Escape to New York
I realize that I have fallen into a routine of quiet inertia and hyper familiarity, which can be toxic to writers. For a half decade, I watch as others move and experience life. A creative jailbreak is required, and soon plans are hatched.
Empire State of Confined
I spent half my life trying to get to New York City and the other half trying to escape from it. Manhattan gave me a sense of identity as a writer while the other boroughs have always just been there. I’m fifth generation Brooklyn and have lived in Williamsburg and, like my great grandparents, in Park Slope. I was born in Queens, raised in Long Island and I haven’t returned to either place in decades. Discounting Yankees games and visits to the zoo, I’ve been to the Bronx exactly once. Staten Island, twice, for one grandparent’s funeral and then another’s. And when I say “Manhattan” I really mean the part of Manhattan south of Union Square and north of Wall Street. Aside from a few court appearances and doctor’s appointments or visits with my parents (who live by Lincoln Center), “downtown” is where I have remained. I drink, work, sleep, eat, and ruminate here. One of the things I’ve been ruminating on lately is excessive rumination. The doctor I see says it’s common to artists, but another thing that’s common to artists is bravery and wanderlust and I fear I may have lost both.
Writers must move and record what they see. We must experience the unfamiliar but there are exceptions. In both fiction and non-fiction, I have written about countries I’d never visited; abetted by Google Maps and travel and tourism websites, and my imagination. Of course none of this work could stack up against the material which drew from actually going somewhere. No website will tell you how big the flies are in Melbourne, or that the floor of a certain London heavy metal pub will sometimes flood up to an inch with stale lager and thanks perhaps to the lasting influence of Motorhead, attract punks as well as headbangers. They won’t show any photos of vintage cigarette machines in Berlin bars or the smell of sausage carts on a thoroughfare in Stockholm. They offer no sense of weather, music, or let’s face it, trouble. It’s troubling to travel. It’s easier to fake it and no longer deal with the long lines, turbulence, language barriers, and well the bravery and wanderlust. I’d given it up. It wasn’t out of fear as it was after 9/11 when I did most of my world travel for the music magazine where I was a contributor.
In the months after the attacks, I would often leave for Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle without even a toothbrush. I would buy what I needed in gift shops or at the hotel I was booked into. Now, I prepare and collect but never use a surplus of items designed for safe, practical, and comfortable travel: multicolored regulation mini bottles to fill with shampoo and other liquids, a deluxe pill organizer to fill with aspirin, allergy medication, Prilosec, Xanax, and other daily meds. I have a sleep mask and earplugs, an inflatable neck pillow, durable nylon shoe bags, a universal world charger and surge protector for my computer, a speaker the size of a tennis ball for hotel room dancing, and a packet of personal wipes the size of a dental floss dispenser which allows me to arrive fresh anywhere I choose to arrive. I’ve even purchased copies of The Fearless Flyer’s Handbook and Flying Without Fear (with a forward by Sir Richard Branson) because in five years a person can forget that turbulence is nothing more than a wave in the air like a wave in the ocean.
Maybe I got lazy and timid and survivor-guilty in middle age? I grew tired? If you live fast for two decades, it’s logical that you will grow older and slower more rapidly than most will (if you don’t burn out). It’s natural, and my fade-away would be fine, if I was retired. I have not stopped being, or considering myself a working writer; worse, now, a freelancer who has to hustle every job. Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the ‘90s was published this year and exposed just about every spare experience, anecdote, dirty joke, and conclusive theory or confession that I’d collected in 40 years of not dying. Poseur emptied the tank.
Meanwhile, those close to me who didn’t share my affliction were trucking. Me ex-girlfriend’s career was taking off and she was traveling constantly. We share two hounds, and the custody situation is amicable and functional but I found myself tending to them more and more while she experienced South America, the British countryside, and Morocco. She’d bring me gifts and I’d hand over two very well cared for dogs who had no problem covering the same few miles every day since there was another dog’s pee keeping things interesting. A friend I’d worked on books with ventured to Egypt just before the mass protests in Tahrir Square. Even my agent, who is my father’s age, took the Trans-Siberian Railway from China to Russia.
