Cruisin’ the ‘Calf
We had to get out of the office. It was just that simple.
So, like all good Kansas Citians, the first thing we did was get in our cars. But we couldn’t just drive aimlessly. We wanted to learn something about our city. In an effort to challenge our own assumptions, we drove to a street that we thought we knew, a street we thought was all about traffic and sprawl.
Certainly we found those — much in progress. A “lifestyle center,” modeled after the Northland’s new Zona Rosa, is planned for the area around 135th Street and Metcalf. Across the road, construction workers were smoothing a layer of asphalt for a parking lot that will serve a bank branch, a furniture gallery and a Ben & Jerry’s. Jeff Swan, the construction supervisor, also built the nearby Chipotle and Starbucks. “You start with dirt, and all of a sudden you have a building there,” Swan told us.
He was describing the satisfaction he takes from his work, but he could have been speaking for all of Metcalf Avenue — and all of Johnson County. When we started talking to other people, though, we discovered something else: a side of the street we didn’t know.
8:40 a.m.
Bob Sight Lincoln Mercury
7701 Metcalf
Santol and Shamoz Lacy — they’re brothers — race against evaporation. The cars and trucks on the lot have been washed, and it is the Lacys’ job to dry them before streaks settle on the factory-fresh paint. Armed with chammies, Santol and Shamoz move quickly through the Aviators, Sables and Grand Marquises.
Santol, 24, wears rubber boots, sweats and a skullcap. Shamoz, 23, is dressed in a powder-blue T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. Shamoz is the beefier of the two; they share the same friend-making smile.
The Lacys work for Carter’s Mobile Wash. Santol and Shamoz each make about $100 a day, traveling from dealership to dealership with their boss, Joe Carter, and his son, Anthony. Most workdays begin at 6 or 6:30 a.m. and end at noon. “The rest of the day is ours,” Shamoz says.
Santol and Shamoz, who live in Wyandotte County, spend their free time and money making rap and R&B records. Each produces and runs a label. (Shamoz also performs.)
“We original,” Shamoz says.
“We don’t sound like nobody around here,” Santol says. “It’s all real, all street, all shit that’s really happening.”
Lately Santol and Shamoz have had more time to devote to their music. Carter’s business is down — more dealerships have brought washing duties in-house. (Some have built on-site car washes.) “We’re about one-fourth of what we used to have,” Anthony Carter says as he waits for his father to pick up a check from the cashier at the Bob Sight dealership. The crew is bound for a lot in Bonner Springs.
Santol expects that he and his brother will be making music full time by January. One opportunity to advance their careers may be imminent. “The Isle of Capri is supposed to be having a talent contest,” Shamoz says. — David Martin
10:30 a.m.
Aubrey Township cemetery
191st Street and Metcalf
Larry Pettit’s yard is a molded menagerie. A plastic deer stands alert next to a molded Jersey cow. A concrete lion guards two swan planters. A 12-inch butterfly clings to the small house’s white steel siding next to a window with an American flag decal that appears backward from the outside. At the street, Pettit has mounted a mailbox on a 21-foot-long pipe. “Airmail,” he explains. “Wife seen one like that in Oklahoma.”
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Pettit has lived next to the Aubrey Township cemetery since 1962, when Metcalf was U.S. Highway 69 and 191st Street was a gravel track known as Tibbetts Road.
Plots that were $40 apiece in 1962 now cost $100. Pettit owns four spaces near his yard — one each for him and his wife and two for any of their six children who might need them. When his time comes, Pettit says, “All they have to do is throw me over the fence.”
The Pettits will join more than 100 years’ worth of dead Johnson Countians in the 2-acre cemetery, final resting places marked by new, red-granite blocks and old, white monuments — Tuggles and Branches, Moons and Zimmermans, Baumgardners, Harrisons and Morgans.
“Dead people, at midnight, they come across the yard to go fishing in the pond,” Pettit says. “When they go back, the only thing you can see are the skeletons of the fish they’ve eaten.”
Pettit’s round body stretches the clean, white cotton of his T-shirt, which tallies various things God is like: Coke, because “it’s the real thing”; General Electric, because God “lights our path.” He’s also like Pan Am, Alka-Seltzer and Hallmark.
