"Wheeler?"
Joey looks up from his AM newspaper at the sound of his name. It's the barista, calling for him from behind the counter at the Starbucks he was supposed to meet his friends in ten minutes ago. None of them have arrived yet, which is strange, because he's usually the one who shows up the latest. But then again, none of the rest of his friends live in Brooklyn, so it would naturally take them longer to arrive than it would him. The N train, apparently, is running local for the next two weeks, so it won't be surprising even if everyone shows up an hour late.
"Wheeler!" the barista shouts, plopping the cup of coffee down and disappearing into a back room. Joey folds up his paper and gets up to get his drink. His name is scrawled in black marker across the logo, for some reason. Fuckin' weirdo. They don't even usually ask for names. Whatever.
On the way back to his table, he bumps into a burly middle aged man in a stained beater. The man turns to him, lip curled into his bushy grey mustache, and curses at him in Russian. Well, Joey assumes he's cursing at him, because he doesn't know what those words meant, but they sounded aggressive and what else would the guy be saying right now anyway?
Not in the mood for a fight, Joey apologizes. "Sorry, buddy," he says, and tries to move on. But the man doesn't let up, and keeps yelling at him long after he's walked across the room back to his seat. The man follows him, yelling words Joey doesn't understand, until the only way he can get him off his back is to leave the cafe and cross the street. The man stays behind, probably for the sake of an order he already placed, and Joey escapes successfully.
"Jesus H. Christ, what a fucking psycho," he says to himself, looking both ways before strolling across the four-lane street during a green light in the middle of the sidewalk. A car slows down for him, and the driver leans an arm out the window to flip him off. He flips them off right back, and continues his leisurely pace to the other side of the avenue.
In front of the 99 Cent store is an old woman wrapped in a heavy shawl trying to talk to him. He hears one or two words before she is cut off by the downtown train pulling into the station above them. She doesn't try to speak again until it's gone, at which point the uptown train lands in the opposite direction. Joey watches a pigeon pick through a pile of discarded bagels on the curb, wondering if there's any chance this woman has anything to say that he actually needs to stay and listen to. He determines that she doesn't, and decides to sit and wait on the boardwalk for the next twenty minutes instead of going back into the Starbucks. Yugi is coming all the way from Riverdale. There is no way in hell he's getting here within the hour.