Unpublished
I knelt at the bank of the Hudson River and plunged my hand in. The icy water refreshed my sweaty palm at first and splashed my hand cold. In the reflection was the grey Poughkeepsie sky in October, the changing autumn leaves and some kind of man with his headphones on and his hand stuck in the water. Systematically the daemons crept up my back and over my shoulders.
“jonny - if you ever come back to New York I’ll be waiting here to kick your fucking ass.”
The cold water began to sting my hand. It started at the fingertips and crawled up to bite my knuckles. Why am I here?
“I overheard these two girls at dinner the other night talking about this poor shmuck they knew who was clearly getting screwed over by his girlfriend. I mean, I didn’t think they were talking about you at first, but they said he moved here from Atlanta and had to leave the state suddenly over Christmas break…”
By the time the freeze coiled around my wrist, it had dulled to a throbbing pain. I could see my fingers were purple through the refraction of the water. What possessed me to fly back to New York?
I’d received an open-ended plane ticket in 2007 after having to break an earlier commitment and I’d just moved to Virginia three months before. I didn’t know anybody anywhere except my brother, who lived and worked in New York City.
I got to the airport in Richmond and parked my car in long-term parking. It took so long to park my car I almost missed my flight and ended up sprinting with my luggage to the terminal. From Richmond you go straight up the East Coast at 35,000 feet and if you’re afraid of flying, you need cash for the drink cart. You fly into either JFK or LaGuardia and they unleash you into the city from there to do to it what you wish.
My phone rang and I jerked my hand out of the water to answer it. The ripples distorted my face, six years older than its last gaze into the Hudson, and my ride said she was waiting for me out front.
When I got off the plane in New York City it took two subway transfers to get to my brother’s office in Soho. On my way I realized I was in New York, the one place on Earth where you can say essentially what you want in public and nobody will pay attention. I turned to a businessman next to me with a big grin on my face and said “I’m riding on the bus.” One more story for the kids back home.
I got off at Canal St. and we set my bag in his office and got lunch at a nearby bar. After we got caught up he went back to his office and I exited his building to trudge around Manhattan.
I found a cigarette in my bag before I left and when I hit the street I saw two girls smoking. “Got a light?” They wouldn’t let them on the plane.
“Just use this,” one girl said to me and held up her cigarette. I grabbed the butt and lit my cigarette and she started screaming. “And you touched the fucking butt?! My God, just keep it for Christ’s sake. Un-fucking-believable.”
“Really,” her friend chimed in with a disappointed shake of her head. “Tourists. Let’s go back inside, Johnna.”
Embarrassed and ousted as a tourist, I bowed my head low and stalked north up the Avenue of the Americas to Prince St. and east to the KidRobot store that followed. I searched the store for small vinyl art toys and do-it-yourself action figures to take home to my wife. I settled on two neon zipper pulls in the shape of straight razors. Fall was upon us, after all.
I zigzagged northeast another few blocks to the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, whose doors would close for good less than two years later. I bought my brother a copy of Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails and left, heading for Union Square Park. Dozens of high school and college students littered the park and I sat and listened to my headphones. Radiohead’s In Rainbows had just released and I played it almost incessantly all month.
“Hey man, you got just a minute?” A boy had approached me while I stared off in the distance at the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan. I paused my music and he started a sales pitch while fiddling with the strings on his red hooded sweatshirt. “So I’m a poet and a beat-boxer and I’d like to play for you my newest creation – the Super Mario Bros. theme song. Maybe it would be worth a dollar to hear?”
“Sure thing.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out some money. “Here, take two.”
“Oh, thank you my brother. Here we go.” The boy started breakdancing and did an impeccable beatbox rendition of the music from the popular video game franchise. He started to draw a crowd and offer other performances for small change. I left him to his audience and made my way back to my brother.
We took the A C subway from Canal St. to Jay and transferred to the F, which we rode to 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, and walked from there. My bag was heavy in my hands by the time we climbed up the stairs to his apartment. I set my bag down and changed clothes and we walked to dinner.
The neighborhood surrounding 5th and 5th in Park Slope, Brooklyn was one of my brother’s main haunts back then and we ate at a South American restaurant called Cocoroco. After we ordered we talked about my move to Virginia from Georgia and he got on me a bit about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. A sax and conga duo played light samba and we applauded them at every opportunity.
“You’re a college grad, bud; you don’t just want to stay in retail forever, do you?”
