About recent delays: many unforeseen situations have made themselves seen. More than 1 of 'em has involved travel, so 'tho I am ass deep in an ongoing narrative RE: a trip to Hawaii, (& have been, for as long as I can remember,) I felt you might wanna know about a trip I took to NYC last month. For some reason. Truth be told, I suspect you have better things to do, but feel sorry for me. So you will read this. And since I have no pride or life, I'll accept you kindness. Here goes...
Fuck New York.
Yeah, I said it. You taxi-fuckin', narcissistic pantywaists. Your baseball team is the Yankees! (Oh yeah--and the Mets! How could I’ve forgotten the Mets?!) Almost every year, they ruin baseball w/ their untouchable financial supremacy. Hasn’t been workin’ for ‘em the last year or 2, but the way they’re throwing money around right now, the odds are pretty good that they’ll pull something together this year.
And your mythical, much-loved gestalt? New York, I’m less than impressed—in fact I’m kinda disappointed. What happened to filth? You’re far too clean to be sexy. It’s way too easy to find my way along your streets. Your people are too polite—mostly. Remember when you used to be cool? Me neither.
And I know what you're gonna say, but I am not bitter, as I sit here in Chicago, writing this. 'Sides, I was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, which is the single coolest city that ever existed on the face of the earth. Yes, that includes Nineveh. (I know you've all heard that Babylonian cities were the best, but like that just ain't so. Ask my Babylonian friend, Pukidu.) And yes, that also includes cities constructed by malevolent non-human beings that ruled this earth when Adam n' Eve were just a sparkle in god's eye, and when in fact, He was just a sparkle in the eye of the Absolute. Even those
cities—hideous, many-angled megalopolises, like sunken R'lyeh, for example, where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.
OK, but so I live in Chicago, so you’re gonna say I’m jealous, and New York, how can I argue w/ you? How can I be sure you are wrong? The mind has a tendency to withhold some things from our consciousness, as a defense mechanism. Still, I must say, I certainly don’t feel jealous—especially after my recent saunter through yr. bloated, weakly blopping heart. Arguments are useless. I’ll just tell you about my recent visit to NYC, in hopes of illustrating what a bland fruit the Big Apple really is…
Friday. The 13th. Figures. These things always start the same way.
I was up early for once. Well, actually I’m up early fairly often, usually when I’m trying to rebuild whatever pieces of my life the previous night has destroyed. In this case, it could’ve been worse. My personal identity was largely integrated, and my cerebral system was maintaining cohesion. For better or worse, I could remember who I was and exactly how I’d arrived here, at home. Emotionally, I was remorseful and depressed by my tendency to fall into the same idiotic traps I always lay for myself, but then, that’s life, right? My fettle was mostly unmarred as well. I had a slight hangover, but had not barfed. That’s the important thing.
Unfortunately, someone else had barfed. Right outside the bathroom. The human struggle: sometimes you make it to the bowl, and sometimes you don’t. Despite a heroic effort, whoever this person was hadn’t quite made it—instead spilling the remnants of something w/ noodles in it onto my hallway floor. Maybe it had been Chinese food.
Without much zeal, I found myself mopping the floor. And that’s when the call came.
Without much zeal, I said hello. It was Beloved Female Acquaintance.
“Hey, wanna go to New York?”
“Why the fuck would I wanna go to New York?”
I like baseball, but could give a rat’s ass about Yankee Stadium, even if it were still open. And CBGB was also shut down, which is prob. just as well. Who needs a Punk Rock n’ Roll McDonald’s?
“Because I’m buying?’
I hate when somebody says something like that as though it were a question.
“What are you buying? Food?”
She said uh huh. Plus drinks. Plus a room. Plus any other reasonable expenses. And I asked her how she was gonna afford all that? She’s a dog walker.
“I found you a job there.”
“I already have a job.”
She sputtered wordlessly, like a gas station air hose. “I mean, I got you a case.”
“Oh. So what’re you, like, soliciting now?”
“Fuck you! You wish.”
“No, I mean, like, are you soliciting for me?”
“You’re a prostitute?”
And I took my phone and whacked it against my head until blood started rolling into my eyes.
And she said, “What was that?”
“See,” I said, “sometimes ‘soliciting’ can refer to business that doesn’t involve prostitution.”
