Asinine Random Noise

There's this thing my son can do. He takes random noises, which on their own, are annoying, and little by little, as he repeats them, they become melodic sounds. He raps and blends them into something rhythmic. He reaches out and grabs babble and clatter that swirl around our heads and stitches them into a smooth, beautiful beat.

When I find out I have to take yet another hurried trip to NYC for work, I conjure my son’s music made from pinpricks of asinine, random noises. The random noises are this trip. A trip that is heaped on top of my other daily burdens and creates just more clamor in my life. I am already overwhelmed with other work projects; I have to hire a nanny to cover childcare while I’m on this trip; I’m in financial discomfort with late property taxes, the need for a new fence, summer camp payments past due.

The music, I decide, is me throwing myself into the trip and making it something good. Trying to be like my son taking all the bits of swirling ugly noise around him and gathering them into joy, clarity, and flow.

I leave on Earth Day but only after watching my daughter’s performance as a Onceler in The Lorax school play. I get to O’Hare with plenty of time before my flight. Once through security, I relax at the gate, with a grande soy latte in one hand and an audio book, Frog Music, in my ears. But the itch to get something done begins to eat at me. I go for my laptop. Oh shit! I left it at security. The panic washes over me. I jump up and say to the American Airline agent, “I left my laptop in security! Should I go get it??” How dumb. Of course I have to go get it. Why am I asking? The agent tells me, Yea go you’ve got plenty of time. But I run. Well for about 60 seconds, then panting, I gear down to a fast, very breathy walk. I get the laptop back with little problem. But I am slightly scared and very ashamed that my lungs are burning from the 60-second jog.

Middle seat in coach. Stuffy, warm, shaky from my laptop scare, a little sick to my stomach, legs numbing as we sit on the runway for 30 minutes, 40 minutes. In the air, I open the laptop but have so little space that I have to use my arms like a tyrannosaurus Rex. Just poking down at the keys, I can’t really see the screen and I have to hold it at a tilt. Fully opened, it won’t even fit on the miniscule seatback table. The plane ride is forever.

Thirty minutes before the end of the forever plane ride, we begin our turbulent and horrible descent. What torture! But my god, really? Can I complain about 30 minutes of suppressing burps? (I burp when I'm nervous.) 30 minutes of barfy feeling? People around the world go through so much more on a daily basis. But after the third deep dip of the plane and more side-to-side rocking, I think I do deserve a mercy-begging minute—I cannot die on a plane without my children. They need me. What am I thinking flying without them? They have no other real parent.

I get only one minute of fresh, cool air walking to the taxi stand. Then a rocket hurl taxi ride in a vehicle that shakes and rattles and feels like it is about to blow apart. A childhood song comes to mind—Going down the highway, going 54 (though more like 94), <fill in name> blew a fart and blew me out the door, the engine couldn't take it, the wheels flew apart, all because of <fill in name>'s supersonic fart.

I want to ask the African taxi driver where he is from as I usually do—I love the reaction when they hear I lived in Cameroon for three years, married a Cameroonian, and have two half Cameroonian children. Though they always laugh an inside laugh when I say I also divorced the Cameroonian. I know they are thinking—silly American woman thinks she can divorce an African man. Ha.

I would have asked the driver's home country and maybe even his name. Then I can sing Going down the highway, going 94, Kofi blew a fart and blew me out the door... etc. But I don’t ask his name because we are hurling through a vortex of lights at light speed. All I can do is abandon myself to the wild zero-safety irrationality of it. Just like marrying a Cameroonian man. Well at least the one I married.

On the turbo jet taxi ride, though I have lost sense of where the ground is, I do manage to see something interesting. Many warehouse type buildings—some definitely apartments; some maybe bars or clubs with the upper floors zooming by at eye level. What is odd is that I can see so clearly inside each big room. The interior lighting is sharp and bright and brings laser focus to details inside the hundreds of rooms we fly by. Most incredible is that buildings under construction are fully lit from within. Lots of these buildings. Why do they light up each and every corner of them all night?

