10.21.04
I dunno. I always have difficulty sleeping in new environments, at least for the first evening I’m there. I’ll frequently bring my head up on the middle of the night and feel overcome with the notion that East became West and that somehow, my mattress had been stapled to the ceiling in the middle of the night like in that Roald Dahl story The Twits. But when I woke up at roughly 1:30 in the morning this time, my environment was more foreign than I could ever remember, as I could clearly hear Nancy in her room engaging in wild sexual activity with her boyfriend. I would’ve written it off, but I have a habit of seemingly going through lightening quick sleep cycles on these first-night-in-new-room escapades, and every time I wake up, I feel like I’ve been sleeping for an entire hour when, in reality, I’ve only been out for a handful of minutes. Consequently, in my half-awake stupor, I came to the conclusion that Nancy had been working it goddammit for roughly 37 hours. My dementia-induced vicariate-vagina ached just thinking about it.
I woke up at 9 (which was, by my body clock, 8… of the following day) and immediately walked to the corner Walgreens to buy some Mountain Dew and Aleve, just to be safe, and coordinated the first meeting of the trip, with Damien. After taking the bus but my own lonesome (and taking due note of the fellow tourist who seemed to think I actually knew where the hell I was going when she asked “will this bus go downtown?”), I took the long way around past Times Square, just to see what had changed. The answer was not much, although I had noticed (upon Ed pointing it out to me the previous evening) that the disinfect-and-homogenize process that had already cleaned up that area had spread to the Port Authority drag. (When I looked across the street where I remember a porn video shop being and saw a Cold Stone Creamery, I was mildly crestfallen.) The evening before, I had wrestled sporadic control of the television just so I could check up on Game 7 of the suddenly monstrous American League championship playoffs, after Boston had managed to come back like no other team ever before. The collective three minutes I watched of the game were some of the most satisfying moments I’ve had in all my collective four or five years of baseball fandom. When I was walking earlier that evening with Ed en route to the art-porn flick, I noticed at least one NY Yanqs hat or jacket to every ten or so passersby. Walking the next morning, I think I’d have to have been eagle-eyed to scope more than three total.
Ditto Bush stickers/signs/buttons/sandwich-boarders. Once I’d been buzzed into Damien’s building and scaled the two flights of stairs (ensuring I’d have a healthy glow about me when he opened the door), I caught a glimpse of the Parisian doormat and tried to think of something to say in French quickly, but couldn’t before he’d opened the door. Instead, I stepped over his chat and noted how adorably gros it was and demanded a tour of his apartment. Nice first impression, I’m sure, but Damien was good enough not to kick me out. Instead, we walked along the street and Damien pointed out the exact locations of the neighborhood’s very lonely Bush supporters. We shared a meal at a film-themed diner on, I believe, 8th Avenue (we passed an ugly scene on the way there — a horrifically lispy waiter yelling at the unhinged vagrant who had the audacity to sit under the restaurant awning), I somewhat gauchely/voraciously ordered a big juicy cheeseburger, but it was the first chance I’d had since a few days earlier to take in some protein. After going over our shared history at an Oscar message board, I attempted my first in what would become a long string of unsuccessful bids to pick up the entire tab. I had to cash a traveler’s check, so I just accepted whatever cash Damien wanted to give me. The only problem came when he kept on giving me a few extra bucks… to be followed with a few more. It struck me so hilarious that we were walking down the street and he was palming me for a few more that I decided to just spend some of his money on John Kerry buttons. 3 for $5, but they had to be small. I chose one that said “Gays and Lesbians for John Kerry,” one that said “One Nation Under Surveillance” (which I just gave to my father on Election Eve to put on his saxophone case), and the Ghostbusters one with the letter “W” instead of a ghost. We walked past the David Letterman studio just as Biff Henderson came through the stage door to round up a crowd. I pointed out to Damien that his job was, more or less, my job too (without the cue cards or health benefits). But speaking of which, Damien had to leave at that point to attend his job, and after reminding me of exactly how to use the subway (at which point it somehow clicked, more or less) and after mentioning that I might be free and willing to get together a second time that Sunday afternoon (a suggestion that I managed to forget until I was sitting in the Newark terminal on Monday afternoon, slapping my palm against the indentation in my brow, making meaty-slappy noises to reflect my frustration), I went on my way back down to SoHo.
