klaus

My travel reroute took me from O'Hare to LaGuardia to Soho, for the fourth sleepover with C in five weeks, to the Chinatown bus to Boston. It was my first time walking through Manhattan at 6:45 a.m. on a Saturday. The 33 year-olds in bubble-hemmed dresses turning their ankles on pitted sidewalks, the erratic taxis, the "Unforgettable Fire"-era U2 tunes from a windowless bistro, all the filth from hours before had been cleared away and only I and the pigeons had the city between Sullivan at Houston and Bowery at Canal. I found a bakery, bought some pineapple buns, and boarded the 7:30 bus to South Station.

I wanted to sleep. Don El Don came through me again, so that my night was spent reading the nonsense sentences that passed in front of my closed eyes - I'll explain my amphetaminic textual vision some other time. Its only relevance here is that it caused me to get no sleep the night before.

I asked the man sitting in the row behind me whether he minded if I reclined my seat. He said, in a northern European accent, No, no, of course, go ahead! I said, Thank you. And then I added, You must not be from New York if you're so polite. Dutch? He laughed and said he was Danish but had lived in New York for seventeen years. I offered him a bun, and we chatted as he tore it to pieces with his fingers and ate it one bite-sized piece at a time.

His name was Klaus, he was in his mid-30s, and he had moved to New York from Denmark - a little tiny town in the north of Denmark where nothing happened. He had worked as an au pair in New York in 1992, and the family he had worked for was wealthy, and they took him along for their summer holidays up and down the west coast. He was young then, and he returned to Denmark to finish his business studies. The education system in Denmark was such that university tuition was not only free but also students got stipends simply for attending, so Klaus did not understand why Danes would stay in crappy jobs when they could educate themselves into better careers and be paid during the process. After graduation, he and his wife schemed ways to move to America, and when two management positions opened for the North American office of European Sperm Bank (that is the name), they took the jobs and moved across the Atlantic. His wife still held the job, which she executed for Seattle from a home office in Park Slope, while Klaus had gone onto a middle management position at an advertising agency.

He had liked working for the sperm bank. You think that the clients are primarily lesbians, but that is not necessarily so, he said. The women who came into the clinic were often emotionally delicate, because only non-traditional situations would lead people to the door. Klaus found it fulfilling to guide people through the process, to help them, to give them what they wanted so badly. He said people sent postcards and photographs of their children, which were kept all around the office.

He was on his way to Boston to pick up a car he had bought, sight unseen, from the Internet. You can save thousands this way, he said. He was buying a Volvo station wagon, for his kids and his bikes. He loved biking. I communicated that I loved biking also, but that my love was born from my commute, not from what I called "bike vanity." He looked puzzled, and I realized that I had made no sense and was being negative to boot. I said, I just mean that I prefer biking for leisure or travel rather than for fitness. He liked biking for fitness, and described to me the pleasure of riding twelve loops of Prospect Park, or about forty miles, two nights before. There were many other riders for pacing or catching, and people and scenery and topography to watch. The convenience of having a forty-mile ride two blocks from the apartment, available any time of day, couldn't be beat. He liked mountain biking also, but needed a car to get out of the city for that, hence the Volvo station wagon.

I sat across two bus seats with my back against the window and talked to him in the row behind me. It was a shame that there isn't a more extensive network of rail so that you could take your bike upstate without having to drive it there, I said. We talked about urban planning and bicycle advocacy, with him generally maintaining a note of optimism about the movement toward bike- and pedestrian-oriented planning and me lamenting the violent zealotry of car drivers and gleefully spelling the doom of the American suburb. Congestion pricing was something we could all agree on.

My eyes could not stay open, so I said, Good night, Klaus, I need to rest now. For the next four hours, through the McDonald's rest stop, I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes and watched words scroll in front of me, and failed completely in sleep. I opened my eyes next at South Station, to see Klaus extending his hand toward me. We shook hands, and he went off to find his Volvo.