A Short Man In A Wide World: Friends

New York is big. New York is the type of place that grows in history, that stands over you and spits out everything that's ever happened before here, and a lot has happened before here, and each neighborhood has its own tenuous grasp on rights and non reason, and the geography of the neighborhoods, the collection and aggregation, the sum of all parts, renders an impossible, predictably looming chasm of America and Western culture, a black hole that exerts its pull on you, stronger as you stand closer, stronger if you're naturally inclined to such a city, stronger if you want to start a new life in America, and so on. And the city is big, never forget that.

I've had different views at different times on New York City, mostly nonplussed over thrilled. Partly, my contrary nature, flawed and lame as it is, dictates that if everybody loves New York, I'll approach with caution, if all my friends move there after college, I'll visit only occasionally, if my best friend desires to visit at every chance, I'll join in dimly, with hesitation. So that's part of it.

But the city is different, and there are legitimate reasons to dislike it. That bigness is overwhelming, American in its hint of the unneeded, most visible now in the incessant I-phones and blackberries that suck the soul out of their users, one at a time (and yes, Moscow and other cities are bigger, Moscow the only one I've been to, and I probably would have wearied of Moscow if I stayed much longer, and the veil of a different culture and different language hide a lot of the problems anyway). There's the noise and the wide streets with cars always jetting by so you can't get away, the feeling that everyone has bought into the rat race here and then, what's the point? That all this bigness is somehow phony, a sham, meant for tourist billboards and movies and J.D. Salinger books and ripoffs.

All those critiques aside, New York promises a memorable trip every time you visit it. In my short career of satellite New York living (for we all seem to be in its orbit at times, especially living near Boston), 8 years or so since my first visit that involved walking in New York and not driving through, I've had the following memories stand out:

June 2002: Visit to Yankee stadium that featured Boston-based friend exhorting me to cheer on the other team against the Yankees, wistfully hoping to "stir shit up".

July 2005: Into town to visit for a friend's surprise birthday party, I remember talking with a girl from Duke who was my year and who I had spotted in the Directory sent to incoming freshmen of our class, of whom I had thought, "hey, she seems small, cute, sporty, and since she's at Duke, probably smart, put her on the 'to watch list!", only to never talk or cross paths with her at school, since she was a Tri-Delt, fit perfectly into the upper stratosphere of Duke, while I was an athlete but mostly a loner with weirdo tendencies, those supported by the friends I did have. No regrets in that statement, just barebone facts.

I also remember seeing a high school friend at the door before we entered and asking if my clothes were decent enough for the dinner, earning a laugh. I earned a lot of laughs in high school.
And we drove back to where I stayed in a cab, through the village, and I thought about Bob Dylan.

To be fair, I think about him a lot.

August 2005: In two trips sandwiching a three-week tour of Eastern Europe, a teammate and I visited Battery Park for a half an hour and saw post-grads in skimpy bird suits prancing about to an instrumental repeat of Love's "Good Humor Man", and then found a nice little Cuban sandwich shop in the Bowery and met a Duke alum a couple years older than us. He advised us that the path was open but unclear, and inspired me to write in my journal that, "it is about PEOPLE, and I feel fortunate to get this chance to meet people, and to have met these incredible ones already." So I guess that was cool.

February 2006: Wrestling match at Columbia against two schools I didn't get into, featuring a win against the one I didn't get into (Harvard, where of course I got to train and was treated really well, but still, it's nice to win that) and a loss against the one I got wait-listed to (Columbia). I was so light I could eat steak at the hotel with my family the night before. Also, we went to Brighton Beach, my first visit there, and I got a cold that may or may not have sent my unstoppable wrestling momentum off the tracks, screwing my season. Ah well, I screwed it too.

May 2007: A visit to my cousin, notable mostly because it followed my brother's visit to her by a few weeks. Wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes, and so I didn't get my car towed the next morning.

June 2007: On the eve to a trip to St. Petersburg, I visit with Ben for one night, immediately post 5th High School Reunion. The night goes from good (sushi dinner in the west village) to artsy (Feist show) to bad (vague wanderings as we wait to meet Ben's sister and her friends) to really bad (thumping Asian dance club and me in full pout mode) to surprisingly pleasant (sangria and hookah bar that they let just in to, with nubile Barnard co-eds and a slight stumble in my step) to redemptive (sunrise breakfast at Ukranian diner Veselka somewhere in Manhattan).

