NUEVAYoL
Nate fucking Berg. Nate Berg is a movie character. Nate Berg is more present than I am, which pisses me off because I meditate every fucking day and he still manages to exude mindfulness in a way I begrudgingly covet. Nate Berg is magnetic in the same way that Charlie Sheen is magnetic or John Lennon is magnetic. Nate has an intense personality and he does not mince his words, ever, and he can be too harsh in his communications if people aren’t ready to hear the truth. He is a quintessential man and he’s well-read and he practices a trade and he has a BANGING mustache and he lives by well-defined principles. Nate Berg invited me on this trip. He felt vindicated by New York the same way that I did. Nate would be rewarded by the city for moving there in the same way that I would. Nate said that New York City was a powerful drug—I understand what he means now. New York City is a substance that pumps you full of yourself. You are emphasized, exaggerated, caricaturized in a way that you best be prepared for, because if there’s not much substance there, it’ll emphasize that, too.
Below are memories of feelings, people, and places I encountered in "the big apple."
FRIDAY. I have planed and trained and walked for five hours and it’s still early and loud and cold and it smells terrible. There is a sour feeling in my stomach from twenty-six hours without sleeping (I have written my 50%-of-grade paper overnight, leaving me time for travel). At the apartment of my traveling companion’s friends, I swallow my exhaustion and regurgitate gratitude towards my shelterers. Their pad has books and liquor bottles and sculptures and roof access and I’m inspired and hopeful to see such abundance and adult-icity in the lives of liberal arts students a mere three years my senior. We invite our hosts to a meal, they know a restauraunt, we commence the walk. I am freezing. I didn’t pack many warm garments because I imagined it impossible to be cold in a place with such a high population density. On the walk there I say:
“I resolve to meet five exceptional people today.”
“That won’t take very long,” a shelterer responds.
A coconut-rasin roll, impossibly dense, stifles any chance my brain has of thinking about the cold or the tired. I’ve encountered three exceptional people already and we don’t even have our takeout order yet. We transport the food back, the other guys dig into the crab special (“don’t wear nice clothes,” the restauranteer tells us as he hands it to us) and I chow goat and reflect on the gamey taste, which, retrospectively, eerily imitates my environment over the next three days. The food triggers a two-hour nap for me and Nate. We arise and I logically justify that I should have energy, and so the adrenaline kicks in and the roam begins. We smoke a cigarette in the Washington Square park and watch skateboarders and I am naive and I worry that this’ll be the most exciting thing that’ll happen on this entire trip. We take a shot of fireball and begin a search for happenings. We encounter boring and forgettable drunk grad students. I buy a jean jacket which will be instrumental to my warmth and drip. We wander into a bar with fake candles and drink Tecate and tequila and Pico de Gallo. We talk to two evil New York women and, when they prove boring and evil we leave and wander more. Our method for choosing which way to go was intuition—whatever direction felt best we would travel down. We wander NYU’s sprawl and miraculously stumble upon a somehow-known-by-Nate sushi restaurant. We wait out front and groove out to a doordasher’s speaker and somehow attract two self-proclaimed Norwegians. They are students from Arizona, sisters, tan and blonde, and in the aftermath of this evening of incalcuable sake consumption I realize that my trip's budget will have to be re-adjusted. I take many good bites; two are blissful. We invite the girls to a jazz. The girls don’t come to jazz and this is not a surprise because they were known practitioners of the art of deception (native Norwegians can usually speak the language when asked). Buzzing and full we depart with their promises and we wander to Small’s, the jazz club. We enter and witness nearly two songs before we are forcibly rejected due to our polite but firm refusal to pay the admission fee.
Back on the street we remember that there is a borscht-themed party happening at the apartment. At Borscht we meet several nice people. Kai, who is a touch aloof but wonderful and his aura is a goldenrod yellow; Sam, who does not understand me nor I him, though we both have respect for one another (he is in love with somebody, though, which is awesome); a smart but not-very-interesting-to-me artist friend of Julia’s, and Julia. Julia wears a fur coat down to her mid-thigh and a gorgeous fairytale dress, and she works at a museum and she is one of those people that Hemingway or Bob Dylan would date. Julia and friend take affinity to Nate and I. We talk on the couch for something between one and three hours and cap it with three roof cigarettes. The evening ends and they leave and we have their numbers and an invitation to a second soup-themed party (Tuscan white bean with crusty bread and flaky sea-salt butter).
