Sinister: Williamsburg? It Was Really Something

Around the Empire State I seek a post office: hand over the oceanbound dose, pick up 8 more stamps, and still clutching my last refill cross the streets back to the Hotel Norman Mailer, then south down Park Avenue, catching the 6 to Brooklyn Bridge. Each stop’s name still makes me want to disembark in tribute: Union Square, Astor Place, Bleecker, even Spring. But what a name is Brooklyn Bridge. I suppose we have London Bridge, but that does not vividly refer. Cops outside police HQ giving stern instruction; a boothed bagel vendor clarifies in his foreign argot, then the businessman in his queue. Bearing the bagel I mount the slopes, head for the cables and ropes, slats and pillars. The Empire State emerges not straight behind but over to the right, uptown: the Chrysler further still – for this is south-east, not looking straight up the island; meanwhile great flats of water West, round into the Hudson; and industrial Brooklyn ahead. Last time I did this I was trying to write a song, in my head or on paper, and I never even made it to the title location. I ought to do something with that tune. I don’t write any song today, I take pictures as other tourists pass, the snow doesn’t fall. Quit the bridge too late, wind up practically downtown, amid heavy-duty buildings and tough-guy traffic; I seek the way west via a delightfully garrulous local, a construction worker I think, hard of hat and Brooklyn of voice, telling of his Italian origins and returns to Rome; he flashes me an initialled bracelet, says those are Rome’s. – the church? – No, not the church: I’m Catholic but… - Not that Catholic. Don’t go to Williamsburg via the risky Projects, he insists; tourists like Brooklyn Heights; there’s not much to see in Cobble Hill. I say I’m reading a book about it; he starts to recall high-school read The Sentinel, and enlists a passing cop friend for advice also. Maybe the whole thing is a performance – I keep looking for his tour-guide badge – but still it bespeaks civic pride, friendliness, community; walking southwest I wonder if those things could be plain progressive, egalitarian, responsible. Across a scratchy park to Middagh Street: is this where Auden lived? You can’t go right with such a thought: if it’s right it’s banal, if wrong an embarrassing solecism. Brooklyn Heights is beyond picturesque, so much a model village it’s hard to believe it’s working; signs forbid any noise, musical instruments, even ‘Standing’ (maybe that’s for cars). Brownstones, proud old buildings like a Massachusetts childhood; a fire engine down the street, another thanking locals for support and love. Lachrymose town. I try to track and tick the streets from the guide: Cranberry, Orange, Pineapple. Montague Street is more like the New York we know, though still quiet, no music in the cafés at noon; for Bob’s sake I photograph the cluttered signpost. By then I have reached the Esplanade or Promenade, differently named in different texts; Manhattan takes its stand across the water. Two English blokes (yes – blokes) see the rough guide and ask if I want a picture taken, chuckling sweetly when they find I share their origin; the gingerbearded character is working with the homeless in the Bronx for 6 months. They’re taking the ferry this afternoon; turn around and come back, I advise (sad to have to endorse the guides’ incurious negatives) – and go to the NY museum. I mean, the Museum of the City of New York. Atlantic Avenue at last, east past the Mid-Eastern restaurants; off Smith Street through Cobble Hill and East down Dean Street to the fortress of attitude. Lethem’s block is between Bond St and Nevins St. It’s not like the book; porches, I guess, but all the red houses have so many windows I can’t see how all those thrown balls don’t break them. And it has clearly gone up in the world in 30 years, a point that the book will reach. Yet to be here at all has a frisson, a kind of secret: like Joycean tourism, but maybe not, for everyone in Dublin knows what you’re up to, it is embarrassing to shuffle past the Martellos and the Ormond; whereas these residents surely haven’t read TfofS. Have they? Strange thought: imagine being advised to read it because you lived in this 200-yard stretch of streets; imagine watching a stranger coming by clutching an English paperback, orange black and cyan. The camera starts failing as I try to photograph signs at