Travelling thru' the Big Apple

(The following posts are excerpted from my trusty Moleskine travel diary that I carried around in my backpack and wrote in occasionally while backpacking. The excerpts below were all written when I was in New York or Philadelphia in August 2009 for a week.)

Time flies when you're having fun.

Life in the crazy Big Apple is hectic, busy, stressful, not so cheap. Fancy bars, stylish restaurants; Brooklyn / Fort Greene is the new hip, Chelsea / West Village is getting jaded. Meatpacking is SOO pre-recession darling.

So we get to new places. Everything is transitory here. 230 5th, Plum, all of them are 2007. 2009 has a new list of places, new cool spots, new cool looks. Looking pretty ain't worth shit if you're not looking pretty in the right places.

Everything is transitory here. But everyday, you're not here. Every instant, I mutate into something else.

Where're you from? They all ask me. What's your backstory? What makes you who you are? It's a series of questions asked with a strange blend of uncaring casualness and somewhat discomfiting curiosity. New Yorkers aren't supposed to care. They've seen it all, remember (after all, everything happens in New York, doesn't it?)

So when they ask, not out of a habituated boredom - just the closing verse of a well-rehearsed liturgy - but out of a genuinely actuating desire to find out, it's much more uncomfortable.

Perhaps there aren't that many brown multi-lingual ex-bankers with a pierced eyebrow and a serious sense of personal style in this world after all. Not everyone can be glamorous, you know.

*********

I haven't stopped thinking 'bout you, you know. There have been times that I've wondered what it would have been like to have gone travelling these past four months with you. What if you had kept me company, if you had been there?

Fantasising about you sticking around is never a good thing. It's not going to help me get over you, now is it? But did you think that I'd have moved on, so quickly?

Do you miss me? Do you think of me? मेरे लिए भी क्या कोई उदास बेकरार है?

*********

Last day in the Big Apple.

Hanging out in the Upper East Side. Art galleries, Iranian contemporary painters. Holding myself back from making a deposit for a 55 inches (square!) canvas. Only 35 grand. Yes, its US dollars, but that's still like 25 grand sterling. Not cheap.

I like it here in NY. Not like it was in 2007; hostile, alien, unwelcoming. 2009 NY is like the NY of my childhood, when I felt like I was a part of the city. Funnily enough, NY is not home anymore; not the way it was when I was growing up, and I have a strong feeling that it will never be home; not in the warm, comfortable way that London has adopted me over these past five years. But London is European, English, Indian, worldly; whereas this place is so decidedly one thing: American.

Life is manic here; you feel like the alien that you are each and every minute. Either you conform, fit in, become that most unnatural of things - a New Yorker - or you remain alien, touristy, a foreigner.

I "know" this place; it is familiar to me as an adult in the same way that London was, but whereas London was a place that I got to know through the prism of my first adult debacle, my sorrow and my intellect, New York is what I know from a happy and warm childhood memory; warm, fuzzy, hazy, with big shoulder pads and clashing colours, but still familiar and known.

It helps that this time I haven't been treated like a criminal at immigration. I know that I'm a single brown man, but seriously, how many terrorists have had my good looks and impeccable sense of fashion and personal style?

But this time, I don't really mind. I enjoy being the outsider, living in liminal spaces. I've realised that I've grown up always being on the periphery, so why start trying to fit in? In London I sound Canadian; in the US they're not quite sure, and the poor Canadians keep going, "what the f*ck?"

(Warm and muggy August afternoons in the Upper East Side; Central Park is four blocks west of this Starbucks cafe. The radio plays kitschy American shock rock pop.)

And of course, being exotic never hurts in the bars and clubs. "You're beautiful" is not an uncommon thing to be told, especially here in New York. Random checkouts on the street, in shops. Bearded, tattooed, clean shaven, pierced, twinks, rough trade; all good. The girl on the subway who wouldn't look away; the guy in Whole Foods this afternoon.

Maybe I'll hit the Lower East Side this afternoon. Gay it up a little.

Puddles of green coolant shimmering in the summer haze beneath the white van pulled up in front. Gay rights campaigners trying to get people to care in this, the most indifferent of world metropolises. My Starbucks iced green tea (grande, unsweetened) strong, bitter, healthy.

People are good looking here, but often quite tediously slow. So much effort, primping, preening, pumping, running, plucking. If you're not beautiful, you're automatically ugly. Not much of a choice, but the food here is so super fortififed, the portions so huge, that it's a bit of a default option if you're not killing yourself in the gym.

Puerto Rican shop attendants stunned at my knowledge of Spanish.

*********

So the Lower East Side absolutely rocks. Far grittier, grimier and down-at-heel than the much fancier and trendy West Village & Chelsea area that I'm staying in right now. Perhaps, if I ever moved here, I'd end up trying to live in the LES or East Village. Chilled, relaxed, grungy; immigrants, rent control, graffiti, almost a Ladbroke Grove / pre-trendy Notting Hill as compared to South Kensingon / Mayfair in London.

Note to self: places that are called Chelsea are almost always pretentious and quite expensive. Not that that's a problem; au contraire, its quite nice to have places like that around, if only to keep the wannabe trendy and tres hep guys out of the actually cool and happening places.

I'm writing this entire post in XES Lounge, a fantastic little bar on 24th St, near 7th Avenue. Speaking to a guy who works here called Derek Tod. We both agree that people should do what they want with their lives, as long as it makes them happy. Not a bad approach, if you ask me. But then, I wouldn't disagree now, would I? I quit a job in banking to be happy. Poorer, definitely, but infinitely happier.

New York (or should I say the Northeast) is very recession aware. People are shopping smarter; denial is the new cool. You save today, spend later. Credit cards are soo 2005.

So this is it. I'll go back to the fancy 2-bed Chelsea pad where I'm crashing with a friend, go out for dinner with R&D. We get along, despite distances, in time and space, despite different realities, different world views, different expectations from life. R&D are mainstream; cool, funky, but mainstream. I, on the other hand, voluntarily seek out the periphery. Liminal spaces; always at the fringes.

Peripheral in the straight world. At the edges in finance (you're not supposed to kick the money in the face and walk off, remember?) Liminal in the brown world (not an immigrant, not Indian either). And don't get me started on the gay scene.

Damn. I'm a fr*cking minority. That Polish Jewish grandmother didn't help my efforts at mainstreaming either.