The Journey Home; or, Transcendence
The journey to the airport for my flight home from New York was sheer chaos. I had very badly underestimated how long it would take me to travel from my hotel in Manhasset to Newark Liberty International. At the hotel, I opened Uber but very quickly closed it after glancing at the inflated fares. I also realised that a cab would probably take longer than just getting the train. Time would be tight regardless, but in the name of financial security and temporal efficiency, I girded myself for what I knew would be a gruelling journey.
For a start, I hate walking and avoid it whenever I can (in my hometown, there is scarcely a taxi driver I don’t know). But, with no chance of getting a taxi in time, I had to walk to the Manhasset train station. Now, it isn’t exactly a long walk—about 10 or 15 minutes perhaps—but, as noted, I’m not fond of using my legs, and I had a big suitcase and backpack to haul along with me. Some of the walk even involved, I am very sorry to say—and I can barely bring myself to summon up the horrifying memory—dragging myself up a slight incline.
But, fearless and resilient as I am, I made it to the station in good time (attended by lots of sweat) and jumped on the train to Manhattan. The train ride was easy compared to the horror of what had come before, and by the time we pulled into Penn Station about 40 minutes later, I had just about recovered from my Manhasset ordeal.
However, time—that relentless, capricious tyrant, so fond of sprinting away just when you need it most or turtle-pacing its way through boredom and drudgery—was tick-tocking its merry way to my flight’s departure time. The clocks were mocking me as I went back and forth, under and over, to and fro, in Penn Station, unable to make sense of what train I needed to catch and from which section of the station I needed to catch it. A waterfall of sweat had reappeared on my forehead (and underarms and back and other even more gruesome areas) as I struggled.
Eventually, I made it onto the correct train, which was as full of people as Times Square is full of scamming, cheating, robbing bitches and bastards (on which more later). I somehow found a seat, and spent another 40 minutes or so inhaling the stench of sweat that wasn’t even my own. One image stays with me: a woman walking around with a ginger cat in a transparent bag on her back. That almost made the journey enjoyable.
Finally, after a stressful few moments when the train came to a standstill mid-track for boring reasons I don’t care to recall, I disembarked at Newark Airport. At last! Now it would be simple: hop on the Airtrain and check in. But of course it wasn’t so easy. No, it took a good 10 minutes just to pass through the ticket barrier and then, when I arrived at the platform for the Airtrain, I just missed a departing shuttle and had to wait for the next one.
Then, at last, the airport, the blessed airport! A quick bag drop, a few panicked puffs of a cigarette outside, and through security I went. The flight was boarding but I had to buy a carton of duty-free fags and some American chocolate for my mum, which somehow I managed to do without missing my plane.
The rest is as you would expect. A tiresome flight and, eventually, home sweet home. But the point of this seemingly pointless, not to mention self-pitying, ramble about my homeward journey is this: in the air, as we flew back across Manhattan and Long Island, I looked out of the window. I looked down at the lights of the city at night, and was stunned. What a sight it was: Manhattan and Long Island lit up, Auden’s “ironic points of light [flashing]” out and filling up the view beyond even the horizon, a star-filled night in reverse. You can see a couple of (very poorly taken) photos below, but they don’t really capture the astonishing scale of the thing.
There it was, New York, New York. During my visit I came down with a nasty cold (and even the mildest of illnesses is debilitating to me), half-froze in the November chill, was thrown out of a bar for reasons I still don’t know, and had had to endure a sweaty, stressful journey to the airport. And it was all worth it at that moment as I looked down at the night lights of the city. If that moment had been the entirety of my trip, I would have needed nothing more.
This moment was prefigured when I first arrived in New York. Taking a cab from the airport, I saw Manhattan for the first time (from the ground up). All those famous buildings, that skyline, those bridges, and even Lady Liberty in the distance! But nothing quite compares to seeing the city from above at night.
