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The Long and Winding Roadby George Ziemann This page last modified -- July 21, 2010 -- 1:50 a.m. New York CityI wasn't going to make Carl waste half of his Saturday driving me to New York. I didn't want to have him pay for another shuttle ride either, because I had seen the price for that and it was way too much. There had to be a better way. We stopped by where he works so he could pick up the charger for the cell phone he was giving me. While we were there, we talked to a couple of the maintenance workers who were there. They suggested taking the train. $15 or $20 tops, they said. Faster than the bus, and plus it was Saturday, so the regular commuters wouldn't be on it. Sounded good to me. Carl dropped me off at the local train platform. I thanked him for the ride, the cash and the cell phone, and grabbed my travel bag, which was a little larger now. Cara had bought a few items for me (a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts, some socks and a t-shirt or two) and the extra side pouches were slowly filling with papers, notes and writing utensils. I climbed the stairs and looked around. Machines were provided to buy tickets. The first problem was that I had never used a train before, other than at Disneyland or Cedar Point. The second problem was that all I knew was that I wanted to go to Manhattan Island. Didn't have a clue what that meant in terms of buying tickets or which station I wanted to go to or what. I looked at one of the machines for a minute and decided that it was probably a good idea to ask for some advice. There were a few people waiting on the platform, but it was far from anything which could be considered crowded. I scanned for a likely helper and, with nothing to make me feel guilty about it, I walked up to the prettiest girl I saw and enlisted her aid. Her mother, who was with her, rolled her eyes, but it only took a minute or two for the girl to show me what to do. I even let her take my credit card to zip it through the reader. I thanked her and didn't bother her any more. Now I knew how to buy a local train ticket, something that I had managed to make it through 55 years without ever needing to know. The train showed up pretty quickly. It was a pleasant surprise after only using airplanes or busses for mass transportation in the past. For one thing, there was room for a six-foot tall person to sit comfortably and even stretch out. Even after the train started moving, you coould actually stand up if you wanted. And unlike driving (my preferred form of transportation), without having to watch the road it was possible to look out the window and look at things. Doesn't sound like much if you commute by train all the time, but I found it to be a rather pleasant experience. Somehow, I had the impression that the train was taking me to Grand Central Station. Maybe it was supposed to but I got off too soon. When I emerged from the train station, I was in East Harlem. East Harlem Nobody is going to mistake me for anything other than a white guy and I didn't even have a New York accent of any variety to help me blend in. My initial reaction to finding myself in Harlem was, "Oh, fuck." This was the first of several misconceptions about the Big Apple that were going to be turned upside down on this day. It took me about 30 seconds, maybe a whole minute, to relax about where I was. The parade helped, which was drawing a multi-ethnic audience to the edge of the street, including a shitload of police officers. It was early afternoon. Shops were open, people were out walking around, but not so many as to make you feel squashed in the crowd. There really didn't seem to be that much to worry about, despite my glaring whiteness. I picked a random person and asked for directions. Not specific directions, mind you, just a vague "which way is Broadway?" reference point. Broadway was about 5 blocks west, 160th St. seemed like it would be 35 blocks north (but not really), so I headed west. After a couple of blocks, I decided that there was no way I was going to walk the entire way. Thought about trying to hail a cab, but then I was walking past a bus stop, just as the bus pulled up. I've taken the bus before, even on a regular basis when I was taking electronics courses at a community college in Tucson. Bought a pass, though, so I didn't deal with the individual ride fares. But this wasn't Tucson. The door opened and I saw a sticker inside that said the fare was $2.25. I pulled out three dollar bills and offered them to the driver. He kind of tilted his head, looked at me and said, "Don't you have a MetroPass? Maybe exact change like everybody else? I can't take cash. Don't you know that?" "Well, I've never been in New York before, so I don't know the rules yet. Just got off the train at the East Harlem station and I'm trying to get to Broadway." Instead of telling me to get off the bus and find exact change or a pass and catch the next bus, like I expected him to do, he said, "Sit down. You want to get off after we pass Amsterdam." The bus driver wasn't a mean snarly New Yorker. He was a really nice guy. And so had been everyone else I encountered in Harlem -- other people watching the parade, shopkeepers selling fruit and vegetables on the sidewalk. As we went past the Apollo Theatre, which I would have walked to and checked out had I known it was so close, I laughed to myself that I didn't even need to rub the lucky stump on the stage. There was already something taking care of that. I'd been in town for about ten minutes and I just got a free bus ride in New York City. The domino chain reaction was still happening. I got off between Amsterdam and Broadway, walked the rest of the way to Broadway and it was time to try a cab. Now, I have called cabs before, grabbed one at an airport maybe, but never just waved one down on the street. There were definite rules of conduct here, so I watched a few other people do it before I tried. Seemed just like on TV or the movies. You go out the the edge of the parked cars and raise your hand as a taxi approaches. Worked the first time. Another domino falls. I got in the cab and said something incredibly stupid, but it was just my honesty slipping out. I gave the driver the address and said, "I apologize ahead of time for saying this, but I'm not quite sure which direction I should be going, I've never been to New York before, and this my first cab ride here. Please, please don't drive me around in circles, because you could get away with it and I'd never know. And I've already asked a couple of people for directions that might not have been real accurate." Fortunately, instead of Robert deNiro, I had a guy from West Africa as my driver. He laughed and said, "You've seen too many movies. I'm going to turn around, because you were going the wrong way, we're going to drive up Broadway for about five minutes, then I'll make a right and drop you off at the front door of this address." He did exactly that. On the way, he told me several things about New York.
