Moving is a pain in the arse. Moving overseas is a massive pain in the arse. And moving to New York and trying to find a place to live two weeks before university starts is such a staggeringly daunting task that to describe the level of arse-pain experienced requires those sciencey words usually reserved for astrophysicists trying to convey just how f#@king big something is. Fortunately for me, I managed to land a place to live before I left Australia (fortunate especially since I don't know any astrophysicists). Even still, the comedy of errors that was Moving Day was still a goddam pain in the arse.
I inherited a room off my close friend Daniel. He's lived happily in this little apartment in Brooklyn for two years now. The room is big with lots of light, it's on the third floor away from the noisy street, and not too expensive - a real find by anyone's standards, and (I'm led to believe) especially rare for New York. Anyway, he's a composer too, and a darn good one at that, so much so that he got into Yale in New Haven, about two hours out of New York. He offered me his room, and knowing what a goddam mothering pain in the freakin' arse it was going to be to try to find one myself, I happily accepted. All I had to do was give him a hand moving out, then go and get my own things to move in. Piece of cake.
At 7am on Thursday Daniel goes to collect a small truck for the move. Daniel wakes me at 8am to carry the bed I was fast asleep on down the stairs to the truck. Within two minutes of waking up I'm walking backwards in my pyjamas carrying a mattress down two flights of stairs so narrow and steep it might be more appropriate to call them "ladders". I neglect to have breakfast, which proves to be a big mistake ten minutes later when we're carrying his 100kg keyboard down the stairs and I almost black out from hypoglycemia. Daniel manages somehow to get down to my end (although God knows how since the piano pretty much filled the width of the stairwell) and holds it while I collapse and pant pitifully for a few moments at his feet trying not to vomit up my non-existent breakfast. I eat a banana and feel better. The move continues.
Half an hour later we're on the road. We have to go to Washington Heights to collect Daniel's new housemate Wayne and his few belongings. Washington Heights is about as far away as you can go from where we are and still be in New York. Googlemaps estimates the trip to be fifteen minutes. An hour later we arrive outside Wayne's place whereupon Daniel accidentally sideswipes a parked cab, breaking its mirror. Daniel swears a lot and bangs the steering wheel a little bit. The elderly cab driver abuses us through the truck window in Spanish. The accident attracts what appears to be every elderly Spanish-speaking cab driver in a fifty-mile radius, and soon the air is filled with shrugged shoulders and shaking heads, angry fingers pointed at the truck as though it was a tank, angry fingers pointed at Daniel as though he was a thoughtless retard, all accompanied by so much Spanish that I think I now know how to speak it.
Daniel has to call the police to lodge an accident report in order to claim the insurance. The cadre of Spanish-speaking cab drivers insist that he just give them the money for the mirror. I leave this lively exchange to meet Wayne and help him load his stuff into the back of the truck. Meanwhile the police arrive, looking shitty for having to come and deal with a broken mirror. They talk to Daniel. They talk to the cab driver. They go to the police car and write stuff down. They talk to Daniel again. They talk to the cab driver again. They return to the police car and write more stuff down. Again they talk to Daniel. Again they talk to the cab driver. The cab driver points at me. The police come to me. They ask me if I was driving the vehicle. I boggle. They tell me the elderly cab driver is now insisting that I was driving the truck. They ask for my drivers license. I give it to them but explain (quite calmly, I think) that I was not driving the truck, because if I did attempt to drive a truck from one end of New York to the other on the right-hand side of the road in traffic so heavy it could warp space-time that we probably would have had a much more serious accident than a mere broken mirror before I'd had a chance to get into third gear. They agree but they still take down my drivers license details (which I hope doesn't bite me in the butt one day).
An hour later the accident report is filled out, the cab drivers disperse, and we are finally on the road to New Haven. Fortunately there are no further incidents that could jeopardise the move, my health, or anyone's freedom. We get Daniel and Wayne's stuff inside, drop off the truck, catch a train back to New York, and get drunk.
So now it's my turn to move. The very next day I begin the quest to furnish my room. I'm kind of excited - I've never actually bought furniture apart from the bed I bought when I was twenty-one. I find a great used furniture shop about six blocks from my house and pick out a nice chest of drawers, a mirror, an awesome armchair upholstered in green faux-velvet, and what looks like a cute little wardrobe.
Now, I'm aware that standard practice when one moves house is to measure things. Things like say, the width of doors, or the height of ceilings, or even the weight of items that might require transport through said doors and under aforementioned ceilings. I foolishly neglected to do so. When my wardrobe shows up I realise that in the context of the massive furniture warehouse it looked all tiny and cosy, but now, in the foyer of my building, it looks like someone chopped down an entire forest and turned it into one piece of furniture.
