 I can ride the F train to my office and arrive in a half hour.

But I don’t usually get a seat.

For $5 I can ride the express bus, the QM12, and sit in plush comfort with a window view (the view: marginal value). It takes 45 minutes.

The bus is silent except for two ladies in front.

First topic: bariatric treatments by doctors. Then….a friend who got her cancer diagonsis over the phone “because she begged him to tell her and it was really for the best, she just had to know.”

I’m twitching. Beloved father died of cancer nine years ago and I hate hearing about it before coffee. I am cancer phobic. Other phobias to be revealed eventually.

They go on and on. I have no ipod. I look at the blah buildings whizzing by.

Why did I move here?

Then the conversation switches to the TV movie “Crazy Love.” about a man who paid someone to throw lye in his wife’s eyes so she would be blind and couldn’t look at another man. And then she decided to be with him when he got out of prison because “who would else would want her.”

Now you may think I hate hearing about this, but hey, it’s OK.

Cancer: NO
Bad TV movies about wife blinding: YES

Especially when one of the women said, “You could kind of see her viewpoint. I mean not really, because she was blind.”

I smiled in the Queens Midtown tunnel at that one.

Then the bus reached Sixth Avenue and I tumbled out.

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