“Really? Oh.”
She has a bachelor’s degree in creative anthropology from Oxford University.
So then she explained that she had an uncle in NYC who needed the services of a private investigator. He didn’t want to hire a New Yorker, because they were all too jaded or corrupt to understand his situation. Besides, he needed someone he knew—or someone someone else he knew knew. Or something.
“He wants someone who isn’t a New Yorker. He’s a little paranoid that way,” Beloved Female Acquaintance said. “So it’s easier to take the Blue Line out to O’Hare, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“So where do you want to meet?”
“Wait,” I said, “you’re coming with me?” If I was a mood ring, I woulda been a very dark shade of purple-green.
“I need a vacation.”
Without much zeal, I picked an L station w/ her. I hate traveling w/ other people.
The airport was chaos—but a boring sorta chaos—as it always is. We didn’t get there too early and only had to put up w/ a small amount of bullshit. Beloved Female Acquaintance is relaxed about arriving at the airport on time. It’s one of her more charming traits. She doesn’t live by post-911 adages about arriving several hours before your flight time. Like me, she figures that anything that demands you arrive so far in advance may not be worth doing—not if it’s domestic, anyway.
Still, no matter how late you get there, the airline always seems to have yr. number. The flight was pushed back, and we sat and waited. I listened to my iPod, of course. BFA is not the greatest musical enthusiast in the world. She pulled out a book, but had a bad time w/ it. It’s not always easy to read at the airport.
At some point, she slumped over and drooled on my shoulder. I said it before: I hate traveling w/ other people. It’s even worse when someone puts you in an awkward position like this one. She wouldn’t even tell me what the deal was w/ this uncle. She’d just said something about “business difficulties.” Shit, you’d think she was Italian, or at least Jewish or Irish or Chinese or Russian or some
And did I really know her—I mean, as well as I thought I did? Why was I allowing her to lead me to NYC w/o more information?
I watched them go by: several of those vehicles that look like large golf carts w/ flashing lights. I listened to music. Small children ran around and cried. BFA drooled into my jacket, and I contemplated my situation. I’d made a choice to go along w/ this shit, and for the moment, that’s what I was gonna do.
The flight to NYC was short. The only thing I remember is that when we broke through the clouds, I put on the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
LaGuardia,10 p.m. I’d never flown there and found it to be like every airport in the eastern 1/2 of the U.S. (The airports in the west, for example, feature all sortsa surrealisms, from slot machines to Mormon micro-breweries, and are therefore helluva lot more interesting) Outside the terminal, a cabbie threw himself on us, like they always do when you get too close to the cabs at an airport. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was a excited: a real Jen-U-Ayn New York cabbie! These guys wrote the book on obnoxious urban shuttlery. This was gonna hafta be an experience to remember. Right?
Turns out this guy acted, drove and spoke exactly like every other cabbie I’d ever patronized. About the only difference was that he hadda slight Gotham-ite lilt rolled up in his otherwise mildly Hispanic inflections. Back home, the cabbie’s ergot woulda been more Ditka than Trump. Otherwise, he would’ve been the same dude. At least, that’s how it seemed at first.
There were some other minor provincial differences, but that’s a given. The guy was a Mets fan. We talked baseball for about a New York minute, before it became clear that there were 3 sortsa teams in the major leagues: Red Sox, Yankees, or Mets. He was categorically not interested in the mid-west, the west or the south. His take on the Cubs: “Man, you’ll never get nowhere till you get Sammy Sosa back.”
But if the guy was myopic about baseball, he was downright possessed when it came to NYC facts, figures and other trivia. And that’s where he really differed from the cabbies I’d met elsewhere.
Did you know that the NYC founders visualized everything that stands there today? That they’d designed the streets around sewer systems to come, which themselves were designed around the as-yet-only-envisioned subway tunnels, themselves sculpted around prognosticated-but-yet-to-exist electrical lines, etc. One only wonders what else they foresaw. What, even now, are we temporally anchored beings, w/ scales draping from our eyes down to the earth beneath us, unable to see? Was Central Park devised to fit around future hover-pads where that dude from the Jetsons—the one w/ the white mustache—will repair yr. anti-gravity windshield wipers, before goosing you cruelly w/ his big wrench, till you splurt and/or ooze all over yr. undergarments? Will the now defunct CBGB one day house time machines, from whence you can call up luminaries such as Fred Flintstone and his pet whateverosaurus, Dino, so they can put on a lil’ show fer you—hmm… hmmm… coff coff? But I’m getting off track.
