So… that was not supposed to be a vacation but it ended up feeling like one. Back at the ghetto coffee shop. Familiar tundra. It is nice to know that after 27 years of living in New York there is actually one person at whose place I can crash for a couple of nights should the need arise. In this case the impetus was the landlord announcing that he was going to paint the bathroom early Saturday morning. He called and sounded like he was asking if that would be OK but really he was just informing me that he had already booked a painter and that I would have to accommodate. He knows full well I am a night owl, although I happened to have been waking up at normal hours last week.
I did not have to vacate but I wanted to anyway. The paint would probably stink and I would not want to be there for other reasons. So I e-mailed my friend Chad with a subject line “Longshot?” to ask if I could stay over for one night. His response was like, dude, perfect timing. He and his wife were going to be out of town so I’d have the whole place to myself. In fact I think I had the entire building to myself, since he mentioned the downstairs neighbors were also going to be away. Sweet. So I stayed for 2 nights instead of just the one, and made an epic wander of both Friday afternoon and Saturday. I also made it back over to the Red Hook Houses today in search of those payphones I saw from the B61 bus, but somehow they eluded me. I did find a dead payphone outside an abandoned supermarket. Hilariously, I realized after taking the picture that I had also captured an image of a group of people ransacking a car in the parking lot. It actually looked like a family of four dissecting a car with Pennsylvania plates.
But yeah, a place to stay the night has not been in my reality since the very early days of living here. I stayed with college friends here and there and then had a girlfriend for a while, but since then I don’t think a second roof over my head has been eminently possible… although there has not really ever been reason to explore the possibilities. Certainly in a real emergency I know people who would accommodate, but for spontaneous things such as this I don’t know. Kind of a weird void.
So the wanders through Red Hook were pretty cool. I had no destination or sense of distance in mind. I just WENT. The view of lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn waterfront was stellar. I mean I’ve seen it any number of times but it never really gets old. I love the buzz of activity that seems to hum around that area, especially the continuous stream of helicopters. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the new-to-me discovery that there is an airport on Manhattan. A seaport to be exact, where planes land on the water.
Speaking of Manhattan I noticed a woman somewhere online whose first name is Manhattan. That might be the coolest name ever.
Carroll Gardens reminds me of what white people look like. En masse, that is. The area seemed as white as the Upper East Side when I lived there years ago. That whiteness was the source of puzzled reaction to something I said when some friends from the lower east side came to visit. One of them looked around and something like “Look at all these white people.” I commented “It’s just another ethnic neighborhood.” A long but silent stare followed, as if I had just something outrageous in implying that white people were somehow ethnic.
Yadda yadda yadda. Yabba dabba dooooo.
Listening to Lubomyr Melnyk on the Spotify, which always makes me think “Poopify.”
This vacating of my apartment inspired my first-ever perusal of AirBNB, which seems like a promising source of possibilities for random jaunts. For $44 a night I could share a place in Manhattan with as many as 8 other people. I would love to find a room at the mythical Parc Lincoln, that shithouse in which I lived for about 9 months after first moving here. Could it be as bad as I remember? Are roaches still crawling into the mouths of residents as they sleep? Are pigeons still sticking their goddam selves through the windows which must stay opened in the summer because of the heat and lack of ventilation? Does the elderly woman who lived upstairs from me still get off the elevator on the wrong floor and attempt to open the door to my former room thinking it is hers? Does the worst opera singer that ever lived still bleat arias like he has any fucking business doing so? And what of the choking, gagging dude with emphysema? Is he still hacking up internal organs 24 hours a day?
I was briefly possible to rent a place at the Trump Tower. A woman was renting her 2-bedroom for something like $300 a night. For that price (if that’s actually what it was) I would have actually contemplated renting that place for a night if I’d known about it in time. She got busted for doing it, as it’s against building rules to sublet. I think she was fined $100. It’s a little weird that that was even possible, though. I mean, the president has not been there since he took office but still, anybody could have rented that place and wreaked some kind of havoc. I’d spend a few hundred to stay a night at 432 Park, just to understand why anybody would actually want to live in that nasty looking structure. I should rent my place out and just live for free down in Florida for a while. It would be cool and perhaps karmic to live rent-free or close to it, as has been the privilege of a surprising number of people I’ve encountered in New York.
I read that first foreclosure on Billionaire’s Row happened last week. It was not my property. Aha.
OK, I need a sammich.
