Sinister: Murray Hill, Murray Hill, Hold On Tight

[P F]

8 o’clock in the Mezzanine at the hotel Clarence
Ashley: quiet hours before the leisurely tourist
breakfasts begin. A strange grizzled foreigner in a
foreign land serving a foreigner just a coffee,
Clarence Ashley own brand no less, cooked up by a
reputable beanier, twitching that I don’t want to hand
him twelve bucks plus for a croissant. Yellow cabs
pass below on 31st street and I wonder about
generations of capitalist aesthetics: the 1920s,
1930s, 1950s, whatever are OK, but take the black
checks off the cabs and everyone says the romance is
gone. How long will it take for millennial Manhattan
to look gilded? I read the Rough Guide, five years out
of date, telling me the subway will cost $1.50.
Adjusting prices from this book is like converting
from sterling, a perpetual and imprecise necessity.
Tales of crime in the city are five, maybe thus ten,
fifteen years outdated. The New York postal system,
the book warns, is poor. Stillness, waiting for the
world to wake, New York starting its Saturday, till
back upstairs out of the white the telephone rings. It
seems to buzz from different corners, bleeping like a
fire alarm, impolite with unconventional urgency. Odd
world of hotel calls, aimed at transience, passing
through. I call Brooklyn, find it awake on the bright
morning. Space.

Past the doorman I head out; - how are you today,
sir?. – Oh, I’m good, thank you: yes, determined to
have a real good time. Art of positive replies you
must learn. I am surprisingly unprepared for the
city’s majesty: through the doors to the sidewalk
stones the impact and momentum of its late-winter air,
the rush of location, back in the land of the high
green street signs. The Empire State is a sudden
casual sight, waiting for my arrival, hanging on when
I’m long gone; the strange happy durability of
buildings is something that those who live among them
don’t quite see. The early-spring wind of the world’s
finest film set, arbitrariness of the way across the
grid, east seeking a first diner: blitzed by the
sensation of the avenues, tunnels of air, magnificent
lines of vision, epic scale of moving city. Park
Avenue, Lexington Avenue, casually they come, I wonder
if I even know how to cross a street here, and think
of ‘Sunday Morning’, all the streets you crossed, as
the world’s most famous roads just drift past like
they’re Tressilian Road or Chandos Place. That all
this can still happily catch me unawares catches me
unawares.

Modesty of the eastern streets. I order a regular
folks’ breakfast, Belgian waffles with syrup, plus two
little sausages that are actually tasty, five refills
of coffee. I am determined to read the whole guidebook
this time out, discovering Chinatown on the plane home
if need be. I read the Rough Guide to Murray Hill.

Like Chelsea further west, it lacks any real center,
any real sense of community and, unless you work, live
or are staying in Murray Hill, there’s little reason
to go there at all; indeed you’re more likely to pass
through without even realizing it.

Odd how they’ll so deprecate such places; this is the
heart of Manhattan, people! Get excited! I plan
payment like a military campaign, try to work out
where the tip goes, how much extra cash they’ll add,
time movements, till, table, door, across the street
and out of range.

Noon South down Madison: the local mixture of history
and the now, the new America that isn’t the same as
all that though it walks the same streets, that has
places to go and Britney Spears videos to watch. Union
Square’s great Saturday spaces. Place to await a
lassie. Upstairs in B&N below the painted writers I
read of how The Gates costs $20 million but not a
penny from the city. She shows and on the road shows
me her badge. Line of unorthodox cops, Ironside, T.J.
Hooker (no, he’s orthodox, that’s his schtick maybe),
Spender, now the ex-bus driver and frustrated Orange
Juice fan in DMs. Out in the air the guidebook
bespeaks a slightly gone world; we try to map this one
to it. Seek the American Savings Bank, lose Tammany
Hall. The road into the East Village, where everyone
and their daughter used to work for the Voice; the
brown signs of Broadway tutti frutti that seems to
start to split and multiply, as though its shadowy
Bowery cousin weren’t diagonal enough. The local
talent assembles for the week’s first fancy a pint,
fancy a burger, FAB. In and out of the candle shop:
scents on sale include Laundromat, Dirt and Ginger
Ale. Out of the SoHo crowds like Suze Rotolo.

Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was
fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian.
The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We
started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s
arrow had whistled by my ears before, but this time it
hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me
overboard.

Unbelievable bathos of that paragraph’s end: ‘She was
just my type’.

Tom & Jerry’s: ambiguity of the name, queer
instability of local knowledge. Who would have thought
so many different bowls existed with ‘Tom & Jerry’ on
them? The reasons are unfathomable. Scrabble is in
use; only game in town is count the numbers for the
forthcoming FAPs. Everybody has plans round here. Back
at Union Square’s subway pavilion the day going, going
fine, how to buy the necessary card at something like
2/5 of the equivalent London cost. No wonder the
tunnels are dirty. I like the stops’ earnest
announcements: ‘This is - 14th Street - *Union
Square*’, or is it, ‘*Union* Square’, where the stress
falls.