I won't go into excruciating detail of what I shall henceforth refer to as "The Ordeal of August 27th", but let's just say there's still bits of ceiling plaster embedded in the doorhandles from when we had to physically pass this monstrosity over the banisters because it couldn't be negotiated around the turn in the stairs. Whoever inherits this room after me is going to get a wardrobe thrown into the bargain because that thing is not going anywhere ever again except in little tiny pieces.
For now however, the worst is over. I'm having a desk delivered tomorrow (and they WILL be carrying it up the stairs) and then I'm pretty much set. My room is big, it's light, and since it's on the third floor it's away from the street noise (a positive point that somehow slipped my mind during last week's move when I cursed mankind for ever endeavoring to build buildings with more than one floor - are we so PROUD?!...ahem...), it has polished wooden floors and big windows, it's relatively cool in the summer nights and Daniel assures me it's plenty warm in winter. I've become a cliche - a poor artist living in a loft in New York. F#*king tops.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
New York Minute
There cannot possibly be a breed of person more aware of how valuable their time is than a New Yorker. I discovered this about seven minutes after my arrival at JFK airport when I dared to get into a cab merely knowing the street address of the apartment I was staying at and not also the nearest intersection.
I told the cab driver my address - 343 South 5th Street, Brooklyn*. In my experience with cabs across the globe, this is generally sufficient information for a successful journey. Apparently not.
"What's the nearest cross-street?" the guy barks at me from the front seat.
"What?" I ask.
"The nearest cross-street. Brooklyn is huge. What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I uh... don't know."
"What?! Whaddaya mean ya don't know?! How do you expect me to get you there without knowing the nearest cross street?"
"Well don't you have a GPS or a street directory or something?" He ignores this.
"What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I already TOLD you, I don't know the name of the nearest cross-street."
"Well how do you expect me to get you there?"
I'm beginning to sense a certain Waiting for Godot quality to the conversation, so I mumble that I have been there before (over a year ago, mind you) and if I study my map of Brooklyn I might be able to recall the nearest cross-street. This almost placates him until I foolishly suggest we begin to drive to Brooklyn (this altercation has thus far occurred in the taxi bay at JFK in front of hundreds of other people).
"Sir," the guy says, like I'm missing a chromosome. "If you don't know where you're going there's no point in starting the journey."
"I DO know where I'm going," I almost shriek in frustration. "343 South 5th Street Brooklyn!"
"And what's the name of the nearest cross-street?"
"Goddammit!" I yell. (I think this qualifies me as an official New Yorker now). So I bury my head in my little pocket guide of New York trying to find where the hell I'm supposed to go. The cab driver is not content with our impromptu performance being a two-hander, and so he decides to recruit more performers into the show by leaning out the window and shouting to the taxi-queue manager, "This guy wants to go to Brooklyn but he doesn't know the nearest cross-street."
"What the hell?" the queue-manager says, staring at me as though I've just announced that I think it perfectly reasonable to attend a christening in a gimp-suit.
"Yeah," the cab-driver says, "how does he expect me to take him somewhere if he doesn't know where he wants to go?"
I'm really getting pissed-off now. I'm not really in a very good mood to begin with. I've just spent 24 hours in transit - 21 on a plane and 3 in customs queues - after having not slept my last night in Australia because I was too excited. This, compounded by the fact that the two nights prior to my departure were spent getting completely written-off means that I haven't had deep, non-hungover sleep since the previous Thursday. So when this guy starts leaning out his window shouting to all and sundry about the foolish Australian cluttering up the back seat of his cab with the audacity to request transport to an address without having an intimate knowledge of the destination borough, something inside me snapped.
"HEY," I said. "I've TOLD you already I want to go to 343 South-5th Street in BROOKLYN."
"And what's the nearest..."
"Do you have a GPS?"
"What's the nearest..."
"DO you HAVE a GPS?!"
"Yes sir I do."
"Then I WANT TO GO TO 343 SOUTH-5th STREET IN BROOKLYN."
There was a sigh, some typing on a GPS, and about ten seconds later we were on our way, which was a little ironic considering we had just spent five minutes immobile in the taxi bay because, to the cab-driver, his time was so freakin' important that he would be better off demanding that I somehow conjure the information he wanted from the ether rather than spend the three nanoseconds it would have taken to type the info into his goddam GPS.
So New York operates under the premise of hyper-efficiency. Everything from food to transport to dry-cleaning is undertaken with the minimum of fuss and pretense. Conversation between customers and servers is generally kept civil yet basic, none of this pesky "how are you today" or sometimes even "please" or "thank you" to waste everyone's time. Go to a diner and you'll be given a menu slightly thicker than a phone book. You can order anything you want on it and reasonably expect it to be at your table before you've had time to warm up your seat. Trains zip around on the subway so regularly they may as well install a high-speed conveyer-belt instead.
