‘It gave my trip to the City a real shot in the arm’

If you have attended a trade show in New York City — like my Taza-chocolate-founder nephew Alex or my former-freelance-partner Terril — then you’ve been to the Javits Center. It’s a super-huge convention center that was repurposed into a vast field hospital during the peak of the pandemic and is now one ginormous Pfizer booth. Well, er, vaccination center.

The ticket that ticket scalpers can’t scalp — not for any price

In honor of its new role, it’s been redubbed the “JAVax Center,” which I suppose is pretty clever, though Jacob Javits, who was kind of a male Bella Abzug, might roll around in his grave to hear it. They should have asked me; I would have offered up “Jabits Center.” After all, you go there and get what they call, rather cutely in the UK, a “jab.”

Well, I got my first jab this morning. It was super quick and super easy — in fact, it took me longer to book the appointment than it did to get the vaccine, including travel time. (I took an Uber, which is an indulgence for public-transportation-loving me, but I was — of course — nervous about being late.)

I was also nervous about the weather. Here was my view yesterday: Dude Man swatting the snow off the Amagansett bushes

I am always nervous about being late. Why, once I bullied my family into leaving for JFK at 6:00AM. We were at our gate by 7:30 — for a 10:30AM flight. I thought The Dude and The Child were going to smother me with a dry-cleaning bag.

Me, at our gate right before my family tried to smother me with a plastic bag

You may be wondering, since Dude Man is actually Dr. Dude Man, why I didn’t just get him to finagle me a vaccine appointment. Well. He actually offered to include me when he sent his “patient-facing staff” to get vaccinated at New York Hospital a month or so ago.

But I cleverly deduced that this was his way to trick me into working in his office again. He knows me well enough by now to realize that — to avoid bad kharma or divine wrath — if I represented myself as “patient-facing staff” then I’d jolly well better be “patient-facing staff.” (Read “Working for Dr. Dude” to see how I feel about that.)

My view today: carefully curated Ken and Barbie bedroom. The weather? Lots of snow, but in NYC you don’t have to shovel it — much less swat it off anything

So. Ten minutes to Jabits, another ten in line (or, as New Yorkers say, “on line”), two handing over paperwork and verifying my identity, then like 30 seconds getting “shot” by a sweet-faced Young Person. (I’m assuming, here, that the half of her face under her mask was just as sweet as the half I could see.)

Me, during my 15-minute wait-to-see-if-she-explodes period after being jabbed by Sweet-Faced Young Person

The thing that took the longest was finding my home-going Uber. Lesson learned. Next time — I come back in three weeks for Jab #2 — I’ll just hop into an arriving jabee’s taxi instead of roaming up and down a long line of identical black cars looking for the right license plate. I swear it was so cold they probably just kept the Pfizer stuff stacked outside.

Oh, any reactions to my jab? Nope, other than being as tired as any eligibly-aged vaccine recipient ought to be. And I can’t even blame the shot for that. I think it’s more about going to bed past midnight and getting up at 5.

Right on top: my ticket for Jab #2. Now watch me worry about losing it for the next three weeks

New York City. February 2021