I have now been in New York for over 36 hours and it’s been epic. After saying goodbye to my family at the airport, I walked into the security line. TSA gave me a nasty look when my laptop bag went through the machine.
“This your bag?” Asked a woman with a mustache.
“Yes?” I said.
“Hmm. Step over here, please.”
They took me to this separate area, where all the other passengers could watch the tiny girl in the teal dress get grilled. The woman wiped my bag down with a small cloth and then put it into a machine, which whirled for a minute and then made a loud, repetitive beep.
I had no idea whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
The woman proceeded to look through each pocket of my bag. One-by-one. Over and over. She took the bag back to the x-ray machine, ran it through a second time, then a third, and then came back to check the pockets, manually some more.
After about fifteen minutes of this, she pulled out a tiny, green pocket knife with a four-leaf clover. I laughed. That knife had been given to me by a boy, a bad-news boy, who at the time told me it was for good luck.
She started to give me the run down of my options. I could go out of the security line, if I had someone to give it to. I told the TSA agent the big, long story of that knife and the boy. She nodded and laughed at all the right parts, then let me go.
This is not the guy I went to grade school with, no. This guy was selling his instrumental hippie guitar music in the airport, one of the many reasons I already miss Oregon.
Upon reaching my gate I noticed a guy wandering around the gate in a large circle. He seemed anxious. I recognized him, but couldn’t place where from. He didn’t look like a Greener, too straight laced and upright. But I knew I knew him. And then it hit me.
I went to grade school with that dude.
So, I walked up to him and just straight up asked.
“Are you…?”
I think he was a little alarmed that I knew his first and last names. He didn’t remember me, which I was 100% okay with since if he had remembered me he would probably have also remembered that I had a rat tail in first grade and wore shirts with silkscreened wolves howling at silkscreened moons.
We exchanged life updates; my own, of course, included lots of information he totally didn’t need or probably want to know, because I’m a chronic sharer. Then I asked him why he was going to New York.
“Oh, I’m moving there to go to grad school.” He said.
I was stunned. “Right now? You’re moving right now to go to grad school?”
He looked slightly confused, but it all seemed too weird that I would be moving all the way across the country, to New York, to attend grad school and someone I went to grade school with would be doing the exact same thing. On the same flight.
We traded information and then boarded the plane.
This is a real New York firetruck, something only a certain almost-three-year old I know would appreciate. LM, I took this just for you.
And then I did not sleep. I did, however give the evil-eye to the guy in the window seat who kept using his Blackberry the entire plane ride. They say that interferes with the equipment, which terrifies me, but then again they say that having your seat back two inches during take-off isn’t safe either. I’d like to see some statistics on that one.
My friend, Jen, picked me up from the airport and drove me back to her apartment in Brooklyn. There she gave me coffee and told me I could either sleep or go into Manhattan with her. I had plans to meet a girl to look at some apartments, so I opted for the latter even though I desperately wanted to do the former.
If it weren’t for Jen and her roommate, James, I would be either homeless or dead and probably both. They gave me a place to stay while I find an apartment. Jen showed me how to use the subway and told me to never, ever sit on the wooden benches. Bedbugs. Oh yay.
Thats me, exhausted, thrilled, and exposing myself as a foreigner by taking photos on the subway.
I rode the subway, for the first time ever, and proceeded to walk around Columbus Circle with the biggest eyes you’ve ever seen. I haven’t been to New York since I was a kid. It was overwhelming in the best way.
I met my not-to-be roommate, who despite having the most obnoxious laugh ever, seemed to be sweet and looked disheveled in that really adorable way. She was the one who told me that she didn’t have a camera on her phone, her iPhone. And she told me we had one apartment to see, right over here. The man who was supposed to show us this apartment could not have been more a characture of himself. Thick New York accent, baseball cap to cover his greasy combover, and big beer belly stretching his cheap button-up shirt to its absolute limit.
He gave us a list of eight apartments and their addresses. Most of them were two-bedrooms, when we were looking for three, and all of them, with the exception of one, were absolutely disgusting. Dead cockroaches all over the floors, crumbling walls, bathrooms with the last tenants feces in places I’d find it difficult to believe had I not seen it for myself. One of the bathrooms had a giant hole in the water-damaged ceiling, it had been patched up with particle board and four nails. I wanted to cry. My not-to-be roommate liked the places. She said, “These have character. We could live in some sterile high-rise, but taking an elevator to my apartment would just depress me.”
I hear this school is the sister organization of the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named Community Center
It was around apartment number six that I realized there was no way I was going to live with her and her band of character-filled, feces-covered cockroaches.
In all I looked at eleven apartments. Two were decent, but she didn’t like them at all.
My phone battery had completely drained by this time and I was terrified that it would die before I was able to get back to Brooklyn. Since the morning I was starting to get fuzzy on all the details of where Jen and James lived exactly. I ran to the nearest subway, got on a train that seemed mostly, pretty much, maybe the right one and crossed my fingers that it would lead me to where I needed to go.
It did. And remarkably quickly. Jen called me to tell me to meet them at a bar right next to her place, for food. While walking to the bar I noticed a bunch of cute restaurants and shops, people out riding their bikes in real bike lanes, and I realized. Brooklyn, at least, this neighborhood of Brooklyn, looks just like Portland. I relaxed.
This is not the bar, but actually a meat market. I appreciate clarity in businesses.
I arrived to the bar exhausted, with sticky subway hands, and they knew exactly what had happened. They’d tried to warn me that morning but I had to see it for myself.
“I’ve been humbled, you guys.”
“Yes,” they said.
“I get it now.”
I looked around.
“I want to live here,” I said.
“Yes,” they said. “You do.” And they told me that it was happy hour and that wings were 50 cents all night.
I really, really do.
