Gotham City

This entry comes from the Filicori Zecchini coffee shop at the corner of 95^th and Broadway on the Upper West Side of New York. I’m one of half a dozen patrons united by one long cushioned booth running opposite the chocolate browns and dulled bronze of the counter itself. I’m also trying to keep my attention on the cursor instead of making eyes at the rows of tiny chocolates in the display case, but it may be a losing battle, especially as my iced cappuccino is now a collapsed igloo of foamy ice at the bottom of my cup.

This little snippet of an afternoon comes on the heels of two delicious slices of pizza from Two Boots pizzeria just down the block. I sat with my chosen pies, the Dude and the Tony Clifton, sipping a ginger ale and thinking that Jeff Bridges and Andy Kaufman would be proud. 

It feels nice to have spent the last few hours at a slightly slower pace. Seven-thirty this morning found me boarding a Megabus in White Marsh, MD, my duffel stowed in the rear compartment and my legs bowed around my backpack. I’d chosen a table seat to potentially get work done and because it was the last of the available reserved seats, but upon boarding, I thought I’d made a bit of a mistake. Four people had been allotted maybe two people’s worth of personal space. As the bus started off, however, my seatmate turned away from me to sleep, which left plenty of room, as long as I accessed each of my pants pockets with the opposite hand. I read through to the end of Stephen King’s On Writing, borrowed from Jon Littauer, tearing up at his description of being hit by the car in Maine. Here's a man who has made a career out of suspense and fear, and yet this was a raw, vulnerable account of how the two came into his life in a very real way.

As I hit the last page, New York filled the long, flat bus windows in panorama.  It was a clearer day than it had been when I drove to Boston, and it drew the city in sharper lines and brighter colors. It was postcard-perfect, but instead of “Wish you were here,” the view said “Almost there.”

I must admit, at the risk of offending my Gotham-dwelling friends, I was looking forward to the people much more than the city itself, being one of those people who has written New York off as “too much” time and time again. I’ve loved living in cities, but NYC feels like a city times a city and perhaps it’s that additional geometric layer that stretches my comfort level. Still, you see that skyline and this inspired feeling flows through you. Say what you want about New York, and it surely plays home to some moochers and dilettantes, but it was built and continues to run off of the hardest-working people in just about every profession we as a species have ever thought of.

Of course, as I stared out the bus window composing those thoughts, I inadvertently witnessed to a man grappling a woman to the ground and ripping a bag off her shoulder. It was probably one of the most violent things I’ve ever seen, which speaks more to my experience than anything else. I knew people who were mugged in college and several, including my roommate, who didn’t even get the courtesy of a request before the violence began. But I was never present for it as I felt now, if only through a window. The bus was in motion and people on the street closed in on the situation, but there was still a helplessness, or worse, a complicity, that I carried with me all the way off the bus, through the subway, and up to my friend Hanley’s apartment.  I think I spent the first hour or two up in her cozy nest rebooting, handling some GA to MD business to try and regain my silly sense of control.

But after a few minutes of writing at Hanley’s kitchen table, the sounds and motion beyond the windows called me back out, and now, after some great pizza and strong coffee (and all from one block), I feel like I’ve processed what I saw and am once again open-hearted to this big, mad metropolis. I’m excited to see my friends who call this home, some of whom I haven’t seen in over a decade, and hopeful that surrounding myself with the merry mania of creatives will be as fruitful as it was in Boston.