Now retired, Pettit spent most of his working life atop heavy equipment for Reno Construction, refilling an old quarry at 167th and Metcalf. It was 100 feet deep when he started. Rock carved from the giant hole was thrown into a hopper with sand, lime and asphalt oil and heated to 460 degrees to become the pavement for cul-de-sacs, circle driveways, major and minor arterials, a new 69 Highway and even for Tibbetts Road when it became 191st Street.
“When we came out here, I could run around half-barenaked outside,” Pettit says. “But the city come out this way.”
Giant homes have replicated themselves down old Metcalf; their ponds are called water features. They are priced at a million dollars and more.
The Pettits’ property cost them $1,000 and a lot of hard work. They cleared brush by hand; played hardball with the power company to get electric lines; built the three-bedroom house, garages and sheds; and dug a cistern to truck in water.
“We was both raised in the country,” Pettit explains. “We wanted country.”
Overland Park groped to within eight blocks when it annexed Stillwell a few years ago. No farther, Pettit insists. “They ain’t going to annex this,” he says. “They’ll have a fight.” — Kendrick Blackwood
11 a.m.
Cigar and Tabac Ltd.
Metcalf 103 Shopping Center
Metcalf 103 is where you want to be if something’s wrong with you. There’s a fitness-equipment shop, a physical-therapy joint, a pain-management center, a Jazzercise studio, a nutrition center, a low-carb grocery store and deli.
Then there’s Cigar and Tabac Ltd. Old Don, whose shiny white hair shows where he dragged a comb through it this morning, sits at a round table in the corner, puffing on an antique Stanwell briar. He’s been smoking for 60 years.
Don worked at Cigar and Tabac’s first location at the Metcalf South mall. Now, he says, he just hangs out and drinks the coffee. Six pipes are handy in his suit jacket. At home, he has 4,000 — pared down from 9,000. He uses them on a rotating basis. He always has a clean one ready to go.
Regulars shoot the breeze and play backgammon, chess or bridge. One denizen, who works at Sprint, comes in with his laptop between meetings. Lawyers stop here between clients. Workers take breaks from installing swimming pools. The ashtray on the table fills quickly as they talk about their personal lives and hobbies — hunting and golf and fountain pens. They never discuss politics or religion. “That can cause enemies,” Don explains.
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Lyn Beyer opened this shop in 1982 after a long career in retail, which led him to the conclusion that corporate America sucks. “If you do this right,” he says of owning a specialty shop, “you’re going to have a decent income and a nice life. If you want extra, well, you better go find a job and listen to somebody else tell you what to do.”
The industry says you can sell humidors only in the fall and winter. Beyer carries them year-round. “I sell humidors every day,” he says. “Why? Because I have them!” He’s proud to be in the business of lighter repair. He never sold a lighter he didn’t see again, he says. “If they get it at QuikTrip, they throw it away. If they get it here, they bring it back. I take care of things. And if they get too worked up about the lighters not working, I’ll throw it in the trash and then say, ‘OK, now what do you want to do about it? This is not something that’s going to change the course of mankind. It’s a damn lighter. Now, do you want it to work or don’t you?'”
A customer comes in and asks Beyer about his health. “I’m still havin’ a little angina,” he says casually.
After the rush, Beyer’s wife, Bobbe, who is handling deliveries and painting doors today, confesses that she stays busy because she’s stressed about her husband’s health. Tomorrow, Lyn will have his second angioplasty in three weeks. Lyn comes back, and Bobbe stops talking about it. They joke about their dining-room furniture. They talk about the regulars. Then Bobbe announces that her paintbrush is getting dry, and she gets back to work.
They went in through Lyn’s right thigh last time, and they’ll go in through the left thigh this time. He’ll take Friday off, but he’ll be back on Monday — if not over the weekend. — Gina Kaufmann
11:50 a.m.
White Haven Motor Lodge
8039 Metcalf
Given the clutter of signs competing for the split-second attention of drivers along the east side of Metcalf around 80th Street, it’s fairly easy to miss the classic neon that heralds the White Haven Motor Lodge. Built at the end of the 1950s, this white-brick building is a quaint throwback to an era when the car was the way to see the U.S.A.
The folks who own the place claim that not much has changed; the motel remains a quiet spot. This is certainly true on a midweek morning. Just before noon checkout time, there’s more activity at the Sonic next door or the Winstead’s across the street. A stout woman with orange cotton-candy hair gets into a white Cadillac idling under the canopy outside the motel’s office. In the lobby, a giant wooden eagle hovers over the plush, burgundy-colored furniture while a talking head on Fox News blathers away on the big-screen TV.
