Going to Queens.

In New York City
in the middle of July
the air was heavy and wet
the air was heavy, your body was heavy on mine.
I will know who you are yet.
-- The Mountain Goats, "Going to Queens"

I'm going to be honest with you. Like many, if not most, people from those lowly hinterlands known as "the rest of America", my conception of New York City comes almost entirely from movies. Annie Hall, The Godfather, Do the Right Thing, Goodfellas, The French Connection, Ghostbusters . . . the list goes on and on. I've learned of Woody Allen's Coney Island childhood, Don Corleone's Little Italy empire, Spike Lee's kaliedoscopic Bed-Stuy . . . a lot of icons. But I've noticed something: there are movies set in Manhattan (even one named Manhattan), movies set in Brooklyn (Crooklyn comes to mind), movies set in the Bronx (A Bronx Tale, anyone?), even movies set in Staten Island (Saturday Night Fever and Working Girl, famously) -- but there are very few movies set in Queens. I was trying to think of a movie that might give me an image of Queens, and unfortunately for that borough, home of the Mets and the pretty end of the Triborough Bridge, the only one that came to mind was Coming to America:

Semmi: But where in New York can one find a woman with grace, elegance, taste and culture? A woman suitable for a king.
Prince Akeem & Semmi together: Queens!

The joke being, of course, that they end up in a horrible, desolate project block and all the good women are already dating Eriq la Salle. Suffice it to say, this was not a pretty picture to have in mind about a place. In my mind, Queens was a place where people took advantage of Eddie Murphy's sweet nature to rip him off and Samuel L Jackson stuck up fast food joints with elaborate weaponry. So when my cousin said, "Wanna come out with me tonight? I'm gonna go meet some friends and have beer in Queens!", my first thought was, Good God, girl, we're gonna get killed!

But, in the spirit of doing rather than not doing, with it in mind that real life is in fact never as good nor as bad as in the movies, I shoved Coming to America to the back of my mind and we set forth on the subway -- with which, by the way, I am already much-improved. When we emerged in Astoria, just on the eastern brink of Queens, abutting the brackish East River, I discovered something: movies are, for the most part, not true. Just as Mekhi Phifer is as yet to attempt to sell me crack in Brooklyn, and Diane Keaton has not yet bowled me over with a white Volkswagen in Manhattan, so, too, was I not forced to defend myself with a mop handle in Queens. Queens is, in point of fact, quite nice. At least the part where I went was. I'm sure there are less-nice parts of Queens, parts I might yet experience, just as I experienced some of the more dire and frightening areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington when I lived in those places. But Astoria? It seems like a pretty good place to raise a passel of poly-ethnic children. That seems to be what most of its denizens are up to, anyway.

We went to a beer garden, which was packed to the gills. Apparently, this has been one of the coldest summers on record here in New York City, with not a single day pushing into the 90s, and the sun had been out, and it was a Saturday night, so pretty much every piker with a day job had flooded into his or her local, and this place seemed to be the local for a lot of folks. There was music (bad -- the world does not need another yob in a driving cap playing covers of Dave Matthews Songs), there was food (pretty good, though the pierogi had more in common with ravioli than the real deal), there was beer (the selection of which has much improved since the last time I lived back East), and there was a large collection of people with a great deal to say, including a fiercely libertarian soon-to-be lawyer who is making an amateur study of all the synagogues on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a very friendly hippyish sort who informed me that blue was the "color of purity" (in the context of the fact that I was wearing all blue, as I quite frequently am -- don't know about that purity bit), a fledgling financial analyst who had put together the rather odd (and oddly unpopular) double major of psychology and economics in college . . . the list goes on.

But all these brilliant minds together, laid low by pitcher upon pitcher of beer, turned out to be just another group of people who liked to play hackey-sack and hang out in the park, gazing across the silken East River to the Manhattan skyline receding away to the south. New York is a city of islands -- the only borough that is not on an island is the Bronx -- but in Brooklyn it is easy to lose track of that fact, because it is so massive and so massively populated. At the brink of Queens, under the Triborough Bridge, one can get better in touch with the fact that he is disconnected from the mainland, on an island with a few million other like-minded souls, drunkenly staring at the stars.

This Ain't No Time to Get Cute.

It seems like people move to New York with a plan to take the world by storm. Maybe it's not ten steps to the top, but there's a course of action plotted out, an end goal in mind. You know. Small town kid comes to the big city with it in mind to climb to the top.

I realized recently that I, in fact, am not one of those people. In fact, I came here very explicitly without a plan, unsure of what I wanted or what my end goal was, other than to change. I came here with it in mind to become a braver, larger person than I had been. That's all I knew: I didn't much care for the person I had become, a timid, unambitious person easily discouraged by the smallest of failures or obstacles. The kind of guy who talks to a girl at a show for an hour and doesn't get her number. (Sorry about that, Horse Feathers girl. My only excuse is that I was leaving in a day or two anyway.) The kind of person who won't get onstage with a guitar or a story for fear of being laughed at. The sort of person who mistakes defeatism for humility.

