Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (23 page)

1988

Not long ago, the people in my neighborhood—Greenwich Village, in Lower Manhattan—were faced with a new problem. Our subway stop was being made beautiful, and we hadn’t figured out how to complain about it. The phrases that trip most easily off the tongues of New Yorkers are expressions of complaint. If a linguistic anthropologist camped out in Manhattan for a while, I suspect he’d discover that New Yorkers have fifty or sixty different phrases for expressing irritation and maybe two for expressing enthusiastic approval (“not that bad” and “it could be worse”).

The average subway rider would associate expressions of enthusiasm with people he’d describe as being from “Iowa or Idaho or one of them.” (True New Yorkers do not distinguish among states that begin with the letter
I
.) For generations—since long before the great cities of this country became associated in the public mind with their problems rather than their wonders—New Yorkers have believed in the old saying that they learn at their mother’s knee: “If you can’t say something nice, you’re never in danger of being taken for an out-of-towner.”

This was not the first time the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had presented us with an awkward situation: In recent years,
all the old subway trains in New York have been replaced with shiny new silver trains, which are absolutely free of graffiti. They are also air-conditioned.

If you live outside of New York—or if you are one of those thickheaded New Yorkers who prefer traffic jams to subway travel—you are probably thinking that the preceding paragraph was one of my little jokes. It wasn’t. The New York subways really do have flashy new cars, but New Yorkers rarely mention that fact. It’s a difficult thing to complain about.

Not impossible. I’ve heard a lot of people complain that the absolutely frigid air-conditioning in the subway cars makes the stations, which are still not air-conditioned, seem even hotter than they are. I’ve heard people say that they miss the graffiti—which is apparently cleaned off at the end of every run, so that there isn’t much reason to put it on in the first place—and resent the censoring of this urban folk art by the philistines who run the MTA. It is also possible to complain about how the decision to acquire new cars was made—or, to put it in the local vernacular, how the MTA unilaterally and high-handedly, without consulting the people who actually use the subways every day, decided to force comfortable and attractive new subway cars on the public.

Improvements in the transportation system rarely meet with the approval of New Yorkers. Some years ago, the then mayor, Edward I. Koch, came back from China smitten with the idea of bicycle transportation. He had protective strips of concrete installed to create a bicycle lane up Sixth Avenue. People complained. Eventually, the concrete strips were removed.

I mentioned at the time that you might have expected the taxi drivers to hate the Mayor’s innovation, since it had cost them basically one lane of traffic. (“He likes China so much, he shoulda stood in China.”) But who complained most bitterly about the bike lanes? The bicyclers. The true New York bicyclers—particularly the messengers—complained that the bike lane was full of pedestrians and garment-center pushcarts and bike riders who were described as “schlepping around on Raleigh three-speeds.”

“Schlepping” is Yiddish, a language that all true New Yorkers—including Irish cops and Dominican grocers and Pakistani news-dealers
—speak a little of, partly because its rhythms are famously conducive to complaint. One Yiddish word that all New Yorkers are familiar with is “kvetch”—which actually means “to complain.” You often hear them say to each other, “Quit kvetching”—to no apparent effect.

So you can see the sort of problem my neighbors and I faced as workmen in our station replaced worn tiles and restored lovely old mosaics. At first, we made do with complaining about the pace of the work. (“Are they ever going to finish this place?”) A couple of people tried to argue that the stunning new floor would be slipperier than the grungy old floor.

At one point, while a neighbor and I waited for an uptown local, I decided that I had to express my approval of the renovations, even at the risk of being taken for somebody from Indiana or Illinois. (I’m from Missouri.) “Not that bad,” I said, gesturing toward the shiny tiles and the stunning new floor.

My neighbor looked around. “It could be worse,” he admitted. “But where the hell is the train?”

1995

“It’s all over,” Harry said when I saw him recently in a Lower Manhattan café that we both frequent. “There are no more secrets. We might as well pack it in.”

“Are you talking about these guys at the CIA and the FBI selling secrets to the Russians?” I asked.

