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York (7.05) |
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The
immigration official is paid to be mean and there's nothing I can
do about it. He's mean to the men in front of me, and those behind.
My sweet face does nothing to assuage his meanness, it makes it
worse. When he asks me where I'm staying I mention the word "Flat".
He barks: "I know what flat means. In this country you will say
Appartment." American immigration nowadays demands fingerprints
and a photograph. You place your fingers on glass pads, you stare
into a lens. If you are tired, like me, you don't press your fingers
hard enough. The immigration official gets angrier and angrier with
you. He wipes your fingers, he presses them down on the glass pads,
it still doesn't work. You're sweating, afraid of something. The
only thing that helps me through it is his name tag: Arthur Brown.
I imagine him as The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, dancing around
the stage in glitter and a flaming crown, singing " I am the god
of hell fire and I bring you... Fire (do-be-dooo) I'll take you
to burn (do-be-doo etc etc)!"
But hey, we have two nights and one whole day in NYC. What to do? Stay at Holly's incredible loft on the Bowery, right on the edge of China Town, round the corner from Little Italy, not far from CBGB, just along the way from The Bowery Mission. I saw some old films last year about the Bowery Bums of the 20s, men selling the rags off their back for a glass of cheap whisky. The Mission of 2005 looks ritzy in comparison to how it appeared back then, but I'm glad that I'm holed up at Holly's air-conditioned palace in the skies, marvelling at her shoe collection, instead of roasting my tootsies down there. If I lived in Holly's place I would become as fat as a house. She lives close to so many places where you can get tons of good, cheap food. Lucky us, Holly leaves a big load of fresh pumpkin tortellini in the fridge for Kay and Sara and I to scoff, and some good salad too. Life is good. At the coffee shop on Bleecker Street, the place with the bad name, we drink freshly squeezed juice out of County Fair Drinking Jars. They have a screw top where, I assume, you can rest your lid and go for a stroll down the midway. We're nowhere near a freakshow, and the jar thing is kind of affected, but I like it anyway. Inspired by Holly, we buy shoes. Shoes! Beautiful fat-foot-friendly Fluevogs. And we buy books and magazines! Yippee! They weigh like stones in our suitcases but make us as happy and giddy as girls. Is it possible to go to NYC and not end up feeling as though you're re-enacting some lousy scene from Sex and the City? I doubt it. As if the shoe shopping weren't enough, we celebrate the day with a fancy lunch at MOMA. The galleries are crowded, the art is over-familiar, but the noodle salad and ice cream sundaes are fabulous. Actually, I'm lying about the art, a gigantic Lee Friedlander retrospective goes down a treat, especially his photographs of big-haired Nashvillians, the kind of people we're hoping to encounter in a few days. Later that night we find ourselves, randomly, at a very strange performance. This is due to my inability to say No to people when I don't understand what they're saying. A man outside The Bowery Poetry Club asks if we want to come to the show. Poetry in New York is usually, in my experience, a good thing, so I say yes, we pay him eight dollars and we're in. There's no poetry. There's a band, there's a puppet show, there's a weird story about pirates and talking monkey-men and posh crabs, an inquisition and I don't know what else. There are in-jokes that the audience loves, many of them sing and bounce along with the songs. I am genuinely confused. It's so well-executed, but the performers are speaking a language I don't understand with jokes I nearly get but can't. Maybe it's the jetlag finally kicking in. It's weird, so random, and later I find out that it's this. |
     
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