Around The World In Eight Days
Okay, so I had to rush setting up this trip around my final days at HSN. Consequently, the only affordable flights I could get were eight-hour-long stretches involving connections in Charlotte, NC. I made sure my luggage included plenty of reading material! I’ve needed this for a while, and yet now I remember why I don’t travel more often: it’s a stressful, extremely labor-intensive ordeal just to get the household ready, pack, fly, and procure transport from and to the airport at origin and destination. Flights all were uneventful, save for the queer TSA fetish of having everyone remove their shoes to have them x-rayed at the security checkpoint. Ironically, I wasn’t asked to do this on my flight from Florida to Newark, in which I wore Doc Martens boots — the inconvenient, lace-up kind — but I was asked it on my other flights, where I was wearing Birkenstock sandals. And how much dangerous stuff could anyone hide inside half an inch of cork sole? Sighing in resignation I handed them over. Loved how Charlotte Airport admin publicly snubbed Asscroft’s orange alert by explicitly stating to passengers that a photo ID would not be required upon entering the jetway. That had to be a political statement of some kind.Day One:
I notice, as I sit at Java-N-Jazz on Union Square, that the energy of NYC causes me to go into a kind of zen-like state of flow, where the hyperstimulus all rolls over me like a wave, and I float to the top like a dry cork. It’s a kind of dance with the world that I think I could enjoy over time. The only reason Manhattan saps me is because everytime I’m here I am never at liberty to just stay — I’m always on the move from place to place, from event to event, and I always have to figure out where to stay, how to get to where I’m going, or like today, I’m burdened with gear in a huge way. Given a home base here I would be free to move about without breaking my back. I’d give anything to have a locker or someplace to stash all this and just walk around unimpeded. I try to reach my NY friends. Having no luck. Everyone must be as busy as the city looks. This could turn out to be one really lonely time here, if I can’t hook up with at least one known person. At the very end of the day I meet up with a longtime friend (a working actress: you’ll be seeing more of her soon enough) who becomes my host for the days ahead.
Day Two:
Awaken, and almost immediately run to Penn Station to catch a train to Springfield, MA, near where my brother Pin lives. On weekends he and my other brother Pay tend to get together, and so I had hoped to be able to see them both on my visit. Alas, Pay didn’t make it up this weekend, but nevertheless. I missed the morning train that would’ve had me in Mass by early afternoon: the next train leaves in the early afternoon, to arrive in Mass ’round dinnertime. Next to me on the train is a sailor from Cape Cod who, caught in an offshore squall, was basically stranded off Chesapeake Bay, his obligations forcing him to leave behind his shipmates and make his own way back north via Amtrak. After almost an additional hour’s delay en route I arrive practically at sunset, just in time to putz around for a very short while with my brother and his family. Watch the movie I Am Sam, one of those calculated heartstring-tuggers, but starring Sean Penn in what is arguably his shortest acting stretch since Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Basically, Rainman with a reeeeeally cute kid. Unlike erotic love, parental love is something I can truly identify with. I had it from mom in spades, so in that sense this movie has more relevance to me than the average Hollywood pap. So I get pretty misty throughout the movie. Well, the half of it that I get to see by myself after everyone has gone to bed, that is.
Day Three:
I train-trek back from Springfield, in the hope against hope of being able to score same-day tickets to the monster art show du jour in NYC: MOMA-QNS’s Matisse-Picasso exhibit — actually, a major motivator behind my trip. Not to be: arriving at 3pm, the museum closes at 5pm on Mondays (and this the very last day of the show), expecting at least an hour’s commute, and no assurance that there would even be same-day tickets available at such late hour, or that the remaining hour would even be enough to enjoy one painting, let alone a whole exhibit. A few days later I read about the plight of the mega art show, and I feel a little better about skipping it.
By the way, you should know that inner Massachusetts and Connecticut both are beautiful in that idyllic, Norman Rockwell-ian way. Springfield on a weekday started to look a little sketchy, but really, not too awful. I could be persuaded to buy and live here, if it wasn’t for the prospect of mind-numbing boredom. Still, three hours by train from NYC isn’t a bad thing. But then, I’m 3 hrs from NYC by plane, if I plan it right, any day of the week. Waterways here are brown. The water in Florida always has a hale and healthy look about it that is lacking here. It’s kind of depressing, looking at this water. I think that would bother me in the long run.
In lieu of MOMA, we walk from midtown all the way to the extreme upper west side, through much of the length of Central Park, during one of those perfect, sunny New York Spring days. At our destination, I am introduced to two of my nuyorican kin, artistes each in their own way: one an organizer of care programs for special-needs people; the other an aspiring fashion designer currently working for a fitness magazine. We have dinner, wine, and then adjourn to watch attrociously smarmy JLo-and-Matthew McConaughey vehicle The Wedding Planner. I wish we hadn’t.
Day Four:
By pure chance my ex-girlfriend happens to be in town so we agree to meet at South Street Seaport, that luscious enclave of fish-smelling yuppiedom on the lower east side. We talk and get caught up, we look at used books, we have coffee and empanadas. A foretaste of Puerto Rico, for me. I walk on to Battery Park to take a look at The Sphere, the sculpture that used to stand in the plaza between WTC Towers and now marks a temporary memorial after having endured the collapse and clean-up. Afterwards, my NY host and I walk the Brooklyn Bridge. As the night wears on I pack and take a late bus to Newark Airport, there to sit in wait for my 6:00 am flight to Puerto Rico. Waiting for the bus to launch I sit while the driver cranes over the north bannister of the Port Authority Bus Terminal to peep through some windows across 42nd street where coeds could be seen changing clothes.
Days Five, Six and Seven:
Here’s where things begin to slow dramatically. For all the supposed benefits of being a US protectorate, PR’s economy remains by far the poorest in the union, unemployment is typically in the double digits, and the place is run about as efficiently as a banana republic. Its heartbreaking beauty notwithstanding, the mental deceleration involved in visiting hits me like a brick wall. I hope that perhaps meeting with a friend or two here will help. I’m having the same hard time reaching people here as I did in NY. I wonder if I’m simply not the sparkling personality that inspires people to stop what they’re doing and call back.
I spend a couple of days sitting in the home of my high school years. Now missing its principal inhabitants (that is, my parents, now deceased), the place feels bereft, weird, like when somebody moves furniture around in a room that is well known to you. On the surface of it everything looks same as it did — the same china cabinet still full of the same old chintzy stuff, family photos on the wall, same plants growing in the yard — but then there’s the few telltale signs that mom is gone, like a woefully understocked kitchen, for example. The place used to smell of mom’s cooking and always rang with the music of kitchen noises and her humming while preparing this or that. My brother Chino keeps good house, mind you, but the air is charged differently. Not to try to sound metaphysical, but that’s how it feels.
Chino and I watch bad TV and get caught up on gossip. My nephew’s having a kid this week. My niece has a boyfriend with whom she cohabitates (something that, until this current generation, was all but nonexistent in PR society), he seems like an alright guy. People are working the same jobs they’ve always worked. The island’s governor has announced she won’t be running for reelection — in favor of pursuing an amorous relationship with a new lover, explain the gossip columnists. Skies look angry and brooding from dawn to dusk, discouraging me from wandering off too far from home. Going to the beach seems out of the question. On Friday I drive my brother to get a haircut. Nevermind that we live within walking distance of about a jillion hair salons, still we must drive clear across town and halfway up into the deep countryside of my childhood, to patronize a barber that is known to my brothers. A childhood friend, I think. He’s cheaper, they say. But don’t we end up wasting the cost savings in time and fuel driving there and back? But such is the mentality here.
Day Eight:
I’m packed, jonesing to get to the airport so I can be on my way back home where things make more sense. Before leaving I visit my mother’s grave. Not sure what I expected out of that visit, and even less sure about what I got out of it. This is not one of those garden-like cemeteries like they have in US, all carefully manicured and designed to facilitate visitation, contemplation, thinking. This is a cemetery for the working class, designed to house your loved ones’ remains and little else. The grave is well tended. Plastic flowers are thoughtfully arrayed around the headstone. I notice mom’s plaque has been added to grandma’s. No great outburst of emotion is forthcoming. I remember both women as I read their names, I mentally mumble my appreciation for them, and I go home. There’s nothing for me here.
Upon arriving in Tampa International Airport I am reminded that slow, inefficient service is by no means the exclusive province of third world countries: it took almost an hour for me to procure a shuttle from the airport to a friend’s place only a few miles away, where my car lay in storage. All told I arrived at my apartment a little after midnight on Sunday, more than twelve hours after I set out from Chino’s home in Puerto Rico. Good thing I brought diversions. Those long commutes afforded me time to: finish reading The Victorian Internet, a cute little look back at how the telegraph affected the world in the 19th century in much the same way that the internet was being claimed to do for modern society; start reading Samurai From Outer Space, a sort-of introduction to the culture undergirding anime and manga; and watch three episodes of anime series Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, and quirky little Hong Kong martial-arts-fest The Magnificent Warriors, featuring a very young Michelle Yeoh (of Crouching Tiger… fame). Whiling away the late evenings after everyone had gone to sleep in PR I also caught Jackass: The Movie and managed to completely miss every single one of my usual things-to-watch. Altogether, gorged on pop-and-urban-culture-on-the-skids, I believe I am better ready to take on the banality of everyday life in present-day Central Florida. Sohelpmegod.
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