Staten Island

Once a year, Nick, a surgeon who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, visits Staten Island. Almost as soon as he arrives, he literally runs back to where he just came from. Nick is a marathon runner — he’s done New York seven times — and like millions of similarly masochistic athletes and wannabes, he’s lined up at the mouth of the Verrazzano Bridge, the eastern edge of New York City’s least exalted borough, with the sole aim of getting back to more familiar territory as briskly as his legs can carry him. “Of course I don’t have anything against Staten Island,” he explains. “There’s just not that much of a reason to go there.” Many others, it turns out, feel the same. I moved to Manhattan just over four years ago.

The Margarita, the divey bar facing an equally divey pizza joint in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, is a special place. For one, it’s where a middle-aged African-American lesbian bought me a drink — the only instance I can recall from decades of drinking that a woman has offered to buy me a drink before I got her one. Given her preference for fuller Latino ladies over lanky white men — which she emphasized through photos on her phone — my new acquaintance clearly didn’t have an agenda behind that drink for me. We just got talking and she did that New Yorker thing of embracing companionship and the moment.