Chronicles of a Baby Boomer - Manhattan Madness

Well (good stories always start with "Well". Once Upon a Time is so Grimm Brothers.) I headed out on my Manhattan Adventure. I had a ticket on will call at the theater and my hotel room reserved. It was cheap and a youth hostel format, though it looked like I had a private room. We’ll see what it looks like. I located a parking garage nearby and plugged it into, what shall I call this GPS? Gypsy was my old one. Esmeralda? Nah. Not catchy enough. I decided to stick with Gypsy Junior. I gassed up the car and we were on our way.

G.J. never once said 'Calculating' or the terse 'Recalculating' that her mother liked to spit in my face all the time. Didn't want Herr Goebbels Google to fire her, I suppose.

It was a hundred fifty miles and would take two hours thirty minutes or so. Less than I thought.

Most of the trip was uneventful. Three cops sped by, bubble gum dispensers a'blazing. Once, the cars in front of me jammed on their brakes, almost stopping. G.J. came tumbling off the dashboard and onto the passenger side floor. She came up OK. It happened another time, but she came back up smiling.

After a few hours I heard "Welcome to New York!" Ah, yes. Rye. Westchester. Rob and Laura. The Chimpan Zee Bridge. (Don't get too close to it. You wouldn't like it.) She was pretty good at piloting me, though she called it the Geo Washington Bridge. She did get Houston Street right (HOW-sten.)

G.J. took me down FDR Drive and off at E 21'st Street and into the maze that is lower Manhattan. Then things got wonky. Oh, look. There's St. Mark's Place! The Big Gay Ice Cream! Hey, gay people! No, I can't say that anymore. That’s bad. They're LG...BLT...Cherchez la gay... Or le gay... Mr./Ms. Gay? I can’t keep track of all the new, superfluous pronouns, possessives, etc.  Hopefully I outraged some people there.

I need a pocket guide. Or a people guide. For people to realize that all these specialty parts of speech, pronouns, possessives, and whatever will only make them look more ridiculous and can't force anybody to respect anybody else more, anyway. They'll just be forced into taking loyalty tests or lose their jobs at the gay ice cream shop. Don’t they read Orwell? High heal jack boots.

Then she got a little confused. She'd tell me I was on Delancey St. and to turn onto E 4'th St. But I was still on 2'nd Avenue and Delancey was coming up. Then she'd get the streets right but tell me to turn right on 2'nd St. when it only went left. I had to turn right on 3'rd St., then right on 1'st Ave. and then right on 2'nd. I think, maybe, she had suffered a slight concussion. Ah, there was the parking garage, which was full.

So I double parked in front of a fire plug that had a wino wrapped around it after taking a circuitous path around road construction and taxis cutting me off, and looked up another parking garage. I popped that into my thinking machine, though I knew, generally, where I was going. She must have recovered, because she got me there just fine. And this one had a vacancy! This one was on 1’st St. I went in, dropped off my car, and left it in good hands.

A few blocks got me to my destination, the Bowery Hotel. Someone was there to open the door for me, a pleasant lobby lay within, and cheerful, uniformed receptionists to welcome me. There were keys hanging in cubbyholes with little tassels on them behind them. There was some kind of beer sampling thing going on this night. Wow! I've never seen a youth hostel like this before!

Of course I haven't. It doesn't exist.

She couldn't find my reservation.

I got out my confirmation and showed it to her. Oh. This is for the Bowery Grand hotel. This one is called the Bowery hotel. People get us both confused all the time. Just go out back onto Bowery St., turn left and it's down the street a bit. I was at 335 Bowery St. and wanted to be at 143. I wanted to be right here, actually, but had to reluctantly vacate the premises without making a scene.

I thanked her and left, the doorman held the door open for me. I think I heard him sniggering.

I went several blocks down, after crossing and recrossing the road around construction. I counted off the street numbers. This is also the Avenue of the Kitchen Restaurant Appliances. I passed shop windows filled with slicers, cash registers, industrial strength coffee grinders, and oodles of steam table trays.

Then something occurred to me. What did I do with the slip to claim my car? I checked my wallet and pockets several times but could not find it. Great. Maybe I put it in my shirt pocket and pulled it out along with the confirmations back at Hotel Nirvana and lost it. So, I doubled back to the garage and said, I think I lost my ticket. Do you need to get something out of your car? I'll need to see your ticket. No, I don't have the ticket. I saw the person I had dealt with before and spoke with him. Oh, I have your ticket here. I must have left without it. OK. I took it and put it somewhere. Maybe.

