Free I Totally Meant to Do That by Jane Borden Page B

ride. On a Saturday afternoon, the experiential combination of sun, wind, and buzz eclipses even the stunning views of Lady Liberty. She may as well have said, “Give us your poor, your hungry, your weekend warriors.”
    Once on the island, the drinking continued. By the time we’d settled in at the second destination on our journey, a curiously empty saloon on Hylan Boulevard, we were good and toasted. I
really
should have seen it coming.
    While standing by the bar in the saloon, someone in the party said, “This was my last borough. I’ve hit them all now. I guess I’m finally a New Yorker.”
    And then Jake snorted. “Bullshit,” he said, wiping the underside of his nose.
    “Why?” asked the befuddled offender.
    “First of all,” Jake explained, “this doesn’t count as a trip to Staten Island.”
    At this point, I agreed with his argument, if not his bullish method. In spite of the fact that we’d eaten with local families at an old-school Italian restaurant, and would soon be rubbing groins with local teens in a terrifyingly loud, underwater-themed dance club called Atlantis, this didn’t feel like an authentic trip to Staten Island—perhaps because we referred to these locals as “natives.” Our journey was, by design, ironic. We didn’t have fun; we had “fun.” We kept enough of a distance that it was impossible to tell whether the wax spiking the teenage boys’ hair was manufactured by Goody or Madame Tussaud.
    To their credit, the locals just as obviously gawked at us: a clanof buttoned-up twentysomethings who referred to themselves as the Blogerati. I know what that word means, yet I still don’t really know. It would also be an appropriate title for tiny gnomes who clean castle moats.
    So did the circumstances of our trip warrant the checking off of Staten Island from the list of boroughs visited? Jake seemed to argue that dancing inside an oceanic nightclub—just so you can say you did—does not. And when compared to truly authentic Staten Island visits, such as meeting a new boyfriend’s parents or identifying a body, it was difficult to argue otherwise.
    “Furthermore,” Jake bloviated, “visiting all of the boroughs is
not
what makes you a New Yorker.”
    He paused momentarily, waiting for someone to ask, “What does?” However, so impatient was he to play the pedant, he continued before anyone had the chance. “You’re only a New Yorker after you’ve told a stranger to fuck off.” He accented the last word by sucking air through his teeth.
    In that case, Jake must be the New Yorkiest of us all: He’d already blessed out a car on Hyman for failing to light its headlamps, taken a shot at a too-bold seagull in the ferry terminal, and assaulted the end of a beer for growing warm. Put off as much by him as his point, I rolled my eyes and mumbled, “Here we go.”
    Jake shot back: “Yes?”
    “Well, I mean, come on,” I said, “plenty of people in this city get by without shouting obscenities.”
    “And I’m saying that those people aren’t truly New Yorkers.”
    “That’s too narrow a—”
    “Why? Because you’ve never done it?” he interrupted.
    “Done what?” I stalled.
    “You’ve never shouted ‘fuck you’ to a total stranger.”
    I quickly scanned the street scuffles from my past, but the answer was already clear to us both.
    “No,” I admitted.
    “Then you’re not a New Yorker,” he said, raising one eyebrow and slightly cocking his head toward the other, a movement that caused one dribble of sweat to swim precariously from forehead to nose so that when he self-satisfactorily pulled his glass of whiskey to his partially curled lips, I was able to pray that the perspiration would drip into his drink.
    “Well, that definition works for you,” I said out loud.
Because you’re an aggressive asshole
, I said in my head.
    Walking around accosting one another: what a self-destructive way to behave! It always escalates. If Jake had been piloting