Partying With Jockeys

If you've never been to Jakarta the term "three-in-one jockey" probably won't ring a bell, but if you have, you'll clap your hands and squeal with delight at the prospect of hearing about those guys on NPR. At least I did.

For the uninitiated, three-in-one jockeys are folks who stand at the roadside and will ride in your car with you so you can get through areas of the city that are closed to vehicles with fewer than three people during rush hour. It's a shitty job, but lots of people do it, and it's a classic Jakarta fix to the problem of government regulations threatening to prevent you from doing whatever the hell you want.

Just last week I engaged the services of what I now think is the New York equivalent to the three-in-one jockey: At the Clinton/Washington C stop, a guy was hanging out nonchalantly by the ticket machine on the city-bound side. When I went to put some money in he walked up to me.

"You buying a single ride?"

"Yes."

"How about you give me two dollars instead and I'll get you in."

"Ok then."

He took me to the emergency exit gate, grabbed a stick he'd hidden above the turnstyle, reached around and sprung the gate open. I handed him the $2 and we both went on our way, I having saved 50 cents and he having made a sale.

I'm all for city services, and I understand they won't get funded enough if we don't pay for them, but I still like these small-scale circumventions. As long as the MTA insists on raising fares while cutting service, I'm going to jump the turnstyle when it's convenient. And as long as Jakarta makes a bunch of traffic policies that it can't enforce instead of just building a subway system, I say three-in-one jockeys should be seen as the true heros of rush hour.

Photo via MSNBC

Let's Get This Train Wrecked

Last Year I started a blog about living in Jakarta and called it Just Off the Jet. It was supposed to be a funny and kind of wide-eyed account of living in the enormous, sweaty kampung that is the capital of Indonesia.

But, as so many of these things go, I wrote like three entries and then spent the rest of the year getting drunk, riding my Vespa around and playing in a hardcore band, documenting none of it except through the occasional fuzzy snapshot.
Now that I'm back in New York and unemployed, it's time to get some stories down. But there's plenty to cover here in the big crapple, and this place is perhaps just as ridiculous as Jakarta. Maybe more, even.

At least in Jakarta everyone knows each other and it's kind of just a bunch of small towns full of primarily modest self-described "simple" people squished together. Here in New York people revel in their big-city snobbery, their weirdness, their effete tastes (and yes, crabby Brooklyn good ol' boy, I'm including you in that last group, you ornery ass).

But both groups have some kind of communal energy, some greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts magic that makes both cities nothing less than a miracle. And I think that's true for most places where people live in cramped, messy, imperfect quarters with millions of others for their whole lives.

So let's get on with the business of tickling the testicles of Jakarta and New York. And hell, if either of my readers wants to share a funny big-city story, from anywhere really, please don't hesitate to write.