The owners become skittish at the mention of the Pitch. “What kind of slant are you putting on this?” one of them, a woman, asks suspiciously. White Haven is family-oriented, they say. The Pitch is too edgy. They don’t want to be featured, don’t know what good it would do for them. Yet another one of the owners continues to talk. He’s been with the White Haven since it was built 47 years ago. They close at midnight, and there aren’t a lot of bars nearby. Sometimes, he says, they’ll get “riffraff,” but that’s rare.
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But what about that classic neon sign outside, which always reads “No Vacancy” when we drive by? “You haven’t driven by much after 9/11,” he snorts. Well, it’s not just 9/11 that’s slowed business down, he adds. It’s also the 32 hotels in Overland Park — mainly clustered around Interstate 435 and Metcalf, all of them newer and not nostalgic. White Haven’s rates range from $47 for a single to $86 for a suite with three beds, but fancy-schmancy hotel amenities obviously count for more nowadays. — Jen Chen
Noon
Andy Klein Pontiac GMC Inc.
7801 Metcalf
The view of the economy is clear on the fake-wood patio, where three men in green shirts and khaki pants watch cars go by. One of them sighs and leans his belly against the rail. Another glances at his fingernails, each picked clean hours ago, then gazes back at the traffic. The third, John Neal, lights his seventh or eighth cigarette of the day.
September is more than a week old, and Neal has sold just one car. This is usually one of the best months of the year, when the new models come out and the newspaper is full of splashy ads. Before the dot-com bust and the September 11 attacks, more than a dozen shoppers would have been on the used-car lot at Andy Klein Pontiac GMC on a weekday in September. Neal recently sold a car to a Sprint middle manager who kept recalculating her payment schedule to make sure she’d be able to cover it with whatever severance package she might receive.
Lately Neal and his colleagues work entire days without talking to a single customer. Cars roll by on Metcalf, oblivious of their need to be traded in and resold.
A woman’s voice comes over the loudspeaker. Neal has a call on line 67. It’s Lucia Jones — a Russian woman, Neal believes — who test-drove a black 2001 Jimmy the night before. She told him she’d found a better deal at the lot across the street. Neal picked apart the competition’s deal, explaining the intricacies of sales-tax costs and unfavorable interest terms. He handed her his card, expecting that he’d never see her again. But here she is on the other end of the line, saying in her exotic accent that she wants to buy the truck.
Neal gathers the paperwork and returns to the porch to wait. A few cigarettes later, Jones pulls up in a weathered silver import. She has her mother with her. Turns out they’re from Uruguay. Jones is the daughter of Roberto Jones, Uruguay’s most famous movie star. Her mother, Teresa Herrera, is a journalist who spent much of her career at El Pais, Uruguay’s paper of record. She came north to be near her new granddaughter but also because Uruguay isn’t what it used to be. The middle class has all but disappeared, she says. Even famous-actor ex-husbands are poor. Now Herrera works at Wal-Mart while her daughter attends college, angling for American prosperity. The new, used ride, with its $240-a-month payments, is a show of faith. — Joe Miller
1:45 p.m.
Rutlader Outpost
33565 Metcalf
Metcalf Avenue finally comes to a close just on the south side of 335th Street, at the Louisburg-Middle Creek State Fishing Lake. Toss some gravel from the road leading to that site and you’ll reach the equally unpaved parking lot of Rutlader Outpost, a strip of shops built to resemble an 1830s Old West border town. The stable-and-saloon-style construction sells this effect to some degree, though the computerized cash registers and neon “open” signs break the spell. One of the most peculiar habits of far-flung suburbia is the tendency to re-create what sprawl erased.
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Rutlader Outpost houses the Middle Creek Opry, a Branson-style country hootenanny that draws up to 400 people each Saturday night. “People come from Independence, Overland Park, everywhere,” says Opry co-owner Brenda Harris. “They hold auditions afterward. You have to see the show first, so you know what you’re getting into. That’s the only stipulation.”
Black-and-white glossy shots of Opry participants line the wall: Splinter Middleton, Jamie Ogle, Stew Lager. “They’re all very well-known,” Harris says. An especially intriguing photo showcases “the hilarious faces of Harley Worthit,” an elastic-faced Branson warm-up comedian who makes occasional visits to the Opry.
