Growing up, there were a few golden legends in our household: The McCarthy campaign in '68; The Vietnam Moratorium; Hunter Thompson's race for Sheriff of Aspen; and my father's own race for Treasurer in Colorado. All of them featured fantastic places imbued with the magic that only places in stories told by parents to their children can have. The most fantastical of all these places was New York City: a land, as anyone can tell you, of great and terrible wonders.
In the eight months I have been here, trying to find work as an actor and writer, I have found it to be nothing less. Despite an early apartment tainted with every form of Vermin imaginable (see 'The Bedbug Chronicles'), and a near-total inability to find profitable work, I think this city is pretty damn glorious.
With that in mind, I'm going to document the hell out of New York for a year or so.
I'm far from the first person to conceive of the internet as a public diary (hence the term 'blog' from 'web log'), nor am I the first person to talk about New York (this site has it's share and www.nycbloggers.com has around fifteen hundred bloggers on just the west side of Manhattan). Still, with any luck I'll have something interesting to say and, at worst, I'll have notes for my own children someday.
January 29th, 2008
It's probably just as well that I'm beginning this thing outside of New York. The Big Apple is hardly a city of natives and where 'what do you do?' and 'who are you here with?' are the standard barfly questions in other cities, New York's is, often as not, 'where are you from?'
I am from Colorado -- or at least that's where I go for Christmas. My sister, Teal, lives in Aspen and my parents spend enough time there that it now qualifies as home.
Plus, with news of an unregulated low-level French banker losing seven billion dollars and gumming up the world's economy, it seems only natural to let my thoughts drift back to New Year's eve in Aspen.
"Phil," my sister's French roommate, Lionel, demanded our cabby's attention. "Phil, I am going to ride on the roof." There were twelve of us packed into the taxi and Lionel had apparently decided it was more spacious up top.
My sister -- our host -- explained "don't worry Phil. He's not going to really get on the roof." We heard thuddings and a dark form climbed the back windshield.
"Lionel!" Teal screamed out her window "get off the roof!"
To throw a really world class bender, you need people who don't fall asleep as their brain soaks in whisky and, preferably, a danger-hungry Frenchman. We had both on New Year's eve.
A heavily accented voice drifted from the roof. "Oh, excuse me Phil," we heard Lionel say, "I am coming down now."
There was scuffling on the roof and the twelve of us, already sardine-crammed into the back, prepared to make room for another.
We were not, as a group, at our most reasonable. Earlier in the night, Katie, a small girl who is highly susceptible to intoxicants, saw some fellow party-goers throwing a ping pong ball back and forth into one-another's beer cups. She walked up to one, stood in front of him and said "stop throwing eggs." There was an awkward pause followed shortly by a new year's countdown. By the time it reached zero, Katie had forgotten about the egg hurling. "Happy 2009," she yelled.
Fortunately, Phil ran his cab service on a tips only basis, so he was willing to put up with us.
"OK, are we all here?" Teal asked. She started to count.
Someone knocked on the window. "Excuse me," he said "there's somebody on your roof."
"Lionel!" Teal yelled again.
The same French accent drifted back from the cold. "I am sorry, I forgot."
"You forgot to come down from the roof?"
Lionel paused. "Ask Phil again if I can ride on the roof," he said.
Later in the night, Lionel insisted that we create a human pyramid but with only one person on each level. A human skyscraper. When we failed, again and again, to achieve even three layers of people, Lionel took things into his own hands. "I will be the base," he said. "My people come from a hearty stock."
An NPR commentator yesterday pointed out that our current, unrelated, stock scandal is very French. "Had this been an American banking scandal," he said "the guy who was making these illegal trades would have had a Porsche in his driveway." The French trader was merely in it for the glory.
Teal finally got out of the car and tugged on Lionel's ankle until he came off the roof. Lionel shoved in with the rest of us. The cab started to move, which put most of us in a good mood, but Lionel was not happy. "Phil, I am upset," he said. "In France they would have allowed this."