New York Part 3: Streets and Avenues

I got off the bus at about 10 AM, two hours later than expected but not really caring. I took a moment to stand on a street corner and really take in the fact that I was here, breathing the air of a different city for the first time in years.
I was hungry.

That first time in Grade 12, when we stepped off the bus, my friend pulled me aside as everyone was rushing to the nearest familiar fast food place. "We didn't come all this way to eat Wendy's." No, sir. We went and found some random corner deli to eat in. My brother Eric, the one who stayed home, echoed similar statements, not to eat in familiar places if it was avoidable. I'm not saying I ate like a king while I was down there. The first place I went was a random breakfast spot that was not that different from what you might see in Toronto. But I deliberately did not eat at the Burger King/Gas Station outside of Scranton three hours earlier, so I had to eat quick. I needed to unfold my map and get my bearings.

In the interest of not unfolding a giant goddamned map every fifteen minutes, I located the fold where my dropoff location was and staked out a territory between there (7th Avenue & 29th St) and Central Park on the other side of the fold. Meg had told me what bar we'd be meeting at, so I plotted out a route to it on the way.

Now, I could have planned this out better. I had no agenda and a whole city as my playground. When you're in a new city, you wander. Just be sure you're not wandering into the wrong neighbourhood. Luckily, I was in tourist central. I was too stupid to take her up on her offer to hold onto my bags, so here's me wandering around Midtown Manhattan with a backpack (full of precious reading material for the road) and sports bag (full of more clothes than I probably needed) on an increasingly hot late summer day just gawking at everything and trying to decide what I actually wanted to do. It was like the ride over, when I could hardly decide what to listen to, presented with all my options. My trip was on shuffle.

Incidentally, New York's grid layout is a frigging gift from the heavens for this sort of thing. If you were new to Toronto and I said "You're at Bloor and Avenue, you need to meet me on College and Bathurst," you'd be taking your map out over and over. In New York: You're on 7th and you need to be on 5th. Traveling as subtraction.

I roamed through Times Square and met with a hustler who quick-changed me out of a few bucks. I didn't tell this story to Alex & Meggo because it was embarrassing as hell. I was right off the bus -- and looked it -- and perfectly willing to stop and chat anyone who'd shove something into my hands. "Hey, I got this CD. Show some love, anything you got. Where you from? Toronto? Shit man, I love Montreal. Here, let me autograph this for you. You got a ten?" I make the mistake of opening my wallet, fat with tourist moneys. More CDs fly into my palm. "Yo, you gotta show them some love, too." Fuck! "Gimme that twenty, I'll give you ten, you give me that other twenty..." Look, I didn't walk away and only realize hours later "Wait a minute..." I'm handling money all day. I know my shit. "Hey, um," I say like it's an innocent mistake, "One of those guys didn't give me the right change." "What?" The first guy says like a seriously-concerned quality assurance manager. "Here, let me go talk to him." They huddle up. I have very little hope of actually seeing a cent returned and I know it. He comes back. "He says he didn't." That's my cue to walk away, admitting defeat. There was this episode of NewsRadio where Jimmy was obsessed with getting back at some hustlers who rolled him at Three Card Monte. I may be a pavement-pounding Torontonian at home, but here I'm a wide-eyed suburban tourist. I fell for it. Have a nice life, enjoy a few extra drinks on me.

Grumbling about this experience, I tromp away from Times Square and head for the park. If I'd known it was my best chance, I'd have made for the Empire State Building and gotten that out of the way.

I just looked it up on Google maps.. A direct route from my dropoff the Central Park is about 2 miles. During the school year, when I had time, that was about the distance I walked from the train station to campus in maybe 40 minutes. Except there it was the "Head down, keep moving" type of walking, and this was the "Gawk at everything, watch your step" type of walking. So it probably took an hour or more. When I saw the trees, I thought "Cool, a place to relax."

In the park, there's a small stretch of lawn right by the south entrance where I sat to unfold my small part of map, to rest my luggage a while, and catch my breath. A stone's throw away is a female body sprawled out on its belly, face shaded by a sun hat, nose in a book. She's clad only in bikini bottoms, the straps of her top unfastened beneath her. I don't know if it's ever come across on this blog but I'm rather an enthusiast when it comes to breasts. I gawk a moment before realizing she's kind of old and I'm a huge perv.

I move over to a nearby bench where, of course, there's a more age-appropriate female fiddling with an MTA route map. "Awesome," I think, "Hot lady tourist." I sit down with my bags next to me, enjoy the view (of the park, not the old lady or the young one.) I notice the girl turn behind us and snicker. I turn and see the elderly woman sitting up fastening her top.

