I really need to sit down on something that’s not a bike for awhile, and that’s why I decide to take the risk and use the pay phone in this greasy-chopstick noodle house on South Sixty-fourth Street and Fife. The lunch crowd—mainly construction workers, seriously chromed and bulging grotesquely with vat-job muscle, who spend their days on the high steel of the fast-growing skyrakers—are on their way out, and I have to squeeze past them to get in. (Not push past them; your typical heavy-duty construction worker could reduce me to a spot of grease with one finger.) The pay phone’s at the back, in a small transplas-fronted cubicle with a door and a seat.