the corner shop, bodega, dagobah, whatever. North up Nevins to Flatbush Avenue. Downtown, the local Lewisham to the Heights’ Greenwich I guess; cars, watches, brothers. Struggle to hear the lady behind glass in the subway, its official status struggling against the scene’s wreckage. Running down Schermerhorn Street, another subway: pleasant sense of how it extends all this way in the same format. East to Broadway-East New York (I thought the lady meant Manhattan: no, this is way out East; though actually Manhattan might have done better), West to Bedford Avenue, from an overground platform looking down on a hillside cemetery. John Ford, Abraham Lincoln, Stokely Carmichael. Williamsburg, out of the depths to lowrise logical junctions, old factories and new bistros: some talk show filming in a new pizza place so no pizza, just talk. The afternoon is awake with casual promise. Back street with the steel shell of an apparently hipster diner; I think of the cod US bars off Northampton’s Fish Street. The waitresses have a thin dead glow and play loud in full the last Magnetic Fields record. ‘It’s Only Time’ reminds me of Lewisham library and pick’n’mix candy. Onion rings, salad, Glasgow sounds always. For $60 Carey went to Hurly Burly with Ethan Hawke and Parker Posey: the living theatre. Down the steps to the backroad she says we just passed Jack White. Maybe in his hoods and hats now he is like Dylan was in 1968, save the talent and importance. The sun shines blind light of afternoon on the grid or maze of cross streets, telegraph poles, scant traffic like a child’s playset, empty factories, bookstores with music playing and anti-Dubya satirical matter always part of the deal, undeterred by last November. On a corner I nearly buy Flannery O’Connor’s complete stories, inside I nearly buy a rumpled Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. Instead post cards, late Didion, and Joyce by the Irish, Myles and all. I have scanned the literary criticism section of every English bookshop I’ve entered, and never blinked eyes at this, let alone the original jacket. $16, what, £9? – well, a bargain for the collector. In an icy record shop the UK assistant disconcerts: you’re not supposed to be here! is the feeling, and now I know how Simon C felt. She asks for Orange Juice, they seem to have fallen from this nation’s racks. I listen to Bright Eyes, standard descending chords, wonder why Lloyd Cole lacks a section when the piddling Futureheads have one. And I wonder now whether Lloyd owns all Didion’s books, how often he rereads them, and what he now derives from them. In the low streets outside snow starts falling. I am not keen on this development, though it has its Salingeresque romance. US rarity for me: buying a cup of tea in the adjacent coffee-shop, where English voices again disturb the national timbre. Crazy fandom, Elvis impersonators. After the snow has faded out, the Brooklyn Brewery by the East River, the vinyl-sided houses, Edward Hopper colours. I am sent out West again to Union Square, the evening must be starting on the streets back to the Hotel Richard Scarry. Uptown walking for the balmy evening, Broadway juicy lucy to Herald Square, 42nd Street, onward up 5th Avenue, great glooming churches right on the street, facing down the department stores and megadromes, the billionaires’ benevolent building bashes, fountains and hydrants, hot dogs every hundred yards. The day fading out round six, and the question is when to stop walking and start riding; an academic question though for at each pertinent junction I seem unable to find the stops I need though they should be in plain sight. At Columbus Circle I try to decipher its exits and entrances: board a subway train whose doors open and close in exasperated repetition at every stop. The train will not move until you let the doors shut. They don’t say what they do in blighty: another train is just behind this one. The crowds thin as we near 110th: out and east to 2010. At the bar my host is faced with pints of beer and backed by a claque. Odd local drinking gang, not cool or scintillating, no glamour to see, just indigenous pals. I’m the only one to produce a card, Riley stripes of the Hotel Rita Hayworth: see, he tells his chums, what you should have done. I am guided by sarcasm into the bar etiquette, $2, $3, tip $1, no rounds, just put the tips there. By the end I am getting served new pints without asking