Day three started with a mean hangover – nausea and general slug-brained pungence, obviously, but twentyfold worse was the beer-fear. I never got post-alcohol anxiety when I was younger, at all. I could take my top off and whirl it above my head, stun everyone around me with a loud and crass story about my own ass, twirl around a stripper pole and wake up in a hedge, and at 9am I’d open my eyes, dust myself down and go about my day. With each creeping year, however, my ability to shrug away such buffoonery diminishes. These days I’m riddled with guilt if I forget what someone’s job is.
I’d been awake for maybe twenty seconds when the memory of the police stop drifted into focus through the fog – and my stomach winced in response. I’d been rather blasé about it at the time, simply thinking it lucky we’d not been slapped with a fine or slung in a drunk tank. In the light of day, however, I cringed and writhed in bed at the night’s antics, remembering the funny looks we’d gotten as we cavorted across train carriages and subway platforms, brawling and hollering. Oh, what a pair of menaces.
Annie, when she woke up, was largely unbothered by all of this.
“I think you have a bit of anxiety you know, boys,” she said, as I sat and wrung my hands. “I’ve thought it before while reading your blog. When I read what you wrote about coming to California for my birthday I was like damn, this boy worries a lot.”
“Almost certainly,” I said.
Annie had work that day, and she was up and out in a blazer and shirt before 9am, seemingly right as rain. I festered another hour or two, until Tayler woke up and we went to a bodega down the street. The guy at the counter didn’t speak much English, so Tayler had to order in broken Spanish. I got two sandwiches, one with pastrami and one with beef and pickle, each the diameter, length and density of my forearm.
When Tayler left for work I spent a few hours on the sofa watching The Mummy, trying to not be anxious. I could have watched a more relaxing film, but when you’re in that state it doesn’t really make a difference what you watch; the Muppets would be just as spooky. I drank water with electrolyte powder from a sachet, showered, and brushed my teeth (which always weirdly helps) – and at 5pm I took the train to meet Annie.
The walk through Brooklyn was nice; it eased my jitters to see green leaves and a father pulling his daughter along in a soapbox car done up with cardboard to look like a helicopter. It took an hour to get into Manhattan; I was looking at the map on my phone as I came above ground, and as I raised my eyes for the final step, I was met with the strange silent jump-scare of the Empire State Building staring down at me, looming over the street from several blocks away. Across the street Madison Square Garden sat in a great circular bulk, and on the corner nearest to me a man stood hawking Bruce Springsteen t-shirts to droves of tourists and businesspeople passing by.
I’d spent fifteen minutes on the corner when I spotted Annie at the opposite side of the intersection in her work blazer, polo and trousers. It’s peculiar seeing her dressed for an office job. It feels a bit like seeing Elton John dressed in a cardigan marking school papers – Mick Jagger in a toll booth. Unlike me, however, Annie doesn’t see the sigh-inducing injustice of lifestyle compromise everywhere she looks.
“Don’t I look sick in my work clothes?” said Annie, as we weaved through the foot traffic of 8th Avenue. “Look at this blazer dude, I’m such a handsome boy.”
We talked about our days as we wound slowly up eight blocks or so, stopping for a beer on the way in a sports bar, to reach what Annie described as the American Wetherspoons – Dave and Buster’s. It’s a giant arcade chain serving cold beer and microwaved fries, soundtracked by a ferociously complex layering of clangs, bloops, fizzes and pumping K-Pop. We spent an hour in there, competing on everything from dance mats and basketball hoops to virtual reality alien-shooting extravaganzas. Annie’s a grumbling loser and a jubilant winner, and far more competitive than me; I beat her at a ball toss, she beat me back at the basketball throw.
We hit the oily warmth of the street afterwards, boozy and energised, and weaved beneath a neon sky to Times Square. The first time I went there, twelve years before, it knocked the breath out of me. A hive of lightning, I called it – somewhere far back in these diaries. This time I took it in my stride a little more, anesthetised by three glasses of beer and three years of crowds and light in London. Still – I defy anyone to be unimpressed by the gleaming great din of it all. You could catch a tan off those ads.
We took photos in the square and read the plaques on the statues there, confused as to how two men we’d never heard of could wind up with memorials in what feels like – when you’re standing in it – the centre of the world. We didn’t hang about long, the crowds were dense and overwhelming and the raft of LED billboards the size of upturned swimming pools are strangely nauseating against the dark of the night. There’s a sinister throb to it, the feeling that all of this, if things were going well for humanity in general – if we were heading in the right direction – probably wouldn’t exist.
We stopped at a souvenir shop on the way out, and I bought a little Statue of Liberty to take home with me. It’s a custom now; after a decade of travelling with nothing to show for it, I’ve decided to be one of those people I always chuckled at, nosing around tat shops looking for keepsakes. I put them all on my desk when I get home. So far alongside my Lady Liberty I have a bust of David from Florence, a small wooden house from Krakow, an Olympic coin from Athens, and of course my little Oaxacan skull. They look a bit tacky, to be honest, sitting there all together – but they will remain there until I figure out something else to do with them.
We took a train to the middle of Little Italy after the square, walked the length of it, and chose a still-open restaurant to sit outside – it was approaching midnight. A bottle of wine cost $50, but we said to hell with it and split one anyway over lasagne, talking about music and art and New York and ex girlfriends. After, we hit a dodgy bar a few blocks over for an hour, before Tayler called us to say she’d finished work. We took a cab back to the Village.
