Big City Eats Little Boy

    I've always had this small town kid fear of New York. I think all of my impressions of New York were from all the '70s movies or the '80s rap I grew up with. “8 Million Stories” by Kurtis Blow or “New York, New York” by Grandmaster Flash. My image of the city seemed amazing and exciting, but one should beware. There's danger around every corner. Now, that still might be true, but I never had this feeling about any other city. I lived in DC when it was the murder capital, I was in LA a year before the riots, and never had any problems in Chicago when I lived there. I think my fear of the Big Apple was because New York had always been an image in my head. A city so big that anything could happen and no one would know.
    For that reason I avoided the New York like the plague. My home is in the South and there really isn’t a reason I would need to go to New York, except for the million and one reasons everyone goes there.
Then one of my good friends moved there and I started to think of the city differently. My friend sent letters where he wrote about New York with great admiration. Truth be told, it is a pretty amazing place. The Rome of our time, one of my teachers told me. My friend’s letters, along with all the books on New York I’ve read, gave me a gnawing feeling that I had been pretty stupid about my phobia of the city and made me rethink my preconceived notions. So, when I got an invitation to come up to New York and see my friend, I hesitated, but then accepted.
    I got to New York without problems and met my friend as soon as I got into town. We took the Subway to the neighborhood he lived and he showed me around. We went to some donut shops and coffee stands and I saw the bookstore he worked at. The more I walked around, the more my fears started to fall to the wayside. Before I left I was talking to some friends at home and was surprised how common the fear of New York is. People don’t like to admit it, but it’s true. You watch enough TV and movies and you’ll know what I mean. It has an effect. But the longer I wandered, the easier it seemed to get comfortable with the high pace and the multitude of people. I was just a visitor, like many on the streets there, but I was starting to feel at home. Or at least at ease.
    If the city were a bicycle, I was on training wheels.
    A few days into my visit, my friend and I made plans to meet after he got off work. He was going to show me around the squats and take me to where the Tompkins Square Park riots happened. I was supposed meet my friend in Manhattan at 11pm for a late night walk, but that wasn't for another four hours. I decided to wander.
    I started out looking for this AIDS hospice benefit bookstore that we passed the other day, but sadly I couldn't find it a second time. The only map I had with this subway map, which helped a little to get a general location of where I was, but it didn’t help a lot on the street. Being a little lost didn’t matter that much, though. I still had a good bit of time and the random tour was interesting. With every step, I was starting to learn why people like New York so much. It was a feeling of awe that I hadn’t experienced before. As I randomly wandered through the city, I'd find myself running into all of these places that I'd been reading about for years. Places that I’d never been to were already somewhat familiar to me. In the Village, I saw the Little Red School House where Angela Davis went to school. I walked a few more blocks and realized I was at the spot where the Stonewall Revolt took place in 1969. After wandering around aimlessly in Greenwich Village, seeing what that was like, I hopped on the Subway and looked for other things that I'd heard about. Mostly stupid stuff, like going to Grand Central Station to stand in the spot Cary Grant stood in North By Northwest and then to Times Square just to see it. That was where I decided to call my friend and schedule our rendezvous.
    "Just meet me at the corner of 14th and 8th. Do you think you can find that?"
    "Yeah." I fumbled around with my map and found the spot he was talking about. "It's the end of the 'L' line, right?"
    "Yeah, that's it. I'll see you there at 11:30." Click.
    I knew it only took a few minutes to get where I was going. Still having some time to kill, I stumbled around Times Square, mostly just looking up at the buildings. That shit was weird. Giant electronic advertisements everywhere. It was as if they replaced the sky with televisions. I knew that Guilliani had replaced the peep shows and strip clubs with Disney and The Gap, but that didn’t make it any stranger. Now the seediness had been replaced with a different kind of seediness. And with a giant "Cup o' Raman" steaming above 42nd St to boot. Very strange, that place was.
    After I had my fill of awe and tourism, I headed to the subway. Our meeting spot wasn't that far away, so I timed it just right and arrived on the corner of 8th Ave and 14th St with about 10 minutes to spare. I picked up a paper in the subway, found a little hidden nook around the corner on this staircase and started to read, waiting for my friend. I waited, reading the news, certain my friend was going to show up at anytime.