for them and not putting any cash down. Hm, this ought to be my kind of bar. Yours too. Douse through the varieties: lager, ale (hard to recall which is best: both sound so good), pilsner. Columbia is easy, he says: the high cost to the students, who stand up and complain at you, but call you sir; the lack of pedagogical concern; the easy marking-up. Disbelief that I have been to Brooklyn: - They named a *borough* after the *beer*? An overearnest chum is a gay New York bore but OK for one evening, and relishes the chance to hector and lecture on the truth about Queens, Bronx and all. Patronizing style, Brooklyn is vast… ethnic diversity…blah. I know! He remembers Money well, plot, scam and all, and somehow that rather impresses me; we wind up talking standards, ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’ he’s not slow to start singing, Ella F’s songbooks and yes (he stops and earnestly stares, launches another wouldbe pedagogic tirade) she was a real New Yorker though not from NY, Apollo Theatre just up the road… A Harlem architect finds half of what I say an occasion for hilarity, and near the end is launching a lecture of his own (these people!) on the complex political breakdown of the red and blue nation…. Perhaps they think we are all tabloid thinkers and dumbo drinkers where I come from. 110th and south to 28th, a long walk east, and once in I need to eat again; a local bagel says $3.50, is $4.39, jeez. Criminals. - Would that be the *real* Simon Reynolds, sir? - Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. I push the clear door of the Hotel Warren Beatty and and head SW to Mayrose on 21st and Broadway, stringing out the dear breakfast from a trendily klutzy waitress who brings more coffee after I’m already overly bombed on it from the hotel, who says postcards are a good part of the holiday; it’s fun to see them once you get home. What an insight: angular, useless, yet true. Over egg, sausage, potato, toast and all, I write a string of cards. SE19, NW5, SE4, SE7, NN1, NR2, Dublin 8. Didn’t I send you one? Sorry – I must have run out of cards. Snow’s starting as I head back, up 5th or Madison, through a beckoning winter wonderland that actually never quite materializes: just a dusting, the doorman assures me. South again, from 28th street on the 6, changing I think to an express, 4 or 5 on the green line, exhilaration, to Bowling Green: now around the southern tip, the financial district’s mix of flash and venerability, new money and old stones, seeking the Police Museum. The museum of Native Americans, and redsuited security men who seem to stand around here, give me one set of bad directions after another: I start to think of looking for and at Ground Zero instead, and its proximity chills me slightly, connects today up to the real and unique 9/11 itself. Falling towers, ‘Milk Bar’, an expert saying over the surreal burning cliffs that this surely couldn’t be Saddam Hussein’s work, Paxman in a studio black as night, unreal. But no, the Police Museum is what I came for, and at last here it is, almost at the water’s edge, relocated from 2000’s Guide in a stone police station, freestanding like the one Myles imagined but no-one else ever will. It’s no longer free as the book says: count out your $5 donation. A crotchety codger guards the entrance behind wooden panels, like a Western sheriff’s office. Left leads to police transport: a bike, cars, pictures of boats, planes, helicopters, bicycles, horses that are quite compelling, with a radio crackling away. Other end, a history of uniforms, and the NYPD over the centuries; in revolutionary times it was controversial for them to be uniformed at all. Imagine. Upstairs, notorious criminals, fingerprints and science, black officers and the first black chief, a hall of heroes and image of a funeral, with purple and green flag; a range of departments hard to take in; the 1995 merger of traffic police with the NYPD (how trivial, yet how large, how interesting); the ESPU, whom police in trouble call; the Police Academy, who were all suddenly mobilized on 9/11. That event unsurprisingly dominates in places: downstairs a crass slab of partisan kitsch shows Dubya leading others ‘Out Of The Ashes’; upstairs video of the event is screened in an exhibit on its policing and the work at Fresh Kills. It has never moved me so much, this visual cliché, this overdone excuse for American follies, as it suddenly does