Sic Transit Gloria Gritty… Tall Tales from a Petulant Tourist
I realise this is all par for the course. And I myself have no doubt been far more annoying taking twenty-three pictures of evil Hannibal Lector’s house in Florence and gawping stupidly at dolphins (themselves sinister and smiling a la Hannibal) in New Zealand. So it goes. We are all tourists.
But a few weeks ago new depths were reached, and thank God not by me. Ladies and Gents, I would like to introduce: The tourist who thinks he knows your city better than you do.
My French tourist friend and I had dinner and caught up and that was lovely. And then he wanted to go to a club and that was not. I had, I said, already explained that to him, no? That I no longer go to clubs in New York, but that I had found a party we could go to. Simple, n’est-ce pas? Non.
He had seemed OK with the party scenario, looking about beaming and exclaiming at this and that thing he found charmant and whatnot. But then my friend T.W. arrived and for some reason The Tourist seemed suddenly peeved. He soon pulled out his shiny Blackberry and began punching at it in some desultory way. We ignored this rudeness, and him, until it got late and T. was preparing to leave and I said that I too must be off.
“WHAT???” said the Tourist, and launched into a bizarre, petulant tirade:
“You are leaving?? You bring me…here and then you say you are leaving! Why did you bring me here anyway…look at these people {most of them looked just like him}….how can you bring me here?… how can you leave?? You should be taking me to a club somewhere with beer on the floor and intellectuals! If….if you came to Paris I would take you…I would take you to some cool place with a little door and people fucking against the walls inside!”
“Uh…I have to be up early”, I said.
And then I should have left.
But, typically, I didn’t. I was angry this person took me for some rube who didn’t know her own city and so I waded, inevitably, into a ludicrous and upsetting argument with a tourist.
I tried to explain that now, as opposed to the arguably mythical “then” of New York nightlife, it is all bottle service and reserved tables, conservative rich folks and doughy men from the Upper East Side in pleated chinos and blue chambray shirts. That after-hours places like Save the Robots had vanished long, long ago back in the 20th Century with the advent of Rudolph Giuliani’s “no dancing!” cabaret laws…that even if he went all the way to Brooklyn and thought he’d found somewhere…some damp basement which felt thrillingly “edgy” and dangerous, that it would be full of hipsters - and, after all, scratch a hipster and there’s a trustafarian underneath. I said, “So if you find what you’re looking for, you let me know.”
The Tourist was unconvinced, seemingly sure I had secreted about my person the ornate, rusty keys to some fabulous, rickety old town house on the Lower East Side where Fellini-esque midgets cavorted in the hall and naked eunuchs in tutus swung from art nouveau chandeliers, Jack Kerouac, Roland Barthes and an assortment of beatniks lounging below sipping absinthe – something, perhaps, like the embarrassing scenes from Eyes Wide Shut crossed with the bar in the first Star Wars.
He stomped outside in his loafers, and I stood at a loss, nonplussed, on 20th Street as he muttered furiously and Frenchly, and stabbed at his little Blackberry (perhaps it knew the answer). But I knew I was more angry than he. And so I crossed the street away from him, and headed up Park Avenue and assume we were both relieved.
On the way home, I thought to myself how we all complain about Times Square becoming “Disneyfied” and have done so for quite a few years now. Perhaps it is time for a Disney version of New York, a miniature ride through the gritty streets of times past. Not that I miss them that much, actually – but, in principle I do, because I miss the variety of the city and the people who used to live here. Now most of them have moved elsewhere, leaving behind the bankers, lawyers, real estate developers and other subjects of the infamous “Die, yuppie, die!” slogans sprayed on East Village walls back in the late 80’s when such slogans were derided as an overreaction. How wrong we were.
Then, a week before Christmas, a shiny new Chase Bank opened next door in a spot where a few years ago even a Duane Reade (the omnipresent drugstore here in NYC) had once shuttered its windows and moved out – even they worn down by the methadone clinic, the overflow of mental patients from Bellevue, the 900 bed mens’ shelter, and the projects – all within a two block radius here. These annoyances exist still – in fact it occurs to me my block is the perfect candidate for the gritty Disney. But I have always appreciated the implicit bargain: that the fact of my wretched sketchy block, the hallways that smell perpetually of garbage - kept my rent a little bit manageable.
I immediately called X, distraught. “What am I going to do????” I sobbed. “I guess you’ll have to move to Queens – or maybe New Jersey”, he said, typically helpful and sympathetic.
“Actually”, I said, “I was thinking about Paris.”