It’s some place all right, old New York. It’s a universe of its own. No, actually, it’s not, such a term is a disservice: Manhattan is a multiverse, brimming, teeming, bursting, overflowing with life and light and energy and possibility. It’s a place that exists for most people on the planet only as an epic sight on movie screens, but which is entirely, and dazzlingly, real. In fact, it’s a place that feels more real, more alive than anywhere else I’ve been, even as it seems so very unreal, so mythological.
And I’ve barely had a chance to experience it. Even as I took in the sights over the week I was there, I knew that I would yearn to return as soon as I left, because I knew there was so much left to do and discover and feel in New York. A multiverse can’t be absorbed in a week, you know.
Consider this a love letter to New York, then. New York, whom I knew all too briefly but with whom I have fallen utterly in love. Stress and sweat be damned—such things are trivial compared to the transcendent scale and beauty of that indescribable place.
What follows are, in no particular order, a few more snapshots, some memorable scenes from my brief, incomplete affair with Manhattan.
Manhasset Murder Motel
I stayed in the Travelodge in Manhasset, Long Island. Manhasset is rather out of the way but it was a cheap place to lodge and travelling into the city from there is easy. Anyway, I confess that I slightly feared what awaited me at the Travelodge: the online reviews I looked at (after I booked, blinded by the price) were mostly dismaying.
But when I arrived, all fear was quickly allayed. Sure, it was a cheap, shabby, scruffy sort of place, but the room was spacious and clean (well, mostly—a couple of cockroaches did make appearances during my stay). Most of all, it felt like a classic American motel, standing by a busy main road, all old-fashioned, beaten-up furnishings and decor, with some rooms just off the car park and others higher up, with doors leading into the rooms from a long, shared balcony. And I had a smoking room. I could smoke, indoors! You don’t get that in your fancy Hiltons and Ritzes, do you?
(Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos to share; I recorded a video but am unable to insert it into this post.)
So, I liked the hotel, or motel, very much. It did feel like the setting of a sub-par slasher movie, but that only added to the appeal. My Manhasset Murder Motel, I thank you for your gracious, if somewhat threadbare, hospitality.
That Bitch, Minnie Mouse (and Her Enforcers Batman, Iron Man, and Spider-Man)
My first stop on venturing into Manhattan was Times Square, which was, of course, quite the sight. But my abiding memory of Times Square is of being mugged by Minnie Mouse and her gang of super-powered thugs, which included a rather chubby Spider-Man.
Perhaps I’m being dramatic. In fairness, I willingly handed over the money. And it was payment for a service of sorts—if allowing her and her banditti to take photos with me can be considered a service. Still, I certainly felt robbed and cheated. Apparently, as I later found out, Minnie and her crew are well-known irritants in the area, costumed annoyances who hound gullible tourists like me into taking photos with them and then demand money for their trouble. When she surrounded me with her superhero hooligans, I tried to shoo them away, tried to reject their advances, but have you ever tried telling Batman to fuck off?
Under pressure, then, I foolishly handed over my phone (!) and fearfully posed with Minnie and her ruffians. When it was over, Minnie was quick to hold out her hand for payment. I told her I had no cash on me, only a card, but that didn’t dissuade her. She and her hoodlums accompanied me to an ATM, where I withdrew 40 bucks. 20 of these I desperately and despairingly pressed into Minnie’s paw to sate her greed and save my skin. It seemed to do the trick, but then another of them came up to me (it was Iron Man if I recall correctly) also wanting money, and I ended up handing over to him the other 20 bucks I’d withdrawn. It would seem that Minnie doesn’t share the spoils with her minions, but then I suppose that’s her prerogative as godmother of this strange little mafia.
So that was my experience of Times Square. I was stupid and spineless enough to fall victim to the rapacious Minnie Mouse and her bandit mob. I suppose this is a quintessential New York experience, at least for outsiders. And since New York was once famous for its muggings, perhaps it counts as an insider experience, too.