It had been five years since I last saw anything foreign to me. After five years, a sitcom is eligible for syndication. Sometimes a careless motorist who kills another driver or pedestrian in a drunk driving accident receives a punishment of less than five years in jail with the implication that it’s a substantial amount of time to reflect on one’s crime. Five years ago, George W. Bush was still the President of the United States. Some bands I’d covered as a music journalist had broken up and were already entertaining lucrative offers to reunite in the span of five years. The Olympics had turned over; and the World Cup. Jerry, one of our dogs I mentioned, was a puppy five years ago. Now he was fully grown and his muzzle is showing flecks of white.
I began to feel closer to the city; almost like a caretaker or a babysitter as others came and went. I noticed and picked up those disposable flossing sticks that suddenly seemed to be lodged into pavement cracks on every block. Who flosses their teeth and throws the instrument on the ground like a cigarette butt? When did this become acceptable? I’d throw them in the trash, my hand protected by a biodegradable dog poop bag. When the first Citi Bike racks were fastened into the curb, before the bikes themselves were even delivered, I felt the subtle change and a sense of pride. Sometimes, while picking these nits from the sidewalk, I’d see another New Yorker, mostly older women, or men with crazy eyes, and they’d nod at me, and I’d realize that they weren’t going anywhere either.
There’s a scene in the famous Louis Malle film My Dinner With Andre, where Andre Gregory’s eccentric actor/director “Andre” is talking to Wallace Shawn’s calmer, bemused playwright “Wally” about the time he consulted with an 84 year old British “tree expert” who told him, “New Yorkers keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do. I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built, they’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.” And then Andre went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said: “This is a pine tree.” He put it in Wally’s hand and he said: “Escape, before it’s too late.”
Many of my friends moved to Brooklyn, initially because the rent was cheaper, and then, the more successful writers and editors bought homes out there and started families but I never visited. One of the more famous of these writers heard and repeated a rumor that I’d moved to Paris. I did not confirm or deny this rumor as I liked the idea of being somewhere without having to actually go there. It’s all about perception anyway. If they wanted to believe I was in Harry’s Bar, carousing like Hemingway instead of puttering around the cobblestones in the West Village picking up trash and listening to NPR on my headphones, fucking great! But with each birthday, I wondered if I was doomed to rust; to witness change but never cause any. And change continued every day, little by little, the world passing me by and my writing getting worse and worse.
“I think one of the reasons I live in New York is because I know my way around New York,” Lou Reed muses in the Wayne Wang film Blue in the Face. It’s a great monologue; delivered in his tough, adenoidal “Noo Yawk,” drawl. “I don’t know my way around Paris… I don’t know my way around Denver… I don’t know my way around Maui… I don’t know my way around Toronto. It’s almost by default.” Lou lived on my block until his death in October of this year. I’d see him walk his little dog, and sometimes ride his bike or hold hands with his wife Laurie Anderson. Sometimes, for long stretches, I didn’t see him at all and suspected he was on tour; out there somewhere. A well known actress lives across the street. Sometimes I’d see a black Town Car or SUV idling in front of her townhouse and I’d say to myself, “Well, she’s going off somewhere.” They’d make art, Lou and this actress. They’d come home refreshed. I missed that feeling; of coming home, but mostly I missed that sense of escape. Television is better in hotels. Music is better in rental cars. “Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull or “Bad Case of Loving You” by Robert Palmer can sound like the best thing you’ve ever heard under the right circumstance abroad. Would that circumstance ever come again or would all radio, would everything else, be terminally local? What was behind this need to never again be surprised, giddy, or lost on a corner under the stars with no idea where the hotel was and how much money I had in my pocket.
In March, a circumstance did arise in the form of an offer to do a couple of readings from my memoir on the West Coast. When I told my ex that I was leaving, I sheepishly inquired how to get to the airport. In five years, I’d completely forgotten. She told me, with the kind of patience she’d long developed in handling me that there was an AirTrain now.
“An AirTrain?”
An AirTrain. I wanted on it. Or in it. I wanted out.
The West is the Best?
I was out of the apartment, out of the city, and finally in motion, but the speed wasn’t there yet. My brain wasn’t working as I needed it to and there was no way I could begin collecting any experiences to write something good. Maybe I just needed a lot of strong coffee after all the medication I took to avoid going Brian Wilson on the flight over.
“How do I order that again?”