now, at the foot of New York, near the scene of the crime, where the sight of the crashing planes and falling towers feels like a waste, a hurtful damage, an offence against lives and society, and almost brings a tear to the eye. Cut it short on a tourist’s schedule, running and losing my flabby breath as I seek the subway the shop assistants have advised and scrawled on the back of a catalogue, distracted by a dumb misleading redcoat (were it their job to mislead foreigners, they would be doing fine; the only explanation): Wall Street express North to 42nd Street, Times Square, up and out in midtown and early afternoon, hardly noticing the detail of all the people (that’s what strikes me later: all those people, all those lives, around these lunchtime streets, I will never know), steaming east through Bryant Park in late winter, coffee stalls and canopies, to the side entrance of the Public Library, up to the marble foyer for the start of the 2 o’clock tour. I’m glad I made it, glad to see this beautiful building and place of scholars and the everyday curious, glad to have got something for free for once in this city. Elderly Regina Ford leads us around: she talks of being too old to climb the stairs with us, but is still better able to walk and talk after it than I am. The building as Beaux Arts, never quite explained classicism I guess; ‘beasts’ dotted around it, most notably the lions at the front, which have been decorated with Christmas garlands and baseball caps. In the Periodicals Room I get distracted punching names into a database, forget to punch my own. I’ve already lost track of the rest of the tour; catch them up as they look at a visitors’ theatre, a changing visual display, rooms through windows holding stacks of books, arranged in part by size in a system unique to the NYPL, which may soon be scrapped. I wonder if the other tour members, some with amusement or questions, are scholars, library users. Upstairs, down a hall of New Yorker cartoons; rooms of rare books we can only peer into, Dickens’ desk or Pound’s pens; a mural on the history of the written word; a room where communications and requests are made by pneumatic pipe; reading rooms with sky painted on the ceiling (that’s ‘Pulse’!). In an inner sanctum, the place they didn’t film The Day After Tomorrow. People nod their heads at the tale, even those who have not seen the picture, which was not filmed here. Running all day, north with a $1.50 hot dog across the everyday, Friday streets, left down 53rd to Carey at the front of MoMA, her presence a charm against the urban mysteries. Imperiously detached she guides me west to a long queue in the strong cold: Tokyo Rosemary in pink with extra black and white stripes today, talking about the Noise Dinner. At four we are in for nothing, amid great crowds attracted like us by the gratuitous entrance: alas, they make the next 2 or 3 hours less bearable than they may be on normal $20 days. Top floor and down: recent work, Surrealism, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, whoever, the place feels a lot more crowded than Fifth Avenue itself. Paintings gather gaggles like bus stops or burger joints, like Virgin megazones or movie plazas. In those scenes you reckon on it and don’t mind, but this is new: the crowd, the ambling or hurtling throng, all trying to practise simultaneously a quiet old model of aesthetic contemplation. Mozart on the Underground, Greenberg in Sainsbury’s. Carey views the place at comical speed, a Gonzales, a six-million-dollar girl of artistic consumption, waiting for us at the end like Superman for the slow cops. Tokyo and I are left to take on Hopper, de Kooning, Johns, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Warhol and all. A drink, an overpriced pause: I should have gone for a Brooklyn Lager, that omnipresent brew. Then the floor below, much better: photography including cameras whose shutters were left open through the 3 years of MoMA redevelopment. Uncannily shop signs fade out from one year to the next, linger in their absence; light of many days pricks half-built rooms. Robert Frank, Jack Ruby, people running in a street with de Valera somewhere around – crazy vagueness of this – and the surface of the moon. NYC is darkening when we leave, 7, 8: across town to the 6, loose NY stories, memories of encounters, south to 14th I guess. The crossing lines, the colours under the East River. Bedford Avenue