    It was somewhere around this time that I realized that my trip to New York might have a tragic flaw.  In all of our walks the borough, through the different neighborhoods, past the record stores and diners and bookstores, I never really paid attention to where I was going.  For that matter, I didn’t even know what street I was staying on.  In fact, I hardly knew anything about where I was staying, the address, the phone number, nothing.  All I knew was that it was near the bridge, but that’s about it.  The bridges there are long, but if it came down to it, I could walk it.  But still, it would be better to know where I was going.  I knew where he worked, but that wouldn’t be open for another 10 hours.  And he wasn’t working for a few days anyway.  It would have been nice to have a phone number.  An address wouldn’t have hurt either.  But I couldn’t get that until I met up with my friend again.  All I could do in the meantime was wait and feel dumb.
    So there I sat, reading the paper for a very long time. Waiting. I'd finish an article on Iraq, put down the paper and look. No one around. I'd read this long article on the conflict in Palestine, put down the paper and look. No one around. I read about the presidential races in several countries, North Korean nuclear weapons, and some more trouble in Ireland. When I got to the obituaries, I knew that once I read those, that that was it. If my friend hadn’t shown up by then, I might be in some trouble.
In retrospect, my burying my head in the paper and hiding in some staircase around the corner wasn’t the best of ideas because I think it hid me from the very person I was waiting for.
    Now I was all alone, and it was 12:30.
    Well, I shouldn't say all alone. There were plenty of people about. Just not the one I was looking for. Once I was began to figure out something went wrong with our plans, I started to get up my defenses and figure out what I was going to do. I'd look down the street to try and figure out who looked the sketchiest. I put on my tough, driver's liscense/mug shot face, and just stood there. Whenever a group of people would come up, in my head I was picturing a scene from one of those 70's movies, like I'm about to get chased down the street by a gang of toughs wearing baseball uniforms or the cast of a Michael Jackson video (“Beat It”, to be specific). But, of course, I was ok and no one hassled me. Thinking back, I wonder how many people thought the same thing of me. Disheveled, dirty clothes, hands in my pocket, staring everyone down, standing on one street corner for hours. I'm looking out, trying to decide my course of action if I get jumped, all the while I'm probably the sketchiest person on this street corner. I'm more surprised the cops didn't hassle me, but I'm sure there are bigger things to beat up in NY, different immigrants to shoot, or something else besides messing with another dumb ass hanging out on the street corner with nothing to do…and nowhere to go.
    After waiting for what seemed an eternity, I finally asked someone with the MTA what time it was.  It was almost one in the morning. I was about to give up and go home, but then it finally sunk in that I didn't really know how to get home.  I knew what stop to get off of on but I hadn't figured out my bearing yet to that part of town yet. And even if I did find the place, I still didn't have a key. My friend was going to have that for me at our rendezvous.  But without my friend...
    So, I decided to wait some more. and wait. and wait.
    I ended up waiting on that one street corner until 2:30 in the morning. I was dead, beat, my dogs were barking from standing up so long, and it was starting to get cold.
     But I really didn't have a choice. Lucky for me this was also the night I decided to leave all my money at home so I wouldn't lose it. So, now I was (mostly) broke, tired, bored, lonely, lost, and with nowhere to go.
    I didn’t want to look as lost as I felt, so I tried to fake my desperation and make the best of my new circumstances.  I had just read something about 5th Avenue in this John Dos Pasos book I was mulling over and walked a few blocks to check it out, found nothing interest, then walked back. I guess I could have done that all night, but I thought it might be best to get back to Brooklyn and maybe if I wandered around enough I'd run into my friend.
    When I got on the Subway, I thought about just riding it all night.  I looked around for a bit to see if it looked like that could be a possibility, but I didn't see too many people doing that and wasn't sure if I'd get kicked off.  I couldn't stomach a night in jail, at least right then, so I just went back to Brooklyn and figured that I’d think of something when I got there.
    By the time I got to Brooklyn, the bars were letting out. I thought maybe one of these hipsters would be someone I ran into earlier, but not a familiar hipster in sight. So, I wandered. I knew he lived near the bridge, but so does half of that area. I thought that if I walked enough, something would look familiar, but what was worse than nothing looking familiar-everything looked familiar.  We had walked around the area so much that I recognized just about everything.  A graffiti homage to pac man, threats to someone named Neckface scrawled on the wall, murals to the dead, basketball courts, parks, monuments.  It was all familiar, but none of it directed me to my friend’s place.
    I remember feeling pretty dumb that night. How could I have been here in NY without even knowing the address of the place I was staying at? Or the phone number? I had a few clues about where I was supposed to go. A street name scribbled on the map, which looked like it could be close to where I thought I was going. But I didn't know.
    After walking shuffling my feet endlessly, I eventually gave up.  I figured I just had to stay out on the streets until his store opened up and someone there would know how to get a hold of him. But it was 4am and, unlike the small southern town I live in, there strangely didn't seem to be anything that was open all night and hardly a soul in sight.
