Herald Culture: Breaking In

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CULTURE Shooz! by Adam Moftah

I

broke into the criminal scene at the tender age of 10, when I first encountered Shooz! 128. For those of you lucky enough not to know what Shooz! 128 is, it’s (or rather, to my satisfaction, it was) a stupidly named shoe store on 7th Avenue in Chelsea, six blocks from the hospital where I was born. The purple doorframe displayed a button with the label “Push me if you’re ready for shit.” My sixth-grade self didn’t know how to process this. But my friends marveled at the idea that we could witness something clearly intended for a more mature audience by simply pushing a button. Since I was the tallest one and therefore the most intellectually developed, my friends figured that I should be the one to ring the bell and propel us into middle school maturity. As soon as I’d pressed the malformed doorbell, I regretted succumbing to peer pressure. A crusty-looking man came out and barked at me, “Are you ready for shit?!” I’d never been spoken to so explicitly by an adult, and by the looks on my friends’ faces, they hadn’t either. I mustered a quiet, “No thank you, sir,” and departed with my cohort. After we left, my friends and I pretended to think the encounter was anticlimactic and so we decided to try it again the next day. So there I was ringing the bell once more, but to a much grander surprise: our old “Shooz!” salesman was nowhere to be found. Shocked, my other friend rang the bell with added gusto. Shoozman torpedoed out of the storefront and chased us down a crowded sidewalk with a fury I’ve never since seen from a man of his age. Fortunately for us, he was old and raggedy, so we escaped. Unfortunately for me, my pretensions of moral superiority crumbled before this act of delinquency. My mother would never again be able to truthfully call me “her good little boy.” I had broken bad.

18 – The Yale Herald

Midnight tea at the Lizzy by “Sunny Turner”

F

olks lucky enough to be invited to tea at The Elizabethan Club, one of Yale’s oldest literary societies, generally sign the guest book upon entry. This, however, was not the case for me and three friends when, against all odds, we found the Club’s back door left heroically ajar. One by one, the four of us—Forest, Samson, Rick, and your humble correspondent—tapped down those worn stepping stones toward a sitting area cushioned by a row of hedges and a hood of winding ferns. And there, nestled in the half-dark yard of that sanctuary of inked page, Forest (or maybe it was Rick?) produced the first of our pre-rolled wands of worldly wisdom. A spark, a cough, an exhaled exaltation, and here we were, delighting in the wild environs while greedily breathing that perfumed, alternative air the enlightened keep so strategically for themselves. “In sooth, I durst not recall an eve more gay than this,” Samson proclaimed, the combination of proximity to first-folios and herbal influence already beginning to take effect. “Indeed—our three-pronged God doth look down smilingly on us presently,” I remember responding with a chuckle. Spirits were high, to say the very least. Too high, perhaps, because soon after we had finished ceremoniously burning the third of our joints, a light flashed on from the library. Then came a call, far off, yet undeniable—a melancholy sort of plea to “please vacate the premises.” The owner of the voice, emerging from the gloom, wore an unnaturally yellow jumper and menacingly brandished a flashlight. Off we scampered, dizzied by the fumes and the sudden disruption, though not without the sweet memory of our midnight tea at the Lizzy.


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