December 2007/January 2008: New Year's in New York consisting of:
1. party in ridiculously ornate penthouse somewhere in/near Columbus Circle, wherein:
- the artwork was very expensive but not very good
- a hockey game table was a highlight
- the library was an impressive room but had a collection dwarfed by my dad's, though I did find a book on the erotic works of D.H. Lawrence (my dad has this too, by the way) that I amused myself with after mailing in 15 minutes of faux-socializing
- also while in the library, I saw a stranger who was at the party seat himself at the desk of the apartment's owner, an Austrian apparently who had residences in Austria and Colorado as well as this one (we were there because we knew the house-sitter), and who according to that stranger had not only a bunch of passports in his desk but a bunch of money, a grand or two - "What do you think would happen if I took it?" he asked; "I don't know," I answered, and his morals held up, the money stayed as is
- a view of the Apple falling in Times Square and many of the fireworks;

2. a ride on the Subway down to the East Village or the Lower East Side (LES as the kids call it, apparently), I forget which, wherein I found a friend (the one who urged me to cheer against the Yankees, then a NYC resident) who had either just instigated or broken up a fight, and who now stood on the street, Delaney or Bleeker, with a shit-eating grin, unable to speak coherently to me or recognize that I was there really, or that a high school friend of ours wanted to say hello to him on the phone;

3. A walk to nearby restaurant where another friend worked as a bartender, simultaneously hating the job and investing all his energy into entertaining (I'm told he's become one of the best bartenders (1st and 10th photo) in the city since then), screaming himself hoarse as he tried to usher all the co-workers and guests, drunk and hopeless, out the door. More nobly, he gave me the key to his Brooklyn apartment so I could go home a couple hours earlier than the rest of our party.

July 2008: A visit with my Moscow cousin and my sister. My cousin was mad on the hunt for I-phones, to no avail (no service in Moscow at the time), and as such sated by shopping on 5th avenue, visiting the Statue of Liberty (my first time too!), and strolling on Brighton Beach. I also got in trouble with Russian friends of my grandparents who lived beyond the end of the 6 in the Bronx, because I had "abandoned" the two girls to the wolves of Brighton Beach and NYC, and at night no less, while I went and met up with a friend in Brooklyn, who through her ineffable charm managed to get me to not only drink my first shot of vodka but subsequently my first (and only) full beer. Not surprisingly, the night saw my first instance of drunkenly (vs. merely clumsily) knocking over a glass full of liquid. However, not my first hangover, thanks to oodles of Smart Water.

Me with my cousin in Central Park. I can't explain the look on my face, as the shaky events were to come later that night.

Which brings us to the present, and by the present I mean last weekend, when I visited New York again. Again, it was on Ben's impetus, again there were friends to be seen (both of those Brooklyn people, the friend whose birthday it was in 2005, my cousin who lived there), and unexpected things to happen.

I'll remember this trip for the nearly two-hour walk from the West Village to Central Park after a big pizza dinner, before we threw in the towel and took a $5 cab the last 15-20 blocks home.

Also for the cartoonish friend of my friend's brother, who I vaguely remembered as a skinny tall kid in high school, and who now looked like he was bursting out of his shirt, and who acted like a cartoon character to boot.

And the Honduras teen I sat next to on the bus, who struck up a conversation with me about how I was reading too much, and who I ended up counseling on the insignificance of age in relationships and the need to not take things too seriously when you're 19.

There was the getting woken up by text messages at 5 in the morning when a Brooklyn friend happened to be going to bed and had to delay plans for the next day, which was this day, if you catch my drift.

Realizing that Ben going for a run at 2:15 guaranteed that we'd be late for a 3:15/3:30 meeting with the other Brooklyn friend, and being ok with it, because at this point it'd be my fault if I wasn't ok with it.

Walking by the Gay Pride Parade for about 5 minutes, and being impressed that it's not just the obvious people you might expect at a Gay Pride Parade, but people from all over the city. Which gives me the sense that this is not just a celebration of Gay Pride but just a plain old celebration, beginning of summer and we're all in it together and what not. Which is cool.

Also, Michael Jackson came up too often in conversation, but I guess that's not really just a New York thing.

All of this is to say that New York, whatever its foibles or irritances, its limits or pretensions, always delivers excitement and interest (the same can be said of Israel, in a different respect, but I digress). Something will be happening, and one has to try to have a dull visit. I'm not going so far as to claim that it's especially unique, because the only cities I've spent anywhere close to comparable time in the states are Chicago and Boston, special in their own ways, and Madrid and Moscow both have their own large city dynamism. And I'm still negligent on the West Coast of this fine country.

But New York City is different, somehow, a place that goes up and up and up, to the point of toppling on itself, except it also stretches up to the tips of the Bronx and into the semi-suburban sprawl of Brooklyn. New York is full of itself, convinced it is its own singular force, and at times that that force is a messianic one, a life-changing power that makes everywhere else unimportant and hopelessly outdated. It might not be completely right, but New York asserts its significance, its rights apart from all others, perennially and loudly. I'm kind of a big deal, New York says, with the only sentiment dripping off its words sneering confidence.

The thing of it is, as annoying as it might be to admit it, New York kind of has a point.

Traveling is simpler when the destination features a friendly face or two. Even when one of those face is actually unfamiliar, and attached to an unfamiliar voice.

So a bus came and rescued our stranded group of bus riders somewhere in the deserts an hour north of Petra, leaving the first, tired vehicle behind. We arrived in Amman at 9:30, an hour later than we might have. At this possibly inconvenient hour, I had to reach out to my friends, and I knew not how.