The speeding sensation, the swirling details are not much different from my 21^st floor hotel room. I overlook a mash-up of crayon colored lights and lines. Why is that building lit in green? Because it’s Earth Day? What is that building? The Empire State Building? Here too is a building under construction lit from the inside out. I turn out my lights and watch the building breathe. It’s just the wind but the small movements of plastic and cords blowing blend into a breathing building that mesmerizes me.

The next day my body has found the ground, the spinning has slowed, the world outside has settled. Though it is still a like a puzzle put together by some crazy creative giant child who does things her own way, cramming together pieces that don’t fit.

I can't seem to be able to get a grip on NYC—how big is it? What are the parameters? What are all these different areas? It's just like Paris to me—endless nooks and crannies to be explored. I start Google mapping my hotel surroundings to try to wrap my arms around just my little corner for this day. If I really am a travel writer, I should look at maps and know what the Empire State Building looks like for god's sake. But just like the city, I roll over one place in the Google map and new ones pop up, others fade into smallness, losing their labels. And that's when I realize that I want to keep it that way—like a big trunk of treasures. Not like an organized, containered set of items.

Speaking of containers, I do feel like I am sleeping in a container at night—one of thousands of precious containers stacked hurly burly, topsy-turvy. Maybe more like a honeycomb—no, no that's too organized, too patterned. I don’t feel a pattern to NYC.

As I sit contemplating the Google map, more doubt about being a real travel writer holds me down. I never know about the cool places to go, the trends of a place. I just wander. I don't want to sit in my room Googling and planning where to go. I’m just going to step out into the mess and see what I see.

I go for a walk. I look and listen. My confidence builds. It’s the sweetest luxury of life to wander aimlessly. I hold my camera by my waist and click off shots. I grab at random bits of what I hear and see and try to think of them as one flowing rhythm. 

A mother stands next to her grown daughter who sits on a park bench in the median dividing Allen Street. The daughter is eating a sandwich out of a to-go container. She says to her mother, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Other kids can go out with their parents and have fun.

An English couple crosses Allen Street and the woman says, Oh for fuck’s sake. 

A mother says to her young daughter, Just button one button. It’s chilly. The daughter says, But you have much less layers than me.

The elevator in Sixty L.E.S requires a swipe of your key card to get to your floor. I fumble to swipe and hit my number. A woman struts in speaking French and crunching an apple. I don't have to look up to know she is young, pretty and has long straight hair. Then another woman comes in and politely asks if I can push 12. The French girl stabs her finger in before me and pushes 12. Doors close and she is saying, "Elle ne veut plus travailler avec nous. Non non elle ne veut plus." But every other word part is swallowed so it's more like "el veu pa trrrr vayer vec new non non veut plu." She would never guess an American is standing next to her understanding. Well actually she wouldn't care. Actually she doesn't even know I am there next to her. Or the other woman. At the 12th floor, she nudges between me and the other woman who is getting off at 12. The French woman bolts out, the other woman and I exchange a smile. Frenchie's rudeness is worth it for the momentary connection to the other woman.

And though it’s less than an hour of wandering, I come back with a tapestry of details that fill me up and make me feel good. That night when I walk with my colleagues to Katz’s Deli, I pass by all my afternoon memories. They are wearing different hues in the evening light but they are still there, mine all mine. 

Last day in NYC. Dinner at Beauty and Essex in Lower East Side. From the outside it looks like a pawnshop or at best a low-end jewelry store. Inside there is no trace of a restaurant. Only jewelry cases with costume jewelry and then guitars hanging on the back wall. I head to the cashier’s counter while my companions linger, looking at jewelry. I wish I would have looked around more. I wanted to get to eating and drinking since I had only an hour or so before I had to grab a cab to LaGuardia. But rushing through this room doesn’t allow me to get illusion they are trying to create—the pawnshop is a front for the secret restaurant behind the obscure door by the cashier's counter.

