Summer’s End
I went to a new bar last night. I do not like going to new bars, and Ernie had to furnish me with notarized documents swearing up, down, and around the side that the new bar du jour would have plentiful places to sit, a healthily-loud-but-not-so-loud-as-to-discourage-our-trademark-brand-of-inane-conversation jukebox packed with all of my favorite songs, and strenuous air conditioning. After I’d signed off on the paperwork and sent the messenger back uptown to Ernie’s apartment, I agreed to go; after all, Labor Day weekend sees a massive outflux of New Yorkers that leaves the city blissfully empty for the enjoyment of those of us who didn’t get our acts together to go anywhere, and we planned to take full advantage of it by going out, knowing that we’d get a seat no matter where we went. But I still had doubts.
First of all, the bar goes by the name “Siberia,” which probably meant that my pathetic sense of direction and I would wander around in the general location of the bar for twenty minutes looking for a storefront that resembled a frozen steppe, or winding up at a different bar completely because so many bars in Manhattan don’t bother putting the name of the establishment on an awning, or on the door, or in the phone book, or anywhere else that might help a beer connoisseur like myself who needs MapQuest just to get to the elevator in her own building to find the correct address. “Siberia” could also have indicated that the bar served nothing but various kinds of vodka, which worried me, because vodka and I no longer have a speaking relationship after an unfortunate freshman-year incident involving an economy-sized bottle of Wolfschmidt and a challenge issued by several members of the wrestling team, and I didn’t really want to spend the last evening of the long weekend sipping a watery Diet Coke in the lair of my sworn fermented-potato enemy.
Second of all, Siberia is located in a subway station. The subway-station part didn’t bode ill per se, and in fact I don’t know why more subway stations don’t have bars in them; people waiting for a downtown 6 train on a weekend evening would have ample time to quaff a pint. Of course, people waiting for a downtown 6 train on a weekend evening have ample time to do many things, like read War And Peace from cover to cover, write a master’s thesis on Tolstoy’s use of synasthesia, defend said thesis to an academic committee, and employ its pages in the construction of a free-standing origami ostrich with movable joints, since plate tectonics will carry them in a southerly direction faster than the 6 train, but wouldn’t a frosty mug of beer take their minds off of that sad fact? Wouldn’t a crisp and refreshing gin-and-tonic help them to forget that they had read with nods of approbation a sign notifying passengers of a recent spraying to eliminate rodents, only to notice a small but unquestionably rodent-like creature nibbling the bottom of the sign? I can’t speak for the rest of the citizens of New York, but after I’ve spent fifteen minutes dropping a dress size in the oppressive heat on the platform and watching a large cockroach wearing an orange reflective vest and an MTA badge repairing a portion of the track, I wouldn’t mind an alcoholic beverage and a handful of pretzels. In fact, I don’t see why the MTA doesn’t subsidize a drink-cart initiative. I imagine that they don’t want to encourage public drunkenness on the subway, but let’s face it, the subway plays host to the most egregious examples of public drunkenness in the city without any encouragement already, and if the MTA insists on plastering entire train cars with that annoying git Captain Morgan and those insufferable “single-malt Scotch = maturity” ad campaigns, we should get a bar-car sponsorship out of it at the very least.
No, I’ve got no problem at all with the bar-in-a-subway-station concept. I just didn’t want to go to that particular subway station, at 50th Street and Broadway, because to get to it via bus, I would have change lines three times, and that’s about four times too many. The second, most logical choice: take the train. But to take the train to 50th and Broadway entailed hiking up eight blocks to Grand Central Station in eighty-degree heat and seven-thousand-percent humidity; descending twenty-seven sets of massive escalators, past signs reading “EARTH’S CORE STAY LEFT”; waiting for the 7 train to Times Square in heat so stifling as to turn me into human jerky in the space of about ten minutes; winding through underground passageways beneath Times Square, clad in a miner’s helmet with a little light on top and a canary flying ahead, singing the “Casey Jones” song; emerging, wringing wet and grimy, onto the 1/9 platform; waiting; waiting some more; waiting a bit longer; taking the 1/9 one lousy stop to 50th Street; clambering up the stairs to the street; getting trampled by the fanny-pack-and-“I Heart NY”-t-shirt-wearing, too-slowly-walking, sidewalk-clogging, “which way is downtown”-asking, transfixed-by-the-three-story-backlit-Cup-O’-Noodles-sign-standing, snippets-of-Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-singing overflow crowd from Cats; crossing the street and going back down into the subway on the other side; and finally staggering into the bar and raving about oases before collapsing in the doorway. No, thank you. I’ll walk.
So I walked. As I walked, I hummed a little song to myself and hoped that someone, anyone, would call me on my cellphone to distract me from the discomforts of walking, because the instant I stepped from the supercooled lobby of my building onto the street, a sheen of sweat broke out all over my body, and by the end of the block, I thought I could feel particulate matter sticking to me. Every patch of odor I walked through adhered to me also, and by the time I reached 49th and Sixth Avenue, I smelled like a complicated bouquet of B.O. (my own and that of others), curry, McDonald’s French fries, pot smoke, shawarma, spoiled fish, exhaust, and that scent unique to a humid New York night which resembles a three-days-dead gopher marinated in flat Budweiser and roasted over a fire of horse apples. Wiping my upper lip for the nineteenth time, I noticed that my sweaty feet had started making a squick squick noise in my sandals, in tandem with my messenger bag, which made a damp-sounding fuhwump fuhwump noise flopping against my ass. I decided to beatbox along with my sandals and bag.
I beatboxed my way past the back-to-school sales in drugstore windows, past couples smooching in doorways but trying not to touch except for their lips, past bums working the Huck Finn look by rolling their jeans up to mid-thigh, past security guards with their clip-on ties tucked in their pockets, mopping their brows and standing side-by-side quietly, too hot to joke around. I stood on a corner and waited for the light to change, and all of Seventh Avenue spread out in front of me, empty, the park to the north, the daylight glare of Times Square to the south, and a single cabbie dumping sugar into an iced coffee with one hand and steering with the other. I kept walking. The air didn’t move at all, and I had to stop beatboxing and concentrate on breathing in an atmosphere that felt like the pink oxygen-conducting fluid in The Abyss, but dirtier. Every fire hydrant I passed had a kid with a lug wrench crouched over it; every corner I stood on had an un-air-conditioned neighborhood chilling in the plaza, waiting for a breeze and flicking water and Gatorade on each other.
I like the city best at times like this, when so many people have cleared out for the weekend and only the skeleton crew remains behind. It’s so quiet, so easy to get a cup of coffee, to find a seat at the bar, to cut across the street in the middle of the block. It’s like having Manhattan almost to myself. Soon enough, all the other Manhattanites will come back and I’ll go back to squeezing myself in, waiting for seats, waiting in line. But today, I plan to go to a movie two minutes before it starts and buy a ticket at the box office and dash through the concession line and plunk myself down in the middle of a nearly empty theater, because I can.
