An American Tale

When my former coworker was moving his family from Israel to New York City a few years back, he traveled ahead to find suitable lodging. Erez booked his hotel online. He couldn't afford much, so the room wasn't very fancy and it didn't have its own bathroom. The website made it look like a decent enough place, and the booking was totally legit. Plus Erez had spent his tour of duty in the Israeli military on a submarine, and what could be worse than that?

When he arrived, the hotel looked like the kind of place characters on Law and Order: SUV go to get raped. It had one of those double-paneled glass guards around the front desk for "security." The bathrooms at the rooming house were so bad that Erez would go to the Trump Towers down the street to use the facilities. And to call it "quaint," as it was advertised on the web site, you would've had to have been recently released from doing several years' hard time in prison.

Consequently, many of the other inhabitants looked as if they had felony convictions, or soon would. One of his neighbors, who stood out as being pretty normal, was an African American man who smiled at him in the corridor and dressed nicely. Everyone else looked like they were from a central casting call for crack addicts.

One evening, Erez couldn't make to the Trump Towers to use their toilet, so he decided to brave the hotel's restroom instead. When he entered the shared bathroom, he could hear a rustling behind the shower curtain. Not wanting the imminent stabbing by a junkie to be a total surprise, he called out, "Hello!"

"Hi," came a voice. From behind the shower curtain appeared the nice black man Erez had befriended in the hallways. Only he was wearing a dress. And heals. And carefully applied make-up.

Erez said to me, "It was like, 'Welcome to America, where all showers come equipped with their own African American drag queens!'"

ETA: Mine's named Anita Cocktail.