Apocalypse on Sixth and 30th

An old man is kneeling by the side of the road, this autumn morning along Sixth Avenue, the Avenue of the Americas, in the city that has insomnia and never sleeps. Scruffy silver beard, check. The smell of too many days without baths resulting in an atomic sort of funk, check. A sign that says, “Repent! The end of the world is nigh!”, check. The only thing missing is Wagnerian background music, a blood-red sky, the Whore of Babylon, and we’re good to go. Good to go for good. This city is a melting pot of crackpots  me included. Jesus freaks, prophets of doom, self-talkers, Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters. And I love New York for it.

I arrived yesterday afternoon after an interminable flight. (Why do airlines always, ALWAYS, show Jennifer Aniston movies?) Not wanting to blow my meager bucks on a cab ride from the airport to the hotel where I’m staying, I book one of those airport shuttles (cost me $18). A kindly Indian woman at the JFK Airport assisted me. Her name was Kong, and I sh*t you not. The African-American woman who drove the van took one look at me and said, “You’re too skinny. You need to eat more chicken.” Bless her kind soul. She started fighting with the dispatcher (“You what? You want me to pick up someone at the mouth of the tunnel? You really hate me, don’t you?!!!”), and bafflingly ended the conversation with “So, what do you want for dinner?” It took me a while to process the entire exchange. Oh. I see. The dispatcher was her husband.

I am here in New York for an assignment for the paper. After making sure to inform the host that I’ve already arrived at the Big Apple, I leave my bags at the hotel room and head for Times Square.

There’s a gaggle of difference between now and the last time I was here in 2007. The old shops making way for the new shops; lots of construction work going on. The Virgin Records store in the middle of Times Square has been replaced by Fashion 21, I think. Record stores are not doing well, while fashion boutiques are thriving. You can’t download clothes.

So as not to be hassled (“Spare me a buck, a cigarette…”), I try blending in: walking with confidence, not whipping out the camera every time I see a building from a Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen movie, not gawking, and generally not looking tatanga-tanga. Effective, too effective. Korean and Japanese tourists start asking me for directions. Something’s lost in mistranslation.

The city that never sleeps will not let you snooze.

New York, gray morning: Scenes from New York City, from the Rockefeller Center to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the fabled realms in between

I stay awake by watching American TV. Don’t I miss TV shows back home? Which ones  those ridiculous soaps, cod-science fiction, or fantasy shows? The heroine rides the back of a giant grasshopper. Then flies. Or breaks into song. Or exchanges regurgitated dramatic dialogue with a dashing debonair of an actor who can’t act. Or those zillions of advertisements featuring artistas? The shampoo commercials with supernaturally shiny hair, medicines with alchemical effects. Not even Philip K. Dick imagined all this happening.

Days from now, I would find myself at the Penn Station waiting for an Amtrak train to Union Station in Washington D.C., waiting to catch a glimpse of the newest Knick Amare Stoudemire at Madison Square Garden and running into former Piston John “Spider” Salley instead (the story of my life), and while onboard waiting for the great American highway to unfurl outside the coach window in all its generic beauty. A one-way ticket out of the blues.

Something prophetic: I will drink Blue Moon beer at the Ruby Tuesday restaurant in the sweet State of Virginia while listening to two musical airheads get into a debate about who recorded the song Ruby Tuesday  The Beatles or the Rolling Stones. “The Rolling Stones?” one guy would say incredulously. “Man, I thought their song was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I’m confused.” It would remind me of a talk show I saw in New York with the topic being which is the better Baby Boomer band. “It has to be The Beatles,” said the blonde broadcaster. “Fifty years from now they’ll still be playing them in elevators. If there would still be elevators.”

Fifty years from now those fake breasts will become withered raisins of dead silicone, and the fake-tanned skin turned to banners of leathery and leprous epidermis, while Happiness is a Warm Gun will lose none of its beauty. 

East side of the sun, West side of the moon

I am with colleagues and their friends in a restaurant in Park Avenue called Park Avenue Autumn, a restaurant that changes name, décor and cuisine in every change of season. Pierce Brosnan and wife (?) dine with moneyed-looking men. I excuse myself from the pleasant company and later on find myself in the seedier side of the city.

Here’s the modus operandi. Walk fast. Talk to others not. Find an Irish pub and drink the shiver away. Meet someone. Watch her disappear, get eaten by shadows. Go out into the dark. Escape in a gypsy cab. That’s the plan, Stan. “How do you make God laugh?” goes the favorite Ben Gibbard joke, “You make a plan.”

New York, you got money on your mind/and my words won’t make a dime’s worth a difference…. In a New York minute, things can get a little strange… And the magic rat drove his sleek machine over the Jersey state line… The subway… she is a porno/ The pavements they are a mess… And all the night girls they whisper/Escapades on the “D” train… Don’t care if it’s Chinatown or Riverside, I don’t have any reasons/ I’ve left them all behind… How did we get here/ To this point of living… Go ahead, bite the big apple, don’t mind the maggots… Manhattan’s sinking like a rock/ into the filthy Hudson what a shock they wrote a book about it/they said it was like ancient Rome… And love, love is just a passing word/It’s the thought that you had in a taxicab that got left on the curb… Start spreading the news.

Back at the hotel room, I tune into AMC, and it’s showing teasers of The Walking Dead; first episode premieres on Halloween. The countdown begins. Watching a hellish zombie town is heaven. No Marian Geronimo in sight with extraordinarily dull sound bites (“Sobrang happy ako to be working with so and so…”). Only blondes with fangs.

I am always like this: thinking about our tragicomic little republic whenever I am a thousand miles away from it. Reminds me of what Nick Joaquin wrote about how the exiles or the expatriates are the ones who really love their country the most. Well, I’d say even the perennial tourist who loves the undead.

I leave New York dragging my suitcase from the hotel to Eighth and 31st, past the side streets and alleyways on cold and wet October day. Leaving New York, sings Michael Stipe, is never easy. Because it’s the one pool where James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) would happily drown.

Ah, New York, to mangle the wit of Ryan Adams: I have to leave before I have to go.