Read Online Driver's Education by Grant Ginder - Free Book Online

cap to the lens. In my back pocket: the hamburger wrapper where I’ve written down the address.
    I say, “We should definitely get going.”
    We catch the M train at Bryant Park and ride it south to Houston and Second Avenue. It’s hotter downtown: there are fewer patchesof cool ground where the sun’s been hidden by skyscrapers, more open sky, more bricks baking in the heat, more halal meat charring on stands erected along the sidewalks. On Houston we walk east, toward the river. We pass the Sara D. Roosevelt Park on Chrystie Street, where a group of teenagers in flaccid jeans are smoking Swisher Sweets and listening to a hip-hop song, the one that everyone’s already heard 3 million times this summer.
    â€œThat song,” Randal says. “That fucking song.”
    At Allen we turn right and we walk by places we know. Places like Lolita Bar and Rockwood Music Hall and Congee Village. And then, farther south, there are wholesale kitchen supply stores, pushing blenders and cutting blocks and things whose names I don’t know. The storefronts have signs written in English, rarely with small Chinese characters scrawled under them in bright red. I film a food processor. Randal asks why, and I tell him I’ve always wanted one.
    He says nothing, he just tightens the straps on his backpack and nods as we move farther south.
    And then we’re below Broome and we go right on Canal and the Chinese begins to overtake the English on the storefronts and the streets get more crowded. We pass under lower Manhattan’s concrete mixing bowl, where the off-ramp for the Manhattan Bridge plunges into Bowery and Chrystie and Canal. Periodically Randal asks me to slow down so he can peel his sweat-soaked shirt off his sticky skin.
    â€œWhat time does this place close?” he asks.
    â€œSeven?” I say. “Maybe eight? I don’t know. It’s a meat market. When do meat markets close?”
    We keep going.
    On Canal near Mott there are the jewelry shops—thousands and thousands of them. In their windows are displays of mock red velvet necks draped in spectacular golden lotuses. There are rings with squares of jade or pearl globes and pink-beaded necklaces and jeweled statues of fat happy Buddhas. There are watches, handbags, DVDs of movies that haven’t hit theaters yet, and all the men who are selling them tell us and 1 million tourists that they have a special deal for us, a special deal only for us !
    Then, down Mott, the greengrocers: boxes stacked thousands of miles high with dried peanuts and shriveled mushrooms that look very illegal. Stands hawking apples and oranges and pears, but also exotic, fascinating-sounding fruits like rambutans and mangosteens and pomelos. And fishmongers—so many fucking fishmongers. Tubs of raw grey shrimp, jagged bouquets of detached crab claws, whole fish shoved into buckets, their gaping mouths and black eyes the only things to stick out through the ice.
    Randal sees the George Meat Market International first. It’s on the east side of Mott, past Pell Street and the Peking Duck House and Hop Kee and Wo Hop: a long white shop that spans a quarter of the block and has slabs of God-knows-what dangling from the ceiling and in open-air cases on the sidewalk. A sign hanging from the store’s awning advertises REAL AUTHENTIC CHINESE BUTCHERS. We walk slowly along the troughs of pork and beef and chicken. We count flies and dodge past tourists and screaming women with canvas shopping bags, stopping in front of a set of pigs’ feet that are attached to strings that hang from the white awning. I feel Randal grab my bare arm, and he whispers some awful joke, like, “Man, these guys will have a tough time getting a foot in the door, wouldn’t you think?” before he pokes one of the hooves, sending it rocking.
    It feels as though we’re standing in the middle of a convection oven, the hot air cracking like whips around us, our