SATURDAY morning begins with Times Square. A bagel gives nourishment and peddler-sold, tajin-dusted fruit assortment gives joy. Nate and I smoke a cigarette and look at a ten-foot tall gorilla, a ten-foot tall grinch, and a 5’ 4” grinch, all competing for tourist attention. We remark upon how strange it would be for a child to grow up here. Thoughts of parenthood loom heavy on Nate and, consequentially, on me. We make our way past hordes of santas (It is an epidemic this time o’ season—many bars designate themselves to be anti-santa). Nate has already caffeinated and I have to catch up. We find a coffee establishment where I coffee and we locate the library of New York and it’s huge and there’s a big Christmas tree. Nate and I examine the treasure room, where the bill of rights is displayed across from an essay on yoga penned by saxophone legend Sonny Rollins. Each seems to be of importance. I am captivated by the enormity of the space and I request that Nate and I wander independently for fifteen. I am astounded at the power that’s contained in a single pillar here, and I realize that massive power—the type that erects skyscrapers or monolithic library-complexes—must be a most intoxicating burden. We depart the library and we are probably thirsty. I have my first Guinness (“chocolate milk beer,” says Nate) and we house jager shots so expensive that I’ll spare the details to not embarrass myself. We finally have our first slice of pizza, somewhere. It’s insane.
We walk for many miles. We may eat more food. We stumble upon a place called the Swiss institute and they sell books but I don’t notice this at first because there is a thundred square-foot cybernetic plant-structure that’s controlling a tubed perimeter of clicking, light-up jars full of rock minerals (“Better than most art,” Nate remarks). We walk up a staircase and the walls are ornamented with resin-soaked garments. The gallery’s second floor is a single room with a glass divider halfway. The side accessible to us contains an eclectic prototype electric race-bike. Across from the glass divider is an office with a man inside. We walk the staircase to roof, and the stairway’s glass walls reveal that the man is hard at work… watching YouTube. How does anything get done in this city? The roof terrace is empty. It is sacrilegious and puzzling that such a mystical public space is so unpopulated. We say we’ll smoke a cigarette up there, we never do. A fellow traveler breaks us off from this space—"Have you seen the basement?," she asks. The art down there is just okay, but the gallery in sum is lovely and we meet an old lady as we're leaving who serves us apple-brandy apple cider and doesn’t make a fuss when she realizes that we’re underage. Nate says that he eats twenty cookies here off a cookie display. Nate buys a book called dreams of dreams of dreams. I buy a book called the joy of electronic music. All of the books are very aesthetic and orderly and Swiss. We exit—soup party preparations must commence. We change into party clothes and we buy two bottles of wine because we must be good hosts. We’re almost there and there is this interaction:
JONAH: Do you know what the place looks like?
NATE: No. But it’s probably where this group of people is, unless somebody else has a fox coat.
We meet them and everyone besides Julia is very apprehensive about our presence but they grow more cordial when we mention we brought wine. On the inside I run into Kai and we eat some buttered bread and I eat pomegranate seeds and gruyere and I talk to people. I talk to a physics PhD and his girlfriend (who makes soapstone art and also does something else not super memorable) and the PhD tells me that he knows 60% of physics already, and that’s more than I expected, and when I ask him if physics is wrong about anything he tells me that he’s pretty sure that, no, physics is correct. I make a half-truth that I’m going to the bathroom but it is to escape because I can talk to physicists whenever I want at Bowdoin. I talk to some dancer girl and her brother who is young but looks young, like fourteen (he’s 18). As they leave, I turn 180 degrees and I meet Amelia. We talked about languages and how she first intended to do something different than her job, law, maybe, but about how she was really happy doing bike and there were 27 people in the company and about how she only really knew two of them. She tells me about how cigarettes are one of the best things in the world, and about how she’ll never smoke another one of them in her life. We’re just beginning to talk about the inevitability of sobriety when I am pulled into an uber by Julia and I remember the visual here but I have zero recollection of what I, or anybody else, say during the commute. I get out of the uber and the snow is falling and we’re there, at the club, underneath the overpass, and there is nothing about what happens in the consequent four hours that is governed by reality's rules. To set the scene: I hand the bouncer my ID and he doesn’t even look at it. I don’t realize there are two levels and, after checking my (Nate’s) coat, I get vaguely lost but eventually make it upstairs where the magic DJ is playing. When the songs there slow down Nate and I travel to the lower level and I try to talk to some of the people and Nate sobers me up with the explanation that they come here to dance, to fuck, and the dissonance between the reality and the ideal I’d been harboring vanishes and I really see the club clearly, and it’s not a bad realization, it’s just different. Nate, Declan and I fucking break it down. Kai has one dance move which he repeats for three hours. A moment happens to me that I don’t dare put in words here and it leads to me and Julia deep in conversation. I And somewhere within our words I am stoned all at once with stomach-churning clairvoyance that I am exactly where I’ve dreamt of myself being, that I have within me the ability to change, that I can attract in this life whatever I want. Here, across from the water-station, I see that I’ve fulfilled my purpose of being in New York, that the tail end of this trip is useless, that it will be difficult to sit through the rest of it until I can apply what I’ve learned. I feel the presence of destiny, of an audience, Julia my oracle, her blessing and her faith treasures that will give me strength when it gets dark.
