First night stand
Tonight, as Howard Dean, a nice New York City boy, tries to make it in Wisconsin, I will tell you how I, an innocent man with a head made from cheese, first confronted New York City. Also, he is going to lose, and losing has never stopped me. Also, it didn’t cost me forty million dollars.
By the way, before this site gets deluged by unrepentant Deaniacs (not to be confused with brainiacs), now it can be told: I also supported your man. But I liked the expressive, erudite, confident, reasonable Dean I heard on the radio in November 2002 and saw speak in the city a few times. He suggested solutions. The crazy screaming freakout who made such a splash, also named Dean, had no ideas about anything except that he should win. That’s the guy who lost. It’s amazing how we contain multitudes.
So as I’m contemplating how to best tell the public about the story of me, I go to that library of experience, the bar. I sit there on a stool, as one does, as many do under a variety of circumstances, some of whom are not trying to figure out the story of their first night in New York City. But you wouldn’t know that from the girl who comes in and sits down next to me with her suitcase.
She looks at me sheepishly and then is set upon by an unusually-attentive bartender. This may be because she is above average-looking, or, in the terms of our bar, stunning. Or it may be because there isn’t much business. Either way, give the good-looking women drinks, and you’re okay with me.
So I take out my little pocket notebook and concentrate on the issue at hand. I want to remember the feelings, the impressions of another person, with whom I have memory continuity: me as a sophomore at NYU, my first night in New York after an eternity in my mother’s house in Wisconsin and three hours on an airplane. I didn’t really take a good look at New York until I got out of the taxi at my dorm and had to handle things on a human scale. Until then, it was just looking out of windows and seeing On the Town in the wrong costumes.
I didn’t have a lot of baggage, as we had shipped some things to arrive in a few days, and I was going to just buy some other things that weren’t worth bringing. The lobby featured plenty of my peers who had baggage, though, as well as the necessary help from family members, but I just took my bags and checked in with the officer on duty. I was shown my bivouac on the third floor. Then I had to decide whether it was more exciting to stumble around town, or just stay in my room. Because nothing like that room had quite happened to me before either.
Even though my part of Wisconsin was not rural by local standards, it was quiet. When things were happening, you took it personally; you were involved or investigating. There was no background except quiet. New York, as you may have heard, is not like that. It’s in your grill no matter what. You don’t forget you’re here. Of course, an undergrad dorm is likely to be even more active than your average Upper East Side brownstone, but that was where I was and where I first started out. I sat on the bed, with my bags on the floor and the light off, and I listened to the shrieks and screeches from the street. I listened to the pounding up and down the hallway. I listened to more buses go by than I probably had heard up to that time.
And you must realize, I wasn’t just an only child. I had lived alone. Mom traveled a lot for work. Dad had traveled only once, but not back. It was different to be closer to strangers here in the city than I had been in my family home. I felt I knew more about them.
The girl at the bar next to me is suddenly speaking. “Are you a writer?” she asks of me, gesturing at my notebook with a too-ingenuous smile.
“No,” I say, “I’m from the board of health.”
She draws back a moment, until the bartender laughs. Then she flushes and laughs. I wonder what part of the Midwest she is from, and ask her.
She flushes and laughs again. “Well, I hoped it wasn’t that obvious. I mean, it is only my first day in town, but I read up in the Culture Shock book. I got as far as recognizing graffiti tags, but I’m only halfway through it.”
I smile at her in my best smiling-at-you manner. She swallows and says, “I’m from Akron.”
“A lovely people, the Akronians,” I assure her. “Totally different from the Cincinatutians and Youngstownsmen. A misunderstood people, for sure, but lovely nonetheless. What are you drinking?”
So I buy her what she’s drinking, although one of these days I’ll buy them what they’re not. And I ask what’s with the suitcase. “As a prop it is contrived. And as a method of carrying goods — well, leave them in your local residence. As the local saying has it, ‘Why schlep?’”
She flushes a little less and doesn’t laugh much at all. “I moved to New York today,” she says finally. “But I don’t know if it took.”
“These things need time,” I suggest. “According to this notebook, it took me the whole car ride from Queens before I knew this was my town. I grew up in Racine County, Wisconsin, you know. We’re most of us from somewhere else. That’s what makes us trustworthy New Yorkers. We’re here by choice. Our heritage is what we invented, so we have to be that much more loyal to it.”
She swirls the stirrer in her drink, looking at me, and I continue, “Heritage is a word they used to use a lot back in Wisconsin. But in New York, if people have heritage, ethnic heritage, they’re thinking of some other country. In Wisconsin it meant some town in Wisconsin. Or Norway, which was considered the same. But the best way to have heritage is to pick it up as you go along. It means more to you than just to get stuck with it. Maybe that’s why you came here.”
“Maybe,” she says quietly. “I certainly was ready for a change.”
I smile at her. “Do you have a place to stay?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. “I did at first.”
“Is this really your first night in town?”
She smiles back. “It really is. What’s left of it.”
“I just want to get a sense of the stakes here. This is your first night in New York, so if I slept with you, it’d be the first time you slept with someone in New York?”
She laughs this time without flushing. She’s moving in already. “Well, no, there was my boyfriend, this afternoon. I came out here to be with him. But we had a fight already. He’s so different. I didn’t understand him at all. After I gave everything up and came all this way — I didn’t like it. I didn’t expect it. We fought. I grabbed my suitcase and sort of left.”
“Dramatic,” I suggest.
“I guess that’s what we come to the big city for,” she replies, pushing her empty glass out to the bartender.
I take a good look at her, a woman perhaps a little older than me, today in the twenty-first century, and think about me at nineteen, sitting on a narrow mattress near Washington Square in the good, lamented twentieth century, full-on quivering in New York.
by Jack, February 17, 2004 8:59 PM | More from Foundational Issues | More from Jack History Month
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