I wrote this a year ago, or more, trying to update some of the adventures we'd had coming to New York and my feelings at the time. It's never been seen by human eyes. Until now.
I was walking down the sidewalk the other day in our adopted Lower East Side neighborhood when I passed a dark red stain on the pavement. It looked as if someone had been mortally wounded, run to this spot and rolled around for some time in terrible agony. I cringed. This dark stain was a block from our front door, in front of a school no less. I had cause to worry since not only did I not want myself or Magda to repeat this process ourselves but I hadn’t even heard anything. Such a terrible crime in Seattle would be loud. A block from my door on Etruria street I would have heard the screaming and yelling, the death rattle even. It would have been reported on the news by men and women in waterproof parkas. But this city has a way of silencing the suffering.
Not to be too dramatic. Basically the suffering is not so much silenced as it is just added to the infinite din of happiness, commerce, poverty, traffic and a thousand other noises in the city. We are not suffering. We have found one of the nicest apartments I’ve seen in these parts, and found it with relative ease. Of course we have to pay lots of money, but that comes with the territory. We have been stressed out. Moving is stressful in any case, but moving to New York, driving all of your worldly possessions across the country and depositing them in the center of Manhattan is probably the least relaxing thing you could do with your time.
When we entered Manhattan driving our 11 foot tall Budget truck, the other three thousand miles were instantly forgotten. Except for a couple difficult stops along the way, it’s pretty much a straight shot, and a no-brainer even for someone who’s never driven a truck that far before. But getting on the East River Highway at 50 miles an hour, on lanes not quite wide enough to contain the width of your mirrors is in a class by itself. I was already tense to the point of explosion, dodging cars dodging me, Magda doing her best to soothe my fears, when I man in a black Lexus pulled up along side of us and starting gesticulating like crazy, it was hard for him to pantomime accurately because he had one of those Madonna/McDonald’s headphones on and it kept getting in the way of his range of motion. Essentially he signaled that up ahead was a low bridge, and we were all going to die. I had seen signs to this effect, but I had decided that death was too dramatic an undertaking and didn’t want anything to do with it. He kept waving furiously until I saw a sign that said, Clearance Ahead 11’-7” . At that point I was a little annoyed, there are signs pasted conspicuously all over any Budget truck describing it’s height. We were 11 feet and not an inch more. I hoped. I tried to mime back that everything would be alright and he gave me a look I’d never seen before. It said, forgive me idiotic stranger, but I have tried in vain to save you from your stupidity. Perhaps my signal wasn’t clear enough, I gave him the “OKAY” sign, and a thumbs up, which may have translated to “I like having the top ripped off my rental truck by the underside of the UN building!” He ended our high-speed charades game and pulled ahead to a safe distance from were he could watch the carnage in his mirrors.
Needless to say, we survived. The height on our signs were accurate, but never before did seven inches seem so close. The scrape marks on the top of the tunnel told terrible tales of rental woe, but we wouldn’t add to them that day. The next time I saw our would be saviour in the Lexus, he was conversing happily on his headset as if the incident was a regular occurrence for him and already long in the past.
The next chilling challenge for us was to find a parking space outside of our building where we could unload our collection of heavy items for a couple of hours. We live on the edge of what used to be a very large ghetto. Rivington street was the northeren most boundary of an area of New York populated by 335,000 people per square mile. It was, for a time, the most densely populated area in the world. If you ever have the pleasure of trying to find a parking space here, you might think it still is. However, G-d finally interviened on our behalf, and cleared out a truck size space right across the street from the front door. Truck Parking Only, it said, for what appeared to be an unlimited amount of time.
We didn’t have time bask in any beams of devine light though, the final hurdle loomed directly before us. We had enlisted some of our dear friends to help pull, stuff, wrestle, trudge all of our worldy junk up to the top floor of a five story walk-up. Fortunately, some of them had even showed up.
As the hauling began, we brought everything out of the back in order to organize the unloading. This opened us up for all sorts of side adventures, as the denizens of the Lower East Side converged to comment on every item we owned. One particularily horrible looking transvestite fell instantly in love with the sewing machine that we had bought on the way over. It is an old thing, and may have actually have come from the very area we were moving it back to, this being the old garment district. In fact, I felt a little bad as if it had pulled off an unlikely escape from a sweatshop many years before and was living a peaceful life in Idaho. Some seventy years later we recapture it and bring it back to it’s point of origin. Being about 70 herself, the Transvestite claimed her mother once owned such a thing. I think I heard a sob coming from the direction of the poor machine.
The Update: We left the Lower East Side for Brooklyn after a year and three months in the glorious, hilarious, Lower East Side. Not our choice, we were essentially priced out. It turns out that our apartment was a deal, and that there were no more like it to be found once the guy we were renting from decided he and his family wanted to move back. One topic I didn’t get back to when writing the above description of our first weeks in New York was the sickly looking stain on the pavement outside the school. I had been appalled that a crime of that magnitude had been ignored. However as I walked by a few days later, a hot summer’s day, I watched a little girl accidentally drop the fudge-sicle that she had just bought from the ice-cream man that had set up shop on the corner. It seemed that he was there every day in the summer, and probably had been there the very day when a similar fudge-sicle fell to the ground, its stain so alarming to the new immigrant to New York.
Posted by ian at January 18, 2006 06:01 PMStone groove.
Posted by: Rob Dunn at January 18, 2006 07:25 PM