Poor old Andy Baio, listing the people he has known. Full of fear of forgetting them, trying to stop everything just for one minute so he can note it down and have it to refer to. Andy's list. I like Mrs. Golden, about half the way down the page, maybe the Mum of Holly Golden -- pop her down, certainly, I mean, I knew her, didn't I? Yes you did, Andy, yes you did.

Boston

Winter is here and last weekend I went to Boston to see Rebecca Hall in her play. We took a Chinatown bus: cheap buses with eighties fabric and no nonsense armrests that run from Chinatown to Chinatown in the North East of America, from New York to Boston to Philadelphia to Washington DC, from dim sum to sweet meat rolls. We took it at seven o’clock in the morning, in the dark. The bus was gloomy and I thought it was empty but no there were some shadows in the corners, holding onto plastic bags with hats down by their eyes. We took seats and stretched away. I was borrowing a Louis Vuitton bag from my flatmate, Mark, who had lost a job in his persistence in looking for the right Vuitton fake. He spent so many hours walking the streets in Lower Manhattan, searching for the right browns and paler browns that he stopped doing his work. Then he dyed the handle to give the bag age and he let me take it to Boston.

The sky went from grey to grey and we growled through industrial lands and along highways with old smashed up ponds and cold-looking trees. In Boston it was early still and the streets were so hard and that wind – who can say what place that wind came from that morning? It was an old dead wind and it wrapped itself around your fingers and it hollowed down between the hairs on your eyebrows. It was so cold I was squeaking. We found a café that was part of a hotel and got a tall jug of coffee and plates of eggs and rediscovered ourselves and Boston took on its first colour. Walking in downtown Boston without knowing which way is up or down is a grey thing – the city seemed to take a big hit from the sixties / seventies builders who spat towers and carparks all over the place. When I finished my eggs I squinted over to the telly which was mutely mutely over the bar and I read two words which became clearer as I bunched my eyes. “SADDAM CAPTURED.” And we took a seat at the bar with the coffee and watched the tyrant’s teeth and beard again and again and enjoyed the movie-ness of it, the “hold-that-thing, turn-it-up-willya-George-what-in-the-name------ my god!”

After Saddam we saw shops and pulled into the theatre to watch Rebecca be Rosalind and say nearly all the words of As You Like It. I’d never seen it before with its forestry and women/men/women love unrequited. It was amazing to hear the silvery American audience judging her twice – not just a young hopeful doing all this Shakespeare but also being the Hall-ette. You don’t have to worry about her too much though. She does carry it. I was relaxed watching her, just tensing and tiring at the lines that went like “wherefore tis marry not a knave who knows himself not but rather the wit who knows himself too well who is thence none of which that nature hath given him but only hence the coming forth of fortune’s goodly expectation…” And she pulled together the last act very well, where it all collapses quickly to produce about nineteen weddings, managing to get real feeling into a folding box of scenes. Outside it snowed like a postcard.

Then it was a party at the British consulate for the Actors and Don Sir Hall who was in town for the day. He looks like a powerful old tabby cat – shoulders bunched around his thick neck with his salt-pepper slick of hair pulling back from those eyes. We shook hands and he met people and when asked to say a few things said: “I first came to Boston in 1957 and was directing a play when I received a very long ordinance from the city telling me that on no account were the words “Goddam” to be said in the performance. Since the script was littered with Goddams we were wondering how to take them out when I saw an advertisement featuring a nearly nude Brigitte Bardot [and he said her name with real rolling relish] with the words ‘God Made Woman.’ Since then I have always regarded Boston with a certain ambivalence….”

An actor became drunk and knocked things off a table and we fell out into the snow and threw it around, carrying Rebecca because her boots couldn’t stand it. The cast were good and we joined that vibe where you’re together and doing a show and nothing matters and we’ll drink and then get up at noon and have a hilarious brunch and somehow do it again. It’s a very loose good feeling and Rebecca was saying that she’d miss it. The actors were funny though – one of them blew up a train in Charlotte Grey, a film very few people saw (even he hasn’t seen it), and Cate Blanchett gave him a cheese. Then there was a small woman who had been on Casualty twice and Phillip Voss and David Yelland who have done many many things.

