Sleep is a desperate and sneaky creature. Everyone does it, most people don’t think about it, but very few ever find themselves in sincere debt to it.
See, the messed up thing about sleep is that it doesn’t care where you are, who you are with or what amazing and important things you are doing-when sleep decides to collect on the time you owe it, it kicks your ass without remorse or apology.
Twenty-six hours into an unplanned-and consequently uncontrollable-insomnia gig, sleep knocked me down and stood stoically on my eyelids with lead boots. That bastard stole seven hours from me that could have been spent absorbing the culture and intensity that is New York City.
There ought to be a caution, a warning offered to certain people upon their arrival in Manhattan. It ought to read something like, “Attention: All those arriving for the first time in New York City and hailing from Salt Lake City, please do not gawk at, stare at or ogle the natives. It is incredibly rude.”
Warnings like that ought to hang all over the city, for the simple fact that resident Daily Utah Chronicle staffers, born and raised in Utah and visiting New York for the first time, have a real problem picking their jaws up off the ground when the famed-if not now historic-New York skyline comes into view.
New York has a way about it. New York has an aura. New York has a vibe, and it floors first timers like a speeding cement truck. This fact is obvious and unmistakable 10 minutes into the city.
It has been written innumerable times. Sentiments regarding the splendor of the Big Apple have spewed forth from the keyboards of many journalists. But the truest testament to how amazing the city can be is flying into gray April precipitation-hating the city without even knowing it, for everything that you just know it can never be-and leaving, four days later, altered forever for the better.
And that is how it is. New York in dreary rain isn’t California, that’s for sure, and five minutes off the plane it becomes obvious that the shorts and flip-flop sandals you packed aren’t going to get much use.
The humidity-or maybe it’s the personal skepticism that New York could never live up to expectations set for it-can chill you to the bone, and the impersonality of the ritzy Upper West Side does little to warm anything up.
An unbelievably attractive 20 something brunette stood coddling her Chow puppy on the East side of 79th street like it was her only friend, and I understand how that could happen-New York, on the outside, can seem unbelievably bitter and cold.
That frigidity hits a tourist hard. New York exists in movies and television shows as a perfect and serendipitous deity of a city, but seeing it in person for the first time can be like chatting and drinking with a childhood celebrity crush-it’s guaranteed to be one strange and amazing ordeal, but when it’s over, you’ll never be able to see him or her in the same transcendent light again.
Or maybe not. Maybe New York, specifically Manhattan, is like that one celebrity who gets better every time you see him or her. Maybe Manhattan is like the one celebrity who you don’t give much credit to, the one whose name you know only because everyone else knows it-only to discover that that celebrity is a veritable diamond in the rough.
Maybe that’s it, because the kind of affection that comes about by surprise is eerie and lingering, and is sure felt in New York City.
The Upper West Side isn’t like the rest of the city-it’s Donald Trump’s stomping ground. It’s the part of the city where material wealth and possession are viable substitutes for character. Trump Towers and Riverside high rises loom ominously in this part of town as an inescapable reminder that no matter how much money you make a year, someone else makes more-and, therefore, is much happier than you.
Right.
The Upper West Side is an area of distortion, and while false delusions may suggest otherwise, it is definitely the New York exception, not the rule.
The rule, in Manhattan, is places like SoHo, Greenwich Village, and Broadway-places that are reminiscent of artisans and poets rather than businessmen and lawyers.
Broadway in the rain looks significantly better than the rest of the city. In fact, Broadway in the rain is how it’s supposed to be. Broadway in the rain broods, and it makes the theaters on its flanks legitimate, as if the rain adds intellectual-authenticity points to the area with every drop that falls.
Broadway is where tourists pay “Rent,” where “The Man of La Mancha” wanders the streets, and where “The Phantom of the Opera” lives beneath every manhole cover. Cheesy, indeed, but true.
If Broadway broods, than SoHo and Greenwich Village explode. The obvious comparison on any savvy traveler’s mind is between New York and San Francisco, but while in SoHo or the Village, that comparison seems futile.
The culture and underground class that is so visibly absent from the Upper West Side-and so much a part of every street in San Francisco-can be seen on the byways of the East End.
Markets and fresh-food vendors cover the sidewalks, peddling everything from authentic Middle Eastern shishkebab to chocolate covered strawberries. If you’re in the market for Budweiser tin plates circa 1920, crates of them are available if you look hard enough-and can be had for a fine price, if you have the cajones to haggle with the intimidating native vendors. But the amazing thing about SoHo and the Village is not the vendors or the street markets. The brilliance of the area is a little less perceptible. It takes newcomers at least six blocks of wandering to understand why the area is so great, and it takes at least five hours of headwind flight on a packed airplane homebound for that realization to sink in. But when it does, it’s nearly impossible to be unchanged.
The realization which comes and settles like a stubborn squatter is, all complaints included, that leaving is by far the worst thing about New York. Because, for all its faults and inadequacies, New York is like that one poisonous ex girlfriend or boyfriend-you know the one-who runs you around, spits you out, makes you think about every idiosyncratic nuance, but about whom, upon leaving home, you just can’t stop thinking.