How to Spend 36 Hours in NYC
Friday, 8:00 pm
Finished my Hunter S. Thompson book on the bus and arrived in the City feeling like I had barely left. Met up with Jadon on the corner of 34th and Park. He was sitting on a ledge in front of a tall office building; the intersection was dark due to roadwork and lack of traffic, human or vehicular. As we walk towards D’s apartment in Murray Hill he tells me about the meetings he had this past week. When we get to D, I am exhausted and she seems down. I suggest we go to bed before things get any worse.
Saturday, 10:00 am
The next morning Jadon and I awaken on the small couch we are crashing on, sore from a night of holding onto its edges. It’s a somewhat gloomy day, with grey skies like I had not seen in a while. 32nd Street is one of those cute strictly residential Manhattan streets with little elevated stoops and staircases that lead to basement apartments on the outside. The building we are in is white and navy with flowerpots on window ledges and vine growing around the door. Friends arrive and we have mimosas on the roof, listening to Lana and sitting around a metal grate table. There are views of trees and inner courtyards to my back and various angles of decrepit NYC roofs in my foreground.
Saturday, 3:00 pm
We all the way down to Seventh Street to Big Gay Ice Cream, which is soft serve covered in a thick crust of chocolate dip and dark chocolate pretzels. We eat in a park in East Village, and Jadon comments on the gloominess of the weather. It feels like seasons changing, but the messiness of this part of NYC doesn’t make it feel crisp, just kind of melancholy and overwhelming. We are not too far from a bar we love called Mayahuel, so we walk to it but only see a corner of their pretty tiled tables lost in darkness; it doesn’t open until six pm. It starts raining and we duck into a café offering happy hour to catch the end of the women’s US open final. One of the Italians, Flavia Pancetta or the like, beats a fellow countrywoman and announces her retirement. Both seem pretty happy to have won millions of dollars. We then walk to Han Dynasty in our never-ending food delinquency and eat Dan Dan noodles, dumplings in chili oil, white chicken, and various kinds of spicy meats. My stomach is protruding from my tight black dress.
Saturday, 7:30 pm
Jadon and I Uber to Broadway but we are one hour early. No matter, we are first it line at the Richard Rogers theatre with an elderly couple behind us. We talk about an essay he plans on writing about Beijing as he has been thinking a lot about his time there, about how he had squandered said time in ceaseless expat partying (that tempting but toxic culture), snapping back into clarity only when he showed up to class drunk and realized it’d gone too far. He recalls a particularly poignant scene that one summer: walking by an old maimed beggar after clubbing one night with a drunken group of friends. The group passed the beggar, and afterwards a girl in the group started talking about how hardened she felt and how sick and troubled and touched she used to get with empathy for people like that and everyone felt bad that she was crying, but it struck Jadon as significant that no one had felt that bad about the actual maimed man.
Then all of a sudden we are ushered into the theatre, a lavish red and gold affair with intricate ceilings and beautiful chandelier, looking exactly like the set of a production of Phantom of the Opera that I had been to in Shanghai. We are, of course, here to see Hamilton. The intermission is a madhouse and I wait between the bar and the gift stand downstairs, listening in on the conversation of two middle aged people who are not quite strangers but not quite friends, perhaps a date between two people who know each other. Their talk about the play was not just banter, but still felt reserved somehow. A sleazy piggy young man in a suit comes up to shake the man’s hand—“Rosencrantz? My name is so and so, I was with one of your classes” and proceeds to small talk smoothly with remarkable cadence, the whole thing some kind of spoken word act in itself. I feel bad because I keep falling asleep throughout the second act.
Saturday, 11:00 pm
On our walk home we are caught first by the blares of Times Square and then by a rainstorm. First we stand against the storefront of a bank, narrow and intimate, in an empty avenue in front of an Irish bar reflecting reddish tones in the puddles. We go into a cafe-diner and buy an ice coffee to go. We keep walking but the rain returns with fury, so we seek refuge again on the stoop of a beautiful building with gold linings and white marble roman columns, with a curious statue in front of a man sitting on the edge of a bench, both entities entirely covered by what appears to be knitted golden wool. The scene is strangely, hauntingly beautiful. In a corner of the sky a building—I can’t name which, for some reason the Empire State comes to mind, though I have no idea where it is or what it looks like—was disappearing into the storm clouds.
Sunday, 1:00 am
When we get back to D’s apartment there is quite a crowd—a bubble of Ivy League post-grad consultants, Bain and BCG and an interconnected networks visiting across cities. Finally drunk, we step out at almost 2 am and I am delusional enough to want to go to Le Bain, the Jane, one of those fancy places I had only seen on the Facebook albums of very rich and glamorous acquaintances. A consultant, in his drunken politeness, objects on the grounds that it is too late; it is very likely that he, having gone to these places, knows that we don’t have a good enough group to get in. We end up at Tonic, a rather seedy bar/ narrow dance club where people are lazily grinding on a semi-empty dance stretch. D buys round after round of Whiskey Sours.
My head bobbing to the music, I feel my contacts losing their moisture. My vision is blurring either from too much alcohol or too-dry lenses. Like every character in a New York book, I feel like this has all been predicted by every other book about New York. But so far it is flattering, somewhat. What’s more, this is only a visit.