I was taking baby steps around the Pearl District in Portland, Oregon. I wasn’t lost. In fact, I was already in the lobby of my hotel, the comfortingly twee Ace.
“Coffee is the same everywhere, Spitz,” I said to myself and steadied my nerves. “It comes in a cup, with a splash of milk and a few sugars. You know how you take it. Don’t be a pussy.” The people who travel regularly; the ones who know what to do with themselves once they land, intimidated me. I seemed to be surrounded by them here. People were easy to avoid in New York, or acknowledge with a fast nod, but now I needed things from strangers; directions, coffee, maybe a muffin.
“Regular coffee,” I ordered.
“Regular? What does that mean?” she seemed to say and quickly moved on to another customer. She was beautiful. Everyone here was slim, with clean hair. I felt like an oily otter. When people don’t want to deal with you, they give you a little more time and hope you’ll vanish.
“I’m sorry. What do you want?”
Was coffee still regular? In every bodega in New York City, “regular” meant the same thing. Three sugars, milk, and some watery brown liquid swirled together to taste like home. In Portland, there was no “regular” anything. That seemed to be the whole point of places like the Ace. A voice in my head was saying, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Stumptown.”
“Do you want an Americano?” she finally asked when there were no more customers. I nodded rapidly as she handed me a paper cup and pointed to a pot. I used to be cool. I hung out in Paris with Franz Ferdinand. The Hives took me around Stockholm. Trent Reznor showed me his studio in New Orleans. Ryan Adams too. I’ve met Bowie, Iggy and Lou. The cool me would have asked for her number.
The coffee calmed the riot in my brain. “Everyone has their customs and mine are no longer dominant. Not for a few days. Now while I am here. Where here is. Oregon. But in return, you can write about being in Oregon. You have material.” Even getting coffee was now material or was it just a fucking drag.
There was a stack of kitsch vinyl in my room, and a turntable where the clock radio usually sat in hotels. Glenn Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy was facing out. I own that record but I still thought about stealing it. We used to steal towels and robes.
After a cold shower and a change of clothes, I met an old friend from my Spin days in the hotel bar. She was now living in Portland with her family but at one time we drank a lot at Max Fish and I borrowed a hair dye-stained Smiths t-shirt from her and never returned it. At one time she was really into Shed Seven so I assumed she’s changed a lot too; but hoping not too much. It’s no big deal to reconnect with friends on trips and have them host you a little, but I’m sure I prearranged to have her at the hotel no later than an hour after my arrival. I needed a triple shot of familiarity like an inoculation against the unknown; anything strange or liberating or compelling. She looked the same, which was comforting. It was lovely to see her, but too easy, so I drank and felt guilty.
The following morning I walked around in the chill and drizzle. It reminded me of Brooklyn in the late 80s/early 90s when only the pioneer artists lived there among the old families. That’s another thing I do when I travel. I look for things that are New York-like. I like San Francisco, London, any city that has streets that could be the East Village through a squint. The pace of some Portlanders certainly was constipated. Here were the puzzling koala people, in no hurry to get anywhere; like grey pony tails come to life or R. Crumb drawings made flesh. They lulled in dark pizza parlors and listened to Low and Come and Sebadoh and Lee and Nancy. They bought and sold vintage toys and used books. Powell’s, where I read that night, had plenty of my own used books and I felt proud. Some of them were obscure by that point; especially my second novel, but there it was on sale, probably thanks to one of these koala bear men. It was a good reading but sparsely attended. At my next reading, in LA, the manager assured me that even if you are a major star, nobody comes out.
“We had Clive Davis here and you had more than him,” he whispered. Cool. But Clive Davis still has more money. He’s in the Hall of Fame. The only writer in the Hall of Fame that I know of is Jann Wenner. Wenner was nice to me once in an email. Davis had me thrown out of one of his pre-Grammy parties for harassing talented musicians and cultural icons for my Spin column so fuck him even if he did sign Sly. I was proud I was a bigger drawn than Mr. Davis. He also signed Aerosmith but I enthralled twelve Oregonians with my own tales of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
On my final day in Portland, I drove around with Connor, my friend and partner in web endeavors and occasionally, mayhem, looking for places where the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith lived and made music with his band Heatmiser and early on in his solo career. This was before his move to New York, before he was nominated for an Oscar, and before he moved to Los Angeles and left a suicide note on a Post-it and became a legend just like Jeff Buckley, and Nick Drake, and Clive Davis.