"Aw, man," I say out loud in my inimitable Scotto way, "You mean I missed that old lady's nipples?" I have no idea who would say such a thing to a complete stranger, except of course me. When you can, you test people.

"It's actually rather jarring," she says in a difficult-to-define accent, "The progression of age." She indicates a young man and an older one sitting shirtless behind the older lady. We have a laugh and I ask where she's from. "England. Can't you tell from the accent?" I explain that, of late, I've had difficulty telling British accents from Australians and New Zealanders. I've made a few embarrassing failed guesses at work. Her name was Yara, a Syrian name.

I tell her I'm from Toronto. She says she'd been staying with friends in Montreal and spent a day in Toronto recently, praising it. She visited during Buskerfest. I didn't go, but I don't explain that it's because I live in the suburbs. She asks whether I've been to London and I say no but it's on the list. I've got family in the north of England. "Whereabouts?" "County Durham." "Oh, that is North." Well yeah. "Lovely country up there." We compare notes on our trips and ask the usual questions you do when you're meeting someone for the first time: what do you do? She's a law student, I'm a globetrotting investigative journalist and masked vigilante. Or I work in a CD store. I actually mention which store, because she's British and she knows the chain. Another question, "what do you think of the city?" She said it was making her appreciate London. Not because it was so much better or worse, but I surmised the differences helped remind her what she loved about her city. The same was holding true for me. Toronto is New York miniaturized and every few blocks Toronto came back to me some way or another.

She asks what sort of music I'm into, and I cite Arcade Fire as my most recent interest. She gasps and says "Thank you! You're the first Canadian I've spoken to who knows them." I find that odd, particularly as they're considered a Canadian band. Most of my friends knew of them years before I got into them. Maybe she knows the wrong Canadians.

She mentions she's thinking of going to the art museum. I say that was on my list of possible activities. I had discussed either MOMA or the Natural History Museum with Meggo and still hadn't decided as of this random conversation. I knew MOMA was nearby, so I asked if she'd come along. We began to walk. When we arrived, she realized we'd been talking about two different museums. She'd already been to this one. She said I should go and enjoy it and she'd go back to the park and read, nice meeting you. Privately I wondered if it was because, during our conversation, I mentioned how I got scammed in Times Square, and she wondered aloud if I was maybe trying to grift her somehow. I tried to joke my way out of it but all of a sudden I felt very sketchy, so when she opted to get away, I let her go instead of saying "Wait, I can go to the other museum."

I should note at this point my bags, which felt perfectly fine when I left the house, now appeared to be full of cinder blocks. The other museums, I now know from checking the maps, were in a location known as "Very fucking far to walk" when you're schlepping such cargo. So I wasn't too eager to chase after her. I was at the MOMA. If nothing else, they had baggage check.

So there's me wandering the Museum of Modern Art just because it means I can put my bags down. Last time I came, we did MOMA, Modern Art wasn't my thing. I would look at a Jackson Pollock and think "Fuck, anyone could do that." Immature. In University, Modernism and Postmodernism were explained a bit more clearly to me. Modernism came in when Photography began to dominate people's perception of real, and acts as a counter by presenting things that cannot by depicted by photography. Splatters of paint, designs, lines and shapes. The painting is a thing for itself, not a recreation or even an interpretation (Monet, Van Gogh,) and Postmodernism is when we understand the world through shared reference points (hence: cans of soup, comic books, satire.) Maybe I'm no art scholar and maybe I don't even know what I'm talking about now, but I at least have a frame of reference now. That doesn't mean I didn't think some of it was silly. I like art, but mainly as a friend.

I took pictures of paintings and I took pictures of people looking at paintings. I took pictures out the building's windows and I took a picture of the gift shop because I figured that was as good as spending money there.

After an hour or so of wandering through exhibits -- including an elaborate installation called "Sum of Days" where you wander through a path of thin white drapes while speakers play jungle sounds -- I decided it was time to man up and get myself back on the street. I picked up my bags (maybe I should have left them and gone and come back) and headed back out. My feet took me back to the park, because my thought process goes something like "Maybe I'll see that girl again." She vaguely alluded she'd be headed back to the park but I had no illusions she wasn't already long gone.

From the park I reversed course, found a small diner to eat and enjoy a Coca-Cola (unspeakably refreshing under these conditions.) When I'd said I was hoping to go to the Empire State Building, Yara mentioned she'd heard Rockefeller Center had an even better view. I went there but was running low on time so I decided not to go up. I just sat around until it was finally time to meet Alex and Meg.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto