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unlabeled tracks
Sunday, August 19 2001
I haven't been complaining about it much because it's kind of a bore, but my internet connectivity has taken a turn for the desperate of late. At home while we wait (since June) for Earthlink DSL, we're using a shitty dialup service called RCN. This service cannot maintain a connection for more than about ten minutes. But when it's feeling especially cantankerous it disconnects the moment it connects, causing another round of reconnection that takes two or three unbearable minutes each time. For this reason, I've given up on checking email or doing any meaningful web surfing at home. I had been relying on workplace bandwidth for most of my needs, but there's been no internet connectivity at work since noon on Wednesday. I feel like I'm living in Afghanistan.
In the evening my old housemate John invited me to come for dinner where he's living at his sister Diana's townhouse over in Hoboken, New Jersey. On the way to the redline subway station, I came upon Gretchen's friends David the Rabbi and his fiancé Elena carrying the last of David's things from his Park Slope apartment (which soon his sister will be residing). On the subway ride into Manhattan, we talked mostly about the extraordinary nature of the Gus-Gretchen online-journal re-catalyzed love story, something that's too easy to forget when you're living in its randomly ever after.
For the first time since arriving in New York, I took my bicycle out for a ride this afternoon. The adventure actually started out as me taking my bike for a walk to get air for the tires, since they were too low to support my weight and there was no suitable air pump in the house. I found a gas station down on Flatbush with free air; it's always good to know where the closest free air in your neighborhood can be found. Since my bike isn't fully urbanized (the seat wired in place, theft-resistance modifications made to theft-encouraging wheels), I couldn't really use it to go anywhere.
I didn't really know how to ride the PATH train system to New Jersey, so I got off the red line somewhere in the heart of Greenwich Village (Gretchen insists that no one in New York ever calls it anything but "the Village") and then walked up to 14th Street and found a PATH station there. But it was terribly confusing because there was only one track and it didn't appear to be labeled in any way and I couldn't tell if it was heading towards or away from New Jersey. Oh yes, and the damn ticket machine refused my $5 bill about ten times before grudgingly giving me a ticket. So there I was stood waiting for a PATH train, uncertain if I was on the correct unlabeled track. Four heavily-pierced, tattooed and hair-color-altered young adults dressed in black stood nearby, looking as if they were headed to a Rob Zombie show. Gradually a powerful gale began to build, eventually reaching a force strong enough to knock over a frail housewife, and I realized a train was a'coming. Evidently the PATH rail system doesn't feature the pressure-relief grates used in the New York subway system.
I was lucky because I actually was on the train headed under the Hudson to Hoboken, NJ. John's sister Diana's place was five or six blocks from the station and on the walk there I noticed that, though there were plenty of Abercrombie and Fitch-wearing white people and a smattering of Puerto Ricans, there were absolutely no African Americans to be seen on the streets. When I saw a Starbucks, that confirmed my suspicions. This was a town that had somehow been made safe for white people. But I did wonder how a town could remain as white as Boulder, Colorado and be this close to New York and Newark. Was there, I don't know, a lot of Klan activity here?
At Diana's townhouse, John showed me around the place. It was a long narrow place, with lots of floors stacked on on top of the other. John's brother-in-law Kevin made out well in the dotcom boom, cashing out precisely at the right time, and the signs of his success were everywhere. There was the huge teevee, where we'd be watching the season finalé of Six Feet Under, and there were the many things related to John's baby nephew Peter. Up on the fourth floor there was a little office/bedroom for John in his capacity as a, well, slave for Kevin's latest venture, a still-nascent dotcom. John's office came complete with a genuine Aeron chair and a flat-panel monitor. What dotcom is complete without them?
Dinner was a strangely familiar combination of corn chips, lettuce, peppers, and flavored beans, a fancier version of the dinners John used to cook me several times each week back in Los Angeles. The baby Peter sat at the table with us, eating his peas with his pudgy little hands. He's almost a year old and just said his first word the other day, "Elmo," the name of his creepy talking/vibrating robot doll. I found it interesting that the baby was doing his utmost to reach out and participate in the conversation even though he lacked fully-developed communication skills. He would do things like simulate laughter (though it was clear from his face and the stylized sounds that these laughs were not real) so as to involve himself in the conversation.
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For dinner and Six Feet Under, we'd also been joined by one of Diana's female friends named Kelley. She's a prosecuting attorney and
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John likes to tell her how much he thinks drug laws suck. Tonight Kelly was wearing a skimpy red dress and this must have been unusual because John kept making a big deal about it, saying (in reference to me while talking in third person about her) "and she didn't even know we were having company!"
Before Six Feet Under, John, Kevin and I went out onto the humid streets to hit a couple bars in our neighborhood, more as an introduction to Hoboken than anything else. The first place we went was called El Quattro and, judging from the single-starred flags everywhere we could tell it catered to a largely-Puerto Rican clientele. Everyone was very friendly to us, pointing out a free buffet that just happened to be available. Puerto Rican food, as I learned long ago in Cleveland, is not anything at all like Mexican food. The easiest way to describe Puerto Rican food is to say that there probably aren't very many Puerto Rican vegetarians. We played two games of pool and somehow I defeated John on the first game. I might be speaking a bit to hasty, but perhaps my game is improving. There's really nowhere for it to go but better.
We went to another bar that was almost empty except for two chicks who seemed to have a drinking plan wherein they got free drinks from the bartender in exchange for hanging out. Unfortunately, they also monopolized the pool table. I took the opportunity to duck into the restroom and unleash foul dysentery. Eating four pounds of cashews over the course of a week seems to have been an even bigger mistake than I initially thought; not only is it responsible for worsening rash on the palms of my hands, it seems to have also left a legacy of lower intestinal malabsorbtion.
After our HBO-facilitated socializing concluded, John joined me on the walk back to the PATH station with his dog Sam, a thoughtful, mellow dog with sad eyes, floppy ears and big brown spots on his white fur. During our entire time together in LA, John kept talking about bringing Sam out from Altoona to live with us, but it never happened, partly because John's mother (who also loves Sam) worked actively to foil John's Sam-relocating plans. Indeed, John only just regained control of his dog a mere two days ago.
Hopelessly confused by the PATH schedules (which change dramatically after 11pm), I found myself riding further into New Jersey before I figured out what was going wrong. Is it really so difficult to explicitly state the intended destinations of light rail trains?
Then, when I was riding home from 14th Street, I got a taste of how strange the subway system can get after midnight. Instead of a Red Line 2 or 3, a Green Line appeared on the tracks, and since everyone was getting in, so did I. But then it didn't stop at Grand Army Plaza; it kept going deep into the heart of unknown Brooklyn. So a small group of us, bonding in our ordeal, had to schlep over to the other side of the tracks and catch another mysterious 4 train back towards Manhattan to get off at the stop that hadn't happened. I wish someone could provide me an explanation for why a trains on a subway line start skipping stations after a certain hour. The only reason this stuff didn't freak me out was that Gretchen had warned me that weird things happen late at night, but she'd been unable to come up with a theory explaining why.
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