Lucien’s
After Times Square, I bought a hot dog from a street vendor, drank an overpriced pint of cider in an Irish bar, and took a gander at the New York Public Library and Grand Central Station, both quite breathtaking buildings inside and out. I was due to fly in a helicopter later, but with some time to butcher, I decided to pay a visit to a famous little restaurant called Lucien.
Lucien is a small French place in downtown Manhattan, and a very lovely one, too. It’s frequented by the famous and the infamous, and its walls are covered with photos of its more well-known visitors. One such recurrent patron whose face adorns the wall was Christopher Hitchens, a dear friend of the late proprietor (the eponymous Lucien), and there is a dish named after Hitchens on the menu to this day. Lucien is now owned by Lucien’s son, who I wanted to meet but never got the chance to. I would have liked to speak with Lucien as well; by all accounts, he was a gregarious and generous host, and it would have been nice to talk to him about Hitchens.
I ate some nice food and drank some nice wine, and re-read the essay in which Hitchens mentions Lucien as a place where he committed a grave crime: smoking indoors. The essay is a very funny account of Hitchens’s attempt to break as many silly laws as possible in Michael Bloomberg’s New York. Here’s the page in which the shocking crime at Lucien is recounted (I took this photo in Lucien itself; the essay is reproduced in Hitchens’s 2004 collection Love, Poverty, and War):
Before we end our visit to Lucien’s, allow me to recommend two pieces by the true gentleman Tom Casesa, whom I was fortunate enough to meet during this New York holiday, on his Provoking Hitchens website. In one, he tells the tale of his visit to Lucien when Lucien was still around and in the other, he interviews a photographer of Hitchens, which includes a photo of Hitchens smoking at the bar in Lucien during the composition of the above-mentioned essay.
Manhattan From the Sky
Again, my farewell view of the city by night was the one that left the deepest impression on me, but I saw plenty of other stirring sights from on high during my visit. After lunch at Lucien, I went on a helicopter tour of Manhattan. Once more: what a sight! I now know what Hitchens meant when he wrote in his 2010 memoir Hitch-22 about seeing Manhattan for the first time that “I knew I was surveying a tremendous work of man.” Here are some photos from the tour.
Pete’s, Cigar in a Bar, an Interesting Encounter, and Ejection
Helicopter tour over, off I went to the famous Pete’s Tavern for a few pre-dinner drinks. I say pre-dinner but when I actually arrived at Hudson Bar and Books to eat, I completely forgot the purpose of my visit and instead drank some more while enjoying a delicious cigar (Hudson is one of the few remaining places where you can still smoke indoors in New York). Lovely as that smoky, old-fashioned little place was, I soon felt restless. Time, I thought, to party.
Much of what followed remains (I think fortuitously) beyond the event horizon of boozy memory, but I do recall a couple of interesting things.
First, I went to the Stonewall Inn (yes, of the riots) but soon was distracted by a bunch of people on the pavement (or should that be sidewalk?) watching some sort of sports thing on TV. Interested less in whatever match was playing and more in finding people to talk to, I joined the crowd and it wasn’t long before I was successful in my ambition. I found out that the bar these people were drinking at had had a fire upstairs, so the TV room was unusable; hence the sidewalk gathering. Whenever we wanted a drink, we had to ask the barman, who stood outside with us all, to fetch us one from inside.
Among the nice people I got chatting with, one stands out the most. I spent a long time speaking with an American guy, whose face I remember chiefly for looking very pinched by the cold and thus somehow both pale and crimson simultaneously. Somehow, we ended up talking about Ukraine, Afghanistan, and American power in the world, and while we disagreed on quite a lot, it was an interesting discussion. Strange that I, the non-American, should be defending America’s role in the world to a native in New York!
