Britical

NYC

Two years ago was the last time I lost my temper. This sounds ludicrously dramatic but my point is that it happens rarely, maybe every seven years or so. I never see it coming. There is no warning, and no thinking in the few seconds it takes. And I am left staring at it from the other side, shocked and shocked at myself.

Because all families argue - or so we’re told - because there is a long, tortuous story concerning me, my Mother, my brother which is far too complicated to explain here, I lost my temper. We were standing in her tiny, dark kitchen and it was summer outside. Upset and frustrated by something she’d said to me, I suddenly screamed at her. What I actually said was garbled nonsense, the words shot up with no warning, Exorcist-like, from who knows what awful place. And then, and within perhaps five seconds, I was, like some bad lover, done. Time for a cigarette and a cab. It had felt bad but ever so slightly good, but only chemically so because of the huge adrenaline rush. Mainly it felt bad.

The next few minutes played out like some agonizing, slightly farcical silent movie. She staggered back - and it was almost grotesquely comic because it was exactly what those words conjure, “staggered back” - a slow motion pantomime, a hideous mime of someone horrified. I stood and watched as her hand reached out behind her, grasping for the door handle, until she turned slowly, managing to open the back door to the garden. She went out, quietly closing the door behind her. I thought then how it is that doors closed quietly at these times are always worse than ones slammed. There is something truly dreadful and final about it. I have done it myself and know there is no going back.

I was seized by panic - wanting to rewind the tape - mistake, mistake! Frantically, I ran to the window and watched my Mother, an upright, strong, seventy year old woman who usually strides along, now shuffling, defeated, across the garden towards an old wooden chair by the fence. She looked hit by some terrible coup de foudre; as if she’d aged twenty years. Her face, I saw, was doing that awful, uncontrollable distorted thing your face does when you’re fighting to control tears. Even from the window I could see she was trembling, and then she started to cry.
I had shouted at her and strangely I knew it was the fact of it, the force and sheer volume of it, not the words themselves, that had sent her reeling; I understood that much. As soon as I closed my mouth it was as if my self, my body, instantly clicked back into place, only to discover a desperate feeling of can’t-take-it-back. And I couldn’t. I have tried in many ways ever since, but it is too late.

Two years later she is still terribly sort of Careful with me, remaining wary and ready for censure - or worse. I am held at arm’s length. Guilt is a useless, a self-indulgent thing unless it prompts one to actually put things right. I have realised that this option is a luxury, something granted if you are very, very fortunate, and that sometimes, hope or no hope, the box can never be closed back up. 

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007

NYC

New York really delivers. For instance, even to the people who actually live here, the city remains astonishingly glamourous -
although they would rather hang themselves than admit it. Never mind that this occurred to me last Saturday morning, lying on the floor in my new boots eating string cheese while watching cartoons with the sound turned down and listening to Car Talk on the radio. But let’s leave the glamour for another day. The fact remains that walk out of your apartment anytime, anyplace on this island and there is much to amuse without your having to talk to anyone, spend even a cent or make any effort beyond minding your own business and strolling down the street.

There’s a man on the radio who says that if something has a one in a million chance of happening, it happens eight times a day in New York. Though mathematically dubious, this explains some of the memorable things I’ve seen here. On the corner of Lafayette and Bond Street, a shrieking man, naked except for a small pair of red boxer shorts, spreadeagled on the hood of a speeding cab, which cab makes a sharp right and shoots up the Street at a not unsensational speed* with its passenger still clinging onto the windshield. Utterly, wonderfully inexplicable. A few people gawped, and an unsurprising amount did not. A bicycle messenger, perhaps new to the city or a particularly fast moving new species of tourist, whipped by and shouted to no one in particular, “Did you see that??” Well really, had no one even stopped to exclaim and wonder at this sight? No, they had not. This is New York City and we see crazy fucking shit like this every day. It’s why we live here. That and the finely honed ability to pretend to ignore celebrities.

Everyone always bangs on about New York being “a walking city”. To me this means that partly due to its small size and partly due to the efforts of Jane Jacobs (Google her), it is possible to walk the length and breadth of the island without finding yourself exhausted and stymied by ugly expressways and small dismaying islands of sidewalk encased in railings (these being London experiences). Nothing and no one seems very far from anything, or anyone, else (the anyone bit being a problem here sometimes - an incestuous small world liability). Public transport is available all night and taxis are not exhorbitant. Yes, the city does sleep, but walking home late at night there is always someone about and less and less now is that someone likely to launch you into the East River in several black garbage bags. Instead, I can walk fairly unmolested and not at all bored, through neighbourhood after neighbourhood - quite far sometimes - while meaning to jump in a cab or on the subway, but solitary and happy, I am pulled onwards by the sheer entertainment value of the enterprise. There is always something beautiful or interesting to look at, a building never noticed before or a gorgeous bit of sky. Despite the light haze, you can still see stars from Manhattan.

There is a vignette on every corner: a seething couple squabbling in some unintentionally humourous fashion by the Flatiron Building; an impeccably dressed man in a bow tie teaching his dog, at 3am, to sit and rollover outside Gramercy Park; the Mayor of New York being hustled down into the subway at 86th & Lex. by three fearsome looking ex-Delta types in suits. And just this past Saturday, I walked home down Lexington Avenue, interested to note as I passed several construction sites, that what X had pointed out the previous day was true: it is always the black man holding the flag.

 
Anyway, I soon forgot about this because just below Grand Central Station lines of parked cars appeared covered in dust and surrounded by very fake looking plastic grass and assorted foliage. There was a dirty looking bus on which a poster blared: Do YOU Have the NEW FLU? The New Flu? I keep meaning to Google it. There were some film trucks, yes, but no filming going on; just hordes of police and some people being dragged into vans. Rehearsal? God knows. I didn’t linger and neither did other passers-by who were perhaps alarmed by news of the end-of-the-world New Flu pandemic. Yet fifteen minutes later even this mystery was forgotten when I saw surely the hugest crane outside of Dubai or Beijing laid several blocks along Third Avenue, it’s monstrous red skeleton being slowly raised into the deepest, bluest of skies while thrilled looking people actually hung out drinking coffee and, rare for New Yorkers, stared and gossiped heartily. Perhaps there is a different rule here for objects and buildings than for people or people called celebrities. There is a reason construction sites always have little windows cut in the fences around them for curious little faces to peer through.

Yes, we will leave the glamour for another time. Of course most everyone here aspires to the lifestyle of “Prada and two dogs”, but that’s old news. There are smaller pleasures to be had, like its being Hallowe’en soon, when I shall dress the dog (not mine, alas) up as a plane, flattening his ears down (he likes it) and parading him around the neighbourhood for all to see - and pretend not to see, in the New York way.

One of the archaic meanings of the word glamour was magic, the casting of a spell or enchantment over someone. I fell in love with the city after seeing, at an apparently impressionable age, Woody Allen’s film, Manhattan. I vowed to move here as soon as I could because I thought New York would be just like the movies. It still is.

* Inspired by a line of my friend ERT’s: “…at an unsensational speed…”

 

 

Copyright Britical 2006