New York Redux
I love going to New York city. Really, I love everything about it. I enjoy the drive, even the part that involves the Jersey Turnpike. I enjoy the surly toll booth attendant outside the Holland Tunnel who says “a $20 bill?! Jesus fucking christ!” And I especially enjoy the transformation that overcomes me as I emerge from the tunnel a self-imagined New York Driver.
The thing about New York, as compared to any other American city I’ve been to, is that even an idiot country rube like me can figure out the layout. It’s a simple series of numbered streets in a perfect grid, with the streets alternating One Way directions. This means I can ignore the tedious process of getting my bearings and looking for landmarks and concentrate on what I call Offensive Driving.
We got to our hotel on Friday night at about 11. The hotel we stayed in wasn’t the best I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t horrible or anything. It was up 5 flights of stairs (which was much fun to navigate after drinking heavily on Saturday), and the room itself was something out of a 40s movie. We shared a bathroom with everyone on the floor, there was a radiator, and one single light bulb illuminated the whole room. I was half surprised there was no Murphy bed in the wall.
The “caretaker” (I guess that’s what he was) was a rather infirmed elderly black gentleman. (Think Scatman Crothers in The Shining.) I felt bad for him as he descended the 5 flights to get us checked in. I felt less bad when he kept us up all night with his odd noises, most of which involved very owl-like hooting.
So we didn’t get a whole lot of sleep Friday night. Saturday ended up being pretty damned awesome regardless of this, however. We made our way to Midtown comics at about noon, where I spoke with someone about getting Tales of the Odd carried in their store. “Well, normally we need 10 copies of a new indie book,” the guy said. He paged through a copy, grinned a little and amended his statement. “You know what? Bring me 15.” I sold them at printing cost, but this wasn’t about making profit. So now my book is available at the best comic store in NYC (and a sister location) and my ego has been sufficiently stroked. Amazingly, the day got even better from there.
We took off from Midtown to visit our friends Jason and Keren. Jason (aka Littleguy) I have known since high school, and his longtime gal-pal Keren I have known almost as long (since his first year of college).
We ignored the warnings involving their new location on 117th street, exactly 100 blocks beyond where we were staying. Apparently their apartment (which was ENORMOUS for NYC standards) is in Harlem, but I wasn’t really uncomfortable or anything. Then again, I spend a lot of time in DC, so the race thing really isn’t an issue for me.
LG felt the need to share with us a horrid piece of late 70s “entertainment” known as Legends of the Superheroes.
The first was a variety show/celebrity roast of sorts, featuring the following:
Yes, that’s TV’s Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, 10 years after their show went off the air. And yes, Hawkman’s mask is apparently made of cardboard.
Ed MacMahon hosts the full hour, and after sitting through the entire thing, I finally understand why the whole superhero concept gets such a bad rep. It would take a hundred Bendis-caliber writers to undo the damage done here.
The “roast” is surpassed in entertainment value only by the second installment, which is presented as a sort of action/comedy thing.
Mind you, the production values haven’t improved a bit, and most of the “plot” involves a succession of supervillains trying to cause incidental mechanical damage to the Batmobile. But it’s worth the price of admission for the big climactic chase scene, involving Batman and Robin on jetskis, and the rest of the makeshift Justice League following in canoes, rowboats and paddleboats.
This is maybe the worst thing I have ever seen, and I sat through all ten seasons of horrid MST3K movies. Somehow, though, I just could not look away.
After this, LG and Keren took us on the “quick New York cliché tour.” We saw a small section of Central Park (including some weird art thing involving orange fabric that really didn’t impress me), had an authentic NY street hot dog (meh) and rode the subway. Really though, we got to hang with two good friends, and that was a lot of fun.
We also got a chance to sample real “mofongo.” This is something maybe three people reading this will understand and/or appreciate, but to we two Otters, it was a religious experience of sorts. It was also pretty damned nasty.
As best we could tell, it was some sort of fried chicken skin/potato concoction. There was some gravy that came with it, but that reeked of rotten seafood and no one had any desire to see if that improved the remarkably bland flavor of the stuff. Really, we weren’t even sure what ethniticy exactly was responsible for our mofongo (our guesses were Puerto Rican or Cuban)… but again, it was more about the experience than the actual results.
We parted company with LG and Keren at about 7PM, which gave us about an hour to travel 100 blocks, get freshened up and meet our Bendis Board pals at the designated watering hole.
The choice of drinking venue was a scant 6 blocks from our hotel (the Cedar Tavern), so we trudged through the chilly evening to meet up with friends, most of whom we had heretofore only known as pixels on a screen.
There really aren’t a whole lot of details I can share: partially because I don’t remember a ton of them and partially because the evening involved a lot of inside jokes. We bitched about people on the board that we didn’t like, commisserated over common interests and raised a lot of hell. It was the most fun I’ve had since my birthday.
Here are some pictures. You figure out what’s going on, I don’t feel like captioning them:
I did the smart thing and started chugging water with every other drink as the night progressed, so I didn’t really have much of a hangover on Sunday.
We didn’t sleep much again though (thanks to Hooty), so we just took off for home around 7AM. We were back home before 1PM (I took a wrong turn at Alber-koiky), and napping for most of the rest of the day.
All in all, though, this was probably my best trip to New York ever, and I have had several good ones. I covered all the bases, really: old friends, new friends, comics promoting, comics buying (oh yeah, I dropped a ton of money at Midtown after selling my book), drinking and debauchery, touristy gawking. Yay us!