encore, Williamsburg revisited, reread this low-rise grid. It’s freezing, either side of a stop for a six-box of Brooklyn Pale Ale (wow! *another* variant! I am thrilled), down to a lonely place where we must wait to be let into a warehouse. Hstencil is a barkeep I have heard, probably a musician too, a DJ, whatever people are nowadays. He is welcoming, out of the cold: in a cavernous apartment the younger and older mingle, the respectful and the cardable. Strange fascination of this occasion, somewhere out in the east, where chilli and hot dogs cook, and someone is trying absinthe. I wander into a room: under the Queen Is Dead poster pick up a guitar and fiddle for 2 seconds (think: days and days without a guitar) till the anxious owner politely stops me, and at my still politer request starts playing himself. The endless song pulls a chick: hm, I say, it sounds a bit like Rufus Wainwright. His response is a sage, unsurprised - Yeah… I get that a lot. People go out late here: that it’s 10 or 11 and we have not yet left fails to irk them. In a narrow room they gather and play godawful hip-hop records loud. Odd, the renewed confrontation with this stuff. Where I live, amid Carrington, Harris, Bruce, you needn’t hear it all the time. But imagine another life, another place, where its computerized crunch is omnipresent, where you can’t walk down the street without it assailing you, someone else’s noisy pollution, or even where you play it yourself. Another life, all right. Down the road we seek a cab in the freeze till a pick-up truck picks us up. Over the Williamsburg Bridge, one of life’s stranger crossings, worthy of Dos Passos or Hart Crane. The Magician stretches back into a room in which Matos holds court: hitherto unknown to me, he largely remains so, but like Maura is gracious in greeting. No Reynolds, but who needs him? That encounter is probably best left immaterial. Hand is the night’s best turn: at the bar we talk tipping and I convince him that this culture and their way of taxing are both regressive, anti-poor. It is pleasant when he agrees, in his delightful drawl: on PSB and how US media went down a wrong path that still fatally threatens the UK. Kind of a depressing conversation, despite the polemical energy it bears. Nabisco is hatching a plan for tomorrow: it seems just a drunken scheme, but no, it’s a real idea, his own and no other’s, an unbleary kindness. In a Taco place bad late-night TV screens: over meat and chicken varieties he ponders the way to wear jeans and DMs. It must be odd, it must be different, to live their way, out so late in scuzzy quarters, catching cabs left right and grand central. You must have to learn how to live this way. The cab drops me near Bleecker Street: within seconds I’ve missed the relevant entrance. North through the night, wind up at Astor Place, suddenly finding that at 3:30am my MetroCard’s not working: automatic subway is cut off just like that, and with it a whole expansive, inexpensive view of the city. The sleeping keeper wakes and lets me through anyway, decent; the train takes a while, and between the pillars rails and tiles for the first time I start to feel like I may have been in New York long enough. Bright blue morning out, Empire State, Madison Avenue, Madison Square Park, Flatiron Building, Union Square’s great sweet expanse of early Saturday. I take out another $100 – $100! – explore Barnes & Noble whose books impress me; a section called Who Knew? is popular Cultural Phenomenology. ‘Who Knew?’: a phrase in the late American grain, not one of ours. The farmers’ or organic market you’ll read about in guides or be urged to see – yes, p.129: ‘the city’s best and most popular *greenmarket* on its northern edge. Farmers and other food producers from upstate New York, Long Island, New Jersey and even from Pennsylvania Dutch country sell fresh fruit and vegetables, baked goods, cheeses, eggs, meats, plants and flowers…’. Against the blue cold from a Chinese type I buy a cup of hot cider for a dollar, and it turns on the city for the walk south, down University Place, like in the song, to – Washington Square. Scrappy land, white arch, Garibaldi’s statue tells his extraordinary tale. August 1988, when it was buzzing like the book says: ‘running track, performance venue, chess tournament and social club, boiling over with life as skateboards flip, dogs run, and acoustic guitar notes crash…’. All gone. A German