My old Spin friend insisted that we visit Voodoo Doughnut and we obliged but it just seemed sad and touristy in the wrong way. The people lining up reminded me of the gals who wait outside Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street and pose for photos outside what was supposed to be Carrie Bradshaw’s brownstone. They were a nuisance, those gals, but as I looked out at Portland and saw how excited my friend was to have his GPS guide him through Elliott’s Portland, I wished I could feel that same tourist ardor and rush and sleep in my own bed at night. Was there a way to have both?
I flew to Los Angeles the next day to do another reading from Poseur, this time at the famous Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard. I stayed with yet another old Spin friend (seeking more concentrated shots of sameness). She lived pretty far from Hollywood but that’s where I was headed and once there, I hit a dozen or so familiar spots in and around the old shit show where I lived and didn’t work and did drugs and chased movies stars. Memories. Why was I chasing them when I should have (forgive me Bon Jovi, or forgive Bon Jovi) been making them? For all the debauchery and failure, there is a permanent place in my heart for LA. I know the low sun and the smell and the cactus that line the sidewalks. I know the feeling in my ankles from walking its inclines, Greenberg style. I know the sadness and the parking and foodie culture. I know the murder myths and how uneasy they make me when I’m in Laurel Canyon with no light.
Even familiar faces came to the reading, also sparsely attended; an ex-manager, a few old friends. I wondered if the person reading there the next day would hear, “Marc Spitz only got 12 people. Spitz. No, not the swimmer. The rock wr… forget it.”
“This city is everything,” Joan tells her neurotic friend on Mad Men and the high you get when you land in New York makes the idea of leaving for anything seem silly. I cracked my problem of inertia and I knew that I would feel giddy just to have New York feel new again for the night (maybe a full day) but eventually I’d feel stuck and suddenly you’re in act one of Finding Forrester but there’s no earnest African American kid to save you.
Nobody was coming to rescue me or inspire me, I could be my own earnest African American kid. I had money from a book sale so one night, on impulse, I purchased tickets to the top of the Empire State Building. I see it every day when I walk my dogs, looming to the north east, with the Statue of Liberty in the harbor in the south west and me stuck between the both of them. I didn’t have to go to Jamaica or pull an Andre Gregory cosmic mind-fuck fest. I just needed to King Kong it one night. The feeling was wild so I kept going. Buying tickets for the places I’d never gone that were here all along. The feeling was wild. With a few clicks, I would see Ellis Island, where my great, great grandparents alighted from Lithuania. Trinity Church has been there forever waiting for me, I’d go there too. I’d venture out from my local to tourist bars like McSorley’s, the White Horse, and the Russian Tea Room. I’d even cross over to Staten Island. Never been on the ferry.
Could I be a tourist? Did I know too much? Did I hate tourists too passionately? Was this folly or my true way out; as anywhere else I went in the world, I was sure of it, I would look for New York. The only true place to free myself from this tick.
The Whisper Corner
What is a tourist and when can one classify oneself as such? Is it as simple as planning and taking a trip, or can a person become a tourist while trying out a new local restaurant or bar? Are there, in that case, sexual tourists? Musical tourists? Does one need a guide to lead you to officially be touring?
Maybe it’s impossible; for a New Yorker anyway. Our instincts are too hard-wired to be knowing. I worry that I can only truly experience or participate in tourism (which is different than travel) by returning my brain to its factory settings. Not that I’m such a fucking genius, but as anyone who has read my memoir knows, I’ve spent the last quarter century trying really hard to be “down by law.” How does one become less “down by law?” Is there a pill? My teenage compulsion to travel was so that I could know things my suburban classmates didn’t, which lead me to the city in the first place. Now being a New Yorker feels like being the Tin Man when we first meet him. I need the oil can. Which is right there. But I won’t even reach for it. Why?
Well, the relationship between the “real” New Yorker and the tourist is tricky. Most tourists come here because they are smarter than us and love culture, possibly more than we do. Very few of them actually wave at the camera on the TODAY show or lunch at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company or whatever the fuck Guy Fieri’s place is called in Times Square; they see plays and go to galleries and see good bands. All the things that I don’t do anymore largely because I have lapsed into a jaded place where I am convinced there’s nothing left to see. If anything, the tourist is now hipper than me; who three dozen times, saw his name in print preceded by the word “hipster.” I have said (in my head) “Look at those idiots… going into the museum… to learn things.”