    When the bars closed, I was alone.     
It was weird being in New York, seeing the Empire State Building off in the distance, and not seeing a soul anywhere. The streets were as empty as back home. A car every once in a while, but not often. Maybe at 4am, the whole world comes to the same conclusion that no matter how big your city was, at 4am, you need to go to bed. I was far from bed, but I couldn't walk anymore and there was nothing else to do. I found this park and thought about just lying down. I thought that it might be a bad idea to sleep in a park in Brooklyn, but I was too tired to care about anything. I found this little park (maybe it was more of a median than park) that was named after a polish priest, Father Studzinski.  It was there that I gave up and fell asleep on the ground next to this little wall where I could hide behind.  I was there, laying on the ground for about 15 minutes, when I started feeling these small drops hit my face. Then they got bigger. And more frequent. Until it just started raining.
    Fuck.
    I got up and kept moving until I got to this awning where I could sit down. There was a pay phone there. I thought about calling someone, but everyone I knew back home had their phone disconnected. I couldn't call my friend because I didn't know the phone number, and the store he worked at would be closed so it wasn't any use. The only thing I could think to call was the greyhound to see how much it would cost to come home. I don’t think I would have gone home, but I was feeling pretty defeated and was just having a bad day. I called the Greyhound operator more for something to do, and was a little excited just to talk to someone.  After a few rings, the agent picked up and asked how they could help me.  But when I went to speak, I realized that someone had broken off the receiver on the telephone.
    "Hello, This is Greyhound, can I help you? Hello....Hello. Stupid little... "
    Click.
    All alone again. Nothing else to do, so I balled up in the fetal position next to the payphone, felt like crying and dying, but instead I just went to sleep.
    This time, I got about an hour sleep I think, until people passing me by woke me up. I sat there for a while. No one looked at me or bothered me. Which, surprisingly, was the case just about everywhere I went. The sun was coming up now and people were heading to to work. I got up off the sidewalk and started walking again. I walked in the opposite direction and kept going until more and more things started looking familiar, and then, after a night of drowsy-eyed looking, I saw a very familiar site.  It was the Dominican bodega that was only a block from my friend’s house.  Then the Chinese take-out place that was across the street.  And lastly, I saw the graffiti that would bring me home.  “Neckface is a fat whore.”  I don’t know who Neckface was, but I was sure glad to see that insult.  My friend’s place was just around the corner.
    It's hard to express the elation I felt, but it was such a relief to know where I was. I think my biggest fear was just being lost and alone in the big city. Now that I knew where I was going, I wrote the address down quickly. I thought about ringing the bell, but it was 6am and I wasn't really sure if anyone would hear me if I rang anyway.  So instead of waking anyone up, I headed to the subway and went to town to spend my last few dollars on breakfast.  I still had several hours to kill and I couldn't do it all at a diner. I got on the train and just rode aimlessly for a while. Went to Queens and back, passed my friends house on the aboveground subway to Manhattan.   As we went around this big bend, I looked off into the distance and could see the clouds lifting above the Empire State Building as the subway went over the Williamsburg Bridge. I saw the skyline, read the graffiti, looked at my fellow travelers. Right then a violinist started playing in the middle of the car, and I got this strange feeling like I accomplished something. Like I did something really big. I was homeless for a night in a city I was terrified of a week before. I was expecting to get mugged, stabbed, shot, and chased. But none of it happened. Now, I didn't care if I was mugged, stabbed, shot, or chased. I felt like I was just another freak on the train that no one cared about. Awesome!
    I walked around Manhattan for a while, hung out in Washington Square Park, went to NYU's library, killed time in a diner until it was a safe time to wake people up, and then went back to Brooklyn.
    After walking the same streets I was lost in a few hours before, I finally got to the bottom of the street and could hear the subway cars riding by the bridge.  The sun was up now.  It was noon.  I found a doorbell outside his apartment that said "Fourth Floor" and rang it.
    I found out later that my friend went to the same intersection I did, waited for an hour, and assumed I went to the wrong place, and, since there was nothing else to do, went home. I guess coving my face with a newspaper, stuck in some stairwell wasn't the best, most obvious place to wait for someone.
    I rang the doorbell again.  “RING!”  While I was still on the street, my friend stuck his big head out the bedroom window.
    "Scotty? Is that you?  You look terrible.  Where ya been?! I was worried sick! Beer or coffee?"
    "I'll tell you when I get up there," I yelled up to the open window on the fourth floor. "Just let me in. I’ve gotta get some sleep. I’m beat…oh and, uh…a beer would be nice. Thank you for asking.”

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