The Mash…You Know, The Kind With Monsters In It
If you’ve gone into a LensCrafters or similar mall-y, big box-type eyecare store in the pre-Halloween months, you may have seen a poster for spooky novelty contact lenses. What? No, you know, spooky novelty contact lenses—like, they have skulls across the center, or lightning bolts, or they make your eye look like the part in the “Thriller” video when Michael Jackson turns into a were-bobcat. If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen the poster while looking for a cheap replacement for the glasses you broke while trying to use the NordicTrack at your mom’s house, and thought to yourself, “Who buys these?” Then, later, you read some article in a NEWSWEEK at your mom’s house about a bunch of teenagers giving each other hepatitis by passing around novelty contact lenses at a rave, and you were like, “Oh, of course. Ravers.” And then you were like, “I don’t even care enugh about ravers to form a real opinion about the validity of these novelty contact lenses.” Well, gentle reader, I am about to spin you a tale about a situation where you would develop an opinion on the scourge of novelty contact lenses very, very quickly.
Picture it: a dreary, rainy Sunday night on Chrystie St., on the Lower East Side. It’s nearly midnight, but I have just seen the inspiring feature film “Milk”, and I decide, like I often do after I see a movie I really like, to take the long walk to the D train on Grand St. to have a little time on the street with my thoughts. Since I love New York City so intensely, as if she were a baby birthed from my own womb, I often turn a blind eye to her shortcomings, with idiotic results, and one of them involves walking alone at night. Having come of age in spic n span post-Giuliani New York, I have a pretty dumb tendency to feel safe walking almost anywhere, especially in lower Manhattan, under the assumption that there is probably an Olsen Twin within 30 feet of me at all times. I mean, whose streets, our streets, right? Um, maybe not that way. But anyway, this is how I came to take a spooky walk down Chrystie St.
It was a misty, Edgar Allan Poe-ish night if there ever had been one, and I have never seen less people on a street with so many bars and restaurants on it. I was starting to get a little creeped out, but made my way onward at a snappy pace anyway. Every so often, someone would pass me going to opposite direction, dodging me so our umbrellas wouldn’t tangle. This happened a few times, with a few innocuous people. I often make eye contact with people who don’t seem like a threat when they cross my path late at night—I don’t know, maybe I think that will bond us and maybe they’ll have my back a little if someone mugs me. So, I’m walking alone, making eye contact with ladies and old guys and all that. Until…I crossed paths with a guy who appeared to be…um…a monster. Okay, okay, back up—he was about a foot taller than me, walking in the opposite direction, and he had zombie eyes. Seriously. They looked enormous, round, and had the narrow center like a cat’s eye, like in the “Thriller” video. He looked at me, straight in the eye. I made eye contact before I could stop myself, because I was so confused. How could a human being have, uh, eyes like that? I probably actually made really prolonged eye contact with him, because I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Here is an exact record of all of my thoughts in the order they occurred:
1. Oh my god, is that guy a monster?
2. I feel so dumb thinking this, but am I about to die?
3. Is this guy going to eat me?
4. This is really scary.
5. I want to pee myself.
6. In all my women’s self-defense classes, no one ever taught me to fight a MONSTER.
This all happened in a disturbing flash where I really did feel threatened. He kind of lingered in my path for just a second too long and I really did feel as threatened as I’ve ever felt on the streets of Mannahatta (Brooklyn, of course, is another story). But he just kept walking by, as I hauled ass to the subway station, trying to wrap my head around what had just happened. It occurred to me once I was already on the platform—oh my god, those fucking Halloween novelty contact lenses! Now I had an answer to the questions of who buys them (assholes who like to spook girls out by themselves at night!) and whether they look effective in the real life (UGH YES). I can only assume he had some kind of zombie make up on to make his eyes look so circular…or, you know, he was actually a monster. As Miss Liz Smith says, only in New York, kids, only in New York. I mean, at least I hope only in New York.