And to be honest, it's probably just as well. New York is, of course, freakin' ENORMOUS (well, to a little ol' country boy from 'Straya it is) and the city would grind to a halt if everyone spent all day naval-gazing while waiting for a train or engaging in prolonged social niceties every time they wanted a cup of coffee. Even still, it can sometimes be a bit intimidating. As such, I try to adopt the philosophy of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".
I think of my experience with the cab-driver outside JFK airport as my initiation.
*Lest you think I'm clueless enough in this age of electronic-identity-theft to publish my address, this is a fake address. Obviously I told the cab-driver my real address though (duh.)
I told the cab driver my address - 343 South 5th Street, Brooklyn*. In my experience with cabs across the globe, this is generally sufficient information for a successful journey. Apparently not.
"What's the nearest cross-street?" the guy barks at me from the front seat.
"What?" I ask.
"The nearest cross-street. Brooklyn is huge. What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I uh... don't know."
"What?! Whaddaya mean ya don't know?! How do you expect me to get you there without knowing the nearest cross street?"
"Well don't you have a GPS or a street directory or something?" He ignores this.
"What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I already TOLD you, I don't know the name of the nearest cross-street."
"Well how do you expect me to get you there?"
I'm beginning to sense a certain Waiting for Godot quality to the conversation, so I mumble that I have been there before (over a year ago, mind you) and if I study my map of Brooklyn I might be able to recall the nearest cross-street. This almost placates him until I foolishly suggest we begin to drive to Brooklyn (this altercation has thus far occurred in the taxi bay at JFK in front of hundreds of other people).
"Sir," the guy says, like I'm missing a chromosome. "If you don't know where you're going there's no point in starting the journey."
"I DO know where I'm going," I almost shriek in frustration. "343 South 5th Street Brooklyn!"
"And what's the name of the nearest cross-street?"
"Goddammit!" I yell. (I think this qualifies me as an official New Yorker now). So I bury my head in my little pocket guide of New York trying to find where the hell I'm supposed to go. The cab driver is not content with our impromptu performance being a two-hander, and so he decides to recruit more performers into the show by leaning out the window and shouting to the taxi-queue manager, "This guy wants to go to Brooklyn but he doesn't know the nearest cross-street."
"What the hell?" the queue-manager says, staring at me as though I've just announced that I think it perfectly reasonable to attend a christening in a gimp-suit.
"Yeah," the cab-driver says, "how does he expect me to take him somewhere if he doesn't know where he wants to go?"
I'm really getting pissed-off now. I'm not really in a very good mood to begin with. I've just spent 24 hours in transit - 21 on a plane and 3 in customs queues - after having not slept my last night in Australia because I was too excited. This, compounded by the fact that the two nights prior to my departure were spent getting completely written-off means that I haven't had deep, non-hungover sleep since the previous Thursday. So when this guy starts leaning out his window shouting to all and sundry about the foolish Australian cluttering up the back seat of his cab with the audacity to request transport to an address without having an intimate knowledge of the destination borough, something inside me snapped.
"HEY," I said. "I've TOLD you already I want to go to 343 South-5th Street in BROOKLYN."
"And what's the nearest..."
"Do you have a GPS?"
"What's the nearest..."
"DO you HAVE a GPS?!"
"Yes sir I do."
"Then I WANT TO GO TO 343 SOUTH-5th STREET IN BROOKLYN."
There was a sigh, some typing on a GPS, and about ten seconds later we were on our way, which was a little ironic considering we had just spent five minutes immobile in the taxi bay because, to the cab-driver, his time was so freakin' important that he would be better off demanding that I somehow conjure the information he wanted from the ether rather than spend the three nanoseconds it would have taken to type the info into his goddam GPS.
So New York operates under the premise of hyper-efficiency. Everything from food to transport to dry-cleaning is undertaken with the minimum of fuss and pretense. Conversation between customers and servers is generally kept civil yet basic, none of this pesky "how are you today" or sometimes even "please" or "thank you" to waste everyone's time. Go to a diner and you'll be given a menu slightly thicker than a phone book. You can order anything you want on it and reasonably expect it to be at your table before you've had time to warm up your seat. Trains zip around on the subway so regularly they may as well install a high-speed conveyer-belt instead.
And to be honest, it's probably just as well. New York is, of course, freakin' ENORMOUS (well, to a little ol' country boy from 'Straya it is) and the city would grind to a halt if everyone spent all day naval-gazing while waiting for a train or engaging in prolonged social niceties every time they wanted a cup of coffee. Even still, it can sometimes be a bit intimidating. As such, I try to adopt the philosophy of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".
I think of my experience with the cab-driver outside JFK airport as my initiation.
*Lest you think I'm clueless enough in this age of electronic-identity-theft to publish my address, this is a fake address. Obviously I told the cab-driver my real address though (duh.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)