tour passes, studying Garibaldi after me. South to Bleecker Street: for the second time in 17 years I look in Bleecker Street Records. The least they could do is give Lloyd a section, when the poxy Rapture get one. The dumb unjust world, the Village in the morning. The street is not deserted but sparsely peopled; the light is bright but the morning is very cold. For fully an hour or two I seek breakfast, checking out every menu going, but nothing quite meets today’s simple needs; in one I wait to be served and walk out before it happens. Divert west down Grove to Bedford Street, to seek Chumley’s: it really is as obscure in the wall as the guidebook says. A tour of some kind is going in: I follow, into halls of stone flags, smoky morning air, literary pictures and covers lining the walls. I get out by saying I may come back later; surprisingly, I do. Up Hudson Street to Abingdon Square, stopping at a bookshop for a book of Grand Central cards. Ninth Avenue leads north out of the Village altogether, into Chelsea for the first and last time, up to the dry spread of 21st and Le Gamin: it’s crowded, full of queues, and French, and I didn’t come to America for French food. So all the way back south and east, all the way along Bleecker Street, across Broadway and onto its shadow, the cold Bowery, where I’m right opposite CBGB. A geezer in front seems too threatening for me to get very near the place. A thought comes together: that NYC’s pop aesthetic is still fairly unredeemedly punk, that the scuzziness of this place, the Bowery, the Ramones’ sound, hair, skin, jackets, the scrappy flyers that plaster walls, these all remain an acceptable version of pop fun here more than they do back home. Turning North with the thought in my head, and the green sign ahead says Joey Ramone Blvd. A right down St Mark’s Place and on east 9th and 2nd I find Veselka, a Ukrainian (Polish? Russian? Czech? whatever) place again packed. At the counter the waitress comes and goes. You have to savour these platters: eggs, sausages, potatoes, toast; coffee, juice. It’s really good; I blow a whole ten-dollar bill including the tip, and meantime pen cards. NN1, N4, Dublin 15, CA92612. If I didn’t send you a card, sorry. I must have run out. I’ll send you one from England, some time, if you like. The trouble is posting them: post offices in Murray Hill are shut, and I won’t get anything gone till Monday afternoon. 3 o’clock in the Hotel Walker Percy: Nabisco is impressed to find In The Shadow Of No Towers knocking around in the foyer. Nothing but the best here, son, nothing but LRB-endorsed satirists, plus that Big Book of New York. We start a 7-hour trip. East to the 33rd street 6, I’ve asked about his badge: DFA? A production company… and record label… yeah, what do they sound like? Rock + disco, like the Gang of Four… I did hear them, years ago, but can’t now picture it, hear it in the head’s headphones. He says they all sound like New Order. The museum’s architecture is as special as anything inside it: Nabisco considers it an ‘upside-down Devo hat’; perhaps a space-age beehive. I am sure he’s right, but must struggle now to picture it, to see it on the head’s screen. Space closed off, admission down; he gets us in for $5 apiece. What’s fine about this museum is its limited scale: after the midtown crowds and excess of the MoMA, something manageable. (Hm – maybe the perfect museum would be always closed.) At the top, new sculpture: wooden figurations of East European secret police HQs, lurid crepuscular shadows of heads eaten by crows. Down the slopes, Picasso, Delaunay and the falling, the shuddering towers; lots of Kandinsky whom he’s not sure he likes; me neither, I grew up with it, but we try to talk ourselves into it. Odd, enlightening or enlivening aesthetic progress from this top-down route: as we descend we travel not forward on the bullet train of teleology but back in time into the verge of realism, coming back out of abstraction rather than the reverse, and thus finding realism, not merely a comfort, but estranged by what we’ve seen above. Imagine, coming out of modernism, finding that you could actually paint pictures that looked like people – looked more and more like them. We aim for Chumley’s, fulfilling that casual promise and taking Hand’s repeated recommendation. But how to get downtown? Across the Park: through the gates, the orange clouds matching them, the sunset above beating