The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (32 page)

By noon Chris and I were back out in the street, burdened no longer by our luggage, carrying only the folding map and an eagerness to see everything. Uptown or down? We went down. To the tip of the Battery we walked, passing the still-unfinished towers of the World Trade Center. We stood by a railing watching seagulls wheel over the decks of a ferryboat taking tourists to the Statue of Liberty. From there we walked uptown through the Chinatown I first came to know with my father; its cagey streets seemed less magical without him guiding me through them. Then up to Little Italy, with its green-and-red pennants and flags, past the iron-fronted buildings of the Bowery to the East Village, where, at the crowded counter of a Ukrainian café, we slurped twin bowls of blood-red borscht. As we were leaving, I gave a quarter to a panhandler.

“Don't spend it all in one place,” I said, earning a disapproving look from Chris.

Midtown. Rockefeller Center. Radio City. Central Park. The Met. The names arrested me with their authority. At the Guggenheim we balked at the price of admission: $3.50 to penetrate a colossal Carvel ice-cream cone. To hell with it! In the district known as Harlem, the streets were in every sense browner, its buildings slung low to accommodate a sky brought to its knees by dense, ponderous clouds. We walked faster, the gusts flapping the lapels of our Windbreakers, passing a building shaped like the parabolas we'd learned to draw in algebra class. At every other block, a sudden whirlwind whipped grit into our eyes and made us grip our jackets at our throats and hunch like old men.

We'd started across town, hungry for Broadway and humanity, eager to arrive at the colossal pinball machine known as Times Square, when the rain caught us. We carried no umbrellas. We'd bought extra tokens, but there were no subways in sight. Taxicabs were prohibitively expensive. Headlong and purblind, we plunged into the monsoon. By the time a subway entrance arose out of the tempest, we were soaked. We clutched our knees, laughing and coughing as we caught our breath. The subway zoomed us to Times Square, where we emerged into a sea of black umbrellas backlit by blurred neon signs. At an establishment called Nedick's we ordered two “frankfurters” apiece and large cups of orange drink and ate while watching people hurry by in the rain. Even soaking wet, New York was a great place, a wonderful, lewd, sexy, forbidden place. Those trips with my papa had been mere flirtations, as chaste as my grandmother's kisses. Now I was a man, and the city was mine to embrace less innocently.

By the time we left Nedick's, the rain had softened to a drizzle. We passed under a succession of marquees featuring slasher and porn films and peepshows for 25 cents, a Coney Island boardwalk of X-rated sex. Had Chris, whose parents were of New England Puritan stock, not been there to shame me, I'd have ducked into one of those seedy theaters. I'd have paid a quarter for a peepshow—or two. Or three. Two women in leopardskin miniskirts and high heels emerged from the shadows to offer us a good time. I showed interest; my friend didn't. I had started a conversation with them when, saying “We're already having a good time, thank you,” Chris took my arm and kept us walking.

We got “home” after dark. What a strange feeling, having those apartment keys. “The keys to the city!” one of us joked as the door to Clara's apartment swung open. The musty smell was still there. So was the Laocoön. It wasn't even half past seven, but we were both beat. Though the rain had stopped, still, the city seemed less inviting by night, consisting only of bars and other forbidden and overpriced venues.

Instead we brewed a pot of tea and sat there, in Clara's living room, talking in hushed, tired voices to the murmurs of traffic until our eyelids grew heavy and we slouched to bed, proud of ourselves for having passed, to our own satisfaction, the city's audition. It was the first of many such trials, but I didn't know that then.

 

III. Romance

 

The rat was as big as a squirrel. It twitched in a trap next to the walk-in fridge. My boss, a retired New York City cop, kept his old service revolver in his office. He took aim, told me to stand back, and blew the thing to furry pink bits, which afterward I scooped into a metal dustpan and carried to the Dumpster.

It was my first job in New York. I'd hoped to be a bartender or a cook, but the owner of the Rozinante Tavern had different plans for me, so I spent most of my time there in the basement, peeling potatoes and cementing cracks in the concrete floor.

It wasn't long before I got a better job just two blocks south, in the oldest building in Soho, a former brothel with shuttered windows and a pitched roof. To work at the Broome Street Bar you had to be an artist: a painter, writer, architect, dancer, photographer—it didn't matter what kind. I told the owners that I was a Pratt student, but that failed to satisfy them. I had to show them some sketches before they hired me as a dishwasher.

