I saw Paul Simon last night at the Beekman, a classic Art Deco Theatre on Broadway in the 70’s in New York.
My brother called about 4:00 with an extra ticket, so I hustled into New York’s Penn Station and then walked almost 40 blocks uptown to the theatre. I have been working in New Jersey for years, and when I get the chance to get back on the streets in the city, there is a part of my that rises to it, embraces its rhythm, wants to ingest its pure essence in massive doses. I love New York.
I grew up here really, arriving like a 21 year old hick with a dumb cowboy hat which attracted all manner of miscreants and was soon purposefully lost. But the stink of my small-town-ness lingered on me, codified who I was even as I adapted completely to the habitat. There is something comforting and same about the metropolis even as it is morphs slowly and at times with great speed into something again, unrecognizable.
Walking through Penn Station, you see them in rather large numbers. Not sure if they are Army or National Guard, but they are unavoidable. Soldiers, mostly men, in full camo, and I think body armor, and even for me unmistakable, The M-16’s. M-16’s!!! And no doubt radiation detectors. This, too, is what we are now, or at least it is the sea we traverse across each day. They are there for our protection, I know this. But one has to wonder what became of the dream, more than 40 years after the summer of love, almost 50 years after I Have a Dream, this is our world. The whiff of failure looms in their presence.
Penn Station is a bustling place, but it has weird dark blue lighting and one cannot escape the hollow, vacant faces of those that are hurting, so reaching the street is a relief. Marc Cohen’s Walking In Memphis is on my IPod, as I come up the stairs on Seventh Avenue across the Street from the Penta, Formerly the Stadler where I landed in 1978. It has had three owners since. But when I arrived and stayed in that old monster that August, it often seemed like the streets around that hotel would melt from the heat.
New York was dirty then. And dangerous. And I know this is wrong, but I loved it. The energy attacked your nervous system. There was sensory overload. Hot, crowded, impossible to absorb or comprehend what was around you.
Some of that is still there. I started up 7th Avenue as I have so many times, weaving thru the rush hour crowd, mostly moving in the opposite direction of the hordes hustling towards Penn Station and their trains home. I am a pinball, bouncing back and forth between the suits, tourists, and immigrants. Mink Deville’s Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl comes in with the slapping guitar and triangle. I see a young woman with flip flops and a business suit, and I think, “Really? Still?” Two teenagers with funny glasses, announcing themselves as prey, are stuck on the corner of 34th looking at their map.
7th Avenue north of 34th quiets down quite a bit until you approach 40th and get close to the new Times Square.
In Times Square, business people evaporate, excepting a few suits with their jackets off, over their shoulders, escaping their midtown hotels. Crowds are lined up here and there, for reasons one cannot know. A big Jewish crowd is gathered at the entrance to the Radison. Everywhere there are handbills. My family could recycle for a decade and never compensate for the waste.
Back in the day Time’s Square was bright at night, but now it is a wildly lit media center. TV newspeople stare down at the masses from their studios, and about half way up Times Square there is a nearly half block long screen with a camera shot of those below. Everyone waves to see themselves on the big Screen above the square until they realize that they have been suckered when their image is replace by a half block long advertisement. I stop and look, but don’t wave. In the Theatre District the women are dressed in their finery, the men compliantly matched, for their evening on the town. Steely Dan’s Haitian Divorce sneaks through the buds in my ears.
People complain about the encumbrances to traffic in the Square now, but to me it is neither better nor worse. Like much of the change on this hard to hold place, it just is. But is massively easier to walk through now and I make good time.
From the late 70’s to the mid-80’s Times Square was a mosh pit of danger, tourists and culture. The Clash played at the Bond Night Club there, and even for me the place was too big, dark looking and foreign to venture in. To the New York of drag queens, hard core club kids, and danger I was still a frightened little tourist with a map, but no guide, but Oh Lord how I loved it. Springsteen played Max’s Kansas City in early 1978. Just before me, but I probably would have missed it anyway for similar reasons. It takes a while when you arrive to not feel and act like a tourist or a transient.
I continue with a swift step uptown. Avoid unnecessary eye contact, keep moving, and disregard or refuse the ubiquitous handbills, all classic maneuvers. Cat Steven’s Father and Son lingers with me as I walk. I use to hear this as the son, but now both my daughter and my son age too quickly, and I am the father trying to sort things out.
“I was once like you are now, and I know that it’s not easy
To be calm when you’ve found something going on
Take your time, think a lot,
Why, Think of everything you got
You may still be here tomorrow, but your dreams will not…”
But then I am rattled out of my nostalgia and longing by a women wearing leg warmers, sandals, and a skirt and blouse. A Madonna convention? Perhaps I was too hard on the flip flop girls. I am mesmerized and consider the fashion choice for a quarter block as she approaches. The couple draws near arm in arm. I see now, she is of that age that would have worn the leg warmers when Flashdance was in the theatres. I saw it, in New York in a movie theatre back when it came out. Can’t recall for sure, but I think I took my friend Calvin.
