yesterday i was in berlin and today i am on thompson near prince street.
i am here to work.
i have not liked new york for quite some time.
but something this morning in the noisy radiator made me feel like a line
out of a norman lear sitcom circa 1974…you know some overblown east coast accent
going on about needing a radiator fixed…i love the idea of jewish cats from new york moving to the coast, wearing expensive ugly leather slip ons with no socks, hanging sweaters around their necks, sporting goofy signature hats (usually associated with some very waspy actvity like boating or hiking) then writing about all the long lost broken radiators and “supers” that they will never see again…
(that’s what happens when you leave home, right?: you write about it. what else?).
anyway
yesterday i was in berlin and today i am on thompson near prince street.
I am here to work on and in our play
i have not liked new york for quite a long time.
but something this morning in the noisy radiator made me remember how much i used to love this place. something in the noisy radiator made me think of bill weiss picking me up from the airport (in a car of course – bill is from LA – i am from LA) on that first day i arrived and i remember how happy i was because finally i was in a place that seemed to be moving as fast as my mind ran. me and the city were in concert..there was a sensual (ok fuck it EROTIC) aspect to civic life that made walking down the street feel like a good fuck..first time lovers moving fast and furious yet inexplicably in tandem. 1982/83: 9th and C, 47th between 8th and 9th, Houston and Eldrige. every day a poem. not always a good poem. but always poetry: like the songs of the whores on houston bartering with their johns who drove up to inquire. always something going on.
on the way back from the airport bill and i were cruising broadway LA style somewhere uptown around columbia gawking at women when suddenly i look at the road and notice we are about to hit some guy so i yell BILL and he slams on the breaks and we literally graze the old guy and the old guy turns around and glares at us and it’s allen ginsberg. WE ALMOST KILLED ALLEN GINSBERG!!! THIS IS GREAT!!! I screamed. I had come from the land of the celebrity sighting but almost killing ginsberg was all the proof i needed that this town and i were gonna get along great cuz in LA you never got a chance to run over a poet.
we made it down to my place on 9th and C and i was extrememly disappointed that my building did not look like the one Tony Randall and Jack Klugman lived in. In fact it was barely a building. It was a store front and nowhere near a high rise. I got over it. We smoked a joint with my roomates and then went to a place called Veselka which would remain one of the food temples, nay, THE food temple of my new york life from that first day til now. Veselka was rather small then. I read the New York Post thinking it was a sort of newspaper version of the National Lampoon. I truly thought it was a joke. We ate and I watched the city go by and I was about as happy as a guy in his early 20s could be in 1982 especially one who was into weird films, music, poetry and life. As I gazed out of the window I saw an old guy walk by. He looked through the glass at Bill and I and then a look of abject terror shot across his face as he picked up his pace. It was Ginsberg again…welcoming me to New York.
/s
3 Comments