The point is that the guys who set up NYC were not just into urban planning, but black magic as well, apparently, as they scried up more than NY strip steaks. (And Satanic trafficking might explain not just their ability to see into the future, but also why NYC is this big grimy, violent city, or at least that’s how it’s portrayed in the movies.) Or so our cabbie sez, and apparently he and every other NYC cabbie had to take a class, so they can learn all this important esoterica for purposes of promotional dissemination. (Ermf… snicker…) That was his story, anyway, and while he may’ve been delusional, I’m pretty sure he believed his story. Or he was an incredible actor.
But ‘tho he ran his mouth non-stop, and seemed to have the not slightest interest in who we were, he was cool enough. He did give us some quick, wholly unsolicited advice about how to find our way around Manhattan, and he did help us w/ our 2 small bags at the door of the hotel. I gave him a good tip—or rather, I made BFA do so.
The hotel lobby might’ve been bigger than an airplane restroom. Everywhere, there were linoleum floors of a greyish-peach color and smeared glass windows and mirrors. The counter in the lobby was so tall that you could hardly see the clerk slouching, troll-like behind it. Heavy-set with voluminous grey-blonde hair and a ruddy complexion, he wore a yellow dress shirt with suspenders. He was eating a sandwich of unidentifiable extraction, and occasionally he would dab at his chin w/ a napkin.
A TV was airing the news, and some guy in a wool overcoat was leaning on the counter, telling the clerk about how we are at war—no matter what anyone says. The clerk didn’t seem to be paying attention to either the electric or organic narratives. Instead, he was gazing w/ reptilian detachment at nothing in particular.
I waved my hand in an introductory way. The clerk nodded and held up a pink finger. The guy in the overcoat gave us a very quick, suspicious glance. Then he said, “See ya, Jerry.” He hurried out, down a hallway in the back, past some sorta darkened dining room. I never really saw his face
Jerry continued to gaze and chomp. His line of sight might have included the TV. I leaned on the counter and said, “Hey there.”
He nodded.
“We have a room, I guess.”
He set down his sandwich, donned a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses, and turned away from me to tap at an old computer.
“Name.” It wasn’t a question.
I looked at BFA, who was skulking behind the bags.
“Name?” I said.
“Forceman, P.I.”
“Why’dja give ‘em my name?” I said.
“Don’t know,” she said.
“Forceman,” I said to the clerk, and when he looked up from his computer, I saw that his eyeglasses must’ve been very powerful. Behind them, his eyeballs looked like a pair of those sanitary cakes they put in urinals.
“Forceman?” he said.
“Yeah.”
He moved some papers in and out of a stack on the desk. He held a card up at me.
Beneath the printed legend, “GUEST INFORMATION,” were lotsa black lines, whereon I put my name, age, driver’s license number, turn-ons, turn-offs, sexuality, psychoses and home address—and probably some other shit. Who remembers?
I handed the completed card to the clerk. W/o looking up, he passed me a key. When his eyes did meet mine, he said, “You got a trundle bed.”
“What?”
“It rolls out from under the bed. Just reach under there and pull it out.”
“Wait. There aren’t even 2 beds?”
“Yeah. Two. One trundle, and one the other kind.”
I looked at BFA.
“Guess that’s why it was so cheap.”
The clerk belched.
After we’d rolled our bags up by the elevators, BFA said, “Oh yeah! You gotta see the dining room!”
“When did you see it?”
“I didn’t. Really. But I was kinda looking at it from the lobby, while you were signing in.”
“So what’s it look like?”
“I couldn’t really tell. The clerk kept looking at me.” Mentioning Jerry, she made a face like she’d just checked to see if the milk had gone over. “All I could do was crane my neck and try to get a better view. The furniture and decorations looked weird.”
“So let’s take a look.”
“What’re we, just gonna leave our bags here?”
“Sure.”
“But we’re in New York.”
“Fuck New York.”
When we walked back through the lobby, the clerk didn’t even look up. The dining room doors were closed and looked. Through the curtains and the smudged panes of glass, you could see something, but it was hard to say what.
