It was to be a surprise visit. On the seven-hour flight over, that’s all I thought about, even as I sipped free red wine in plastic cups and watched a succession of films on the back of a headrest – the surprise. I imagined it any of fifty different ways, planning my entrance, my opening line. I’d thought briefly about opening with “Miss Kissiah, I presume,” but when I workshopped it with friends the week before flying out, nobody got the reference so I dropped it.

I would pretend to be a delivery man and knock on her door, perhaps. But then of course she might well be lounging in her pants on the sofa, knockers akimbo, and we’d both be mortified. Maybe I’d just plunk down into a seat opposite her in a restaurant. Maybe I’d position myself on a doorstep reading a newspaper, and when she walked past I’d wish her a casual good morning and laugh with glee at her stunned double take. As usual, these thoughts came with counter thoughts: what if I shocked her too good? What if I spiked her adrenaline by accident, made her question her reality? Not likely, no. But not unheard of. If I stepped outside to buy a pint of milk in London one day and bumped into Annie in the bread aisle, my go-to assumption would be that I’d slipped on an olive oil spill, bust my head open and died.

I saw the Statue of Liberty as the plane banked and curved down into Newark Airport, then the long island of skyscrapers. We touched down and taxied and I carried my rucksack down the aisle, past rows littered with crumbs and discarded blankets. At customs I tried to be friendly with the passport guy with a smiley ‘hey dude’ but he soon put me in my place by refusing to say hello back and demanding to know where I was from, what my job was, why I wanted to visit America, where I was staying, and to see evidence of my return flight. I had no phone signal of course, so bringing up the flight email took a full two minutes – giant queue tapping their feet behind me – and I was irritated to find myself babbling apologies and sweating. The passport man – crew cut hair, overweight, void of any discernable emotion – didn’t need to see my return flight, obviously. You’re allowed to not have one. He just decided to put the thumbscrews on me because I tried to be friends with him, which in his mind, I suppose, would have levelled us as equals – which in his mind, I suppose, we were not.

I was relieved at least to see no Trump portrait hanging beside the Stars and Stripes in the foyer. I’d never been in Trump’s America before – rather proudly. As a kid on holiday in Florida I’d noted Obama’s portrait upon entry, thinking it an amusing quirk of the country, and in California 15 years later I’d been met with Biden’s photograph. But no trace of Trump – and I would not come across a single image of him for the next seven days.

I left the arrivals gate and headed straight for a bathroom to brush my teeth and push my hair into a reasonable shape, then began the slow wander back across the arrivals hall in search of an information stand, seeking to ask someone how the hell I got to Brooklyn. As I passed a cafe, I glanced to my right and saw a fair-skinned figure in a hoodie peering at me from around a corner. The hooded head attempted to duck out of the way, then gave up when we made eye contact and came trudging back around. This figure, of course, was Annie.

“What the fuck?” I asked, stumbling towards her. “What are you– were you hiding?”

“Fuck. I’m sorry boys,” she said, lowering her hood. “I messed it up. I was planning to creep up and grab you or something.”

“But why are you here?” I asked, laughing in confusion as we hugged. “What the fuck?”

Every atom of my being had been coiled like a spring for the big reveal; I’d slept two hours the night before the flight, electric with giddiness, picturing Annie’s elation when I burst into her life unexpectedly – the look of shock and rising joy on her face. I had played out the moment a thousand times in my mind: how we would hug, how we would probably fall over while hugging, how wildly euphoric it would all be.

“Tayler told me you were coming like three weeks ago,” said Annie. “She couldn’t think of any other way to keep my schedule clear for the week, so she just told me.”

“Hang on, you’ve known the whole time? So why didn’t you… like… say?”

“I wanted to surprise you back!”

“That’s… insane.”

I’ve never felt quite so emotionally blueballsed.

“Oh man,” I said, still in a state of shock. “I was expecting this incredible, cinematic reveal, not to just accidentally bump into you lurking behind a pillar.”

“Aren’t you glad to see me though?” said Annie, punching my arm. “It’s me! Your best friend come to surprise you!”

“Yes,” I sighed, laughing and hugging her again. “I’m glad to see you.”

On the bus through the junkywards Newark towards Manhattan, Annie produced a couple of cold beers from her backpack. She explained as we cracked them how she’d researched and planned a full week of activities for us – bar crawls and surprises and shenanigans. I felt weirdly guilty; this was supposed to be my big treat for her, and here I was being showered with plans and affection. I suddenly wished I’d brought a gift, a book or a sculpture or a gateau or something, so I could even it out. But of course I doubt she cared – she just wanted to make me happy, just like I’d wanted to make her happy. And I suppose I had, just by being there – surprise or no.

We scooted around a ramp and dipped into the Holland Tunnel – white tiles, orange lights flashing – and emerged into the towering grime of Manhattan. Impulsively I took a photo of nothing – just any old street, captured through the grubby lens of the bus window. But even this, a run-down street with a couple of idling taxis waiting at a stop sign, looked achingly cinematic. The green street signs, the taco stalls, the traffic cones and steam rising from grates. New York on arrival is as alien as Hanoi – the same sudden boisterousness, the hot calamity – but there’s an uncanny element too, as what only exists generally within the confines of a television screen suddenly yawns above you, solid and honking and glinting.

