Manhattan All Hallows
I’m in the middle of All Hallows- and getting to it caused me to have to get through the Eve to it, with 60,000 costumed goblins. It was the start of the busiest weekend of the year for Mahattan, with Halloween, the New York Marathon, and the Election on Tuesday.
Actually, the Goblins this year seem to have chosen to represent themselves as husky young men in sexy nurse’s uniforms, which was unsettling on so many levels that I was pleased to be running a small fever and have it seem normal.
I arrived in Manhattan and managed to navigate to the Morgan’s Hotel, an ostensible four-star establishment that was likewise unsettling on several levels. I was unsettled enough, and the thought occurred to me that I should have gone to the doctor rather than to New York, but being a man of relentlessly good health I don’t think about those things.
The hotel was paid for, as were the train tickets, and the wedding was going to happen. I assumed I could tough it out and worry about the consequences in the next business week.
Perhaps.
The thing about Morgan’s Hotel is that it is relentlessly modern., You can look it up on the web, if you want, 237 Madison Ave, in Mid-town, but in brief it is an old medium-rise hotel that was done up a few years ago in aggressive modern. By that I mean that the rooms did not get any bigger, but they did become clad in shining steel plates, geometric black and white tiles, and light fixtures so modern that you cannot figure out how to turn them on.
Quirky but fine, and the bed was nice enough. I dropped my bag and put myself in it and did not move for several hours. I had some fever dreams, and woke about an hour before I was supposed to be at Cowgirl, a Texas-themed place in the East Village.
I know my way around the big city a little bit, which is to say I can do the subway if pressed and often walk for miles here. I could do neither when I staggered out onto the pavement. It was dark, and cabs were in short supply.
A couple of the sleek black limos came to the curb, and I waved them off for reasons of expense and paranoia, and finally realized I was thirty blocks away from where I needed to be, and the consequences of a gypsy cab ride- kidnapping, murder, etc, had to be damned.
The driver was an arab, or close enough to it. I told him where I had to be and he said “Impossible. Parade on 7th.”
I said: “Fuck.”
He said: “$40.”
I said, “Ok.”
Perhaps a half hour passed, weaving downtown. People in costumes lined the streets; token ones, consisting of only the lighted devil-horns flashing slyly, or elaborate. Like really elaborate; Medieval Dukes and Duchesses, towering drag queens, pirates and the like. My fever made it seem normal, or at least elevated to shoulder-height, so that it could have been any night in Manhattan.
My driver was yammering in some dialect of Arabic on his cell phone all the way, adding to the sense of distortion. Eventually the crowds thickened and traffic barriers appeared and the driver appeared to be done with me. I asked him where Hudson Street might be and he waved off to the right side of the cab.
I emerged after coughing up the two crisp twenties, and made my way uncertainly into the crowd. I was directly in front of the Village Vanguard, the night spot of legend. In any other circumstance or time I would have plunged in for a drink or a cup of coffee
I won’t bore you with the next hour on foot. I talked to cops, asking for Hudson, and was told that they were on special assignment, not from this borough, sorry, no clue.
I was queried by earnest brusque New Yorkers as to whether I was from the neighborhood, so there was a lot of confusion in the air.
I wandered with my little GPS device in hand, unable to understand its strange icons- the Village, after all, is in that place south of Houston Street where nothing makes sense and everything is a little nuts.
Like all the people around me.
They say that even a blind pig will occasionally find an acorn, and at length, and found Cowgirl near the intersection of Christopher and Hudson quite by chance.
I was not that late, if time has a meaning in a fever, and being sober, took the chance to abandon it. The Cousins were all there, and the Spouses, and the radiant prospective bridge and groom. Fever or not, I was glad I had made it downtown.
I did not have the stamina for more than a hour or two, and felt myself beginning to dissolve. I made my apologies and ducked out a side door, heading for the river, where I could see yellow cabs hurtling north.
I got one, and informed him of my direction, and realized the old-time cabbie’s sense of direction and place was another thing of the past, like remembering phone numbers. He punched the direction up on the GPS on his dash, an illegal move in most states, and that is how I wound up at the Morgan Hotel, in a line with a half-naked man, two jump-suited Umma Thurmans from “Kill Bill” and a towering Imperial Storm Trooper with an ominously real sub-machine gun.
There was a function at the Morgan, and I had to present my credentials to gain access to the lobby, and to the elevator back to the eighth floor.
I was a little woozy, and not from alcohol for a change. I put myself under the comforter, and that is exactly where I found myself nearly ten hours later, drenched in sweat.. The light was gray down the light-shaft outside my interior window, facing the blank brickwork.
I eventually managed to crawl out of the eiderdown and hook up the computer, still sweating. The first task was to wade through the hundreds of e-mail I had ignored while wasting my time sleeping. I sample the journals from the UK, for reasons best known to others. Maybe it is that I don’t trust the media here any more than I trust the politicians. Melanie Philips in The Spectator- the real one, not the bogus American version, started out with this:
"You have to pinch yourself - a Marxist radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshiped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it's considered impolite to say so."
My goodness, I thought. I voted weeks ago. It isn’t Halloween yet, regardless of what I saw last night. The fever must be worse than I thought.
It has not yet even begun.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com