“No, no,” Harry said, “not the CIA and the FBI. The bus-stop signs. I heard on the radio that the city is going to put up three thousand new bus-stop signs. Color-coded. Now any yahoo is going to know just which bus stops where. This is not the city it once was, my friend.”

Harry, who was born and brought up not far from the café, is remarkably open about something that few of his neighbors would acknowledge: Native New Yorkers hate the idea of out-of-towners being able to find their way around the city.

Why do they feel that way? Maybe, given the fact that New York moves at a pace that can keep even the savviest city dweller uncertain of his footing, natives have had to find comfort in the thought of some people being totally lost. Maybe native New Yorkers are what English out-of-towners call bloody-minded.

Whatever the cause, Harry puts great store in municipal bafflement. Once, when I was feeling frustrated with the system used to designate subway routes, I mentioned to him that the R and the N trains—which sound from their letters as if they operate two or three boroughs apart—actually stop at more or less the same places.

“Right!” he said, beaming. “But that’s not the beauty part. The beauty part is that depending on the time of day, the B train goes to two completely different places. You could get on thinking you’re on your way to Roosevelt Island and get off at 168th and Broadway, where nobody’s ever
heard
of Roosevelt Island. This is not a town with codes that can be cracked by the first yokel who wanders in, my friend.”

I’ve seen Harry swell with pride like that once or twice since. When occasional intersections in New York—chosen, as far as I could tell, for no particular reason—sprouted signs with an arrow pointing vaguely in the direction of the Javits Convention Center, Harry was ecstatic. “Have you seen those?” he asked me. “There you are, deep in Washington Heights, a hundred one-way streets from nowhere, and you see an arrow saying that if you go down that street you’ll get to the Convention Center. And that’s the last sign you’ll see for miles. I mean, it might as well say ‘Omaha’ or ‘Roanoke.’ I love it.”

In general, though, things haven’t been going well for Harry lately. He suspects that the signs guiding travelers from the airports have been made, as he puts it, “conventionally relevant to the journey.” He has always kept a list of unlikely places where visitors have ended up while trying to get to Manhattan from JFK in a rental car, and it’s been a year and a half since he heard one he considered worth adding to the list (Fort Lee, New Jersey).

He was in a dark mood for days after the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority ended its policy of posting maps of the subway system only inside the trains. When large maps began to appear on subway platforms, Harry just shook his head and sighed at the thought that someone unfamiliar with the route would no longer have to board a train and fight his way over to decipher a map similar in design to spaghetti primavera only to find out that he was going at breakneck speed in the wrong direction.

Harry was also deeply opposed to a decision the Department of Transportation made to add signs saying
SIXTH AVENUE
to what New Yorkers had never been able to bring themselves to call “Avenue of the Americas.” Before then, he could brighten up a gray afternoon by standing on Sixth Avenue waiting to be asked where Sixth Avenue was.

Hearing the bad news about the bus-stop signs, I tried my best to cheer Harry up. “Just about all subway stations that have multiple exits still won’t say which street each exit leads to,” I said. “There are tourists wandering around in the rain out there, Harry.”

“True,” Harry acknowledged, “that’s true.”

“And the announcements over the subway public-address system remain unintelligible, Harry. I met an out-of-towner the other day who thought that for some reason they were being delivered in Turkish.”

Harry seemed to brighten a bit. “You know,” he said, “I was thinking for a while there of leaving the city.”

“What stopped you?” I said.

“I can’t find my way around anywhere else.”

1997

My Aunt Rosie called from Kansas City to ask me who was at the luncheon that Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera gave at Mortimer’s for the Rajmata of Jaipur.

“Is this a bad connection, Aunt Rosie?” I said. “Or have you been trying out the pink Catawba wine again?”

“Don’t get smart with me, big shot,” Aunt Rosie said. “I knew you when you could have been called the Diaper of Jaipur.”

Whenever she calls me “big shot,” it’s clear that I’m in for trouble. Aunt Rosie takes it for granted that absolutely anybody who lives in New York is clued in about all sorts of sophisticated matters that remain mysterious to what she calls the “meatloaf crowd” at home, and she is horrified anew every time I prove to know less about such things than she does. On one hand, she assumes that I’m personally acquainted with every glitz-hound who has ever been mentioned in the gossip columns; on the other hand, she’s constantly complaining that the only one of her nephews who moved to New York is so completely without connections that he can’t even get an out-of-town relative tickets to
Cats
.