After I approach and say we have a reservation, the door is opened for me and I enter another world. I first notice the alluring lighting in all varieties like pineapple shaped light bulbs and long stemmed wall sconces but all with warm, sultry yellow light melting out of them. 

At the reception desk there are several tall thin not very approachable or welcoming people. Unlike Katz's where the maitre d' was a young nose-pierced woman with colored hair who pleasantly broke the stereotype of her look and was excited to see us there, proud of her Katz’s, grabbed my camera and insisted we pose for a picture, and brought us menus to peruse while we waited for a table. Also not like the woman at Steak Shake, which is just a burger joint, though really good, who chatted with people in the line going out the door. She also broke the stereotype of a fast food worker just trying to get through the day. She chatted and promised the line would move fast or she'd go in and cook if she had to. I joked that she pass out some fries as appetizers. She left and was back in 2 minutes with a tray of hot fries. New Yorkers truly are a proud and vibrant species.

Once I sink into the big leather couch, the hoity receptionists disappear just like the Frenchie when the elevator door snapped her away from my sight. This smaller room opens up to the dining room which is probably not much wider than the bar area but seems luxuriously large and empty—something rarely felt in NYC. It is due to the oval glass sunroof that is gridded with wrought iron and dripping with plants trying to peek in on diners' heads.

And peek in they should because the secrets behind that pawnshop door are fantastical. At first I am not going to have a drink for fear of puking on the plane home. Considering how heinous my incoming flight was a couple days ago, I don’t want to risk it. But it only takes one person saying, Oh go ahead and have just one drink. Even just “Oh go…” works for me actually. I have an Emerald Gimlet—vodka, citrus, and basil. Then two more, despite their fishbowl size.

The drinks are magical. And the food. Little sashimi tuna tacos, lobster mac and cheese, scallops like baby arms, NY pretzel with corned beef, which I think I couldn't possibly swallow after the mountain of pastrami I ate at Katz's the night before. But I do swallow it—so lovingly it goes down. And those Chinese green beans. Everything makes me feel good—not full and over indulgent and gross and guilty. Instead like I had taken some drug that softens the edges on everything and makes me hug my coworkers like I am hugging sisters.

 

How I managed to get myself out of that den of hedonism, I’ll never know. But the stars have never aligned so nicely for me as they did on that return trip home. I step out onto Essex Street and someone is just getting out of a taxi that I get into. It is a dreamy cab ride. Going over the Brooklyn Bridge, my view is graffitied trucks inching along, rooftops, ships in the harbor. It’s all stinky and grimy. Nothing lovely about it but I feel soooo good from the drinks and delicious food that I float. I gaze and let the sights fill my eyes like warm liquid. Everything is beautiful. I text my best friend. I call an old boyfriend. I text the women I just left at Beauty and Essex and ask them to send me pictures of their desserts.

And then the oddest thing. I get in first class on the plane ride home. I don't know how and at first I fret that it is an expensive mistake I made when trying to assign myself a seat at the hotel where I printed the boarding pass; maybe I hit a button that put me in first class and would cost $500 more. My boss will be pissed. I decide there is nothing I can do about it on the flight so best to enjoy it. 

My god it is soooo much better up here. Legroom for days. Drinks served in real glasses with real limes. They warm the nuts up! And give us warm chocolate chip cookies. I stretch and arch my back like a sexy kitten. I consider how this flight is like eating at Beauty and Essex. While the incoming flight was like eating Kraft mac and cheese when you wait too long to stir the cheese powder in so you get day-glo orange lumps coating your spoon, which you chisel off by scraping the spoon on your bottom teeth.

I wonder if my son would understand how he taught me to do this. To make a rhythm from disjunctive bits of chaos. I ponder this on what seems like the shortest flight ever.