I arrived well over two hours early for my meeting with Jaime, and so I walked around a few blocks of Houston and Broadway, patting myself on the back over having correctly guessed which direction to walk upon exiting the subway. I took a stop at a used bookstore and didn’t buy anything; for some reason, my stinginess was starting to kick in to the extent that I was considering donating blood at a clinic advertising “Donate Blood and receive a Free Movie Ticket,” even though I was pretty sure it would only be redeemable at a Mann’s or an AMC. They took the sign in as I approached, so I sat on a park bench and called Jess and Adria. Adria was on the other line with her new boyfriend, but Jess was excited to hear from me, and I informed her that moments ago, I had seen her mother walking around with an unleashed dog. I also called Zach and was relieved to hear that he was only two or three blocks away from where I was sitting. I hadn’t planned on meeting him until the next afternoon, but since I had nothing but time (actually, an extra hour on top of what I thought I had, as I had told Jaime 6pm, but filed it in my memory as 5… I blamed the time zone again) we walked to one of his favorite coffee shops, where I had an unsweetened lemonade and leaned my shoulder against the cold dessert display glass because, whether due to walking around all day, changing environments or simple social nervousness, I was again dabbing the meat sweat off of my brow. We chatted about other message boards, his education (I admitted that my mom was really pressing me to check out NYU for possible graduate programs, though I think I’d stand a better shot at concentrating on my studies if I was back in Fargo again, not going to the movies three times a week), Stevie Wonder (I was wearing a glitter-strewn black shirt featuring The Man in a classic, 1973 pose), something depressing that I have since banished from my memory, and everyone else I had yet to meet. After warning me that the Angelika is a sort of chach, poseurish establishment (he told me about the dude who wore headphones blasting techno music during his screening of Esther Kahn), we split ways and I went back to the Crate & Barrel where we’d planned to meet.
I waited while he finished up an entry on his blog about Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire the previous week (which I had watched, but I was at work doing other things) and, actually, started worrying that I might have missed him as he walked out the door and strolled over the the Angelika. After all, I’d gotten the time wrong originally, and so there was no reason to believe I’d gotten the location right. But eventually he came down the stairs and we bought our tickets and walked around. He mentioned that we would be stopping in Kim’s, and I knew the name rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure why. We stepped in and I sweated for the third time that afternoon, this time out of sheer jealousy. Three stories of reasonably-priced artsy DVDs, obscure out-of-print rentals, and uncut cinephilia (and music, as well). I very nearly sprang on an import DVD of Brian De Palma’s early works (including Dionysus in ‘69), but the stinginess kicked in once again for no discernible reason. After we left and he bought a quart of a caramel-colored liquor (not from Kim’s), he had a Subway wrap with no jalapeños or green peppers (but I’m pretty sure a few stray jalapeños found their way in anyway) and I pointed out that my very favorite disco song had come on the radio: Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.” At this point, I had met three internet acquaintances face-to-face for the first time and, as far as I was concerned, I was batting a thousand. All were humble, gracious, intelligent, and by the time I had gotten to Jaime, my euphoria over my good luck was making me start to worry that I was maybe beginning to come off as overly boisterous and fake.
We went to Primer. For the second evening in a row, I came out of a movie in an extremely cloudy state of mind, and was far more interested in my companions’ reactions than my own. I’m glad that Jaime heard the “faggot” dialogue too, because I was almost convinced that I’d made it up in my mind in a knee-jerk fashion to validate what I saw as the film’s masculinity. I might have been a bit more dismissive of the film, but I tried not to devolve too far into making evaluations of it on a Good—Bad continuum, aware as I was that Jaime isn’t much interested in such appraisals. Jaime and I split ways, but not before we agreed to meet up once again for a Three on a Couch viewing (when he would postemptively confirm that he wasn’t trying to express his feelings about Primer on a star-scale). He told me in three seconds flat exactly what I had to do to get back to Port Authority, and, by this point, I had almost anticipated what he was going to tell me. No longer feeling like a fucking sightseer, I tried to pick out which riders on the F train were, like me, former tourists who were pretending to be, if not natives, at least residents for the past few months or seasons. I wonder if they thought they were as pathetic as I thought I was in their guessing game. I can’t remember what conversations I had with Ed and Sal that evening (or really any evening short of the final one), but I know that Nancy was there and she was embarrassed enough to tell us all to shut-up-I-hate-you for speaking about her sex the previous night. They were watching Will & Grace. I was eating a chicken parmigiana melt from the pizza parlor down the street. Everything else was a blur. I went to bed listening to my iPod. I saw my first roach then.
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