Not For Tourists

my plan was to go to the West Village this weekend, find a cafe, get a little work done, and have a celebrity sighting. i got some things done and saw no famous people. i did, however, see the kind of city culture that would fit right onto the pages of Bust magazine. i was slowly working through an oversized sandwich in a semi-hip cafe, and right next to me was this ginger typing away on her glossy Apple laptop. she had on a white shirt with literary slut stamped in black across the chest. later on i walked by a coffeeshop/knitting store with bright spools of yarn on the wall, and tables around which people were drinking coffee and knitting together. very very Bust afternoon.
anyway, so back to the cafe with the sexy girl next to me. her friends then showed up and they were cute and late-twenties, the South Asian girl in grad school, her boyfriend doing something more structured, like banking or something (brief lapse in my otherwise-skilled eavesdropping). and they were chatting away, and the ginger kept referring to "my novel" and the two girls gushed about Anais Nin, and talked about not having any money. they were really just being young and breezy and kind of intellectual, and probably sounded a lot like my friends and i will sound five or six years from now. it's just that they were also kind of irritating. you really can't classify strangers into social groups without making yourself look down on them a little---even when you fully realize that their social category is your own, that you betray your group ties just as obviously as they do.
but who doesn't love that scene in Annie Hall when they're sitting on a park bench and Alvy's making Annie laugh by cutting in to every innocent passerby, summing up the lives of all these strangers. or when he meets that early girlfriend Allison backstage at a show, and after about one second's conversation, he goes, "You, you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps, and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right..." and then she responds in that sleepy voice, "No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype." (Woody's punchline: "Right, I'm a bigot, I know--but for the left!")

i ended up eating half of the sandwich and moving to a different cafe, where i am now. Housing Works is less crowded; the music is quiet and the lighting is calm. i have a view of big pricey art books, shiny sloping bannisters, and plaster pillars rising up to meet the exposed piping in a network of off-white tubes. i congratulate the designers on making a charitable bookstore/cafe also feel a little French, a little luxurious.

this summer i've been careful to know where i'm going. i look it up if necessary, get down the address, sometimes make lists of stores or cafes i might want to try---then i write it all on a post-it and stick it in my little black book, facing the appropriate map of the neighbourhood. as the summer's gone on, my Not For Tourists guide has become a real scrapbook of my time in New York, crammed with bits of paper with friends' addresses and a recommendation for a good stationary store in Soho. i feel only a small amount of embarrassment about my allegiance to this guide, because, really, this is how i'm learning. so what if i get judged when i consult my guide in the subway? the information has stuck with me, so that now i can turn up somewhere new and just start walking in the right direction. they're small victories, but i am feeling much more comfortable in this city now.

granted, i feel comfortable with a very tiny fraction of this city. last night a friend and i considered going to a party on the Upper East Side. i had to take pause.... i haven't been that far north since i got here. isn't it really far away? i mean, i occasionally work in the Flatiron district; i've had to pass through Grand Central a few times; and once Lisa and i got dragged up to Columbus Circle to see a movie. (that was the only time i've walked through, or been in sight of, the park since i got here.) but the rest of my life seems to take place between Houston and Fulton Streets, with occasional stops in Brooklyn. okay, i'm not a tourist, but nor am i used to the idea of inhabiting the whole of this very large city. it's not a big deal at home to get in the car and drive however long to get someplace; it seems to be a very big deal to traipse up and down this island, especially knowing how far downtown i have to go to get home at night.

about a month ago, i brought my mother to Housing Works (a real gem, introduced to me years ago by an insider ), and we pulled out every single one of our guides--Zagat, Michelin, Eyewitness, and the NFT--to figure out where we were going for dinner that night and brunch the next day. i have to admit it was fun to be so brazen a tourist, if just for a weekend.


the above was written on Saturday; now it's Monday and i'm sick. and like sometimes happens when you've had a rough couple of days and you're sick in a foreign spot---i've decided that i'm done. never mind liking New York, never mind being gutsy and transient, never mind living in five different spots over the course of the last year and being excited about it. the city is hot and glaring, my apartment has cockroaches, and my throat hurts. i want to go home now. not on Saturday, when i'm actually going home, but now. i'd even settle for going back to school; in fact, school sounds wonderful. either one will do, but summer's got to end.