Next door, an extra-twangy instrumental version of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” plays on crackly vinyl at a knickknack shop. An employee fluffs a pillow embroidered with the words “moon beams and country dreams” and chuckles at a card that features a bathing cowgirl extending her feet to a nearby horse’s face. The payoff line: “From nose to toes … you tickle my fancy.” — Andrew Miller
2:30 p.m.
Hollywood at Home
9036 Metcalf
Six guys are browsing the adult section. Among them are an older man assisted by a cane yet wearing skimpy sweatshorts and a floppy-haired beauty in an untucked white oxford shirt who could be the next Abercrombie & Fitch model. On the wall is a poster for 1 Night in Paris, the Paris Hilton porn video shot by whoever was her boyfriend that week. A toolbox at knee level in the center of the section offers free condoms. Two are left.
Hollywood at Home owner Richard Rostenberg calls his street “Metcash.” The video, DVD and magazine emporium celebrates its 25th anniversary next year; presciently, Rostenberg opened the store in 1980, just in time for the birth of a billion-dollar business. “We were the first in town to rent movies and, yes, we had Beta tapes and Laserdiscs,” he says. The store is maybe one of a dozen independent video stores left in Kansas City, aided by its testosterone-heavy magazine selection, cigars and extensive foreign-film and adult offerings.
When Kansas City endured an anti-smut campaign in the late 1980s, Hollywood at Home was a convenient target. One can, after all, see split-levels from the store’s front door. The effort inspired Rostenberg to found the Kansas City Coalition Against Censorship. Eventually, he recalls, a grand jury determined that he could sell no child pornography and no bestiality porn. “I mean, of course,” he says. “We’re a family store. We have a self-policing policy.” It works. The X-rated titles bring in a lot of revenue, but on this particular weekday, Rostenberg estimates his customers have checked out between 500 and 600 movies from the nonporn stock.
“Everything from [Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 16-hour] Berlin Alexanderplatz to Fuck Doll Sandwich.” — Steve Walker
5 p.m.
Timber Creek Bar and Grill
Near 271st Street
David, a tall guy wearing a brushy mustache and a John Deere cap, smokes Pall Malls near the waitress stand. His friend Robert, a short guy with a Hulk Hogan haircut and jean shorts, swivels on a stool beside him. A man in parachute pants and aviator shades — Robert’s cousin Billy — has settled at an unoccupied four-top, lighting smokes and watching the wine-sipping suits-and-ties who’ve come in after a funeral. All three have been inside the log-cabin-style bar for more than an hour.
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Outside, telephone poles stand like tilted crosses along the two-lane blacktop, and a red light blinks at Louisburg’s major intersection. Every day, this stretch clogs when the school bells ring, David says. Women with orange flags usher the yellow buses through, making other cars wait.
“On average, you could be sitting there [at that intersection] 3 to 4 minutes,” Robert says. “I shit you not.”
Growth can be measured in hamburger and pizza places, Robert says. In car washes and churches. In the number of by-the-book cops who won’t drive a drunk man home.
Weeknights, the bar closes at 10. After that, the only option is Tanner’s on 142nd Street.
“David, he came out of the tree! They got him,” Billy says suddenly. He grabs a stack of breaded chicken fingers from the buffet and heads out the back door. The two men grab their mugs and follow as Billy descends a wooden ramp and heads toward a raccoon that has emerged from the underbrush. Billy kneels and shakes a strip of meat in front of the animal, who saunters up to Billy and takes the food, reaching forward tentatively at first and then almost burrowing into the stash Billy holds against his oversized purple T-shirt.
Billy runs Cedar Cove Feline Conservation Park, an animal preserve a few miles south. He used to care for more than 25 coons. Then, in 1979, he switched to tiger farming. Years back, he lost an index finger to a tiger at feeding time. Last week, he got a diagonal gash across his nose for, he says, leaning too close to a raccoon while strumming his guitar.
The coon lashes out for more food. Suddenly Billy stands, his middle finger dripping with grease and blood. “He got me. It’s OK. It’s nothing,” he says.
He pulls out his keys and jingles them at his side.
“I’m taking off, Zeke. I’m leaving you,” he says. Robert chuckles, watching as Billy jogs away from the underbrush, the raccoon chasing him across the yard. — Ben Paynter
5:30 p.m.