As I got closer to 143, I tried to see a sign for it. I began to think of that Woody Allen movie where he was on a plane and had to move to second class. He could see through into first class where everybody was drinking champagne and dancing in the isles. The stewardesses were dancing in cages hung from the ceiling. Meanwhile, in second class he was stuck with some grubby eastern Europeans and some goats.

It wasn't much different than that. I didn't see a sign, just a recessed door with a grubby window and 143 stenciled on it in Cyrillic. I went in and there was a Budweiser can on the floor and a steep, long, narrow staircase beyond it. The words of the prophets… No goats. Yet.

At the top of the stairs I was buzzed into a corridor and a window with somebody sitting at a cluttered table. Behind him someone was eating noodles out of a Styrofoam take out container. That reminded me that I was hungry. I gave him my ID and he gave me a key. No tassels. No dancers. No doorman. No craft beer. Just room 120 on a little paper tag glued onto it. Bathroom's down the hall. The half torn signs pasted to the walls said things like, “No female guests allowed,” “Lost keys will result in a $20.00 replacement fee,” “Rats are extra,” and cheerful stuff like that.

Room 120 was cell like with a single bed on one side, a cot, really, and a fire escape on the other, a tiny end table, and a place to hang my coat. Still no goats, so that was good. Eh, I've had worse. At least there were no roommates. And there was a picture on the wall!

I rested for a while, got my bearings, and looked for places to eat. I remembered bringing Kristin and Matt to an Indian restaurant somewhere around here. There was an Avenue of the Indian Restaurants around Greenwich Village. The nearest I could find any was on 6'th St. One was called the Raj Mahal. There were others there, as well. Sounds good.

On my way there I noticed something. New Yorkers love their horns. It seems to be some kind of primal call or instance of alpha status. I’d see someone come up behind someone at a green light, perhaps because there were pedestrians still in the walk way (they might have the cross light, too, sometimes. It seems to work, mostly,) and honk at them. Then, about one and a half seconds later I’d hear an identical honk, tone and duration, from about five cars back. Is that a herd instinct? A challenge? A sympathetic response? A signal? Once one jerk flew past a traffic cop going too fast. The cop did not have a horn, but yelled at the guy. I felt like I should also yell one and a half seconds later. I’m going native.

I walked back up Bowery Street, trying not to look at the guests drinking craft beer and the receptionists dancing in cages in the real Bowery Hotel. I found the Raj Mahal and decided it looked good. Raj was the owner. I had a fish dinner with Sag Paneer, chutney, rice, some kind of fish I didn't recognize, a vegetable curry, and desert. It was great.

After that I found my way to a subway station for the B and D trains. I had to buy a new Metro card since mine had expired in February. Then to the platform. I tried to remember how to figure out which way they were going, uptown or downtown? Once you are in the bowels of Manhattan it is impossible to maintain your sense of direction, just like when you are on the top of the bowels of Manhattan. I was on one platform, which I thought was right, but kept double checking the map, because something didn't make sense to me. Then I realized I was on the wrong side of the tracks. The one going downtown towards Brooklyn.

Oops. So I skirted over to the right side and waited for my train. Soon I was at Bryant Park and 42'nd Street. Billy Joel was nowhere in sight. After turning the wrong way again for a block or two (I have a knack for being on the wrong side of things: Subway stations, hotels, the Law) I soon found Times Square. I had a couple of hours and decided to get some cheesecake and coffee at Sardi's. Pricey, yes, but good. I could have gotten the same thing at a little grocery store in the same area and eaten it inside for half the price, but; Sardi's!

It was definitely worth it. Fresh cheesecake with fresh strawberries, not canned. A pot of coffee and pitcher of cream, not coffee in a Styrofoam cup and Moos. And the waitress poured my first cup while raising the pot high above it. I expected the stream of coffee to slalom back and forth on the way down like in Dagwood. I finished, then got my ticket at will call and found my seat in the St. James theater on 44'th Street. It was in the orchestra section, pretty close to the middle.

Frozen was phenomenal. The acting and singing were superb with several new songs. Anna was very precocious, both the six year old and the sixteen year old instance of her. The special effects were very extensive, clever and effective, and could have overshadowed the actors had they not been as strong as they were. Some of the special effects were really magic tricks, with lots of glitter, special gobos and costumes magically changing from one to another. It was a lot of sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors. Sometimes there is a danger of having too much tech. It can drown out the action. But these worked together well.