Time passed, the match ended, and people moved on. I think my interlocutor might have known the barman; at any rate, a select few of us were allowed inside as the place closed, and we continued to drink and talk. My memory is hazy, but I think this went on for quite a while. I continued talking to the guy I had met outside and also with the others who had been allowed in, plus the barman. We all got along very well. Indeed, I spoke at length with the barman, who was warm and friendly.
So what went wrong?
Fast forward and at some point the barman literally took hold of me and ejected me from the bar. What had I done? I’m afraid I can’t remember. Perhaps this is a bad sign of how much I drank that night, or perhaps I didn’t do anything wrong and some kind of miscommunication was involved. I vaguely recall lighting a cigarette inside, which I wouldn’t have done except that I’m fairly certain one of the others had been allowed to do the same—I was merely following suit, and the other guy, I’m pretty sure, was not unceremoniously shoved onto the street!
Ah well. It was late/early anyway and long past time for me to make haste back to the Murder Motel. So soon I went off into the night, having had a very interesting first full day in New York City. Mugged by Minnie Mouse, flying above Manhattan, drunkenly talking politics with a stranger, and being hauled out of a bar for crimes unknown—all in a day’s work, perhaps, for old New Yorkers, but quite the experience for this not-so-innocent abroad.
Ground Zero
One day, feeling rather oppressed by the cold I must have caught on my first night in New York, I attended a 9/11 tour at Ground Zero. Now, I know this sounds rather incongruous. A 9/11 tour? What next, the Holocaust funfair? But it wasn’t cheap or gimmicky; it was an outdoor walking tour conducted by a New Yorker named Brian with a personal connection to that terrible day. From St Paul’s Chapel (The Little Chapel That Stood and the oldest church building in Manhattan, where George Washington prayed on his Inauguration Day in 1789) through the Oculus Transportation Hub at the World Trade Center to Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial, this young man was both funny and profound as he told the story of that day and his various connections to it. If you ever have a chance to go on one of these tours, I recommend it, even if it is wretchedly chilly and you are suffering from a vile cold.
The 9/11 Memorial itself is quite something. You’ve seen the images: where the towers once stood there are now huge black square holes in the ground, water running down the inner walls into a smaller, deeper hole below, the names of all who died on September 11 and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center incised on the upper edges of the pits (these names were very carefully arranged to place people who had some sort of connection, however distant, near to each other).
But, as with everything in New York, second-hand images are insufficient: you have to actually experience it. It’s peaceful and quiet at Ground Zero and very difficult to assimilate the fact that you are standing in the exact spot where the towers blazed and collapsed, where burning bodies came hurtling down from the sky, and where an evil, toxic smoke engulfed and choked the surrounding area.
But memories of death and terror are antithetical to the spirit of the Memorial, which is intended to be a place of life and energy and meeting, a peaceful spot in the city that never sleeps, where you can sit and read or reflect or just sit. Brian told us that his uncle, who died on September 11, would have wanted people to be smoking cigars and partying at Ground Zero. He also told us that he’d once witnessed a couple leaning against the edge of one of the pits, kissing, and also (I presume but cannot be certain that this was on another occasion) someone dressed as the Joker paying his respects to the deceased. Meanwhile, lines of trees are everywhere at Ground Zero, and there is one very special tree which was recovered from the carnage of September 11 and nursed until it stood tall and green and defiant once more.
Yes, that seems to be the spirit of New York: even among the wreckage and death and horror wrought by religious fascism, there is life and love and resilience and eccentricity. Life and love against death and terror—this is the fundamental thing.
After the tour and the Memorial, I perused the 9/11 Museum, which contains, with its many exhibits, a tasteful account of New York’s darkest day and a moving memorial to the dead. Then, to One World Trade Center, or Freedom Tower, the 1,776 feet tall replacement for the twins. It’s another grand sight, an elegant feat of architecture and engineering. I went up to the One World Observatory, apparently the highest observation deck in New York, for yet another spectacular view of Manhattan from the azure.