We ate Thai and the snow turned to rain and suddenly the weather was ungodly, wet all around, cold underneath, spitting freezing in your face, lurching deep cold puddles and we hankered for taxis. We found one and then a bar and one of the actors had his younger brother in town and he told a joke: “What does NASA stand for after the Columbia space shuttle accident? Need Another Seven Astronauts.”

The Heroine

I must tell you about Wednesday before it fades and turns unreal. I’m doing this thing about the sewers – the history, the illicit attraction in the undersmellybelly. I came across Jinx Magazine, a group of political explorers who adventure in sectioned-off New York. They climb bridges and see water tunnels – mainly dressed in cocktail suits and dark glasses. They have a monthly Athenaeum on the first Monday of the month in a bar on the lower east side and because I was late I took a taxi.

Now I need to tell you that the night was fretful. It was twanging like the string in some instrument. It was cold but the wind wasn’t blowing straight. I don’t know if the stars were inclined or disinclined or if the moon was hauling itself across men’s eyes. I couldn’t tell if the air was full of fortune or if I could hear the sound of dice rolling towards an unlikely series of malevolent coincidences. I make these gobbledygook words because this is what happened:

First, before the meeting, I forgot my shopping in the shop and had to go back. I nimbled down the steps of my building and was heading fast up the street because the water was boiling and the sauce was simmering. A man was walking along and he saw and me and turned. He was wearing a woollen hat and he said, “You got a cell phone bro because I think some brothers are chasing me, something about a girl…” I didn’t know what to say but put my hand on my phone and looked around for the running gang of thugs but there was none – just the campy men and well dressed women that rush up and down fourth street at any old time. I was in a hurry for my sauce but this man wasn’t. I was walking faster than him yet he was on the run. I went on and heard him ask a man who was darting into the cigar shop, he asked: “You got a razorblade, bro?” And the man said “What?” And went into the shop.

After the pasta and with many of my clothes on, I climbed into the taxi. The driver’s name was BYFIELD THEOPHILUS, and his picture showed a middle aged black guy looking straight, uncomplicatedly, at the camera. The name sounded like gold letters off the back of a leather book, I felt like I’d climbed into a taxi with Virgil. That he was going to spin off 4th street and plunge us down the nearest pothole and into the special circle of Manhattan hell, the fifth avenue inferno, with melting gold carpets and burning city fathers, the Rockefellers and Fricks, the Pulitzers and Tammany Halls. Byfield didn’t. He just drove and nearly crashed as a car came whizzing past our left hand side on Houston St. “Where you rushing to?” Asked Byfield. “Where you gonna get to? The next red light.” And then, in a mixture of anger and pity, “You sick son of a bitch.”

Byfield dropped me off and I crossed over Broome Street where I saw the electric purple light from the bar woozing out into Allen St. As I crossed Broome I had to wait on the island between the lanes of speedy traffic and their bright eyes. In these partitions in New York, especially on Broadway up near Columbia, they have built places to sit between the lanes of traffic, with benches and bushes to protect you from the worst of the clouds and flying grit. They have always struck as unpleasant places to sit, the sort of happy wish you see in white architects models where small plastic figures sit under the glass ceiling of the model, talking very quietly and minutely about their plastic lives. In New York, these places are not quiet but still you occasionally see people bravely eating their lunch in the raw and the maw, gobbling their tomato sandwiches in the fumes. Sometimes they make me feel dimly self-conscious, as I’m waiting for a gap in the traffic in their living room. All this to say that when I crossed Broome Street with a few minutes to spare before 8 o’clock as the wind blew cold and uncommon on Wednesday night, I did not necessarily expect to see anybody passing the time of day on that crossing. But I did.