“Aunt Rosie,” I said, “I wasn’t even aware that Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera were acquainted with the Rajmata of Jaipur. How in the world would you know that these people had lunch at Snerd’s?”

“Not Snerd’s, dummy. Mortimer’s,” Aunt Rosie said. “And I know it because I read it in
Vanity Fair
.”

My heart sank. A couple of years ago, Aunt Rosie and her bridge friends started reading tony magazines like
Architectural Digest
and
House & Garden
and
European Travel & Life
—the sort of magazines that, according to a rather sour friend of mine known as Marty Mean Tongue, are someday going to be made into a composite television show called
Lifestyles of the Rich and Useless
. Aunt Rosie started calling me with questions like, “Listen, how much do you figure the Baroness de Gelt had to fork over for that château they showed in the November issue?” or “Hey, what kind of bucks are we talking about for a yard of that fabric the Countess used on her sunporch in Capri?”

I know how these questions must come about. Aunt Rosie and her bridge pals—the people she always calls the Jell-O Mold Rangers—leaf through these magazines, mainly to speculate on how much everything costs. Then, when the speculation deteroriates into a heated disagreement, Aunt Rosie says, “I’ll just call my nephew who lives in New York. He’ll be able to tell us, even though he’s a little slow.”

Now the Jell-O Mold Rangers had obviously taken to reading
Vanity Fair
. It was bad enough answering questions about how much I figured some cat-food heiress had to pay a yard for the chintz on her couches. Now I was going to get constant questions about the parties given by dress designers and charity-ball trotters and New Jersey countesses and what Marty Mean Tongue always calls the Von de Von crowd.

Apparently,
Vanity Fair
’s coverage of the Rajmata’s luncheon presented a seating chart of the table with first names only, and challenged the reader to guess the full name. “I know who C.Z. is, of course, because I saw her patio in
Architectural Digest
or somewhere,” Aunt Rosie said. “And Pat is obvious: She had Oscar’s dress on when she was talking to Jerome a couple of issues ago. But who do you think Tom is? I told Myrtle Weber you’d know for sure.”

“I don’t suppose Tom could be Tom Beasley, Cousin Bernie’s partner in the laundromat,” I said. “That Tom certainly could be counted on to show up at a free lunch.”

“I don’t know what made me think you’d know,” Aunt Rosie said. “I always told your mother you’d never amount to anything.”

There was a long silence. Then Aunt Rosie said, “Myrtle Weber’s son in New York said he could get us tickets to
Cats
anytime we wanted them.”

“I’m sure he can,” I said. “Taxi drivers are surprisingly good at that sort of thing. I read a story about it in
The New York Times
—a publication, I should mention, that you and the Jell-O Mold Rangers might think of reading instead of these glossy gossip sheets you seem to favor.”

“I already take the
Times,
” Aunt Rosie said. “For that Evening Hours column they have. That’s how I knew who the Lee was that Reinaldo and Carolina seated next to C.Z. and why Estée was put next to Bob.”

“Is it because Bob tends to spill things late in the meal?” I said.

“Listen, big shot, I knew you when the only Indian princess you had ever heard of was Pocahontas,” Aunt Rosie said. “So save your smart-aleck talk for your fancy New York friends.”

1986

As Tepper glanced up from the newspaper to make a quick perusal of the Sunday shoppers, he noticed that one of the countermen from Russ & Daughters was standing on the sidewalk, about to tap on the window. Recognizing the counterman from past trips, Tepper slid over toward the passenger door and rolled down the window.

“How you doin’?” the counterman said, bending down to lean on the door.

“Fine,” Tepper said. “How are you?”

“I thought I recognized you,” the counterman said. “You come in to buy lox sometimes on Sunday.”

“Herring salad, usually,” Tepper said. “Sometimes a whitefish. Very occasionally, lox.”