Last Things
I intended this to be a short post, but here we are. I leave you with some more photos of a few other places I visited and some parting reflections.
First, the photos: the Waverly Inn, the Statue of Liberty, Fraunces Tavern (among other things, one of Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War, where he gave a farewell address to his officers after the British evacuated New York in 1783), the Rockefeller Center ice rink, and (unlit and boarded-up, alas) the Rockefeller Christmas Tree.
Since I’ve already mentioned Christopher Hitchens, let me share with you some more of his thoughts from Hitch-22 on experiencing Manhattan for the first time:
Sometimes an expectation or a wish does come true. I have no faith in precognitive dreams or any patience for "dream" rhetoric in general, yet Manhattan was exactly as I had hoped it would be. I had to survive some very discouraging first impressions: the airport café where I ate my first breakfast was a nothingness of plastic and formica and the "English muffin" was a travesty of both Englishness and muffindom. Outside stood a paunchy cop with, on his heavy belt, an accoutrement of gun and club and handcuff of a sort that I had never seen in real life and had believed exaggerated in the movies. The bus into the city was sweaty and the Port Authority Terminal is probably the worst possible place from which to take your original bearings on Midtown. The next thing I actually saw in the city was a flag-bedecked campaign headquarters for the ultraright candidacy of James Buckley (brother of William F.) for the Senate. "Join The March For America!" it yelled. But I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and free matchbooks in contrast to English parsimony in these matters), I felt the same thing in a different way. The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me. Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think—made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.1
The macro and the micro, the heroic and the human scales—this combination and contrast is the essence of Manhattan, and New York City more generally. I hope I’ve been able to impress upon you my own experience of this beautiful and enlivening paradox. The mighty and the mini aspects of Manhattan, the grandly epic and the transcendent everyday of New York have (as must be very obvious by now) charmed me utterly.
Hitchens also wrote of feeling “the strong gravitational pull of the great American planet” and this is something I very deeply feel within myself now. I also visited Miami earlier this year and have long been interested in American history and literature. I greatly admire the democratic republican experiment America represents with its high, radical ideals. But perhaps above all, right now, I feel not the pull of the American planet but of the Manhattan Multiverse.2
One of my favourite songs by one of my favourite musicians is Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’. Well, Berlin can wait, and the disturbing themes of that song can be put aside, for I might not yet have taken Manhattan, it might not yet be my own, but I hope I will be able to claim it as a home one day. Meanwhile, there is one thing to be sure of: Manhattan and New York City could never “[sentence] me to 20 years of boredom.” No, not 20, not 50, not 100 years of anything approaching boredom. As I have already said, they constitute a multiverse, the Manhattan Multiverse, and are thus not places one could ever grow tired of. New York has forever replaced London in Dr Johnson’s famous remark.
There is nothing else left to say but this: my dear Manhattan, I shall see you again.
Allow me a further indulgence: another favourite writer of mine, Salman Rushdie, has penned various brilliant portraits of New York, all the more interesting for being produced by his cosmopolitan, multicultural, immigrant imagination. See his novels Fury (2001), Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) (incidentally, I think this is one of his most under-appreciated, and certainly under-known, books; it’s a strange and brilliant masterpiece of hybridity and magic and philosophy), and The Golden House (2017).
Would a multiverse have a gravitational pull? Come to think of it, does the universe itself, as a whole, have one? Or is such a concept nonsensical? Maybe a universe as a whole would only have a gravitational pull as part of a multiverse, as one of many universes, while a single non-multiversal universe or a multiverse as a whole would not—only the ‘highest’ layer being incapable of having one, while all the ‘lower’ layers, by being objects ‘inside’ something and thus by virtue of being objects ‘alongside’ each other, would be capable of exerting gravitational force and being exerted upon (unless the ‘space’ between each object is of such a nature as to negate such a thing). Well, I’m not a physicist, and my head is sore now.