The bar's owners were two diametrically opposed brothers named Kenn (two
n
's) and Bob. Short, bowlegged, cigar-smoking Kenn wore blue jeans, cowboy shirts, and belts with enormous buckles. He saw himself as the rough-and-ready type. Bob, on the other hand, was a slender, soft-spoken, effete man with pale skin. Their love of artists was the one thing the two brothers shared. While Kenn held forth with the patrons upstairs, Bob spent most of his time at a desk he'd arranged by the prep kitchen, keying numbers into an adding machine and chain-smoking Parliaments. He'd take four puffs of a cigarette before snuffing it out, having read somewhere that the first four puffs contained less nicotine. The floor under his desk squirmed with partially smoked cigarettes.

The bar had an open kitchen, with the dishwasher's station facing one end of the bar. I liked washing dishes. I liked the hot, soapy water on my hands and the sense that I was doing something useful. Dishwashing is honorable work, I told myself as the busboys dumped their greasy loads and I flirted with any decent-looking woman who sat on the last stool at the bar.

The other workers in the kitchen slung omelets and burgers, sliced sandwiches, and cracked jokes. Jimmy, the salad chef, was an architect. Francis, the prep cook, wrote show tunes. Joe Hinkle was writing a novel. The waitresses were mostly actresses and dancers. The griddle chef, a guy in his 40s named Bentley, a painter in the manner of Kandinsky, was the funniest and most cynical of the bunch, with a mop of sandy hair that covered his eyes and that he would toss back while flipping his burgers. Somehow, despite his talking a mile a minute in a flat, nasal voice with which he cut to the quick anyone he disliked, the ash from Bentley's cigarette never fell onto his grill.

The bar was a magnet for artists. John and Yoko were patrons; so were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Among the regulars was a sculptor named Bob Bolles. He had a job there, doing what I'm not sure: something to do with plumbing or the beer taps. Mostly he hung out at the bar. Bolles's artistic claim to fame was on permanent (so we thought then) display at the “motorcycle triangle,” an open space at the intersection of Broome and Watts, where bikers parked their crotch rockets and where, without permission from municipal authorities, Bolles's jagged iron creations sprouted like rusty weeds, providing windblown papers and coffee cups with crannies to wedge themselves into and neighborhood children with objects to skin knees on. A short guy with an Edgar Allan Poe forehead, Bolles wore hoop earrings and red bandannas and was as much of a fixture in Soho as its loading docks, its bay doors, its freight elevators, as the trucks that barreled over cobblestones to and from the Holland Tunnel. When Bolles died of AIDS in the '80s, the sculptures fell into ruin. Eventually, under the auspices of a zealous borough parks commissioner, the “dangerous, dilapidated, rusting, falling-apart litter magnets” were carted off to a storage facility on Randall's Island, making way for a public green space called Sunshine Park—pleas to rename it after the sculptor having fallen on deaf ears.

Looming over the motorcycle triangle, across the expanse of a windowless building, the words
I Am the Best Artist
were spray-painted and signed by “René.” This early example of guerrilla art was, as far as I know, that artist's only creation, but for me it did the trick. To be the best artist—that was the main thing. It was why I had come to the city: to practice my own art but also to breathe in the atmosphere of artists, to size up and learn from the competition.

What sort of artist I wanted to be, I wasn't sure. I had a grandiosity of purpose but no clear vision to go with it. I knew only that I wanted to touch and impress others with my work so they would someday say of me, “He's the best artist.”

It was an imperative, an obligation—as inevitable as that
GAS HEATS BEST
sign I'd first seem with my papa as a child. To impress myself on the city as it had impressed itself on me, that was what I wanted, what I yearned for.

Meanwhile, I washed dishes.