Two cars backed up onto the partition. Lights on, blasting at the waiting pedestrian, windows down, music on, two men talking to each other from one car to the next. It was a very dominant way to hang out on a crossing. They ruled, no doubt, as they talked from car to car. It seemed so wasteful. Why didn’t they get into the same car? Turn the lights off? Relax? No. It was as if they were stuck into their cars, face it, like the shoepeople.

So across the road and I was early for the Athenaeum. I wanted some calm so I thought I would walk the block and relax before impinging on this session – I didn’t know if there would be secret knocks or tests of adventuring wildness in store and I wanted to be ready. I pulled up my coat and walked up just one block before I came upon a woman really just dragging a very small dog around the corner like a child’s train on a piece of string. Yet this small dog had a pink cast on its leg. The victim of an accident, “That’s my baby,” she said as she dragged. My friends the streets were varied. So I headed for the secrets of the bar.

Which was a presentation by a funny blond young normal woman about our age: “Heroin: The Hobby that Ruined My Life.” It was in a basement under blue lights, with her off-lit by a single bulb and the rest of the Jinx collective – really just wearing their camper shoes and black clothes like any other creative-urban-manifesto-riddle-group – sat on a bench up against the wall, drinking their beer and laughing. Because she was funny. Funny and frank and really I’m as naïve as a buffalo but I had never heard heroin addiction talked about in this way, with no particular heroic or tragic narrative. The same as this good blog here, by the way. Just a sort of: “Really the methadone doesn’t taste that good, it’s just like this cup of liquid and yeah, you can’t get high while you’re taking it.” She talked about how she got into heroin when she was sixteen and depressed (her basic thing was that a lot of addiction is self-medication for depression, which I find in-teresting) and then developed a substantial sniffing appetite before she thought, “Right I’m taking like 4 bags a day but when you sniff you waste loads of the drug, so maybe I should start injecting and then I can maybe cut down to one bag a day, I thought it was like a smart thing to do.”

So she got a needle from the neighbour’s diabetic cat and got going – and she rocketed, she zoomed in bliss to ten bags a day. Now that’s some scary heroin habit – a chippy as she told us they called it. $100 a day. In the loos at work, at home, in the morning, every couple of hours, take it or you get sick. That was the word she kept using, sick. When you’re high you feel normal, without it, you’re sick, like the flu but you’re twitching, they called it kicking because you’re legs kick, and your bones feel like they’re burning. After detox after retox after drug camp after being arrested, she got on methadone and stopped using. From the dates she gave I would guess she was addicted to heroin from 18-22, and now she was 23. God so young and so worldly, underworldly, standing in the East Village by a payphone with her coffee, talking to her crew – “You meet a lot of people through dope” – stealing from her home and all the jobs she did.

At the end a Spanish-sounding man said we had been laughing too much, some of his friends had been killed by heroin. And she said something like this in reply:

“I don’t mean any disrespect. I’ve had friends die as well but like, this is my way of talking about it, like it’s a normal thing. It fucked me up. I feel fucked up about it. I lost a bunch of time. But like, I’m better now, I’m doing other things, whatever. I could just think about how awful it all is all the time but like, I would end up shooting myself in the head. I’m better now.”

And today it started to snow.

Central park near the reservoir

A couple of weeks ago, with my head cloudy and the sky very blue, I went for a walk around the reservoir in Central Park to clear my mind. The reservoir is famous and so it should be. It’s not quite round and stretches most of the way across the park from about 88th streets to, I don’t know, 95th? Now it’s named after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as the new signs say with their curly que’s, and it opens up a space in the green and the trees of park where you can walk and look outwards to the blocks and steeples and flags of the apartment buildings that line 5th avenue on the East and Central Park West on the you-know. It’s about a mile and a third to walk around the reservoir, which was built to provide water for the city but then just left for show, and at either end there are a couple of old water buildings, and I never know inside which one it was that Dustin made Lawrence eat the diamonds in Marathon Man. A little spit of something stretches down the middle of the reservoir as a perch for the seagulls and ducks that live there and on fine days, like the one a couple of weeks ago, there are fountains in the southern reaches of the reservoir. Fountains like I like them, not with the marble curlicues or anything, just, uncomplicatedly off to one side of the spit, flinging water into the sky without a worry.