Overland Park Marriott
11301 Metcalf
Most weekday afternoons, business travelers gather inside Pitcher’s, the bar in the Overland Park Marriott. Today Mötley Crüe is on the radio at low volume. The guy behind the bar is Kurt Gress. He wears a gold cable bracelet on his wrist. A bottle opener sticks out of his back pocket.
Gress can relate to being in a strange place; his dad was an executive for AT&T, so the family moved around a lot. Gress managed restaurants for 13 years before giving up his stressful job to pour drinks at the Marriott four nights a week from 3 p.m. until midnight. He loves it. “It’s not even really like work,” he says.
The people who pay $160 a night to stay at the 390-room Marriott like Gress because he’s personable. He amuses them by making bottles levitate and napkins skitter across the bar like crabs.
“Guys! Can I get you another round?” Gress calls to three pale men in business casual sitting at a table. They order three more Fat Tires. They discuss software problems before the two men who live in the area get up and go home, leaving Mark, from Portland, Oregon, all alone.
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Mark works for a company called McData, and he’s doing some work for Sprint. He says his wife is at home taking care of their 2-week-old baby and twin boys. He says he’s a conservative but is in favor of gay marriage; he doesn’t believe it’s the government’s business to tell people what to do. He says Kansas City seems nice.
Suddenly, three men at the bar start razzing one another. One of them, a tan, sinewy guy with a neatly trimmed goatee, says he and his companions are in town for the National Lineman’s Rodeo at the Overland Park Convention Center. They’re with a company that sells gloves made of a natural rubber that Kansas City Power & Light linemen wear for insulation. At the rodeo, linemen from all over the country scale 45-foot poles holding 160-pound dummies, then shimmy back down. “They have this little basket they hold in their teeth, and there’s an egg in the basket, and you’ve gotta climb this pole and get back down with the egg intact,” one explains. “Then they change out transformers and change insulators, slice ropes.”
Mark leans in. “I bet being a lineman is just about the most dangerous job in the world,” he says.
“Nah. We’re actually behind farmers and convenience-store operators,” the lineman announces cheerfully. “The number one cause of workplace fatality is homicide on the job. So we’re pretty far down the list.” — Allie Johnson
6 p.m.
H Bus
112th Street and Metcalf
There’s no bus stop and no sidewalk. You have to run along the gutter of the six-lane street and flag it down.
But the riders of the H bus, which blasts north from 112th and Metcalf, then east on Johnson Drive before skirting 47th and Troost, moseying through the Plaza and circuiting back, swear by this method of public transit. Even when Rhonda makes them run to catch it.
Nearly all of the dozen or so riders on this afternoon bus know Rhonda Bolden, who greets them by name as they climb aboard. She laughs loudly and never once says a bad thing about the traffic.
This is a supernaturally happy bus. Bolden scoops up Misty and Anita from their IRS jobs in Rosana Square. Misty reads a copy of Jet with singer Jill Scott on the cover. “Ooh,” she says, pointing to a page. “She’s getting chubby.”
The people who board this northbound bus around 95th and Metcalf wear service-industry garb. They carry plastic bags as purses, wear oil-stained mechanics’ gear or the dark pants and white blouses that are the base of every fast-food uniform. Susan, who says she works at the “three-in-one” — KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut — sits in the seat closest to Rhonda.
The bus circles around the back of the ailing Metcalf South Mall to pick up some food-court workers. A kid in a baseball cap climbs aboard and promptly passes out in a row of seats in back.
This particular run of the JO, as the bus line is nicknamed, is a raucous mobile salon for the mostly female, mostly black ridership going north and east into Kansas City, Missouri. They talk about subjects in the news, subjects out the windows, and how many days remain until Friday.
The ridership changes dramatically as it heads back south toward Metcalf, swinging first by the Plaza to pick up John, a men’s hairdresser in a toupée, a yellow polo shirt, khakis and clip-on sunglasses. On Johnson Drive, it grabs Terry, from the Mission Center Dillard’s, and Chet, who works for the Environmental Protection Agency. This direction is mostly male, mostly white.
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Rhonda foresees her bus route growing longer as destinations pop up farther and farther ahead. “I know eventually it will go further south,” she says as she deposits a passenger in the grass by Newcomer’s cemetery as the sun dips low behind the cross-studded hill. — Nadia Pflaum
7:30 p.m.