Nate and I uber back in near silence; I cannot disrespect what has just happened to me by talking about it. Nate’s thinking about something too. We talk a little. We tip our driver three dollars, then stumble up the three stair-flights and fall into bed and it’s over and I know that I will remember it forever.
SUNDAY early afternoon. We share Pancakes and Borscht lunch with the shelterers. One of them, Michael, will be a great dad, and it’s very strange to hear fatherhood discussed in a distant but very serious manner. I feel young compared to my tall, bearded, employed compatriots. I do dishes, we pack, we leave, and I feel disinterested in everything that’s to come because there is no longer the sense of crescendo and it feels counterproductive to drink. We get hand-pulled noodles in a restaurant called “tasty hand-pulled noodles” and they’re so fucking good that I’m jostled out of my melancholy. We leave and see weird shops and then eat Tiramisu and then we go to a star wars-themed bar that accuses us of forgery and evil (really!) as we kill the time before Christian McBride at the Village Vanguard. It is dark and there are photos of jazz legends on the walls when we enter. We sit next to a retired police officer who says that his 30 years of service were spent “watching the most interesting show on earth.”
Christian McBride and his band begin to play and each song is like a laser beam pointed into the geode-kaleidoscope of human experience—so clearly and so vibrantly illuminated are the crystal, contoured, jagged caves of life that can only be explained with jazz. Watching him play was like drinking an exceptional bottle of wine with great friends. We leave, and to ride out the high of what we’ve just born witness to we find ourselves in front of a bar titled KGB with a man outside and his name is Bernie Mac. We talk to Bernie Mac and he’s funny and we flatter him a bit and he tells us to cut the bullshit, that he’s doing the bare minimum, and this is a really serious moment for me, to treat people honestly, always. We give him a dollar and a cigarette and he tells us to go upstairs and tell the bouncer that he’s a pussy. We get inside, tell the bouncer Bernie Mac sent us up (“Is he clean?” he asks back) and inside there’s great artwork and real candles and a bartender that looks like a convict and it’s the type of place that melts off your veneer within ten minutes of sitting down. Nate and I have a very honest conversation over gin about ourselves and about women and we wingman the shit out of our guy that’s at the table to my right. We leave when everybody else leaves, around three-thirty, and it takes another half hour and change to wander back.
MONDAY morning. Goodbye Chinatown hotel with stuffy hallways and possessed paintings (I literally shudder thinking about them). We get drinks, Nate holds a dachshund, and we go to the 9/11 memorial. You can’t see the bottom of the memorial—water simply fades away through the central column. We smoke a cigarette for the ones who can’t. The museum costs thirty-five dollars a ticket. Nate remarks that it’s an insult to the American people to not make it free. We walk in silence for a while, ending at Tasty Hand Pulled Noodles—again, thank god—and Nate talks with steeze (one of our shelterers) about living in New York, how long he expects to be there, how expensive his rent is and some other things that I could not be bothered with as juicy baby bok choy, fried pork dumplings, crispy duck noodles, shrimp and beef noodles, tea, and Chinese beer all sat in front of me. Without putting it into words, we both understand this feast is to commemorate the small, but significant, personal accomplishments we've had here.
Our final order of business is the Met. Unsuccessful at locating a bag check, Nate volunteers to hold our bags while I go inside and examine the things. I think about how when I live in New York City I will go to the Met for hours at a time. When I see pianos with paintings on them I think about what value music had before it was bastardized by recordings. I think about the excesses required for the commission of these works. I wonder if I should have swapped places with Nate to give him some minutes to look around, but I’m relieved that I didn’t when I learn that he spent the time writing. We order crepes (mine lasted minutes, Nate’s lasted seconds), then stop at a coffee shop and I get a cappuccino from a very gay barista who calls my bluff when I order a macchiato yet can’t tell him what a macchiato is. I talk to the person maintaining the shop’s green wall, and he shows me photos of his seventy plants and tropical fish tank and I think about how badly I want his job. We begin our journey back with the intention to get our ears pierced, a drink, and a slice of pizza. We get only the pizza and that is enough. We almost miss our train because of dead metro cards—thankfully Nate reminds me that I have free will and that it’s not really necessary to pay. I am not stopped by onlookers nor employees (out of pity, I think—this has to be in the running for the most ungrateful and desperate brambling-over ever to occur at a metro gate). With our voyage back to the airport in process, Nate informs me that the trip is technically over. Weird. The airport is slow and I think about how travel doesn’t feel as special as it used to. Nate talks with the Japanese, together they laugh at the impatient people about to miss their planes who did not plan accordingly for the miracle of aviation. I feel like a million dollars in my cool fucking fit and I remark upon how I feel myself in an airport, and how I have felt very myself this entire trip, walking around the city, how I have felt beautiful and intelligent and interesting and how all these feelings might just come back with me to Bowdoin, if I’m lucky. The plane rattles as it descends from the sky and I think about how violently I want to stay alive. The flight is too short and it does not accurately capture how far away I just was.