Tuesday’s, N agreeing that the real city is always so much more spectacular than any painting – but that’s the point, the painting should sensitize us to it. I ask about NY’s municipal, collective identity: he says New Yorkers simply don’t see why anyone would live anywhere else, and they barely know where Chicago is. (Chicago? Yes, where is that?) The gates have not been vandalized; he reckons some graffiti downtown OK, when it gets so thickly mixed it’s abstract. N tried Motherless Brooklyn, thought its Tourette’s idiom was like an 18-year-old’s. Intrusive narration: he himself is trying to write with the equivalent of spoken narration. At the other side, steam from a sidewalk hole, lights, tourist diners, a shop full of magazines (this is a magazine city, he says: what a concept), films’ bad narrative, The Royal Tenenbaums he likes; a beggar we turn down, on the train downtown N’s tales of writing copy for a jeweller’s in Rego Park. Christopher Street, the Village in the evening, confronting its strange sense of space, roads that go one way then another. A Londoner, he says, should understand. Chumley’s is now dark and full. Red ale, stout, noodles vs shepherd’s pie which he follows with irresistible fries. Columbia creative writing: odd, to slot this next to Thursday night’s tales of the place. The guidebook says that Joyce finished Ulysses here. Really – Dublin’s cheek is understandable, but this is folly. The Sundays, that old nut, and how the 3rd LP is like a different band altogether, that old crack. Zadie Smith vs James Wood: curious how everyone knows and digs that critical encounter, a rare thing nowadays in the ice age after the man of letters; anyway, he sympathizes with her. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because he’s not a Londoner. The bill is big, he tells the waitress to bring back five, meaning take a ten-dollar tip: she brings it back in ones, which he takes to mean, comically, she wants a bigger tip still. She doesn’t get it. So much for thrills: from here on in they are mostly phoney, philosophers applauding each others’ roads to nowhere and highways to Heidegger. Stepping out queen # 1, checking out staff #2: the eventual message is that I can store my luggage, with a fellow adding the at once cool and smarmy line, - You’ve stayed with us for 10 days – I think we can store your luggage for a couple of hours. Oh, yes. Down Madison Avenue I find The Coffee Shop, which seems the fine cheap diner I have all along been looking for. My mistake is the penalty-taker’s: at the last moment I change my order, go for pancakes rather than eggs along with my sausage. Down Fifth to 12th street in the first thing morning. My co-pilot from London has arrived via Canada; at the back of a maybe wouldbe courtroom we listen to a zany, distracted introduction, touching in its Mylesian nod. An unlikely German follows with a ramble around exaggerations; I reflect on how solemn deconstruction always is about itself, how highly it rates itself despite being utterly indeterminate and nigh indefinable. They have a sense of humour, but it’s rarely at their own expense. I will plunge the record into obscurity, and skimp on the tosh I hear for the next solid hours in crowded air. I start making a list of top NYC moments, count 18. Like a lunchbreak Virgil I lead my compadre to St Mark’s Books where he picks up poetry and I advise against theory, and we agree that we should work out better ways to freeload and get big grants like these characters. Back in the hall a deManian veteran is rambling bull. Gosh, I don’t know how they have got away with it so long. What tedium. I try to start rewriting a four-year-old song, fail. Faces come in echoes in the crowd. I spy a back-row black dude whose flamboyance attracts. Hours later, back from a second fruitless harvest of the Strand, I fall in beside him: he turns out to be a real character, a major player, a top-flight charmer, an accredited thinker. His crooked-toothed mouth is almost as mobile as his extraordinary body, which seems to dance up and down on the spot, ducking and rising, floating like a butterfly and flashing exaggerated interest or assent as he talks with whoever wants to about Victorian social critics, brother Edward, Terry’s homecoming. At an upstairs table I tell him to try The Fortress of Underberg. – Hip-hop? - No, it’s not hip-hop exactly, it’s earlier than that, soul and funk… - like *I* know