The reservoir is lined with a low fence. It used to be much higher (see MMan) but now you can step up and take a hold of it to look over the water and feel the wind and look at the buildings. The path around the reservoir is pleasantly gritty and a great attraction for joggers. To walk around the reservoir you must step into the circuit of runners and walkers – an adult crowd compared to the rest of the park (perhaps children are not so excited by the pleasing lap-sense the reservoir gives) – and take your chances. The prevailing direction to walk or jog is anti-clockwise. A couple of weeks ago I went against the crowd and earlier today, under different circumstances, I went with them. It is more interesting going against the running crowd because you can see their faces.

Two weeks ago, under the sun and the blue, there was a lot of traffic going around the reservoir. It was November still but with the trees being autumn, the water reflecting happily and a nippy, hopeful little breeze, it was a time of optimism. You could see it in the joggers with their college sweatshirts and cd players clawed clammily in their hands, you could see it in the birds as they wheedled and freewheeled, dillying and chucking themselves, you could see it in the fountains as they simply threw water around. It was golden. It was an afternoon for breaking your reservoir running records. Every runner was out, some of them bouncy and lithe, others hauling themselves, bits of feet all over the place. The conversations of the reservoir-walkers were more complex: there were a lot of complaints out on the circuit, but they were complaints tinged with confidence. The afternoon was conferring power. Walking against the grain, I only ever got one or two second snippets of parkside chat, but you could extrapolate freely.

“…. well why don’t you just take a couple of weeks and then…”
“that is the thing, that’s what they do, they seduce you…”
“…. look, I’m not, I’m not going to, you know? How many…”
“…………. I always say..”
“fuck them… you know? It’s not about that anymore…”
“…. the job is right for me, but the…”
“48 dollars, can you believe that?”
“…… I KNOW! He never thought to mention….”
“… are you?”
“… actually from my parent’s attic…”
“no, I mean, we met a couple of times in…”

And etc. I walked around twice and with the sun going down, sliding down the buildings and the constant changing view, I felt stronger for my time there but a little unworthy among all the speeding health, all the action plans, job changes, breakups, bargains and get togethers being plotted, fomented on the gritty path.

Today was different. Today the sky was frowning. Above the east side it was one dimensional, a medium spread of grey. The west was different, a ruddy-layered-grey-going-green-going-blue-metal moving slab. It looked hard indeed up there. And the wind blew. The wind blew straight from south to north, rasping along the water, whipping it nastily into little chops that flicked water onto the ducks backs and in their eyes. They were all hunched, necks nothing, frowning. Brown leaves were slapped against the side of the reservoir and the trees were bare. The joggers – and there were much fewer of them – behaved again like the animals. Today was a day to tick off. Just get round. Nothing flashy. No high kicks for the ladies today my friend, this is a pain day. The walkers were similarly sparse and more reverential to the weather. I only heard one little fragment of conversation, everyone else was silent, lips slowly chapping, hands in gloves, eyes mincing in the wind. The only thing I heard (words all over the place in the wind) was a man saying to a woman, “the water… the city… the sky.” Which seemed to cover it. I only walked once around the reservoir today but dawdled and walked about because the weather was softening, and soon the great slab was opened up into pieces of blue and the sun sat squarely, like a desk lamp on its side, blasting yellow through Columbus Circle – at the south west corner of the park. The light came through the trees and you were sucked towards it. As I came close to that corner of the park I suddenly saw yellow and orange in the trees and saw that the sun was spreading light on the shoulders, the collarbones of the buildings around the park, splashing them and turning the clouds pink. Then, quickly, it was over, and the park was grey again and a rollerblader came by in a very tight outfit.