The Villa Capri
8126 Metcalf
It’s the dinner rush at the Villa Capri, and tall Steve Scudiero is apologizing to customers coming in. “Just wait a minute so we can clean off a table for you,” he says. There’s only one waitress tonight, the 10-year veteran Renee, who runs back and forth from the kitchen with clenched teeth. Right now, two people are waiting for a table and another two are waiting to collect their carry-out orders.
“You know how hard it is to get waitresses to work in Johnson County,” Scudiero complains to one of the carry-out customers. “They all want Fridays and Saturdays off.”
Eight tables are full in the long, narrow dining room — including a noisy ten-top — and another eight need to be cleared. One of the men waiting for a table comes out of the bathroom and whispers to his friend, “Christ, what’s taking so damn long? Does he want us to bus the tables ourselves?”
The friend offers to pitch in and help, but Scudiero only laughs, then escorts the men to one of the less cluttered tables, which he wipes off with a damp cloth.
No one really stands on ceremony at Villa Capri, which has so many regular customers that it’s really more clubhouse than restaurant. It’s the type of establishment where customers feel comfortable lighting up a cigarette in the middle of dinner and strangers turn away from their dining companions to talk to the folks at the next table. When the toddler at the ten-top starts screeching, her young-looking grandmother turns around, exhales a puff of cigarette smoke and asks the couple behind her, “Aren’t kids in restaurants great?”
Actually, the Villa Capri has been a family-friendly scene for 43 years. Scudiero’s 73-year-old father, Tony, owns the place; he says customers come in carrying babies, point at the restaurant’s high chair and tell him, “I used to sit in that chair, remember?” Tony does remember. After all, the Villa Capri is probably the oldest restaurant in Johnson County. It is unquestionably the longest-running dining room on Metcalf.
“A few people come in and order the fried chicken, but mostly they want pasta,” Tony says. “They like our red sauce.” It’s the classic 1950s sugo: not too spicy, not too thick, not too sweet. Tony’s food seems unsophisticated compared with some of his Metcalf neighbors, such as Il Trullo over at 90th, the Macaroni Grill at 92nd or even Carrabba’s Italian Grill at 105th. But it’s a lot cheaper, and no one ever complains about the portions.
Tony can remember when there weren’t any businesses south of 87th Street. “King Louie, that was it. There was a little taxi shack over where Metcalf Shopping Center is now.” Tony’s culinary competition was a lot simpler in those days, too. “There was a Shakey’s Pizza, but it didn’t last.” — Charles Ferruzza
9:22 p.m.
Raoul’s Velvet Room
Rosana Square, 119th and Metcalf
“Try this,” urges Louis, my dining partner for the night. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s squishy.” His fingers lightly trace my face, searching for my mouth, and once he finds it, he feeds me a dense, bite-sized orange cake, his fingers lingering on my lips.
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We’re sitting in the dark in a walled-off section of Raoul’s, which is hosting a dine-in-the-dark-with-random-strangers-because-that’s-really-sexy promotional event for Axe’s new body spray. After being seated by staffers wearing night-vision goggles, we fumble around with plates of nibblets in front of us. It’s actually pretty fun and surprisingly titillating, despite the shrieking of our fellow diners, who are discombobulated by the darkness (and the fact that I’ve never met Louis before).
“Is this hot?” I ask him, as our fingers intertwine.
“Well, it would be hot with just two people, as opposed to being with, like, fifty,” he says before dipping my finger in a gravylike substance and sucking it slowly. “That tastes kind of sweet,” he notes.
After we eat more unidentifiable food items, a red light comes on to reveal all. Louis is cute — spiky hair, T-shirt straining around his bulging biceps. There’s a piece of chicken in my wine.
Why bring this traveling fingerfest to Kansas? “We did a yearly study of America’s best and worst cities for dating, and Kansas City came in 80th out of 80,” says PR guy Andy Bowman. (Grrrr. Those damned dating “surveys” again.) Nevertheless, the novelty of this party has attracted an outgoing group of singletons, such as Alex, 26, an indie-rock-type guy with spiked hair and glasses, and his friend Gabriel, 31, who sports an almost-shaved head with a small mohawk. Both agree that the dating scene isn’t really as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
“When I first moved here, it was fucking horrible,” Gabriel says. “It seemed like every woman over 18 was married with two kids. But you find your niche, and it’s not as bad.”
“Any city is bad for dating,” Alex adds. “It depends on your outlook. If you’re fun and upbeat, any city is good for singles.” — Jen Chen