New Yorkers rely on tourists and this is another reason why we often shun them. All cities need them. “Tourists are money!,” Johnny Rotten sang on “God Save the Queen.”
Murray Head didn’t like ‘em when they were all over Bangkok that one night: “Get Thai’d! You’re talking to a tourist whose every move’s among the purest.” Murray got his kicks above the waistline, sunshine.
At home, I didn’t feel like a tourist, as Gang of Four once sang, and that was the problem. I was too uptight. “Bridge and Tunnel,” that horrible term to describe people who hailed from the towns where I grew up. I used to live in fear of being labeled “Bridge and Tunnel” and even now at 43, as a “downtown artist,” this concern swells back up as I attempt to mingle with the visitors and have a bit of their fun and frenzy in this town.
“Hey man,” Thom Yorke sings, “Slow down. Idiot… slow down.” Okay.
I remind myself that I’ve always been helpful to tourists, giving directions and smiles. I have dogs so I get stopped a lot. The question I used to get asked the most was, “How do you get to Ground Zero?” Now, it’s “How do you get to the High Line?” I’ve seen the city from the High Line and it is congested with tourists, still if you simply pause and breathe you just can’t hate them. Or rather you shouldn’t hate them simply because you don’t understand why everybody doesn’t live in New York City (when they clearly should).
I decided the first tourist site I would visit would be the Empire State Building. I see it every day to the north west from where I walk my dogs but I’ve never been up top. What it lacks in strangeness it makes up for in the potential of sheer horror (I have a choking fear of heights). When you are in the elevator, heading for the first observation deck on the 86th floor, your ears will pop but the ride is fast and smooth. By the time I think I should be scared, I am already there and off the car, it’s simply too beautiful to be scared at all. The beauty melts away every other emotion and just drugs me. It’s a 360 degree view of the island with so many lights in so many different colors that invade the eye and makes you dizzy. The rivers, frigid and deadly in the winter, look like calm slabs of perfect nothingness. It’s the void.
Some think a tourist is someone who seeks out bargains or cupcakes, diversion and not meaning, but perhaps a tourist is someone who also seeks out beauty. Kong was drawn to the Empire State Building and later the Twin Towers because it reminded him of home. I am here to forget home and I guess I knew I could. It’s not like I happened onto this view. The ticket up is not cheap but shivering and staring out at the city (now from the glassed in 102nd floor) I realize too that the hyper-familiar can take my breath away. You just have to see it their way; you have to stop and look closely, very closely.
Every night I see the sun go down over the Hudson. In the summer it’s purple and orange; popsicle colors. In the winter a deep, beguiling blue, and I just shrug. If anything, viewing something similarly beautiful that I had to go out of my way to see, has helped me. Sam Waterson in Hannah and Her Sisters takes Carrie Fisher and Diane Weist on a tour of his favorite buildings and does not seem to be bored with any of them. But then he always seemed to be more of a solid guy than I could ever hope to be. I’m not saying the trick is to be like Sam Waterson (the trick is to be like Sam Elliott… all the time) but simply to appreciate beauty without fear of turning to corn.
Forget the fact that the once living tree that they are all celebrating is dead, or dying, I decided a few days later that I would attend the lighting of The Tree at Rockefeller Center. Instinct told me that I should have gotten there hours if not a full day earlier but I was still giddy from my semi-transformation into a New York tourist. By the time I got to the rink, where I skated as a child, it was too late. People were being turned away and the cops guarding the barricades could not be reasoned with.
“You ever go clubbing?,” one with a thick mustache asked me.
“Imagine the worst nightclub you’ve ever been to and multiply that by ten.”
I left promptly and debated a cocktail at the St. Regis. I love the King Cole bar with its Maxfield Parrish mural. He has a blue named after him, parrish blue, there is a rapper and swimmer with my name. Something drew me towards Grand Central Station instead. I’ve passed through it, but only in a subway car. It was something I assumed I knew but truly foreign if I ever stopped to examine it. I’d never seen the ceiling, the domed, pale green sky with its gilded constellations that bring the word, “Wow,” involuntarily to the lips. There were answers in that ceiling; the green was bringing me closer, just as the black did the rivers from the Empire State Building’s deck. The void.