It masqueraded as a chic flick, notwithstanding the famous dance scene with the water cascading down Jennifer Beals. The woman approaching me wanted to be the maniac, check that, wants to be the maniac. Crazy how some things will make one chuckle inwardly. The horns in Al Green’s I Can’t Get Next to You pelt my brain.
North of the Square I pass the bar I paused at on 9-11. Literally outside the Sullivan theatre where Letterman has been doing his thing for years. The bar where I first saw the videos of the towers coming down is gone. I had stopped in for a drink, in grief and I think shock, walking towards the George Washington Bridge from 33rd street. 180 blocks. That was my plan. In its place, the bar has been replaced by another faceless pizza parlor. An irreverence to me, is a convenience for those that replace me in this space.
The acoustic guitar opening from Pete Townsend and Ronnie Lane’s Street in the City builds as I approach Columbus Square, forever transformed by the new Warner building complex. I worry as I walk about my employment situation, but my thoughts do no stay there long.
I keep passing Muslim women. I don’t recall seeing many in the 70’s. Now I see some with just headscarves. Then I pass a couple, the man walking with the woman, but a pace or two ahead, accident of the crowd or expected I wonder. Headscarves I can absorb. So many religions and cultures cover their head’s to please the heavenly god they worship. But the absolute fear of women that inspires the burka or the Hassidic wig and headscarves I cannot fathom. These are the days of miracles, wonder and primitive fear. And then right in front of that glistening tower, I see a woman in a burka, hailing a cab, complete head to toe covering, carrying a brightly covered book bag, with the slogan “2 Teach a child is to affect them 4ever”.
Getting ready for Paul Simon, I click the IPod to Graceland and then Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, Ta Na, Na, Na Na, Ta Na Na Na Na…
Lincoln Center now. The cultural Mecca of the city. I have walked though the courtyard dozens of times. Recall vividly more than once drifting into the background of tourist photos there, an old trick that used to amuse me. Still does. I always hoped that people would get home from their trips, scattered to the four corners, and wonder, “Who's that guy?”I have used the interior facilities, pristine as Seinfeld’s George noted, but never once entered to see a concert. But the massive Chagall, The Triumph of Music, is still there. The angel blesses those who stand in the greatness of her beauty. Just to the west, on that apartment building on 64th street, the other statue of liberty.
Here and there ballet dancers pass, hair drawn tightly into a bun, rail thin and athletic. Dance studios still abound in the area for smallish young men and women with biggish dreams. Back then I used to love to have breakfast in one of the nearby diners and watch them come and go. Calvin lived on 66th Street, so I came though here often in the late 70’s and early 80’s. From the projects you could see the Hudson and dream of escape across the river or anywhere. But now one of Trumps piggish castles blocks the sun. And the view of escape. The projects now bounded on all sides by opulence, pointing the neglect inward, so those on the edges can easily look away and ignore it. In another block or two I pass the Museum of Modern Commerce, the Apple store, all slick surfaces and minimalist displays, but every gadget has a customer fiddling with it.
I Get the news I need on the weather report
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report
The Only Living Boy in New York, with Garfunkel’s soaring harmony carries me the rest of the way to the Beacon. Out front I find Mark quickly and we both note that we are younger than the average audience member. People arrive in walkers, and as we wait a van pulls up and the back door slides open as Grandma de-vans with her wheel chair. Sidewalk Stub-Hubbers pedal their wares.
Inside the retirees are a surprisingly lively bunch. Next to us a contemporary of my mother sings quietly to almost every song. But her version of Here Comes the Sun, one of Simon’s encores raises the most longing in me. She sings neither well or poorly, but there is something in there of the guitar masses from 1969, something in the way my Mom sung those secular songs, reverently, joyfully, and yet somehow flatly, something about not wanting to stick out in the crowd I think. Sometimes made you wonder if they ever understood the profound affect they had on us and the changes we were going though and what the country was going through as well. Not just the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, but all of it. From the Kinks to the Clash. Dylan and Ian Drury, Stokely and King.
Around here it’s still the ’69 Mets, the joyous miracle. But in my memory, it will always be the ’69 Cubs, the wretched collapse. Lost something then. Learned something too. Sometimes life is loss, sometimes even when it seems you are close, you are so much farther then you know.
On the way home it lingers with me until I have to acknowledge it. We grew up. I grew up. Of course Mom knew, because she had to travel the same road of change, and loss, and hopefully, finally acceptance.
And all at once I just want the change to stop. That engine that has propelled me and this great city has gone too far, and something that I needed is gone. I forgot something back there, and I just need to sneak back in to get it. You know that feeling you just feel instinctively you’ve left something so you start patting the pockets, and as I do the space below my neck where I always sling my reading glasses. I want to go back. I need to go back. Alright maybe I’ll lose that hat.
But I want to go back. I Just want… I Just want… I Just want to do it all over again.
Peace, and many thanks and muich love to Brother Mark...
