NYC

Last week I went to New York to feel anonymous, but mostly I just felt like cattle. On Sunday I took the 7 a.m. train into Penn Station, where I proceeded to wander in circles for two hours before figuring out which direction I needed to go. Basically the first thing I did upon arriving in the most famous city in the world was to walk up to the movie theater on Broadway (which has a better IMAX than the mid-town theater near the train station) and see TRON: Legacy in 3D. I hadn't slept at all the night before, since I'd routinely been staying up until the hour at which I had to leave for the train, and so it took some effort to stay awake even during such a sense-enveloping film experience. TRON is a weird movie to watch while tired; I would nod off during some bit of exposition and be quickly jarred awake by some strobe-y bit of CGI or a squelch of the Daft Punk score.

After the film I took a long route, via Central Park, back downtown and met up with my old friend A., who works at a bike shop. We met up with some of his friends for burgers and beers and then caught the subway over to Brooklyn. We drank some more and hung out at his place, and then went out. I was pretty fucked up at that point, but I remember meeting his girlfriend S. at a place called Alligator Lounge, where they serve you a personal pan pizza with every beer you order. I ate two! Next we hit the hipster hot-spot bar/arcade known as Barcade, where I vaguely remember playing a series of classic arcade games thirty seconds at a time (Centipede is hard when you're seeing triple). Eventually we stumbled back to S.'s apartment and passed out.

The next day we had an amazing brunch of lox bagels and mimosas (and I played some Nintendo 64; it's weird how many N64s I encounter when I'm in the city) then went back to A.'s to drink more champagne and hang out. My friend D. had arrived in the city a little before noon and immediately set about seeing movies all day. We tried to connect and meet up for a flick, but it took me awhile to get my shit together. Eventually I parted ways with A. and S. and went back to Manhattan, but I was unable to get to where D. was seeing his second film, so I told him to call me whenever it got out. I decided to go over to Rockefeller Center. The previous day, I'd stashed my suitcase at a storage place for a few hours, but now I was lugging around my bag along with my regular backpack, so I basically occupied the space of a very fat or pregnant person. Trying to move through one of the most crowded blocks in the city four days before Christmas was, as friends would later tell me, a foolish decision. Even so, I was undeterred.

I wandered into one of the buildings in the plaza, looking for a restroom, and proceeded to accidentally set off an alarm. I was embarrassed, to say the least, although the guard who hassled me was cryptic in his reprobation, repeatedly asking, "Why'd you do that?" I don't know, buddy, I was experimenting with social spaces. In his defense, he was probably tired of dealing with dumb tourists who aren't naturally attuned to the rhythms of the city; in any case, he directed me downstairs toward the "concourse," which is a fancy word for "underground mall." After another bout of circling I found a place that piqued my interest: Nintendo World. The current celebration of some arbitrary Mario anniversary has left the store bedecked in even more self-indulgent regalia than I expect is normal; I ate up the themed decor as they'd intended every nerd to, I suppose (spotting yet another N64 in the outside display). They have genuinely cool stuff there that I would have bought had I not insisted on being so thrifty during the trip (only buying booze, subway passes and the occasional meal, I spent a good two hundred bucks over three and a half days), but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The mini-museum they got in there is pretty cool, there are vintage Nintendo playing cards (or at least replicas) from their 19th century origins, a few hand-made sketches by the properly hero-worshiped Shigeru Miyamoto, and, in a bit of unexpected patriotic poignancy, a charred, blackened Game Boy from the Gulf War, triumphantly running Tetris at full speed. I played a bit of the new Donkey Kong (awesome) and talked for a bit with an employee about the Super Mario Bros. film. (I saw the legendary flop once, when I was about six, with my brother. The guy said that Nintendo not only disowned the film; nobody owns the rights anymore. My housemate recently got a copy in a holiday gift swap; I’m pretty excited to watch it soon.) After that I went over to the Lego store, which was amusing for about three minutes.

Having had my fill of comically oversized Christmas decorations, I made my way to Times Square, where a man randomly complimented my Afro. The M&M store caught my eye and I killed a good fifteen minutes exploring its entire three stories of sugar-worship. I’m as big a fan as anybody of mercenary cultural idolatry, but M&fuckingM’s? I’d prefer if the distinction of what is being celebrated weren’t entirely pretend. I’m sure it’s very exciting that you can go there and fill up bags with the little candies in any color of the rainbow (a funnily less-appropriate set-up can be glimpsed at the Lego store; choking hazard, guys) but Jesus, people. They all taste the same. I glimpsed the Disney store down the street but I’d had my fill of cynical commercialism for the evening. Mercifully, D. texted me shortly directing me back toward Brooklyn, a mere one stop away from where I’d set out earlier that day. I hustled out east, my increasing mastery of the metro re-inflating the confidence balloon that had earlier been punctured by the Rockefeller incident. I found D. and Other D. at a little Chinese place. Other D., who lives in the Lower East Side with his folks, met up with D. (out from PA, where he lives with his parents—ah, post-grad) to check out an apartment but the realtor apparently stood them up. We ate and chatted; I tried to take stock of the situation at Other D.’s place. Apparently D. was meant to stay with him but Other was having a tiff with his parents and was unsure of the wisdom of inviting friends to stay the night. My nervousness increased; with Other D.’s place unavailable I officially had no place to stay. We went back to the building, which was pretty nice, but the guy never showed.