I lingered in the whispering corner, the famous spot outside the Oyster Bar where one person can stand fifty paces away and whisper up the cold marble, his or her voice traveling perfectly into the other person’s ear; a miracle of sonics and physics or something. The people staring at me in the whisper corner had no reason to suspect that I live in the West Village and have for nearly fifteen years. Before that Willamsburg, and before that the East Village. “You need a drink,” the voice said, into my ear from along the marble. It was my own voice of course, but it was clear that I needed to process all of this in a place that did not smell mollusky.
The first thing I do when I take a stool at the bar of McSorleys Old Ale House, another spot on my list, is put my camera away. The old sketch, broad and often racist, of a tourist is someone with a big camera strapped around their neck. I’m thinking Mr. Wang (“no offense”) from Caddyshack. As I drink my bourbon I wonder how much of a tourist I already am without knowing it. I document everything, everybody does now. But what I am really doing, I realize, is collecting. It’s why I left the city in the first place, to collect experiences and things to write about. Before phones came with high quality cameras built in, you had to write things down to remember them. I think of all the artists who drank here (Woody Guthrie, Brendan Behan…) lingering in this smelly, dark bar with its American Flag (Lincoln famously had a drink here) and its stained walls and low back chairs and realize they had to work harder than I did. They were not only up to the task, but they were better tourists. We are all passing through the city, every artist, whether we have convinced ourselves we belong here or not. It’s not some kind of membership or civic minting we are searching for, it’s only inspiration. I am so pleased to be informed of this that I drink three more bourbons in its honor.
I have stayed in New York to guard whatever dwindling inspiration I had left; whatever I have not used in my memoir. But as I head back west and due south towards Wall Street, I realize I am guarding something else as well. Trinity Church is another spot on my list of things I’ve never seen. Stepping lightly over the fallen leaves and all the ancient (relatively ancient) graves, I began to think that maybe the earth itself is why I don’t leave the city at my age. I have family buried in it; bones and souls down in this island, well not this island, but Staten Island (where our family plot is for some reason, and that reason is it’s cheaper). Just as the oxidized, be-wigged, scowling statue watches over these souls (among them Jerry Orbach, the actor who my youngest dog is named after, and most recently Mayor Koch), part of me cannot leave my deceased kin for too long, or who will think of them? I have seen the city as a tourist from high and from low but perhaps I really need to see it from the water and from beneath.
Losing the Plot (36 Chambers)
The goal of this experiment was to open up to New York City, to make it seem larger. In that way, I believe it was a complete success. Shivering on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, under a canopy of orange life preservers, I listened to the waves slap against the sides of the boat and watched as Manhattan got smaller and smaller while the city itself got bigger and more open. Staten Island seems to be the least gentrified and most suburban-Gothic of all the boroughs; what I saw of it anyways, which was not much; a few houses, sandwich shops, tattoo parlors and one gigantic Jewish burial ground. It’s nothing like my little walking circle of West Village. It’s completely it’s own thing; perfectly welcoming. It’s New York City, which is my home as much as the small part of Manhattan where I hide.
Hats off to it. Staten Island gave us the Wu Tang Clan of course, as well at various times and points, President Bartlett, aka Martin Sheen, Robin Quivers, Robert Loggia, Alyssa Milano, Rick Schroeder, Steven Seagal. Paul Newman lived there with Joanne Woodward. Patti Hansen, who would marry Keith Richards, went to high school there and probably never suspected her destiny. Bozo the Clown is from there as is Hassan Johnson and Tristan Wilde, both of whom I interviewed once for the magazine Maxim as part of an oral history of The Wire.
I wasn’t expecting much, waiting in the terminal for my travel partners. At first I sat under that blue sign, now made famous by that episode of Girls where Ray and Adam try to return a stolen dog and fail to bro-bond. A tour guide came up to me and made an exhausted helicopter motion with his finger and said, “Heli?” At first I thought he was simply saying hello and when I realized he was offering me a helicopter tour, I shivered. “No way,” I told him. Not with that energy. There’s no way that things staying in the air. It was Christmas Eve and maybe he was just over it, but if you want to lure someone into a helicopter, you gotta speed the gyration of those fucking fingers and maybe make a noise like the beginning of “Goodnight Saigon.”
