Harlem tricycle

The past two days I've taken to making coffee with water from the tap as hot as it gets. Saves the effort of heating water on stove. Advance or decline?

New York and TV go together like white and rice, perhaps because it's the loneliest city in the world. I was watching a stand-up comedian on Comedy Central, and he did a bit that allowed him to use a loud Chinese accent, lucky devil. He mentioned he goes to the same place and orders the same thing for lunch every day: Chicken broccoli.

It occurred to me that I, too, could live cheaply and deliciously and mindlessly and effortlessly on chicken broccoli every day. There is usually a sweetness in the sauce that makes me happy.

The Chinese take-out restaurants here in Harlem are about the size of a mausoleum. Sometimes there is a little bench you can share with two Mexican workers. Yesterday's place had no bench. Just a little red tricycle. I thought that would have made a nice photo by renowned photojournalist Channing Johnson, a shot of the menu on the wall so you knew where you were, the window where all the miscommunication takes place between the Chinese woman and the customers, and the little tricycle where one can sit in the foreground.

The other day I had already ordered my Chicken broccoli when three English-speaking workers came in and ordered. The miscommunication occurred in the ordering process. The woman said something no one understood. "Prostate?" one guy said. "You do prostate exams here too? Wow, you can get everything here."

Every night I've been talking to my roommate, Kawah, a tall slender Chinese who teaches yoga and would make my childhood friend Rick faint. He is an architect in San Francisco and has an Asian fetish, for all you readers who happen to be Asian women living in the Bay Area.

Rick places free ads on craigslist specifically looking for an Asian woman. Rick is too cheap to pay $25 a month for salon.com or match.com personals. The good news for Rick is that Kawah herself has used craigslist to place personals ads. The bad news is that she said she would never respond to someone who said they were looking for an Asian woman. She said she's wary of yellow fever and doesn't want to be fetishized.

Kawah has a moddish haircut and looks like Shelly Duvall in The Shining. When I told her this while we were sitting in the kitchen last night, she called The Shining a beautiful film.

She grew up till age six in China, then in New York City, so she's a true New Yorker, with an accent 75 percent New York/25 percent Chinese. Are people scared to watch horror movies in cities, or is that only in the burbs? She said she enjoys terrifying herself but can only watch scary movies in the daytime. I then looked over her shoulder with a horrified look on my face, twitching slightly. She was terrified.

"Okay, talk about something else! I'm freaked out. Talk about something else. Oh my god, I have to close this cabinet." She got up and closed a cabinet. She is very feng shui oriented and the one rule of the household is that one has to have the toilet seat shut before flushing. I'm not sure if that's feng shui or germ phobia, since her toothbrush is nearby.

Did you make it to the beach?

Hells no, in the middle of December when it's 20 below?!
(anybody remember who said this?)

(or this:)
That's what she planned, but she stood me up, Roxanne Roxanne.


Well I ran past Jersey fisherman hosing off their catch as the sun descended, under a bridge on a cement dense with seagull shit, across the tracks to the good side of town with the big houses, and finally I saw the landscape clear and the great grey sky opened up and the salty air hit my nose and there could be no mistaking what this clearing in the distance was, something beyond human. At last, at last, something beyond the mad human scurry, immense and indifferent, and when I finally sprinted the last two blocks and made it onto the sand it was dark and the beach was deserted and I was singing Johnny Cash (I'm going to get some sand in my shoes) and I had to focus on the crooked old man marching away from the sea, and away from me in fear, because to look at something so great as the sea at night is hardly possible.

I examined a dead stingray and looked for the part that killed the Crocodile Hunter. I stared into the small waves and tried to remember the circumstances that led the heroine of Kate Chopin's The Awakening to walk into the sea, but I drew a blank and dreamed for a minute about being in a place where I could read books like that and talk to people about them, then headed back to the street and passed a Mexican in a huge parka going to fish for his dinner.

In the gym across the street I pretended to be moving to town and was there a free trial membership but the lesbian gently said no. In the 7-11 next door I stared at a Life magazine's 1982 photograph of a father hugging his son dying of AIDS, while a local woman told a man she hadn't seen in awhile that her father had just died. "That's life," she said, "I'm just glad he's not in pain anymore." She did seem glad, and when a cell phone call came in she laughed lightly and said, "I'll see you at the funeral."

I worked my way back home, following the Shark River inland for two miles to my friend's house. It was hard to tell which way the water, coruscant under the dock lights, was heading, but it seemed the tide was bringing it in.