We bumped into Tayler and her colleague – I forget his name but I want to say Mike – waiting on a corner; Tayler hid behind some bins and jumped out to scare Annie. I chatted to Mike as we made the long walk to the East Village, but couldn’t find too much common ground – he was very handsome and cool and tattooed and confident, and my usual self-deprecating humour and whimsical observations never charm people like that; I always feel I come off as insecure and boring. It was often the same in Berlin – cool people who know magazine photographers and strippers aren’t interested in listening to your ponderings on what the statues in Times Square were about. Mike and Tayler between them seemed to know everything there was to know about the Village – what nights were on, who was partying where, who was shagging who, which cocktail bars made the best Manhattans. There was a lot of gossip about chefs and bartenders and club owners, and I found I couldn’t contribute anything more than the occasional chuckle.
Annie, bless her, must have noticed this, because she tried to throw me a bone.
“Dan has tattoos,” she said, out of nowhere. “Don’t you?”
“Er, well,” I said. “I’ve got one.”
“Oh, right,” said Mike.
She does this often, the kindly numpty – tries to big me up to people, show them what she sees in me, show me off, get me laid. Often, however – although Annie has many fabulous qualities I wouldn’t list ‘tact’ as one of them – she accidentally shines a weird spotlight on me when I’m least expecting it, and neither I nor the other person in the conversation know how to respond.
“Don’t you think he looks like Jude Law?” I remember her saying once, as I chatted to a girl in a greenroom in Manchester. “But like, you know, a bit more rugged.”
The girl looked at the two of us in response, and answered with a polite laugh that I could only interpret as meaning: ‘no’.
*****
After a long jaunt, we arrived at a bar in a trendy, boho part of the East Village. The streets were too pretty; all those red bricks and old signs and rusting fire escapes cascading down to the second floor. The bartender – a tall, viking-looking man with a big beard and pigtails – greeted his friends and poured us beers with whisky chasers that I didn’t want or need but drank anyway. We sat at the bar and drank and talked, and I learned Mike owns 58 guitars.
“Fifty eight?” I asked.
“Yeah dude.”
I struggled not to ask the obvious question – why? – and instead went for the safer route:
“What kind of music do you play?”
“A mix of things,” said Mike. “Shoegaze, noise, ethereal wave. You know, like Zip Buggow, the Hoolies, Frederick L Sloane, the Twains.”
“Right, yeah,” I said, not having a fucking clue what any of the last fifteen words had meant.
Jesus – was I really so uncool? Fuck, man – I like music too! A lot! I’ve played guitar since I was twelve! I was in a band for four years, god dammit. But then – I do listen to a lot of the same stuff. A lot of old stuff. You can’t sit in a gloomy hip bar and say you’ve really gotten into the Beatles recently, can you?
I asked what shoegaze was, giving up on trying to appear culturally knowledgeable, and Mike invited me out for a smoke. We stood in the street and the viking barman joined us, and the two soon got into an energised conversation about their sex lives.
“Yeah, so I’d seen her around the bar a couple of times,” said Mike, “and she comes up to me and asks if I’ll join her and her husband in their hotel. She offered twenty grand.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Right? Like, I can make that in like, a week with tips.”
I think he misinterpreted my ‘Jesus’.
“Twenty grand, man?” said the viking. “I’d do it for less. Hell, I’ve done it for less.”
“Oh yeah?” said Mike.
“Yeah this chick offered me like a thousand bucks to fuck her and let her boyfriend watch, so I was like yeah sure.”
I stood like a fish out of water (not that fish stand), eyes ticking back and forth between the two men. My love life in London is – well, if there was a word stronger than ‘dead’, I’d use it. A peck on the cheek gives me a rush of much-craved oxytocin these days; a hug gets my heart racing. I’ve simply not had the desire to date, nor the resources – financial, emotional, physical, social. I can’t bring myself to use dating apps – they’re so reductive and depressing – and I so rarely feel attracted to anyone I meet in the wild. I tell myself it’s fine, that I’ll find love eventually, everyone does – but as the months creep by, you can’t help but wonder.
And sex – well, after an explorative youth, at 33 I’m not particularly interested in sex if it’s not with someone I feel a deep connection with – and it’s been a very long time since that happened. No, I’m not interested in casual sex these days – too often I’ve seen first-hand the mess such thoughtless dalliances can cause, and as a result, rightly or wrongly, I now associate lustful feelings with wrongness, badness, shame – a lack of control. Hence the love-seeking. True, meaningful, loving sex is the only form I’ve experienced it in which there are truly no downsides.
And yet – I couldn’t help noticing how I envied the two men their escapades. I suppose it just sounds very exciting in theory, doesn’t it, all that lascivious adventuring, even if you know deep down that it doesn’t solve anything. I suppose there was also the notion of being desired – and, though I have learned that sex is not a route to self worth, I still occasionally feel the vague yearning for a throwaway encounter, just to feel assured I’ve ‘still got it’. This yearning, however, is never strong enough to act on – and so I wait, and wonder, and hope, and tell myself it’s okay – that it’s only a matter of time. Focus on the other stuff – the writing, the self improvement, the learning – and the rest will come when it comes.
I found myself thinking of the Beats again, listening to the bartenders swap stories in the depths of the Village at night – distant sirens wailing, crawling taxis, neon glinting off darkened shop windows, shouts from bars and peals of wild laughter. “This is the night,” wrote Kerouac. “This is what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
That was true of me, once. I feel today, though, that I have quite a lot to offer beyond confusion. Loyalty, friendship, support, kindness, laughter, random literary quotes sprinkled into conversations at poignant moments, texting ‘I’m here for you’ at 3am when a friend needs a shoulder to cry on. Duty – the role I play among family and friends and society at large. The confusion remains, yes – but these days, it’s only one facet of many. And though I do still feel the call of debauchery, the pull of long dark nights and twisting corridors – I wouldn’t make an exchange of it for what I have now.