“Well of course not.” Our ceviche arrived in a hollowed half-coconut with a fried plantain chip sticking out of it like a sail. I broke it in half and gave one piece to my brother. “My writing is coming along alright. I’ve got almost half a book on my computer.”
“What is it?”
I unraveled my silverware from the cloth napkin, placed the napkin in my lap and scooped up a forkful of ceviche. “It’s all creative non-fiction, like that NPR, slice of American life type of shit.”
I took my first bite of ceviche. The tuna and salmon, which had marinated in a blend of citrus and pepper juices for a half day, played symphonies on my tongue.
“Well, good; is that something you want to pursue?”
“Jesus Christ; this is amazing.”
“Yeah; I told you. So are you going to try to write this stuff?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun and I seem to be alright at it. What’s in this sauce?”
“I think it’s lime, orange and maybe a bit of jalapeno or habanero. Finish your book, then what’s the next step? Hey, dinner’s coming.”
My steak was served to me and I wasn’t surprised that it was cooked and seasoned perfectly. I made my case about publishers and blogging and felt more relieved by the minute that we were getting along as well as we were. We made our way back to his apartment after dinner and went to sleep.
The next morning we rode the subway back to Soho together, utilizing the same routes and transfer as we had the way down. I’d made arrangements with an old college buddy to meet upstate on the Hudson and go to A Taste of New York. My brother and I took the F to Jay and transferred to the A C, and while we waited for the doors to close, a man in tattered clothing standing near us started yelling at someone in a seat nearby.
“Yeah, I knew it was you, you no-good raggedy-ass motherfucker,” he said. A cardinal rule of city life is minding your own business, and nobody besides us would even look at him.
“I can’t believe what you done gone and did to me you god-damn Cabbage Patch son of a bitch.” As he went on, my gaze shifted from him to the person he was yelling at and back. We noticed that he wasn’t actually screaming at anyone who was there, but rather an empty space between two people he’d never seen. “I ain’t never gonna forget yo shit, asshole. You think I’m gonna let you live this down? You got another thing comin’, bitch. You fuckin’ ass bitch.”
The doors still hadn’t closed – there was some kind of delay with the subway – and my brother gestured towards the doors with his eyes. Come on; let’s go, they said. “Excuse me, pardon us,” we said, and we slipped past the other passengers and out of the car, back to the platform, to fresher air, and got on the next car.
“Did you hear that guy?” A smirk crept across his face. “What was he saying? ‘You got-damn Cabbage Patch motherfucker!’”
“I think he just said ‘raggedy-ass bitch.’”
“Yeah, but when you or I tell this story later it’ll be ‘Cabbage Patch motherfucker.’”
“Yeah.”
We rode in silence for a minute and burst out laughing.
“You Toucan Sam wannabe punk.”
“You Charles Grodin lyin’ piece of shit.”
“It was funny, the more he talked, the more I looked at him and realized he had plenty of knife wounds on him, and some of them were fresh,” my brother said. “Probably not a guy we should be messing with.”
“Right.”
“Hey, did you hear about the Mad Stabber?”
“No,” I said.
“Well we’re starting to think that like, where the newspapers used to advertise all this great stuff to try to bring tourists, now they just broadcast these crazy stories to keep them away,” he said. “The Mad Stabber is this guy who was locked up in a psych ward in the city, and they eventually let him out.”
“Okay.”
“So he gets off the subway in Soho, walks into a restaurant, grabs a set of silverware and walks out. As soon as he grabs the knife from it, he walks down the street and starts stabbing women in the face with it!
“In the face, jonny.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, and the next day in the papers the headline was like ‘Mad Stabber at It Again!’ like he’s just this wacky local figure.”
“Like the kissing bandit.”
“Exactly! Or did you hear about the guy with the gas-powered hand saws?”
“No.”
“This construction company was doing some work down in the subway tunnel, and they left their tools at the site while they went and got lunch. Among other things, there were these like mini-Jaws of Life circular saws that are handheld and gas-powered.”
“Okay.”
“So some guy, I think he was fresh out of the asylum too, grabs these things, and they’re not plugged into a wall or anything so he takes one in each hand and runs screaming down the subway platform chasing people with them and trying to kill them.”
“You probably shouldn’t tell mom these stories.”
“But it’s not all bad. Did you hear about the Subway Hero?”
“Nope.”