Something like this occurred to me:

The human noises trying so hard,
The soft rumble of the train,
The endless soughing of traffic,
The arch of road over the Shark River,
For a few seconds at least let us see
That what stays is the smell of the salt air,
The squawk of the gulls,
That idiot cars will one day fade,
but never the mystery of shimmering water.

Sometimes a Mofo is Just a Mofo

One thing I've learned in my travels is that it's always the mofo you hate the most who ends up your savior. So it's okay to ignore this mofo but don't totally write him off. I learned this in Nepal. On the long, brutally bumpy bus ride to the trailhead, there was a pasty, long-blond-haired Brit who kept "taking the piss" out of me (as the Brits say) at every rest stop for the way I enacted various American stereotypes. The sickly young man would stare at me in contempt whenever I said something like, "Do you guys know if this is safe to eat?" Or, even more offensive: "So, what do you do back in England?" To this he offered no reply.

So I ignored him for the rest of the trip, quietly despising him. I marched on my own up the ascents of the Langtang trek for a few days, staying in guest houses for ten cents a night and eating dahl and rice, but on around Day 4 I got so sick I couldn't move. All my body's energy sucked in toward my gut like a black hole. And I hadn't slept at all the night before because it was freezing, and I'd had to share a bed with the Nepalese guest house owner and his nine-year-old daughter, and she kept stealing the blankets in the night.

I didn't know if I'd be able to reach the summit, which was a grave disappointment. Even the fat Kiwis were passing me as I rolled around on the ground in front of the guest house while the nine-year-old laughted at me. But then up came the scrawny Brit, and it took all the strength I had to greet the bastard and not ignore him or say something rude. But he had turned nice. When I told him my symptoms, he produced a plastic bag with tiny black pills. "Carbon pills," he said. I took one and he left and my stomach felt better within an hour. I reached the glorious summit a few days later, then tried to reach a further summit but fell asleep on the barren mountainside from altitude sickness. I didn't slip into a coma, but if I had I'm sure blondie would have been there with a magic pill.

Hm, strange prolegomenon to a discussion of my New York real estate broker, but I hated this bastard the moment I talked to him on the phone. Although I plan to return to France in a few weeks, I'm trying to line up an apartment for my return. I respond only to no-fee apartments on craigslist. The broker listed in the ad offered to show me some places. Brooklyn accent, no "bye" before hanging up, interrupts, the worst kind of New York rude. When I see him he fires off questions such as: "What do you do? How much do you make? How long you been here?" Of course all the brokers want to know this, but usually there's some civility along with the brass tacks. Between questions he checks his cell phone and organizer again and again.

So I started ignoring him, reading my amazing book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is so good I couldn't focus on the words toward the end because my hands were shaking and my eyes were jumping. It was so good that at the end of my yoga class, when the teacher said, "As always, dedicate your class to someone or something" without thinking I dedicated my class to the dead soldiers of the Spanish Civil War. With this book in my hands I couldn't be bothered with the schmuck next to me on the uptown train as we went to look at apartments.

But somewhere I knew that the Asshole is always the one who comes through for you. He showed me an amazing place, and I agreed to take it, and everything was smooth as ice.

Now, I seldom err about people, which is why my colleagues in anthro grad school called me the Doctor of Human Nature. But this time I was hammered! Two days later, I came all the way back uptown to his office, he handed me an application form and his personality had suddenly flipped. For 15 minutes he tried cracking jokes ("There was a prank on TV from Germany, they dug a hole in the woods and filled it with water and covered it with branches and leaves and filmed people falling in the hole, and that's like life you know, you're going along and everything's fine then all of a sudden") that went nowhere and put his family on the table, pain-in-the-ass wife and five kids, now asking about my private life. They were pathetic attempts to bond, but I thought, "Here's my theory, asshole becoming freindly" Then, as I put pen to paper, he mutters under his breath that there would be a 19 percent fee.

"19 percent of what?" I asked.

"The annual rent."

"So what's that?"

"Well, rent is $1,100, and you're getting a hell of a deal on that by the way, usually it's around $1,400, so I'll cut our normal fee and call it $2,200."

"You want me to pay a $2,200 fee?"

I explained that I only respond to no-fee ads, and he said well the studio I initially called about was no-fee but all the other ones had fees. I realize that brokers are at the bottom of the barrel and it's my fault for not being explicit at every turn about my no-fee policy, but this guy took the cake. I hightailed it out of there without a word, just as we'd started.