First of all, "friends" is a loose definition. Natalia, a classmate and freshman dormmate of mine back in Durham, was to be my lovely host. We were never BFFs or anything, but had hung out and seen each other around, played the occasional facebook tag, and she even hugged me upon my graduation. She was there along more so to congratulate the other half of my hosting party, Khaled, her longtime gentleman companion. Khaled's family is from Jordan (as a trio, we cut quite an international grouping: a Ukranian-born American citizen and a Jordanian-born Canadian citizen, hosting an American born citizen whose family consists of Jews from Russia and who is living in Israel; it made for fun when we thought up morbid headlines as we wandered into shadier parts of Amman. But I precede the plot...), and as such it was a reasonable landing place for them in the hazy phase of post-college life that most people lamely call "the real world."

85% of the previous paragraph comes from information I garnered after meeting up with them. Before that, I was armed with most of my knowledge about Natalia, the invitation she extended me (initiated, by the way, by a certain memorable entry in this here blog), a mobile phone number, and uncertainty over whether they were available to host me that night, as our facebook discussions before I started the trip only confirmed Tuesday night. I knew of Khaled but hadn't formally met him. While I was pretty sure things would work out, strength would not be the word to characterize my position.

I stepped out into a clear Amman night, my back sore, my feet sore and dirty. I knew little, except that I needed a phone. And that the Arabic middle-aged male greeting me as I got off the bus would ask me the following question.
"Need a cab, mister?"
He asked it.
"I need a phone first," I said. Perhaps not amazingly considering the potential for JDs at the end of it, the man lent me his phone. After some confusion over how to dial the number (i.e. with 0 or not), and then some busy signals and Arabic deciphering on his part, we got through. The man talked first, and then upon confirming that someone was there, gave the phone to me.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello," a male voice greeted me.
"Is this Khaled?" I asked, shelving the "My, Natalia, how Amman has changed you," alternative remark.
"Yeah."
And we were off. (Aren't my dialogues always riveting?) After some thinking, we decided the best move would be for me to take a cab straight to his parents' house, where they were living. Khaled told the cab driver how to get there, and he took me there with no problems. We saw a car crash at an intersection unfold in front of us: one driver driving on the left side of the road, who received heavy yelling from the two guys in the other car. We avoided similar hijinx, arrived at Khaled's house, and after another couple minutes of phone calling and wondering whether this was the place, Khaled emerged from a gate. I tipped the cabbie for the ride/phone, introduced myself to Khaled, and all was well.

There's not much of a narrative to tell from here, but a few descriptive elements are worthwhile. For example, going into the trip I was worried about Ramadan, and the implications of eating in public during daylight when the general population fasted. Petra was of course a tourist-happy exception to that rule, and I didn't make it into Jordan before sunset Sunday, but surely Tuesday I would have to face that.

Except I learned from N&K that my second Amman arrival coincided with the end of Ramadan, and the beginning of Eid. "You got here on Christmas, basically," they told me. Nothing would be open for my one full day in the capital, but at the same time, I could eat freely. Also, nothing was open that night, so for dinner we ordered McDonalds (they deliver!).

While I'm on food; I lucked into having an authentic Jordanian meal with the pair. Mansaf is the dish, a rice-based meal. Nuts are mixed into the yellow rice, and then gravy-laden lamb is served atop the rice. A yogurt-based sauce is the garnish, and really pulls the dish together. It's quite good, especially when chased down with a nice cleansing glass of Pepsi. Ahh.

I had a hard time getting a feel for the city. We walked around Khaled's neighborhood before the mansaf, and it looked modern and nondescript. Gray buildings, few skyscrapers, hilly with some nice views, the occasional mosque or picture of King Hussein, and construction that suggested skyscrapers were coming (groups in Amman aspire to make the city the next Dubai, it appears). After mansaf, we took a cab to a hipper part of town, only coincidentally dubbed Rainbow st. Near the tallest flagpole in the world, we had tea and then dinner, but while the street looked like a cool little place, it was mostly shutdown due to Eid.

Amman, from what I was told and what I could observe, is an interesting mix of economic and quasi-Western strivings (ala the construction and longing to be Dubai) and Middle Eastern ways and means. The city and history of the place is fairly liberal, as far as the region goes, but religion is an ever-present facet of city life, if only because it seems like the call to prayer is a constant one, with each mosque issuing it from a speaker system. The government is a constitutional monarchy, somewhere between democracy as we know and export it and tyranny as we support and/or oppose it.

Put those two paragraphs together and you might say that Amman doesn't seem like much, on the surface - and how many people set Amman as a destination, especially when Jordan, travel-wise, is considered a one-rock city- wonder? - but there's a lot going on here.

Anyway, my stay in the city was lovely, if that had mostly to do with the company and the recuperative aspects there of. While the trip already became a success high on that hike in Petra, it cemented itself that way during the laidback Amman appearance. And I made it home without any problems bigger than the cab charging 15 more JDs than I thought he would (because we were confused on what bridge to go to). I even bought the guy a pack of cigarettes at the border, duty-free of course.

And so, with nothing left to say, I turn to photos to complete this trilogy. Enjoy, and until next noteworthy item in my life. Because you're dying to hear about it, and I to glorify it.