“This guy was with his baby and some other guy had a seizure on the platform and fell onto the tracks with this subway car barreling down on him. So the Subway Hero turns to someone, points at his baby and says ‘Watch the kid’ and just jumps on this guy and pins him down flat. The subway goes over them – doesn’t hit ‘em – and he saves the dude’s life.”
When we got to Canal, my brother handed me a 20. “You need a jacket,” he said.
“Oh come on, it’s not that cold out here.”
“jonny, don’t try to be a hero. C’mon buddy, buy a jacket.”
I walked south and found a street vendor and bought a navy hoodie that said “NEW YORK” in collegiate letters for twenty dollars. I sent a picture of myself in it to my brother, who texted me back and asked what the original price was.
“It was $20; I just paid what was on the ticket.”
“You’re supposed to haggle. Locals negotiate; tourists pay full. You could’ve gotten it for $15.”
I shook my head. I was sick of feeling like a tourist. I took the A C north to Times Square and saw tourists lined up to eat at the Hard Rock Café, the Olive Garden and the McDonald’s. “A hundred cultures’ culinary achievements at your fingertips – maybe for the only time in your life – and you’re going to get a fucking Big Mac?” I asked myself.
I walked to Gray’s Papaya and had two dogs with sauerkraut and Tobasco and a Coke for four dollars. From there it was a short walk to Grand Central and I had a Seven and Seven with a couple from Germany at a bar with mood lighting.
I listened to old Radiohead on the train ride up to Poughkeepsie and watched as the scenery turned from Manhattan to Harlem, eventually thinning out to the suburbs, and beyond that the rural landscapes of lakes, rivers and rocky hills. The train finally rolled into the station at four and I still had an hour until my ride would show up. I walked around the outside and down the hill to Main Street and into Mahoney’s Irish Pub.
Mahoney’s is a 150-year-old house converted to a Pub and Grill. It has a beautiful wooden bar downstairs and I was the first customer of the night. I sat and had two Jamesons with ginger ale and made small talk with the bartender. She was a student at a nearby university and knew the tattoo parlor 20 minutes north at the Rondout in Kingston where I’d gotten my first two tattoos in 2001.
“So why did you have to leave college up here anyway?”
I took a sip of my Jameson. “I got mono about two weeks before the semester started again. My dad and an uncle packed up my dorm for me while I sat wheezing on a chair.”
“Why didn’t you come back?”
“There was a girl up here. She got me into a lot of trouble at school.”
“There’s always a girl.”
I sent a text message to my brother to let him know I was safe upstate and I’d meet him on my way back down. I left the bar around five and walked along the banks of the Hudson. I found a spot and knelt and plunged my hand in.
When my friend called I told her where I was and ran to the nearest street to meet her. She looked terrific; she hadn’t aged a day and I gave her a big hug across the front seat as I climbed into her sedan.
“So where are we going?”
“It’s this food festival thing; they have like 40 or 50 local businesses represented and they give out free food and beer and stuff. We just have to swing by my office first.”
We drove to her office and chatted, and again I was nervous about how we’d get along. We’d had a falling out five years before that was entirely my fault. I shot my mouth off at her about this girl we knew who I’d dated briefly – I was only 19; I didn’t know anything – and we’d only started speaking again a year before I came back to New York.
We got to her office and I was proud of her for doing so well with her newspaper. A ping of jealousy set in and I found myself wishing I’d done something professional with my writing – to date I’d had a short-lived blogger job that she’d gotten me and four semesters on my school paper on my resume. She finished some paperwork while I introduced myself to her co-workers and then we drove south to the event.
Music boomed and lights flashed and we ate free sashimi and barbecue and gourmet chicken for hours. The only free drinks I could find were Mike’s Hard Lemonade and I had two or three while we talked. She photographed local culinary figures and enjoyed a free ten-minute massage and the night became a blur. I leaned in to her ear after a quick photo op and asked if she had a minute.
“Sure thing babe, one second – could you guys move closer together? Perfect!”
Click, flash.
“What’s up?”
“Look…it took me a long time to realize it, but I wanted to apologize for five years ago.”
Click, flash. “Don’t worry about it, jonny; it’s ancient history.”
“Are you sure? I know it was all my fault and I was a real shit; I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, sir, could you hold that tray a little lower? That’s great! Babe, seriously, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I wouldn’t have invited you up here if you weren’t my friend; it’s great to see you again. Did you try the sashimi yet? It’s amazing.”