Inside, the escalators are still under repair, washed out by Hurricane Sandy over a year ago. There’s a Nathan’s which was and is always comforting and a news stand; the general vibe of a sadder, smaller airport. I had some time to kill so I noticed a few New York souvenirs. I’ve never had cause to buy any but now that I was frontin’ like a tourist in my own city, maybe I needed a foam rubber Statue of Liberty crown-hat? Or a Big Apple, fruit-shaped beer bottle opener? Why are all the New York City t-shirts paint splattered? What is that supposed to suggest? How do people view us from the outside? Do we not give a fuck about paint, we just splatter that shit?
A musical combo was busking with old soul, “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Drifters and the obligatory “Jingle Bell Rock.” They made me feel sad for some reason until, during the breakdown of “There Goes My Baby,” the lead singer went into a rant about how his woman took the remote with her when she left. “Where’s the remote? Why’d she have to take the remote?” he screamed and I thought, “Wow, he’s actually improving the song.”
The point of the Staten Island Ferry ride was the Staten Island Ferry ride. It was a commute for most, but a total thrill for me; something new. The other task, visit my grandmother and grandfather’s graves to place some rocks on each of them to pay my respects (no flowers per the Jewish tradition). It wasn’t easy to find a pair of rocks in Manhattan. I almost considered going to the House of Cards & Curiosities on 8th Avenue and purchasing rocks. We are a rock ‘n’ roll town but not much of a rock town. Paint splattered tees? We’ve got you sorted. Small, elegant rocks (no not pieces of broken concrete or petrified dog shit) no dice.
I wanted to feel anchored to the land, via the bones and the souls of my kin, but what I felt was inept, spaced out, mentally unwell. I found the bone orchard, as Elvis C. might call it, but I literally lost the plot. I’d been there for the funeral many years ago and but I believe I was on drugs since I forgot just how vast it was. It might have been easy to get the coordinates but in my head, I figured, I’d either remember or they’d just be there, two above ground mausoleums with the same last name etched into them, just where I’d left them. My family sort of dumped both bodies out there like it was a Potter’s Field. I don’t say this to disrespect anyone else’s memory but it is a schlep from where my grandparents actually lived, it’s a cluster fuck of tombstones (some of them etched with those creepy laser photo portraits), and nobody in my family has visited but me as far as I know and these were well loved people.
I don’t feel so bad. I still have had a communion or two with their souls via memory and photos on my bookshelf and through my writing. This was just a cold study by comparison but it might have been nice to have found them. Once it was clear that they were somewhere in this vast lot of dead Jews, I gave up and placed the rocks on a tomb that read Chayevsky. I told myself it was Paddy Chayevsky to make myself feel better but I’m sure he had the sense to be buried in Manhattan so his kin could visit without a Zipcar.
“Don’t Fear the Reaper” was playing on the radio as I left the cemetery, I kid not. And I didn’t. Not only do I not fear him, I don’t believe in him. I turned the song off and thought about The Cure instead. That first track on <em>Disintegration</em> where Robert Smith sings “It’s so cold like it’s cold when you’re dead.” All I thought about was cold. Now I had a shiver in my bones like Natalie Merchant. Then I thought about what Natalie Merchant uses to write lyrics; a diary or a computer. And what she eats for breakfast and whether a fox brings it to her. There’s a character in Too Much Too Late who is obsessed with Natalie Merchant. I got lost in thought which is better than being lost in a graveyard. Still, it’s good to see one ever so often to remind you that you are alive and if you are alive, it’s probably good to do things that living beings can do and dead folk cannot like travel, explore, go to Tokyo or Amsterdam, and not spend all your time in your local bar (which dead folk can do if my local is any indication around happy hour).
Every sandwich shop I passed on foot on my way to the Zipcar looked like it could make the best Italian hero you ever tasted; one that would keep you coming back to that piss and popcorn smelling ferry. Maybe one day I will return to Staten Island and have one of those sandwiches. I’ll have the plot numbers. Maybe I’ll even own my own car and drive there, charming as the ferry is. And maybe it won’t be such a big deal. Movement is key. Movement makes more movement and the world remains available to write about.