 

IV. Promiscuity

 

The Pratt dorm was in a high-rise on Willoughby Avenue, lording it over a neighborhood of tenements and gnarly trees. From there I took a share with a retired church organist named Fletcher on Washington Avenue—or was it Clinton? After that came the sublet on DeKalb and another off Flatbush, down the street from Junior's, where, for the price of a cup of coffee, I'd fill my belly with specimens from the sour-pickle dispenser. From there I took a one-year sublet in the East Village, on Seventh Street, where the avenues are alphabetized and the women wore orthopedic shoes and drab scarves around their heads. Next came the loft on Broome Street, the summer the lights went out throughout the city. By candlelight at the corner tavern they dispensed free lukewarm beer and half-melted ice cream. Then back to Brooklyn, a fifth-floor walkup two blocks south of the Heights, one of those jobs with a clawfoot tub squatting in the kitchen and cracked, sticky linoleum. Followed by another share, this one in Stuyvesant Town, where they didn't permit air conditioners (fans only) in the casement windows and where, during the holidays, they strung colored lights around the lampposts. Was this before or after I lived with that crazy woman on Cornelia Street, the one who nicknamed me “Leonardo” and vowed to make a star out of me? Through her I auditioned for the singing waiter job on Third Avenue and the talent manager in Hell's Kitchen—the one who, wearing a velvet robe in his living room, by means of an exercise called “The Boy on the Mountaintop,” tried to get me over his knees. After the crazy lady threw my things out the window, I moved into the office of the literary agent for whom I'd been working and who, for a cut in my $100 a week salary, let me sleep on his sofa. After that, for a while I left the city, returning to housesit for a lady whose dog mauled me. Then the railroad flat in the area adjoining Soho north of East Houston that my songwriting partner (I was writing songs then) and I dubbed “So What.” The greasy exhaust fumes from the diner downstairs made my partner sick, so he left the city and me. That was when I broke my leg and moved into the Gramercy Hotel. There, lying prone in bed, I could reach out and touch both walls while listening to bottles breaking in the air shaft. Then the Greek woman who taught me typography offered to share her Astoria apartment, a shag-carpeted, plastic-slipcovered efficiency over a garage a few blocks from Ditmars Boulevard, where the cafés featured excessive chrome and glistening mounds of baklava. After Ourania and I split, I moved to Sunnyside, to a one-bedroom near Calvary Cemetery, in a neighborhood of dismal pubs with shamrocks on their awnings. Shortly after this I met, proposed to, and moved into a two-bedroom with Tara. The apartment had French doors. I'd step out of the bathroom or the kitchen and see Tara there, through the grid of glass panes, bent over her watercolor block, smoking. Tara's smoking put the kibosh on our engagement, so I told myself, when in truth I'd been ambivalent from the start. For a while I hung on in Queens until, with a journalist named Steven, I went in on a rental on 1st Avenue, off 14th. It was a one-bedroom; we put up a makeshift wall. We spent a lot of time on the roof there, Steven and I, drinking a brand of cheap red wine called Gato Negro and having aggressive philosophical conversations. I stayed there until Paulette, my new girlfriend, and I got tired of squeezing into my captain's bed. She and I rented a floor-through in a brownstone on 101st near West End. In its living room, in the presence of two witnesses, a gay Episcopal priest married us. Six months later we bought our own place, a foreclosure on 94th and Columbus in an art deco building with a sunken living room and built-in sconces. Though on the ground floor and dark, it had a nice view of the dogwood tree in the courtyard. I set up my studio in the master bedroom and decked the walls with paintings of passenger ships and the Empire State Building at night. In spite of the rap deejay living downstairs, we were happy there until one morning I woke up from a dream in which, instead of a dogwood tree, our window faced the wide, gray-green expanse of the Hudson River. That same morning I boarded a train from Grand Central to the Bronx. At a place called Spuyten Duyvil I got off. Nothing but weeds, trees, water. Water! How I'd missed it! We lived on an island but rarely saw the stuff. Overhead loomed the blue arc of the Henry Hudson Bridge—the same bridge my father and I had crossed into Manhattan in his Simca. Six months later, my wife and I bought a co-op there. We called it home for the next 12 years, until we divorced. I was 50 years old.

 

V. Dissolution

 

The dreams of my youth, where had they gone? At the midcentury mark, one is entitled to such inquiries. I'd struggled, worked hard, produced, yet there was the nagging sense that I'd wasted myself, that I'd poured my essence into the city only to see it washed away like so much scum down its storm grates and sewage drains. Another part of me wondered, was it my own damn fault? In abandoning the city (and as any New Yorker will tell you, when you say “the city” you most assuredly do not mean the outer boroughs), had I forsaken my dreams? Had I been as fickle with them as with apartments and women? Had my quest for artistic glory been nothing but one long flirtation—as feeble and hopeless as the flirtations I had engaged in from my dishwashing station at the Broome Street Bar? Had my romance with New York, New York, been no more than a prolonged, fruitless act of mutual seduction?