Before we knew it we were late for the last train back into the city and we had to race to the station. We leapt into the car literally as the doors were closing. We caught our breaths and cooled down. The buzz of the drinks and food, the fear and anxiety of exorcising my New York demons and the serenity of righting some old wrongs were ebbing and flowing through me. I felt terrific.
We brought up the new Radiohead album and I said I had it on my mp3 player. We each took one headphone and listened to it the rest of the way back to Manhattan. “Reckoner” came on and she said “Oh, I love the part where everything drops out but the guitar and the vocals.” We rested our heads near each other’s and listened.
Her boyfriend picked us up from Grand Central and dropped me off in Soho. I took my brother’s A C and F route back to Park Slope and met him at Bar Reis. It was raining – it was always raining – and I ordered another drink. In Bar Reis they play excellent music and there’s an outdoors area in the back. I found my brother there with some friends.
“Hey, jonny; how was your day?”
“Really good; I went to this food tasting party for this newspaper.”
Everyone groaned. “jonny, never tell people who have been working all day that you’ve been hanging out and partying.” I cursed myself again. Stupid tourist, I thought. He introduced me to his friends and we talked for a while. Then we went back to his apartment. I felt sick from the drinks and sheer quantity of raw fish I’d eaten and the night didn’t end well.
The next day I stayed in my brother’s apartment most of the day. I walked around a few blocks and ate a sandwich at a shitty Italian restaurant and went to the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., which is Dave Eggers’ creative writing center for kids. They have a very Adam West Batman style and sell items like Invisibility Powder and Jet Packs and do writing seminars in a secret room in the back.
I drank two liters of water and bought and administered almost $15 in cold medications. I sat in my brother’s apartment and watched Sanford and Son reruns. His roommate got home and asked if I was ok, then he got home and asked the same. I was starting to feel like a human being again and he took me for “a real New York hot dog” before showing me his rooftop, which has the best view of lower Manhattan from Brooklyn that one could hope for.
It was dark and raining and I stood leaning on the roof access door, smoking a cigarette and listening to Electric Ladyland. I stared at the Brooklyn Bridge and as Jimi’s 2nd solo waned and the in-studio audience clapped, a revelation swept over me thicker than the fog and the mist rising from the street.
I just didn’t belong here. There were something like 8 million New Yorkers surrounding me and I really wasn’t one of them. This is not my city, and these are not my people, I thought. I’m a suburbanite. A townie. I’m not a city kid or a cool guy. I’d seen enough hipsters in tight clothes and tourists snapping pictures of the MTV building to know what my natural habitat was, and it wasn’t in one of the five boroughs.
My fourth day in New York my brother had off work and we took the subway to Midtown and walked into the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. I asked to go up through the halls, but if you’re not a staying guest you’re not allowed. I sat and prayed to rouse the ghost of Sid Vicious but had no luck.
Next door was El Quijote Bar and Restaurant, and we went in for brunch. I had something like Eggs Benedict and my brother ate a skillet or an omelet; I don’t remember. We stopped back by Bar Reis one more time that night and on the way home, passed by posters for Legally Blonde: The Musical and Edward Scissorhands: The Musical. We laughed at how bad we imagined them to be.
“Yeah, the funny thing is when you go to lunch afterwards and the actors are there serving you your cheeseburger,” my brother quipped. “Hilarious.”
I packed my bags and got up on my last day. My brother walked me to a popular corner for taxis and on the way we passed a building with Halloween decorations in the lobby. It was obviously low-rent housing, and one could assume it had as high a mortality rate as anywhere, but there was a plastic baby-sized skeleton in a stroller with the words “Help Me” in blood red on its bib.
“Oh, that’s horrible,” we said in unison.
The rain slowed and he flagged down a cab and told him to take me to a subway station that would lead me to my airport. I got on the wrong way in the subway and was halfway back to Manhattan before I realized it. I barely made my plane and flew back to Richmond.
I got back well after dark. It was probably 8 or 9 and the world was dry as a bone. I couldn’t find my car for over an hour and when I went to ask the girl at the ticket booth for help I could clearly see she was crying. She was pretty save for the mascara streaming down her cheeks. I asked if a shuttle were still running and if I could hop onboard for a bit while it made its rounds. She called one to my location and I asked if she was ok. She’d been having some trouble paying her bills, or with her boyfriend, or having her boyfriend help her pay bills, and she acted presentably until the shuttle pulled up and I stepped up into it. As I sat and we pulled away, I saw her erupt into tears again; she wept into closed fists and her shoulders heaved with each sob.