It let out around 10:30. I found Bryant Park and hopped a train back to the Bowery 'Grand' hotel. Before I left, I remembered that my Metro card had expired and I had had to get a new one earlier. Well, they will take what's left on the expired card and add it to the new one. That was a good ten bucks. I got the D train to Grand Street. I had to make sure I got the RIGHT D train. The D line splits into three before it gets to my station, so I had three choices. The way you tell which is which is to look at the line you need on a map, then follow it to its terminus. The trains that come to the platform will have their termini on them, so you look for the D train with that as its terminus and get on. Mine was Coney Island.

I got back in my cell sans dancers. But sans goats as well. Outside there was a lot of noise, fire trucks, traffic, pedestrians and guns. But it was dying down now. You would think so. It was 1:30 by then. I ate some Naan bread I had taken from the restaurant earlier and wrote some of this essay. Eventually, I fell asleep.

Sunday morning! No need for an alarm, the bluster of Bowery Street woke me up at 7:30. I checked out and went on a quest for a New York breakfast. I found a place called Russ and Daughters. I got The Mensch, Sturgeon, butter, tomato, onion and capers on pumpernickel. They also had knishes, caviar, Shtetl, and the like.

I checked to see if there was anything interesting in the area, since I had over three hours to kill. It was 9:30. The Tenement Museum was nearby, as was a tour of a beer brewery. But they all opened at 11:00.  I was getting a little tired, having had a maximum of five hours of sleep the night before. So I just took a leisurely walk up to my car, which was a good walk away.

Strange think about the streets of Lower Manhattan. They are not like the streets of Upper Manhattan. They twist and turn, end abruptly, and cross each other in places. The old Dutch settlement ended at Wall Street, which used to have the northern wall along it, hence the name, but as the city squeezed the southern part of Manhattan until it spurted northwards, it continued the same haphazard waltze of weird. Around Houston (HOW-sten) Street they hired a city planner to contain the crazy. His first suggestion was to plow under the whole lower eighth of Manhattan and start again.

The next city planner made due with what was there, including Broadway, which runs in a zig-zag gash from Battery Park and way up to the very tip and ends at the Harlem River. The result was a modern city of a hatch work of Avenues (N-S) and Streets (E-W,) with the occasional anomaly here and there. Where Broadway jauntily crosses another Avenue is a square, Times Square being the most famous.

Now that the architectural lecture is over, what does that mean to me? Well, I’d look at the map app (Maapp?) on my phone and see where I was in relation to where I wanted to be. OK. I’m at this Jewish Restaurant on Delancey and Orchard. How about I walk up to E Houston Street, turn left, and then to Bowery Street. OK. I’m off. Somehow I missed Bowery Street and got to Broadway. That can’t be right. Check the Maapp again! I could see that I was considerably closer to the Hudson River (oddly pronounced HUD-sen, not HOWD-sen.) Back to the Maapp! How’d I get here? Ooooo-Kaaay. Oh, I can go up Broadway to Bleecker Street and then turn right until I get back to Bowery Street. Which I reluctantly did. Are you pulling my leg, Gypsy Junior? You got some streets a little crooked before, you know. I thought I heard a snicker. What’d I ever do to you? I thought I heard something about throwing her on the floor a couple of times. Under my breath I muttered, You’re just like your mother. I heard that!

Duly ignoring her, I walked up Broadway not quite sure where the hell I was, but eventually found Bleecker. Turn right! Hm. Crosby Street. I wonder where Stills, Nash, and Young Streets are? Unless it’s for Bill. No, that would be Cosby. Mulberry Street. Doesn’t that go to Chinatown? And Mott Street. Yes! Those are a few of the main streets there. I began to feel like the Hobbits in the Old Forest. No matter where I went, I’d end up back at the same place. I hope they don’t have willows in Manhattan. Elizabeth Street…Oh, here’s Bowery. Now which way do I go? Dare I trust old Mappy-Appy again? Do I have a choice? Look, 1’st Street is one street down! I went and didn’t have to figure which way to go on 1’st, as it ended at Bowery instead of going all the way to the Hudson River. A block or two down and I found my garage.

I had my golden ticket, and soon had my Volvo car. A hundred and fifty miles, two and a half hours back exactly the way I came, without incident.

Well, Gypsy Girl. I think we made a good team.

Don’t call me Girl.

Not you, too?