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 42^nd 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

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