Five days in New York. A fantasy lifestyle: a hotel suite in the Upper West Side, an unlimited use MetroCard, an empty diary and a bulging address book. A city to be enthusiastically explored and disdainfully ignored. Conversations round tables piled with food, coffee, beer. Intense music and companionable silence. Combinations of old and new friends shuffled and re-shuffled: hearts and diamonds, jokers and knaves.
“What was it like?” people ask me on my return. Fuck knows. There’s no narrative, just a series of fragments. Dysconnection on the Long Island Rail Road. Greek food at Niko’s (pasta and pizza available, feta cheese obligatory). The slow regaining of consciousness in Starbucks each morning. The strange perspective on a home life 6,000 miles away. Shopping. Drum & bass and an infinite selection of t-shirts.
Sticky heat and torrential downpour. A mountain of fries in L’Orange Bleue. The magnificence of Grand Central. Midtown and Rockefeller. Meatballs and mash at Hallo Berlin. An upmarket fleamarket peopled with stall-holding eccentrics. Cognitive dissonance in Central Park as skyscapers clashed with trees. The Boat Basin Café, a mini log.nu reunion of sorts. Piercing sunlight in the Amsterdam Ale House.
Local and express. Sam Adams. Carnegie Hall – “the most beautiful room in the world” – and the tangible evidence of decades of music obsession. A few words. High-gravity jetlag in the Parker Meridien restaurant. Taxi-cab confessions (“Forgive me father, it has been four hours since my last taxi…”). Street pizza, then rock ‘n’ roll on the High Line. Armchair-sinking in the elegant bohemia of the Gaslight Lounge.
Beers in the Macdougal Street Ale House over $2.50 Mamoun’s falafels. F-line FAIL, then on to watch a Packers game at Angry Wade’s in Brooklyn. Lunch at the Slaughtered Lamb, washed down with Grey Dog cappuccino in Washington Square Park afterwards. A rush-hour walk and a good-natured bicker over the aesthetic qualities of the Port Authority building (beautiful; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).
Rogue Dead Guy Ale and avoiding the meat sweats at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Harlem. The iron grandeur of the Riverside Drive bridge. Salad (“Just to let you know, the dressing is vegan”), gossip and comparison with with English Girl #1 in the West Village. Bumping into friends on the subway. A taxi to the airport, our driver missing other cars with millimetre precision. Checking in and checking out.
Life and laughter. Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine. There was much more, but I’m already forgetting. Who needs a story? These snapshots will do.
Excellent writing. Very vivid. Snapshots indeed.
Thanks Phil. It seems that even when I carry my camera around with the best of intentions, my world always ends up being framed and depicted by words.
I haven’t had anyone to tell about our trip, but I think I shall refer to this when I finally have my chance. It has been difficult trying to explain the connection we all have to other people I know . . .
Yeah, it’s a tough one. What I’ve written above doesn’t even begin to cover it, because where do you start? Far easier to reel off a list of bars that we drank in, than to try to explain what actually happens around the table.
Yup, sounds like a typical New York visit.
That’s what a friend said earlier, when I off-handedly said I thought I’d been a pretty inadequate tourist… “But that’s what you DO in New York.”
In early spring of 2002, I took a trip to Manhattan. I went with the aggressively näive expectations of a Midwesterner, and came away underwhelmed. I anticipated Metropolis or some of the sets from Brazil. But I was only there for a weekend, and didn’t have the chance nor the presence of mind to look hard enough to find the hidden volume. I mean, it’s not until you look really closely at a dinner table that you see how much emptiness is trapped in that lattice of atoms.
I even had the gall to be disappointed that people were pleasant, and that they didn’t carry the sterotyped swaggering nonchalance or acidic condescension that fill media caricatures of the city. Oy.
I feel the same way about London sometimes; my adopted home for more than half of my life. The London in my head always seems so much bigger and stranger than the one that I try to show to visiting friends.