We were drinking black and tans in a bar beneath the J Train
tracks in Williamsburg.
‘It’s a good launch-pad for the airport,’ said the barmaid.
‘And it involves alcohol,’ I said. ‘What can go wrong?’ I checked my watch and ordered a third round.
It wasn’t drunkenness, though, that caused to miss my
homeward flight but, rather, a compound of misfortune that is funny enough to recount now in retrospect but
had me sweaty and tense and very angry at the time.
First of all, the Air-Train wasn’t running. It had been
running when I arrived, four days previously but it certainly wasn’t now, when
I stepped off just short of Jamaica
dragging my suitcase behind me. Very
eventually a replacement shuttle bus arrived but the clock was already ticking.
Secondly, and most profoundly, my print-out from the
airline’s website had clearly and unambiguously stated that my flight would
depart from JFK’s Terminal 2. It was
more than unfortunate, then, that after I had lugged my case off onto the
sidewalk and dragged it up a ramp, and the bus had pulled away and an
indeterminate piece of metal that held the case and its wheels together had
dropped clattering away, that Terminal 2 turned out to be altogether too empty
with no passengers and barely any staff.
I managed to attract the attention of the woman on the Hertz desk away
from her ‘phone long enough for her to gesture at the prominent sign that I had
passed by in a fluster which announced that Terminal 2 had closed some two hours
previously and which redirected misbegotten souls, such as myself, off to
Terminal 3. And the clock had ticked
some more.
Down ramps, up ramps, descending in an elevator, dragging
the disintegrating case behind me – another piece fell off – the clock ticked inexorably on as I began to
lose my cool in the dark concrete labyrinth.
Thirdly, and most comically, the check-in desks in Terminal
3, when I eventually arrived there, sweating heavily by now, were distinctly
undermanned and the queue before them was almost entirely composed of large
family groups of Hasidic Jews. If I’d been in a slightly better mood at this
point, and in considerably less need of the rest room as those black and tans
took their toll, I might’ve imagined myself to be immersed in a early-mid period
Woody Allen movie. There was a lot of
shouting going on. There were children
and cases galore. There was a great deal
of confusion. The airline staff were
worrying about from one desk to another and back again, conferring over great
handfuls of passports and finally, just as I reached the front of the queue,
the clock ticked time and the seemingly sensible hour that I had allowed myself
between subway and desk had run right out.
Too late they said.
It was too late to check my case in and nearly too late by now for the
rest room. I challenged, I queried, I
pleaded, I excused myself for five blissful minutes, and came back and pointed
out the very salient point about my misdirection to Terminal 2. It could have been much worse and I might’ve
struck a more obdurate person than Teri. She grudgingly admitted that the
balance of the fault was more upon the airline’s side than upon mine, booked me
onto another flight for the following evening, and loaded me up with vouchers
for food at the airport and for cabs back into Brooklyn again there and then
and out to the airport again the next day.
I stepped outside for a cigarette and called X. ‘I’ve got a bit of a surprise for you.’
----
It really exists America. Manhattan
is really there. Like Arthur Dent of
immortal memory I had always somehow doubted it, but there it was in its
immensity as X and I stood upon the slip of a beach beside the East River in the lowering dusk of the evening that I
arrived.
It had become one of those embarrassing, almost shameful, admissions,
like not ever having owned a Radiohead album, which provokes
near-incomprehension in the metropolitan mind.
‘You’ve never been to New York?’ I had never
been to anywhere in the Americas,
North or South, mainland or islands.
There were various reasons for this, mostly financial. So it was mainly through the good offices of
Facebook and the fact that I had got back in touch with X, who I had last drunk
together with some twenty years before, his consequent kind offer of a berth
in Brooklyn and the suggestion that I should spend the money thus saved in
hotel bills upon ‘cultural enlightenment and ale’ that caused me to bite the
bullet and book myself some flights.
America,
of course, and New York, and most especially Manhattan, in particular,
is part of the cultural patrimony of everyone upon the planet, be it through
TV, or films, or books, or music. Rather
more prosaically, I had been more than usually engaged with things NYC recently
on account of a making my enjoyable way through a backlog of New Yorkers. A friend of mine, who lives just along the
road, has been a subscriber for a year or more.
His wife has belatedly begun upon the backlog and, as she finished them,
batch by batch, their little boy has been happily playing postman by putting
them through my letterbox. There is a
great deal to be said for this, for absorbing the sense and the feel of a
magazine in this way, and it’s not so very different from watching TV shows via
the DVD box-set, a disc of three or four or five episodes at a sitting. I had only ever picked up odd copies of the
New Yorker before, very occasionally and not often enough to garner a real
impression of it as the institution that it is. And I have to say that I am
now, as the backlog begins to diminish and the political stories in the Talk of
the Town begin to creep ever closer to the current, rather hooked upon it, and
must, in some small way, have been absorbing an NYC sense of the world.