In the Hotel Chloe Kiel the telephone rings: a voice
out of Mike Leigh that yet seems to know his NYC.
Share a cab downtown? No – see, I’ve got this *card*,
I have to make it worthwhile… From West 28th street I
head south to where every other query is a mock exam
question, every other assertion a prank. A Miami man
wants to drink beer with me. I never do make it.
Derrida’s infinite capacity for making dumb people
feel like they had just said something very
interesting: ‘a genius, in that sense’. I make it
somehow back up the cold thirty streets North. Another
doorman coated against the night awaits to welcome me
in.
- Would that be the *phenomenal* Paul de Man, sir?
- Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.

Cars both ways on 5th Avenue, the terrific morning
bright and crisp. Flatiron building a scaffolded
postcard. On 12th street it needs more assurance than
I yet have to pass the guards without blinking. A
blonde in black with no trace of Red Indian. Outside
the downtown skyline against a pretty Sunday,
nineteenth century Wall Street, halted docks and stern
ministers, Henry Fonda joining the trek to church out
in the civilized West. 6 hours later I hear a new
definition of the function of criticism: to remind you
of how good books are. Don’t laugh, I could buy that
one. Leigh’s pal walks me home in afternoon light,
marvelling at sudden skyscraper visions: marvelling
even though it’s not new to him, 20 years ago he would
fly to and from his Brooklyn girlfriend. He likes the
locals’ pride in their city and the naiveté he finds
in the acronyms: SoHo, TriBeCa, so simple. A kind
soul, he says he’ll come by with a sleeping pill; I
never see him again.
 
Sleep won’t come, the day’s still light, so out at 5
uptown on 5th, passing bars and pubs and wondering
about them, wondering why they feel more occulted
here, not advertising themselves to me. Perhaps it’s
the thoughts tristes of solitude, the lack of anyone
to discuss or seek them with. The Empire State lit red
white and blue at its top, the steps of the Public
Library that’s just closing near six, where Peter
Venkman seemed about to start to sing in Ghostbusters.
The midtown city is fading and beautiful, mobile and
lonely, tantalizing and memorable. At the Hotel
Freddie Francis I call Sugar Loaf, talk to a father.
His daughter calls me back out of the black on the
K-mart bill and we rate the imaginary museums. Down
the street I seek the right price for a bite, ask a
gay fellow in Pinch for a pizza: first unnerving thing
he does is ask my name. - So you want 7 inches, huh?
It looks slim to me, tasteable enough but not quite my
idea of $9. Under the stilled television, by the high
window, the Brooklyn lager label’s artful symmetry is
beautiful. I have brung three LRBs, which proves
optimistic (I never get through the cellophane of more
than one) or pessimistic (this is New York – it’s too
important to be spending your time reading the LRB).
‘Unfortunately, Will In The World is very much not
that book’: odd mix of negation and emphasis for a
closing line. I pick up the book of the week, read
something like

They circled under the on-ramp to find stone stairs up
into the sunlight of the bridge’s walkway, then
started across, over the river, traffic howling in
cages at their feet, the gray clotted sky clinging to
the bridge’s veins, Manhattan’s dinosaur spine
rotating into view as they mounted the great curve
above the river.

Line by line you can tick and nod your way through a
book, even one as overlong and partially rebarbative
as this; but looking back out of order, I wonder how a
writer finds so many fresh phrases, so many different
ways in one book to say ‘Manhattan’s dinosaur spine’
(which is fine, to start with), and notice the buried
echo of ‘The Great Curve’.

Blue light on the clock fades out, waking time
civilized by one hour, just another Manhattan Monday
below, unpromising skies above. In the Mezzanine a
shaven fellow who never visibly sits tells me I can
return for a refill: when I do he congratulates me.
- That’s good, taking advantage.
Always the cool music playing here, not even quiet
enough to be background. We talk about location, the
quiet centre. Murray Hill: yes, a hill; mostly they
were razed when they settled Manhattan. Algonquin,
Manna-Hata: Island of the Hills.

Downtown in the rain on the arrayed, at the foot of
Madison Avenue I walk into Wendy’s, no luxury spot,
and buy a combo meal whose price shoots from $5.99 to
‘biggie’ (?) 50c extra to taxed $7.04, jeez, bargains
always vanish into air. I eat upstairs, scribbling on
Hotel Donald Regan paper my introduction, while a
plump Plutonian in the corner sings along with the bad
music, a live recording of an old ballad. That’s what
I get for trying Wendy’s. Wild ride around the
corporate halls, watching and listening to the
enforced greetings. In their rows of desked seats the
kids gather: contra yesterday’s rumour they’re not all
armed with laptops. Sarcastic mode of the US professor
addressing the unruly class, wondering out loud how
long the assessment should be – 3k? 5k? – asking one
of his former students, the last person to ask. On
12th street hours later the rain is lashing
carelessly. Over one beer after another I talk to a
high roller, have to admit that I don’t like HobNobs,
Snow Patrol, Garden State, don’t remind me. A voice
twelve years dated says Queer is the new way in: there
aren’t two sexes, there are thousands. I can’t think
what they’re called.





		
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