Oh, the point of this post is to say that this misunderstanding with the broker led me to homelessness, so now I'm at a friend's beach house in New Jersey. It's a college friend who kindly gave me the keys for the week, until I move into a sublet in Sugar Hill (north of Harlem, remember the Sugar Hill Gang? I nearly took a place in a tough neighborhood in the South Bronx, a huge apartment for only 925, but on a whim I stopped at the police station afterward and asked when the last murder was: "Last week," said the sergeant.) The friend came down for the weekend and farted a lot and watched his favorite TV show, Veronica Mars, and together we looked through all our college yearbooks and some black and whites he'd taken of the boys for a class.

We did some rough calculations of what the money we spent on that crappy Midwestern school would have come to in the stock market, as we groaned at page after page of painful idiots we suffered day after day during our indenture. There were about five for every one who brought us a smile. The poodle-haired girls and the meathead guys with mullets. Jesus, what were we (or our parents) thinking. We called Afghan, a guy from our freshman dorm, and his laugh and jokes and timing and slight speech impediment on the "ch" were exactly the same. We tried to get him to tell the story about how he once walked 40 miles to see a girl named Maria, but he said it was a sore subject, that he'd been on the brink of insanity and didn't know what he was doing.

So my friend calls this a beach house to impress the ladies, but in all the years I've been coming here I've never seen the ocean. Today I consulted a map and took a run for the shore but my legs wouldn't hold out long enough and I came away empty again. Tomorrow, for those of you who enjoy hope, tomorrow I'll make it to the sea.

I can make you 6' 5"

Perhaps it can be said that the only good thing in New York for me right now is Chelsea Piers. I never thought I'd say this about a gym, and it all comes to an end in two days when my free one-week membership expires.

But what a playground. Tonight it was basketball first. I shot around with the aforementioned mafiosi (earlier post) and got some clarification on the back injury of the young stud. I asked him how his spine was, and he said, "See, I was standing against the bar, and she came up behind me, grinding, and I wanted to push back, but she got these big hips, and I don't got big hips..." Seemed backwards, but that's cool.

The mob wouldn't let me in, so I wound up on the junior court in a 3-on-3 game. My play was compared to that of Moses Malone, which led to a slight from the South Asian I was covering: "Is he that old?" Then I was likened to Phoenix playmaker Steve Nash, which was more appealing. Nash, said the guy shaving next to me in the locker room, played soccer here all the time over the summer. (We won, for those of you keeping score at home, 11-10 on an acrobatic shot by yours truly.)

See, everyone's got a famous name on the tip of their tongue at this joint. They're just dying for you to ask them who they saw here at Chelsea Piers. I saw my college friend Beard in the locker room tonight, and he said he saw Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

"You see 'Capote'?" I asked him.

"Yes."

"It sucked," I said.

He looked around the corner and said, "Yeah, but...best not to be insulting the talent," or some such.

The other day I showed up for some ball, spotted my new friend Jason shooting around. There was a 5-on-5 game going on. I said, "You playing next over there?"

"Nah man," he said. "There's so many famous people on that court I don't think they'd let us play with them."

"What the fuck is this, junior high school?" I thought.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Who we got."

He stood next to me, conspiratorally, and said, "We got (he listed three names)," and when he saw my blank face he added, "You know, Jay-Z's posse."

At least yoga gives a chance to get away from this famestruck city for an hour and a half, if you can tune out the beat from the next room of the latest fitness craze and if you can get over the theatrical teacher Paulo's "iiiiiiinnn-aaa-heeelllll" (that's "inhale") AAAANNND exhellll." I've traveled a lot but I've never heard anyone talk like that.

In the locker room I was talking to Beard, and Paulo comes up to me. I did the thing straight guys do when talking to gay guys: "Tsup."

"Hey, how did it feel?" he asked.

"It was great," I said, truly.

"How tall are you?"

"About six three."

"I could make you six five. I feel that you're six five naturally, but there's some tightness in the hamstrings and back, you're hunched, trying to fit into this shape (demo). I can stretch you into your true height of six five, but you'd have to own it (demo, standing proud)."

Bye to Beard, bye to Paulo, all alone for the best part of all. Taking your sweaty body and putting it under the hot blast of the shower with the eucalyptus squirt body wash and the green tea shampoo, then out for a shave. What a wasteful extravagance. You toss your disposable razor. You pull out a little plastic cup for a squirt of mouthwash, then toss the cup. You Q-tip the ears, spray on some deoderant, and if you're a man of a certain generation you pull a black comb out of a jar of blue liquid and comb your hair. Squirt out some lotion and rub it into the face and body. Now you're all ready for...eh...my post draws a blank.