Having never been before, of course, a good deal of what I
did in my few days there was touristic tick-boxing. Thoroughly enjoyable but tick-boxing
nonetheless, of the sort that one does anywhere so as to be able to prove to
yourself and to others that you were indeed really there. So, put briefly, there was the Staten Island
Ferry, a self-consciously ghoulish glance over Grand Zero, the New York Public
Library, Grand Central Station, The Top of the Rock, MoMA and the
Guggenheim.
But it was the little things too. Being on those streets: 34th and
42nd, Broadway and The Bowery, 5th Avenue and Bleeker
Street, with the cabs and the cops and riding the subway uptown and downtown
and walking past The Zimm’s old place on McDougal Street and resisting the urge
to go have a rummage through the bins.
And the music. The guy with the grand piano playing Gershwin
in Washington Square,
the student jazz musicians who turned up one by one as the ensemble expanded
from drum and bass to sax and trumpet and guitar, and the trio of North
Carolinian musicians in Central Park.
And the bars - lots
of bars - in Manhattan and in Brooklyn too, ambling around them with X,
chatting to people, who were all far more polite and friendly than the average
for London, and sampling the brews. I
knew there was a proper brewing scene in America but I was very pleasantly
surprised at the offering of IPAs and Stouts and whatnot everywhere we
went.
As I made my way about that wonderful city I was working my
through the chapters of a fantastic book.
X was at work a lot during the day so I flying solo for much of my sightseeing
which didn’t bother me overmuch: I never got really lost and there’s no sense
in dragging someone around the sights that they has already seen a dozen or
more times. But in such circumstances I
like to have something more about me in the way of reading material than just a
guide-book, if nothing else because a guide-book marks you so starkly out as a
tourist. So it was fortunate that a
while before I made the trip a friend had recommended me to read Up in the Old Hotel – a collection of
pieces, mostly for the New Yorker, by Joseph Mitchell. I began upon the book on the way over across
the Atlantic and then carried around with me in my man-bag on my daytime excursions
about the city, taking it out at pauses in parks and cafes and bars, savouring
not just the taste of the city of half a century of more ago but also the pitch-perfect
style, as Mitchell roves about the Bowery and the Fulton Street Fish Market
profiling itinerants, preachers, dreamers and lost city ramblers, imposters,
freaks and Gypsy kings. Bits and pieces
are scattered across the web. The full
text of the piece that gives the collection its title is here.
Every now and then,
seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go
down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a
walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New
Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the
East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands
in the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of
finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and
half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the
fish-mongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness
always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I wander
among the stands for an hour or so.
Most fascinating of all are the profiles of Joe Gould,
Professor Seagull, the man who, in a megalomaniacal fantasy which he held to
for year upon year, claimed to be writing a 9 million word Oral History of the
World in scrappy notebooks while bumming his way around the Village soliciting “contributions”. Mitchell duly fell for it and his 1942
profile of Gould elevated the holy fool to minor celebrity status such that tourists
would look him up and literary New Yorkers like e.e. Cummings were always ready
with a few bucks. Gould died in 1957 and
it wasn’t until 1964 that Mitchell, in another piece, revealed how he had suspected
and then become certain that, a few fragments apart, each of them endlessly rewritten,
the magnum opus simply did not exist, had never existed beyond Gould’s
imagination and bravado.
You couldn’t make the rest of it up. After this this piece on Gould and his
non-existent masterpiece, Mitchell duly went along to the New Yorker office
every day for the next thirty years, and although people heard the clatter of typewriter
keys behind his office door, he never again produced anything of substance in
one of the ultimate, most frightening, cases of writers’ block.
----
Although it felt as if I were taking French leave – I had to
text the office and inform them of the delay and could well imagine the
sarcastic comments at the misfortune of being stranded in New York – that final unexpected day proved
a very pleasant bonus. X took the day off
work and we rode the subway down to Coney Island. The beaches were empty, what with it being a
Tuesday, and the sun was beating down in an 86 degree heat from a near
cloudless sky and you could have imagined yourself to be on a Caribbean
shore. We bought beer and fish and chips
from Nathan’s and sat in the shade looking across the bay to Far Rockaway
before wandering along the boardwalk, past the shuttered stalls, down to Brighton
Beach for more beer in the company of the local Russians. This time, however, I called it a draw with plenty of time to spare.
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