what all that’s about. He writes it on a crowded filofax page before leaving to join bigger names than ours. A colder duller day than any other in New York: but we wind up in a bar the guide says was a Beat hangout, trundling through a single round. Cabbing it uptown, uptown, through the falling snow that sparkles suddenly across the night, on a tab to the Hotel Edith Wharton. I change upstairs to purple and white, and feel like… like *the pinefox*. In the Mezzanine we are the last drinkers in Murray Hill, two vast cans of Japanese lager fuelling the talk of O’Hara, Joyce, big Italy. I am slinging things in the case, bathroom gear and hotel notepaper, LRBs I never opened, and sorry to leave behind the nerve centre, the big white firm bed, the window on the street far below. I check out and pay $429 expenses: wow, hair-raising stuff, with a charge for the mini-bar I never used and taxes piled upon taxes. Funny, I thought the US was chary of taxes. Looking at these, I don’t blame them. Never mind that now. A foreign driver (but we are all foreigners here: I sure am) wheedles me with talk of how he’s looking forward to visiting Britain, then charges me an excessive $8 for 18 straight blocks. No meter has been running. Never mind that now. The free bagels of 12th street have been calling me for weeks: I eat as many as I can while the literary theorists read the New York Times and the philosophers score bore draws. Ham and ramble. I sit and calculate costs: £2,000? I will spare you, spare myself, the debacle that follows, the unwonted polemic and proprietary bile. I leave with a few underhand and appreciated words of compensatory kindness, from the mad hatter and the queen of hearts, those without whom. But I am fizzing with mental wounding, doubt, the adrenaline of fear and indignation as I head east to 1st Avenue, running controversies around in my head, looking for a decent value bushel of authentic bagels. $3.90 gets me 6: a Brit chortles, - hope you can get them through customs!... good luck! – and I head North again through Gramercy Park, up Lexington Avenue, $40 from an ATM, too much really, I’ll later seek ways to blow it. West through midtown I steam quaking feelings on through a shopping mall and into the General Post Office on 8th Avenue, a building of Kane scale or Ghostbusters grandeur. President’s Day: the only place to buy stamps; as if it really matters, when there is an aeroplane, an airplane, to catch, to fly on. In the queue I make real headway through the Fortress of Fortitude: maybe I should bring Proust here. Back at the Hotel Lionel Trilling I collect the case, hand a $2 tip to the oriental doorman (maybe they all expect tips, all the time… maybe he thinks $2 meagre. Never mind that now) and walk north, the case biting my hand, the day still vexing my head. The struggle with the weight in the cold against the clock is one of those temporal passages you must just traverse, pass down, for all their floors of rusty nails. Finding the Newark bus is a task. Eventually a huddle of us awaits transit from the centre of the universe. $11 and it leads a dance out of NYC, down Lexington Avenue with an old melody in my head, west down a main street, past Trump Tower maybe; I’m reading the Rough Guide, the Midtown pages I never quite made, and it sends me looking up and out again at the cold Monday city, and we are heading north up the west side and through a tunnel… the Lincoln Tunnel on 40th street, must be the same one we came in on, and the last views back at Manhattan, island of the hills, are worth straining for before they’re covered by a bank of snow, and it’s just New Jersey we’re traversing. In the queue behind Germans I stick with the Rough Guide, absurdly racing to finish it up. Forget the renewed security checks, the charmless airport barkeep who under basketball serves bad beer badly and wants a vast tip every drink – forget that lot. I sleep for no more than 15 minutes, spend the night grimly hanging on to the protean New York novel, this now first-person 1999 narrative, in a speeding lump of metal above the clouds that having barred any view of golden Manhattan fade out into black, fade back up into grey and eventually a European sunrise. But never mind Europe now: this is a late last long salute to New York, and the people who made it new. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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