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We swam for three days in a shallow sea of human flesh. Even late in the afternoon,
two rivers of tourists washed into the Metropolitan Museum, separated by an exiting
trickle at the center of the wide stone steps. Inside they swirled and bobbed
around towering masterworks like waves against the pilings of a fallen pier.
We stood in line to pay our $15 entrance fee, stood in line to have our packages
searched, stood in line to see the art, to have a snack, to use the bathrooms.
We stood in line to leave.
At Katz's we stood crushed against the chest-high deli counter for 30 minutes
waiting just to order a pastrami sandwich on rye. That's because the guy with
the $50 haircut in front of us kept taking orders on his cell phone and feeding
them to the cutter in the white butcher's uniform. He knew the score -- we didn't
-- and New York City is all about knowing the score.
We swam for two full days, the marathon broken only by nighttime hours of decompression
in our dingy $200-a-night hotel room at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. We moved
with incredible intimacy among faces of every color, through bodies of every scent,
past lives at every level from exaltation to despair.
Manhattan, to me, is less an island than an ocean. The swim from side to side,
I'm told, grows easier with practice. That surrounding din of intimate conversation
fades. The fear of empty subway platforms dulls. The weight of unending replenishing
anonymity lessens. I would not see, with practice, the broken soul of the old
Chinese man who sold me two dollars worth of candied cashews. I would learn, in
time, to just swim on.
In Chinatown and through Times Square we moved elbow-to-elbow with our unknown
companions. In the Lower East Side we visited the Tenement Museum where immigrant
families huddled in rooms even dingier than our hotel. From 1865 until 1940, our
guide explained, over 7,000 men, women and children had lived in this single three-story
building. We were told to touch the wooden banister that so many thousands of
passing tenants had touched before. Minutes later, aboard the subway, ten hands
gripped the shiny metal pole with mine as our submarine rocketed beneath the city
streets. We touched, but did not talk.
"It's so crowded in here," I said out loud, "that I just picked my own pocket."
My wife, a former New Yorker, just frowned back. Go with the flow, she said telepathically.
Don't draw attention to yourself. Just shut up and swim.
Our swim through Central Park was much more civilized and synchronized. Thousands
of us moved rhythmically beneath the flowing "Gates" of orange cloth installed
temporarily by the artist Christo. This was what we and zillions of others had
floated here to see, lured by cheap bus tickets. We paid just $26 for the round
trip from Boston to the Big Apple. The lure worked very well. Hundreds of us overflow
travelers stood for up to three hours in long lines in the icy bus station. Eventually
more Greyhounds arrived and we sat tightly for the four-and-a-half-hour journey
from New England to New York.
We were invited, out of the blue, to dinner on the 15th floor of a high rise apartment building in the upper East Side. The doorman
knew our names when we arrived. The spacious condominium was warm. The owners,
the parents of a friend, were extraordinarily gracious. There were fascinating
guests, gourmet dining, warm drinks, brilliant conversation. There was room to
spread out and stretch.
I could survive life in the city, I thought, if I could have a place like this.
I could write my novel here. The apartment was an island, much like my safe and
quiet little haven in New Hampshire, except that this one hovers 150 feet above
the endless tide of people, rushing home to write their novels.
Manhattan, in my short visit, seemed less an island, than an ocean full of islands.
It is a miracle really -- millions of intimately disconnected people who can touch
without talking. They know the score. They know what's what and who's who and
where the action is. And through all the epochs of time it takes to criss-cross
the New York City ocean, to get from here to there and back again -- they exercise
the secret of survival locked in our shared DNA. They practice the prehistoric
wisdom that kept our ancestors going when we all wore fins and gills. Just shut
up and swim, man. Shut up and swim.
Text and photos copyright (c) 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson, All rights reserved.
READ: A Yankee in the Desert
CONTINUE to two web pages of NYC pix
New York City Photos (continued)
(Place mouse over picture to read the captions. Note how much the Brooklyn Bridge
looks like the McDonald's logo.)
CONTINUE New York City photo tour
All photos (c) 2005 J. Dennis Robinson / SeacoastNH.com.
New York City Photos (continued)
All photos (c) 2005 J. Dennis Robinson / SeacoastNH.com.
BEHIND THE SCENES: I Fear New York
All photos (c) 2005 J. Dennis Robinson / SeacoastNH.com.
I FEAR NEW YORK
In which the editor explains why he has not been to the Big Apple in 30 years.
(From SeacoastNH.com reader newsletter, February 2005)
My wife Maryellen loves New York. I fear the city, any city, but the Big Apple
especially. I went there 40-something years ago. I remember being inside the Statue
of Liberty and I think we even went up into the torch. I was with my Aunt Gracie
and a cousin or two. I recall thinking, even as a kid, that this city was just
way bigger than it should be – like one of those 600 pound pumpkins at the state
fair.
I’m sure we did all the typical tourist spots, but my brain is stuck on one image.
We had just climbed the stairs of some seedy hotel. It was one of the hotels you
see in the movies where the clerk sits inside a wire cage. The room stank of ancient
cigar smoke and when my aunt peeled back the covers on the bed there were large
bugs crawling around on the tattered sheets. She grabbed a kid in each arm and
hustled us off to a motel in New Jersey.
My second view of NYC was in the early 70s. Me and a college roommate were crashing
at his sister’s apartment. I remember that the Rolling Stones "Let it Bleed" album
had just been released and we listened to it after seeing Shakespeare’s "Titus
Andronicus" in Central Park. Danny Devito was in the play, which is one of the
bard’s bloodiest. That night I heard someone scream, and when I looked out the
window, a guy was getting stabbed. Being from New England, my first instinct was
to run outside and call for help. It was not a good instinct. We called the cops
from indoors instead. The next day I saw a naked man running down 42nd Street. Hardly anybody seemed to notice.
Maryellen tells me that the city is a wholly different place now. It’s safe.
It’s clean. She worked there for years and hardly ever got mugged. Just don’t
make eye contact with people and everything is fine.
Last week she had business in New York City. She knows a guy with a Lear jet
and 45 minutes after they left Pease Tradeport in Portsmouth they were on the
tarmac in New Jersey. They took a limo into the city and she was back in the NH
seacoast just a little after noon. She told me again about how safe it was, and
I told her again about the cockroaches and the naked man. She says the only way
to get beyond fear is to jump into the flame.
So we’re finally going. To assuage my paranoia we’re going by bus. We’re going
to go see Christo’s "installation" blankets flapping in Central Park. We’re going
to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. She’s going to show me some nice places to eat.
Everything is going to be fine. Maryellen says, statistically, New York City is
a lot safer than Portsmouth. Come to think of it, I saw a guy mugged here once
too. Maybe I’ve gotten "safe" mixed up with "familiar".
I read a comic book once where Batman developed a fear of bats. Robin, the Boy
Wonder, tied him to a chair and made him watch movies of bats until he was cured.
I watched the film "New York, New York". It helped a little. --- JDR
NOW READ: What happened on the trip
Copyright © 2005 by SeacoastNH.com. All rights reserved.