Even scarier when young
This is the third in Bill Taylor's series of New York reminiscences - see the last one, New to NYC: lost in Manhattan, cursed by Lauren Bacall, at http://www.francesalut.com/2014/12/taylor.html and you can link from there (or here) to the first, New to NYC: waking up in a city that never sleeps. Another treat from the keyboard of the lad from Land of the Prince Bishops who chose a life in the New World ...
Adaptation plays a major role in the art of survival. I was a green-as-grass 25-year-old from a northeastern English coalmining town of about 20,000 people. I had an urgent need to find my feet in a raw, almost impossibly demanding city of eight million.
A city teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, a city where the term “crumbling infrastructure” could have been coined. And this was even before then-president Gerald Ford refused to countenance a financial bailout, prompting the classic Daily News splash of Oct 30, 1975: “Ford to city: drop dead.”
From subway trains that appeared to be held together by graffiti to leprous yellow taxis armoured like stock-car racers and driven in a like manner, everywhere I looked, every time I turned around, there was something else to jar my senses.
I couldn’t… I didn’t want to fight it. I wanted to be a part of it, to go with the terrifying but intoxicating flow. That meant learning fast and assuming the adaptation skills of a chameleon.
I knew I’d made it the day I boarded a Continental Trailways bus in Philadelphia heading “home” – I was still putting that in quotation marks – to New York. The bus had come from Dallas, a two-day trip.
As I was settling myself, a man got on and said with a cowboy accent, “Excuse me, you’re in my seat.”
I don’t think so.
“I’ve been in that seat since Dallas,” he said. He was bigger and no doubt tougher than I but aggrieved rather than angry.
I told him he had no proof of that; that he’d left no sign of occupancy, even a magazine, before he got off the bus to stretch his legs. I told him I wasn’t moving. We locked eyes. I was thinking that maybe, before things turned nasty (Texan? He might even have a gun), I should cede the ground and find another place when suddenly he sagged, quite visibly, and began to move away.
“You New Yorkers think you own everything,” he snarled petulantly over his shoulder.
“I sure as hell own this seat,” I replied. I grinned inwardly all the way back along the New Jersey Turnpike – “You New Yorkers” – and mentally removed the quotation marks from “home”.
But this was a year or more after I’d arrived. A year of rough-and-ready education. A year when I counted every penny. A year when I didn’t always have enough to eat.
One Sunday evening, when I’d arrived back from the small Pennsylvania town where my girlfriend lived, I was glumly wondering how I’d get through the next 36 hours to payday on a single hot dog. That was all I had the money for, less than a dollar.
It was late winter but unseasonably warm. I’d taken my overcoat but hadn’t worn it. Now, as I got off the bus, I put it on and shoved my hands into the pockets. And found a $5 bill. How could I have forgotten it was there? No matter. I could spin out five bucks and some loose change into two, possibly three, rudimentary meals.
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered my future mother-in-law had put it there. There was no love lost between us back then but she wouldn’t see me starve. Nothing could ever repay that. Nor the mailroom boss at the British Mission to the UN, who always seemed to know when his ill-rewarded messengers were on their beam ends and would casually invite one or another of us up to the Bronx for a home-cooked dinner. He made it sound as if he and his wife were starved for company and we’d be doing them a favour.
There were other ways, too, to feed yourself economically. Manhattan was still full of bars with an all-day “free lunch” counter, a steam-table stacked with finger foods, to encourage patrons to drink.
We’d nurse a single beer each for as long as the bartender would allow while we stuffed ourselves. There was one beloved Irish place that ran to ham sandwiches but you could always count on meatballs and chicken wings and chopped up hot dogs. We could have traveled farther and fared worse.
By now, I had the occasional freelance cheque coming in. Rupert Murdoch had started up the National Star weekly supermarket tabloid – these days it’s a glossy Hello!-style celeb magazine – to take on the National Enquirer and its ilk and I was on the books as a stringer. I wrote a lot about miracle diets.
It seldom paid more than $30 at a time. I could and probably should have saved but with money in my hand, thrift was the last thing on my mind. I’d take my girlfriend out and blow it on dinners at what we thought of then as fancy restaurants.
And all the while I was absorbing lessons, taking in New York’s essentials by a process of osmosis.
If the frigidity of winter was a shock, summer was a revelation. Who knew such heat and humidity were possible outside of an Amazonian jungle? The pollution in the air was a tangible thing.
I woke one morning hardly able to speak, swallow or see. The British government might not pay handsomely but it did provide health insurance. I took myself off to a doctor who diagnosed “the classic New York triple punch”, laryngitis, pharyngitis and conjunctivitis, all caused by the Beijing-like quality of the atmosphere.
That was one lesson. Another, perhaps the biggest that I learned, came one evening as I was walking home from work up Lexington Avenue. The rush-hour was in full spate, a snorting, snarling mess of pedestrians and traffic.
Up ahead there was some kind of interruption in the flow of people north and south, a sort of lurch in their elbow-to-elbow progress. Through the crowd, I could see a policeman’s cap.
He was standing by the body of a vagrant who was stretched out on his back across the sidewalk, uncovered, eyes staring. The cars and buses were relentless. To venture onto the street would be a very risky thing. So the pedestrians, barely pausing, hardly looking down, simply adjusted their stride – that brief persistent hiccup in the flow – and continued on their way.
This all happened in a few seconds; there was little time to think and no room at all to maneouvre.
I stepped over the corpse and kept on walking.
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