That's all he got to tell me because we were at my destination. The fare was only $10, so I tipped an extra $10, which was still less that it cost me to take a cab the two or three miles from the Phoenix airport to my home. Also I was still feeling a little guilty about the whole "don't drive me around in circles" thing. Went to the front door, found the buzzer for CP's apartment and he let me in. Upper Manhattan CP lived on the fifth floor of what I guess could be accurately described as an upper Manhattan tenement building that had been turned into a co-op. It was old, it had character. There were three bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen and a large living room area with wooden floors. You could see the ceiling beams, and there was lumber stored here and there. Why it was there, I didn't know. My overall impression was that it was a classic Bohemian-style artist dwelling. Very cool. One of the windows in the main room offered an exit via a fire escape. From the window ledge, you could watch the street outside. For the first time, I felt like I was looking at a New York street scene from TV or a movie. The street was narrow, as were the spaces between the buildings on each side of the street. There were kids playing in the small space between buildings. First they were playing catch, then started kicking a soccer ball back and forth. At one point, the ball bounced through an open window on the first floor. One of the kids walked over to the window and a minute or two later, someone handed him the ball. Life was happening out there. It was palpable even from the fifth floor. The buildings also created an amplifying effect on everything at the street level. The most striking example was when a pack of Harley riders came roaring through. I felt like I was pretty much used to the volume of serious bikes. Hurricane Alley pretty much specialized in biker bars. In addition to our own music, the originals we played were classic rock. And yes, "Born to Be Wild" was on the set list. They loved us. And the feeling was mutual. Bikers will never tell you to turn down; the harder you want to rock, the more they like it. What's not to love? I was used to hearing 20 or 30 of them fire up at once. But put those same choppers on this particular New York street and the natural acoustics of the urban landacape made it sound like the fucking Space Shuttle taking off. It's was huge and overpowering. You couldn't ignore it. The same with the sounds of people having loud street conversations, car horns honking, an occasional siren and just about anything else that happened below. CP cooked up some pasta/salmon dish with veggies that was really tasty and mostly, he listened to me babble on for a while, catching him up on the events which had transpired since the last time I saw him. He was a good listener. When I was done with that, then CP helped me out general info about where things were, my travel options, and he gave me a couple of maps to look at and keep ("You'll want these later, anyway."). By then it was starting to get late. CP let me use his computer to look up travel information and he went off to his room to watch Saturday Night Live. It amused me to think that it actually was live, for one thing and, no matter where the hell Rockefeller Center is, it wasn't that far away if it was in Manhattan, and there were about a dozen options to get from Point A to Point B. I thought about things for a while, then went off to my own designated room to try and sleep. I didn't expect to have much success. I hadn't slept more than four hours in one night since I stopped at a motel in Baton Rouge the night before going into New Orleans. Plus I never sleep well in a strange place and, while oddly familar in a weird sort of way, this New York tenement/co-op apartment definitely qualified as a strange place. I slept for 12 hours. ------- The first thing CP said after I emerged from my room was, "I'm surprised all the yelling outside didn't wake you up sooner." "Yelling? I didn't hear a thing. I slept like a rock." "The Prozac Room strikes again. It has that effect on a lot of people." While CP was watching Saturday Night Live the night before, I had decided what my next move was. "How do I get to Penn Station?" "That's easy enough. You take the A train," said CP. Now I was in a Duke Ellington song. "What's your plan?" "I've got a grandchild that was born in April. Haven't seen him yet. I really enjoyed the train ride from Westport, so I'm going to take a train to Toledo. Amtrak is at Penn Station. Today's train leaves at 3:00. It's already noon." "Wow. You've done your