Painted-face Woman

Writing from my office, early November 2023.

For some reason as I stood at the office Keurig machine and watched my coffee cup fill up, I thought about church. About my mornings at my old church, I can’t even remember what it was called, I think it was First Presbyterian Church. I never think about my days at church, and when I do, it’s not about the church snack bar. But something this morning, a combination of the cold, the coffee, the lack of sleep – possibly the silence too, since I’d gotten to the office early, and the casual, familiar interaction I had with Yuu, made it so that when I turned back to my cup of coffee, inhaled those beautiful coffee molecules wafting into my nose, the sound and sight of the coffee cup filling up, the way I stood there, waiting, with my hands in my pockets.. it took me back to that basement snack bar at First Presbyterian Church.

These days my past often feels like it didn’t really happen. At least it was someone else’s life, someone else’s memory, and not my own. I just happen to have memories of someone that isn’t me. From a combination of the strangeness of this new reality that I’ve teleported to, the unrelenting amount of notable occurances, and a gradually-accumulating sleep deprivation, depending on how connected to reality I am at the moment I fluctuate between feeling like I’m in a dream, and I’m a character in a novel.

Let me tell you about the painted-face lady.

I was walking to my local subway station, at around 8 in the morning, last week. As I turned the corner of an intersection, where there is always a confluence of people going every which-way, I noticed that someone had seperated from the mass and was now making a beeline for me, like a homing missle. I had been marked as a target. Maybe because of my nice suit, maybe because we had made eye contact. Maybe my overwhelmingly powerful masculine pheramones. I don’t know.

I saw that it was a woman, in a grey sweatshirt, average height. She had caught up to me, and was now walking behind me and to my side, repeating, “I’m hungry, I’m hungry.” I had heard her say this back at the intersection. It’s what made me look at her.

I could see that she had white paint on her head, on her hair, thick white paint, but her face was obscured by a hood. I turned to look at her, and she looked back at me. I was startled. 70% of her face, all of the left half of her face and hair and some of the right half, was covered in thick white paint. With her pointy hood up, with the black hair jutting out of the sides of her head, and coarse, cracking white paint all over her face, she looked like some kind of witch doctor.

I kept walking, her alongside me.

I asked her, “What happened to your face?” I was very curious. She said that someone attacked her, and from her gestures it seemed that she had been attacked with a paint roller, which would explain how the paint got on her, but who the f*** gets attacked with a paint roller? I didn’t press further. She said again, “I’m hungry.”

I was carrying 20 ounces of sourdough bread. I pulled it out of my bag and tried to give it to her. “I have some bread.” I said. “Here.”

She said, “No bread. I don’t got teeth.” And, with her fingers, she pulled back her lips, revealing a mouth devoid of anything but 3 misshapen, rotting fangs. She closed her mouth. This was tough bread. There was no way she could eat it.

I put the bread back in my bag. We kept walking. I had a train to catch. We were walking like we were best friends, side by side. Like we had known each other for a long time, casually chatting about her no teeth and recent paint roller attack.

“What can you eat?” I asked her.

She said, “Oh, soups and…” Something else I didn’t catch. She was hard to understand. I made a decision. I stopped and turned to her.

“I’m going to give you some money. You have to promise me you won’t buy drugs.”

I know that’s an absurd thing to say to a drug addict, but I had to say it nonetheless. She promised, and turned out her pockets to show that they were empty. At the time I didn’t know why she was doing that. She may have been trying to show me that she didn’t have any drugs. She was standing next to me. I pulled out my wallet and opened it up. I had recently withdrawn a large amount of cash. My wallet had probably 30 bills in it. It was overflowing. And as soon as I opened it, we both saw the same thing. Both looking down into that wallet, we saw and felt a power, like the power the sun has, in a sunrise, to light up the world.

This sunrise was green.

She immediately snatched at it. She tried to reach in and pluck the bills out, like a crane diving for a frog, or a fish. Finally, my thousands of hours of intense competitive gaming came to some use. I reacted in microseconds, pinching the wallet closed, and pulling it away. “What the f***!!” I exclaimed in astonishment. Some coins fell out of the wallet and spilled to the ground. I started moving away from her. She was not going to let me go so easily. She held onto me and said, “I have a knife. I’ll stab you.”

Now, I’ll tell you what was going through my mind at this moment. It was something like, “There’s no way I’m about to get stabbed by this b**** on my way to work, and on such a beautiful October morning, right? That would just be completely ridiculous.”

She was brandishing something in her left hand. I looked at it to make sure it was not, in fact, a knife. It was a lighter. She saw that her bluff failed, and was now saying, “I’m just joking. I’m just joking.”

I shrugged her off me. We were now right outside the subway station. I left her on the street and went in.

—

Yes, everybody, come to the great New York City! Come see our wonderful Broadway shows and try fifty-thousand different various of bread, sauce, and cheese! Come down into the subway, and see true poverty, hopelessness, despair! Have a thrilling and authentic encounter with a pathetic man in the grips of a complete psychotic break! Enjoy as your children take in the horror of being trapped on a train with an aggressive, raving lunatic, completely free of charge! (Pro tip: You don’t actually have to pay for the subway. It’s only a suggestion. Only if you want to voice your support for the great work the government is doing here. And they are doing great work.) Extinguish your last flames of faith in humanity as you step past completely unconscious men without shoes or any shred of dignity on the subway platforms! You may even spot the lovable and envious New York rat, living a life better than the average New Yorker! The American dream, alive and well in New York City! The greatest city, in the greatest country on Earth!