Sinister: Williamsburg? It Was Really Something

[P F]

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.






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