homework." The subway station was just a few blocks away. CP led me to it, took me down the elevator and showed me where the machines were to buy a ticket. It was pretty much the same idea as at the train platform in Westport, except the tickets were only $2.25 and, instead of giving the ticket to a conductor on the train, you let the turnstile scan it, which unlocks it for one turn and allows you onto the subway platform. "My first subway ride. And it's on the A train. What could be more appropriate? Another domino falls..." CP laughed. "Good luck. Have a good time." Penn Station It was Sunday, so I was still benefitting from the lack of weekday commuters. The subway wasn't crowded at all. I knew Penn Station was on 34th St. All you had to do was watch the walls outside the subway. The A train is an express run to Midtown, so the number of actual stops was limited. Still, the location of each station was clearly posted in enough places that it was easy to know where you were, even if the train didn't stop -- 145th St., 125th, 110th, 97th, 86th, 72nd, 66th, 57th, 49th, 42nd, and then 34th St. Didn't take very long at all. Like the subway, Penn Station is underground. It spans almost a third of a mile between 7th Ave. & 8th Ave.and contains the station for the Long Island Railroad as well as Amtrak. The A train drops you offf closer to 8th Ave., and it seems like the Amtrak station is in that same relative area, although it was easy to lose directional orientation. Once I found it, I stood in line for a few minutes and bought a ticket to Toledo. Now all I had to do was wait for 2 and a half hours. Had I studied the maps that CP had provided me with the day before a little more closely, I would have had several options to choose from as to how to best spend that time. Unfortunately, once I located Penn Station, my planning was done and I had put the map away. So I didn't know that I was below Madison Square Garden. Or that Times Square was a 10-minute walk away. Another 10 minutes or so to Radio City Music Hall and Rockefeller Center or Carnegie Hall and Central Park. Plenty of time to see it all, if briefly. Would have taken the walk, too, if I only knew. I went outside twice. I even walked to the edge of the plaza once (8th Ave & 33rd St.), but I must not have turned to look east. Looking at the map now, it's obvious that if I had done so, I would've seen the Empire State Building, which is between 33rd & 34th St. on 5th Ave. Missed it completely. I'm such a shitty tourist. Instead, I went back into Penn Station, found a restaurant and got a solid meal. It was going to be a long train ride. I suppose this is a good place to point out (if I haven't already) that prior to my sudden departure from home, I had been taking enough meds on a daily basis to choke a horse. I had pills for cholesterol (including fish oil, statins, and a couple of others), high blood pressure, migraines (Percoset for the headaches, an anti-seizure medication and a beta blocker to try and prevent them) and the every popular anti-depressant (Zoloft). When I drove away from Phoenix, I left them all behind. That had been 11 days ago. I had been feeling myself withdrawing from some of them, but except for a few moments after walking several blocks uphill on the way to catch the A train at 168th St., I was actually feeling better without them. The migraines would have been my worst problem. However, I had a spider bite (or maybe it was cellulitis) in March, which resulted in some heavy antibiotics. Turned out i was allergic to the antibiotics, which didn't reveal itself until 7 days into a 10-day course of treatment. The cure for the drug allergy was a 6-day declining dosage of cortisone, which had also served to turn off the migraines. As for depression, I had been tossed out on my ass and was now wandering around the country trying to figure out what to do, where to live and how to start my life over at 55 with no real job or income. I should have beeen depressed. Instead, what I was feeling was the fog of being sedated for 15 years lifting and I was experiencing things I hadn't felt in a long time. Good things. I felt like I had just been released from prison or something. And I was in New York, a city that had scared me to death until the moment I walked off the train in Harlem the day before. Now, without even being aware of how close I was to so many things I wanted to see, I was wishing I had a little more time to spend in NYC, just to look around. But I didn't have time for that now. I had already bought my train ticket. More to Come... |
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