We went to Williamsburg to meet up with C., and then went over to P.’s apartment. P. was the next-best bet for available floor-space, so I began trying to modestly turn on the charm. We hit a bar for some drinks (and I grabbed a fish taco from some famed Brooklyn truck), parted ways with C. and grabbed a train back to Manhattan. We were headed toward the apartment of a friend of a friend of Other D., where some show was taking place. We caught the last few songs (it was an interesting kind of electro-pop thing with an appealingly deep-voiced female vocalist) and then I tried my best to mingle. In addition to the beers we’d grabbed at a shop prior, they’d left a bottle of Ketel 1 on a windowsill, which we took full advantage of. I like sipping straight vodka, and that’s a fine brand. The problem was that, since arriving and walking around in the freezing wind for hours over two days I’d forgotten to properly apply lip balm, and the outside of my mouth had become awfully chapped, so every sip included liquor painfully seeping into the cracks in my skin. It was incentive to drink faster, I suppose. After chatting with my friends for a while (I received an unexpected/distressing first-hand explanation from D., of all people, for my failure to maintain romantic involvement with a recent female interest) I met the woman in whose bedroom the show was being held. She was cute and good-humored and I couldn’t quite place her charming accent (later explained to be Australian by way of London and somewhere on the East Coast). She listened intently as I rambled at length about my bullshit studies, and we took off before I could embarrass myself in any significant way. We found a nice little lounge and hunkered down to relax before heading home. Blessedly, P. consented to let D. and I stay at her place, and we proceeded to get more concertedly drunk. I got a Tecate and the bartender showed me something called a “dirty ashtray”—you fill the rim with lime juice and then season with salt and pepper. When you crack the beer it all foams up and the first gulp is exotic and intense. D. somehow offended the guy in a way neither of them could explain; he ended up tipping the guy ten dollars without being sure why. At around 2, we all (us, the barkeep, and the enthusiastic tattooed woman who was the only other customer) went out into the street to watch the lunar eclipse. It took a few minutes for us to realize that none of us were sure what we were seeing.

The next morning we got what P. claimed was the cheapest decent breakfast in town; even though D. was paying for me (I covered the cab the previous night) I somehow spent like seven dollars just on tip. Fucking New York, man. We took off from P.’s and headed to Bushwick (I think) to meet a realtor. After a few minutes of waiting in the cold, cold wind we finally found the proposed building, a wildly extravagant sort of constructed artists’ colony in the midst of an otherwise run-down neighborhood. The realtor was a mildly shifty Hasid, J., who pitched the building pretty craftily, although I could see D.’s proverbial mouth watering already. (I think he was sold when he saw the private screening room right across from the gym, even before checking out an apartment.) As J. chatted hurriedly in Yiddish with his associate, the building manager, we looked at three separate places but eventually D. realized he couldn’t make it work financially, and J. took us over to a more modest place. I looked out the back window and was almost sure I could spot the same depressing junkyard (literally, a trash heap in someone’s yard) that I’d seen from the opposite angle at A.’s place the other day. After looking at a similar place next door and some contract-finagling (Other D. couldn’t get out of work for this extremely important bit of future-planning) D. managed to put some money down on the place and we parted with J. We went to a weird Mexican corner restaurant where I seemed to face a communication barrier with the servers even beyond the language thing. D. hypothesized it was a front for some kind of operation. But I got a fish sandwich!

He realized he was late to meet with another realtor and so we took the train back to where we’d just been before J. drove us to the bank, got some directions from a passerby that we found to be incorrect after walking about six blocks, during which D. insisted on stopping in every other shop to try and buy a “loosie”—a single cigarette—despite the wind being too heavy to even light one, and finally gave up and headed to Manhattan to meet up with our respective cousins. We got some coffee and drinks and parted ways; I found my cousin’s place and headed up. Cousin was in the midst of working on finals, but the beers I’d brought put him in a feisty mood. He kept insisting we should go to some club where they don’t let you in, I guess, unless you’re wearing the correct clothes. I tried to explain that that wasn’t really my speed and that we should just hit a dive bar and then see a movie, but it was rendered moot when his neighbor came over and said he had three women at his place and to please come over to help entertain. I was pretty gone at that point but basically we went and drank beer and Jäger and chatted with cute Asian-American chicks while watching music videos on the guy’s giant television; all in all, not a bad night. I awoke the next morning having no memory of going to sleep the previous night; it was early so I watched Saved By the Bell and VH1 until I felt it was appropriate to wake my cousin and say goodbye. I had intended to leave the following evening but I had kind of run out of cheap things to do and was bleeding money, so I resolved to change my ticket. After waiting in a long line at Penn Station I went out to see if I could grab a movie before my train but there was nothing interesting playing in the next hour, so I got some pizza and decided to check out Macy’s. I’ve never been in that store before, but two days before Christmas Eve is not really the prime time to do so. When I referred to myself as “cattle” at the beginning of this piece I was mainly thinking of that experience. Since there was nothing in there I was actually interested in, I just killed some more time at Border’s and then headed back to the station. On my way to check the departure board I was accosted by a horribly pitiful woman who pleaded with me for some money; she was short for a ticket and insisted she was “licked” if she missed it. I offered her half of the twenty she needed but accidentally revealed I also had a full twenty in my pocket. I’m not the most obstinate donation-refuser; annoy me enough and I’ll give just so someone will shut the fuck up. Her horrible, piercing cries of “Oh, pleeeeaaase” were enough to sway my hand to fill her ticket price, although I insisted she give back the ten I’d given; I don’t care if you’re hungry, ma’am, I’m hungry. We’re all hungry. Whatever, I’d probably have spent it on booze, anyway.

The train was delayed almost an hour (I found out later there was some kind of medical emergency en-route) and so I went into literally every news stand and book shop in the place, trying not to stick out. (And I hated being among those crowds that eerily stare up at the departure board, hypnotized.) Finally, I made it onto the Amtrak and was on my way home, tired but satisfied.