Round two of today’s text splatter. I might have stayed at the library today longer if not for the annoying noises seeping through these headphones. These cheapo headphones are eminently passable for walking around or sitting in coffee shops but altogether not a tool for killing noise.
I recognized people at the LIBARRY who seemed to be sitting in the exact same spot as when I saw them the last time I was there, maybe a month ago. That is a motivator for me, to be among familiar strangers whose discipline and routine can inspire me to be so focused as they.
That was one of the many things I got wrong about L. I wanted her penchant for working long hours to be a motivational thing for me. It was, at first, until is was not. Too tedious to explain. Some of my happiest moments with the women I’ve known were those times when I was proud of them, and happy for their successes.
I thought of L. today because (as far as I know) she lives a block away from that LIBARRY I was at today.
I have ventured over to the Ravenswood library, or whatever that newish one on 21st Street and 38th Avenue is named. There is a teeny-tiny library inside the Ravenswood Houses on 21st Street but I’ve not been in that one. The only other reasonably walkable LIBARRY I can think of is up by the St. George Churchyard and Cemetery.
I drafted a decent piece about a payphone scene from the first-ever episode of “Taxi”, a show I watched when it was current in the 1980s but of which I have little memory now. The opening credits feature a lot of the Queensboro Bridge. The Queensboro also appeared in “Death Wish” and “An Unmarried Woman,” which I started watching last night. DW is solid film-making but not-so-vaguely misogynistic. AUW is considered path breaking for the windows it opened onto the so-called real world of woman. I can appreciate that from just the first 20 minutes of the film, but to this veteran of “Sex and the City” and a fair amount of real life time spent with woman talking like women AUW lands somewhere between tame and a willfully coarse.
There is a fair amount of the Queensboro and views toward Long Island City in that film’s early segments, but LIC was kind of a wasteland back then. No ugly-ass hotels or Citi Building on the horizon. The couple in AUW lives in a building which appears to be at the John Jay Walkway. I thought they would show my old apartment building on 78th and York but they did not.
I would like to move back there. I was thinking of this earlier. I could move away somewhere, get a bullshit job and a $500/month apartment in some butthole town. Save my money and come back to the New York Upper East Side I always regretted leaving behind. I had to vacate apartment 2B at 509 East 78th so I could take the reputed glamour job at CNN in Atlanta. I made it 6 months of the one year I promised to stay down there before high-tailing it back to New York. I took what I thought would be a temporary place in Astoria, but just never got off my ass to move back to UES. It was said to be close to impossible to get a “normal” apartment in that area by the time I got back, and that remained the situation for years to come. By “normal” I mean no doorman, no swimming pools, no $150,000 grand pianos in the lobby like the place where I lived in Atlanta. That place had three grand pianos, 2 swimming pools, multiple waterfalls in the lobby… I hated it. I might have lasted longer in Atlanta if I had a car, or had I lived over in what is now the hipster part of town… Can’t think of what they called that area but a CNN co-worker lived there in a monster house for $650/month. I paid $800 for a small one-bedroom in a fishbowl antiseptic high rise. That building is now a Trump-owned building. No wonder I didn’t like it.
I guess the hazard of moving to some butthole town with the plan of moving back here is that I would stay lazy like I did in Astoria, and just stay wherever “Butthole” is forever. I remember driving from Florida to here in my father’s car in 2005. I met people along the way who asked where I was going. A dude working at a gas station responded saying “You can have a good life there. New York has everything. I lived there… Ozone Park. You can have a good life there.” His response was something between happy to hear I was heading to New York and melancholy that he had his time there but could not make it last.
A woman who owned a tchotchke shop in the town of Washington, North Carolina, spoke at first of how great New York was, but that she was an exile, too, and she missed it every single day. She did not seem miserable there in her little charms and souvenir store. But her smiles seemed fake after we talked about New York for a few minutes.
A woman who worked at the Bose store at a mall in Tampa saw my MetroCard when I opened my wallet to make a purchase. She blurted out “Are you from New York?” I said “Yeah.” She said “I want to get there so badly. I want to make it up there.” I think she had been to NYC a couple of times. She was obviously familiar with the look of the MTA MetroCard.
Another time, years earlier, my mother and I went to a Tampa Bay Buccaneers store outside of Tampa. For some reason this was one of those asshole establishments that demanded your name, address, and telephone number as their terms of making a purchase. I gave them a real name, followed by a fake address (207 East 61st Street, more on that carefully-crafted canard another time) and a fake phone number. Before I started in to the fake phone number the cashier pre-empted me: “So your phone number is 212…” He had already filled in the world-renowned Manhattan area code before I had a chance to lie about it myself. I was in the wilderness of the (718) area code by then.
And on and on… It started to seem like people who are not here have some rote assumption they fill in about New York, be it the notion that we all are branded with the uber-cool 212 area code or that we stand around Rockefeller Center every day to see what we can of the “Today” show from outside at Rockefeller Center. (Someone in West Virginia asked me that: “Do you go to Rockefeller Center to see the ‘Today’ show all the time?”)
On my Nebraska/Dakotas road trip in 2002 everybody, I mean every single person I engaged in conversation, asked a variant of the same question: “Where were you?” I think I stuck to the same story: I came out of a subway station where I heard and saw the first plane fly right over my head. I remember noticing how low to the ground it was, and the sputtering noise of the engine sounded strangely intimate. But I didn’t think anything beyond that half second of airplane shadow being cast over 8th Avenue. I don’t remember the rest of my 9/11 story, except that I was careful to excise the fact that I worked at CNN at the time. For some reason I thought that would make my experience seem less than genuine.
Yes, I would like to have made it back to the Upper East Side, far over by York Avenue. I would not think the 2nd Avenue Subway has murdered the East Side that far over, at least not yet. To me the lack of subway over there was what made the far east side such a relative enclave. With subways come crime. That was said to be conventional wisdom when I lived there. Maybe that is a dated generalization now.
I think I shall go to the ghetto supermarket and grab another satchel of $0.55/pound chicken. I laughed when I discovered the discount chicken a few days ago. I did not see it at first. Normally when you buy chicken drumsticks they are laid out in an orderly fashion on a styrofoam dish and wrapped in plastic. The cheapest they sell chicken in that format is $0.99/pound. For $0.55/pound they dispense with the formalities and the elegant presentation.They just throw a dozen or more chicken legs into a plastic bag and seal it with a knot. Not even a twist tie. Classy stuff. Hey, whatever works.