We got off the bus and stepped out onto 8th Avenue, with the New York Times building stretching to fill the sky like a Norwegian cliff. Bicycles, cops, businessmen, bodegas, tumbling fire escapes, newspaper stands – I always have an overwhelming urge to spin around and around when I stand on Manhattan’s streets, to capture every detail, every mad happening, in all directions at once. All those vanishing points – every street rushing away, the cars and streetlights and people progressively more snug as they shrink to an infinitesimal dense pinprick on a low horizon.

As I stood and stared at the yellow taxis, thinking vaguely of Joni Mitchell, Annie asked me what I wanted to do next: go straight to hers, or hang out a little. I needed some time to adjust, to take it all in and believe in it. I’d not slept more than 30 minutes on the flight, too excited, filling the time with zombie movies instead. Everything felt a little removed and waxy, like I was exploring the city via the fisheye lens of Google Earth rather than smack in the middle of the real deal. Once you leave that tunnel, the wave of it all crashes over you so quickly it’s hard to catch your breath.

We ducked down an avenue – quieter here – and passed a large bookshop called ‘The Drama’.

“Oh yeah,” said Annie, when I commented on it. “They sell scripts. Do you wanna go take a look? It’s where a lot of writers and theatre people hang out. I think you’d like it, it’s your kind of place.”

Impressed that she could know so intimately such a boisterous, blocky jangle of concrete, I agreed and we breezed inside to take a look around. We prodded a couple of books on shelves, snapped a couple of hardbacks open and closed. Clever-looking people with interesting scarves sipped lattes in the shop windows, poring over manuscripts.

“Do you want to hang out here for a bit?” she asked. “We can stay if you want.”

I told her I was too woozy to take it all in in my current state – I felt a bit boorish, jaded and half-drunk among the intellectuals. Best to take refuge in the gloom of a bar for now, decompress and catch up a little. Annie guided us to an Irish pub a few doors down and we sat at the bar. They do that in America – sit at the bar. It always surprises me. If you do that in the UK, people get infuriated: there’s one way to order a drink back home, and that’s with your feet on the ground. If someone sits in the way – or worse, a row of people (usually carefree bouffant finance types), they’re universally hated. ‘What kind of a system is this!’ people (me) will mutter as they struggle to get served. Not so in the States: like cowboys, you sit in high chairs across from the bartender, and if anyone wants a drink, they simply reach through and around you. 

Then there’s the billing process – a strangely anachronistic system where the bartender puts two pints down in front of you and asks you if you want it ‘open or closed’. The first time I heard this, back in California in 2024, I drew a blank and simply stared apologetically back. Turns out it’s the tab – the option to keep it open is given with every drink you purchase. If you say ‘closed’, as we now did, you hand over your bank card, they vanish with it for a few seconds, and upon their return they hand you a paper slip with a pen. On this slip is the total price, and you’re expected to pencil in what tip you’d like to add, then tot it all up in your head and write a new total below, before signing it. One dollar per drink, Annie told me, is the general rule in most bars. Pushing back the receipt with the number ‘22’ written on it, I wondered how the hell anyone could afford to be a booze-hound in this town. I supposed I would find out in due course.

Refreshed – and blurrier than ever – we headed out to find a sudden rain had started, and crossed a few blocks to find the subway. I’ve been to New York before – age 21, in 2014 – but never dared take the subway, fearing the grime and the dark. As it happens, it’s not really any worse than the Underground. Same dank, urine-y smell, same perilous platform edges – except where London has mice, Manhattan has rats.

The train, when it arrived, was silver and jangly, like a string of tin cans fashioned into a walkie-talkie. We rattled under the city, and Annie cracked us another drink each as we burst above ground into the daylight, crashing over a giant metal bridge over water.

“Is this the Brooklyn Bridge?”

“Uh, no. I think it’s over there somewhere,” said Annie, pointing away across the bay.

“And what the hell is that?”

“What?”

“That giant evil tower over there. It looks like the Eye of Sauron.”

“The what?”

I made her Google it; she laughed. We chatted and joked and bickered and farted around for a dozen stops, getting off at last on a raised platform in Annie’s neighbourhood, a place called Bedford-Stuyvesant. We stopped to buy drinks and candy at a bodega, then it was only a short walk back to Annie’s place. I saw my first ever brownstones – those big, bulky terraced houses from the movies with wide stone staircases leading up to a raised front door. They’re beautiful – every last one. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was creeping around a film set – that any moment, Spiderman would zip by on a web and fire me a quick finger-gun salute.

Annie’s place, when we reached it on the top floor, blew the lid off me. It’s a stone-cold pad. It’s the kind of place the word pad was invented for. I do not live in anything you’d ever dream of calling a pad – I live in a Hobbitty ground-floor flat with lots of bookshelves and plants. Annie’s place was all speaker systems and record players and neon ‘GAY BAR’ lights, ash trays and incense, guitars on stands and a big fridge with a sign on it that read ‘EAT MORE VEGIANA’. Two balconies – one on each side – with blossoming trees beyond the windows and daylight and breeze flooding in.

“Holy shit,” I said, wandering around like the kids entering Willy Wonka’s chocolate meadow.

We sat on the balcony and caught up beneath falling white blossom, and passed what remained of the day indoors – me too weary and jetlagged for much else – consuming Haribo and cans of beer. We showed each other songs we’d written on the guitar, raced one another in Mario Kart, swapped stories of new and old friends. Tayler came home from work in the early hours, but by that time I’d long since passed out.