So I arrived at JFK International this afternoon with nothing more in mind than to say "yes" where I used to say "no", and do the hard thing where I used to fall back on the easy one. (Well, that and to go to graduate school, but the graduate school was more a reason to come to Brooklyn than anything else.) I had thought I was going to take a cab from the airport to my hotel, but as I walked past the cabbie calling me "sir" in his obsequeous tone and saw a sign for the train, and thought about the $60 fare for the cab ride, I just thought, "Fuck it, I can do this. The signs are in English, the maps are straightforward." So I boarded the train.

I'm not prepared at this point to call it a mistake, but let me put it this way: your first day in New York is no time to get cute. My first mistake, easily corrected, was to debark the Air Train and go stand on the wrong platform for a while. It’s a good thing no train came, because I would have ended up in Rockaway Beach, which is apparently not the hoppin’ center of the universe I had assumed it to be by the sound of it. I had to cross back over to the other platform, to board the A train toward Manhattan (apparently it goes without saying that “toward Manhattan” also means “toward the part of Brooklyn where everything is”, though you could have fooled me). I suppose now would be a good time to give you an inventory of what I had with me:

1. A pair of cheap rolling bags, not waterproof, each containing a shocking percentage of the clothes that I own in the universe, and one containing some shoes and big, heavy books.

2. An extremely dorky backpack containing yet more books, as well as a high ratio of important documents such as chequebooks, passport, and so on, hefting at something on the order of the weight of a golem’s soul.

3. A leather briefcase containing my laptop and various electronic sundries, as well as a couple of notebooks and a book of crosswords.

All told, these things came to something more than a hundred pounds, in my guess. What I discovered in the course of this adventure is that train life contains a lot of stairs. And stairs are hard to negotiate when you’re carrying half your own weight on your back, in your hands, and in your pockets.

So, up the stairs, to the other platform, and onto the A train, thinking to change trains at Franklin, some several miles into town. Only, as I’m sitting there watching Brooklyn flash by like some out-dated movie montage, I start to realize that the closer we get to the center of town, the more prone the train is to skip a stop here and there. At first it’s only one at a time, but then, once we’re underground, they begin to fly by, three, four stops at a go, viewed only as a flash of faraway tile and grumpy faces as our train barrels headlong toward Manhattan. I start to get worried. But I placate myself: surely, there’s no way we’re going to skip a stop where transfers are made, are we?

Well, I was wrong about that. We fly through Franklin, and stop at the next stop. What is there to do? I get off at the next stop, transfer to a train headed back toward the airport, and try to reach Franklin from the other direction.

Are you seeing the mistake I made? Do you see it yet?

Yeah, there it is. Turns out express trains go both ways. Who knew? Not this yokel from the sticks. Back in Portland, we don’t really do subways. Not that we wouldn’t like to, but there isn’t any money, and we have these earthquakes sometimes. So basically, I’m much more at sea than I was willing to admit to myself before. We blow through Franklin again, and I again get off at the next stop, having pieced together now that what I need is a local train, going back the other direction. First I go down to the local platform going the wrong direction, thinking I’ll be able to cross. Then I come back up. You want to know how many stairs there were? I’ll tell you. There were seventeen stairs between the express platform and the local platform. I counted them.

Back up on the express platform, I approach a transit cop with the following distinguishing features: 1) He appears to be about twelve years old, despite 2) the massive scars that spider in vivid pink all across his right cheek and 3) his thick Bronx accent, which, I have to tell you, as a Red Sox fan, I have always associated with the enemy. Anyway, I approach this gentleman, and ask him, desperately, how I get to the other side of the station. He asks where I’m trying to get to. Franklin Station, I say. And he says:

“Shit, you could just walk there. Go upstairs. It’s three blocks.”

Rather than protest, I think, Well, it will be nice to get off the train. So I slog my way upstairs, and realize once I get up there that I failed to ask the following key question: Three blocks in which direction, sir?

Let me tell you: Not the direction in which I walked. I threaded through a very crowded and run-down commercial district that seemed to be peopled largely by recent Caribbean immigrants who sold phone cards and Bob Marley paraphanalia to one another for a living, a district in which I was probably the only white person for several blocks in any direction, and let me tell you, though I did not feel in the least unsafe, a whiteboy in an orange shirt carrying two bags, a dorky backpack and a briefcase with a laptop in it gets some funny looks as he drags himself along the avenue in that part of Brooklyn. Finally, having walked six blocks in the wrong direction, I realized my error, and turned around to try again, the whole time looking at the lowering afternoon sky, thinking, Gosh, I hope it doesn’t start raining.

But I made it to Franklin Station, eventually. Subway stations are, in my experience, unbelievably hot and muggy places that smell faintly of piss and tend to be populated mostly be people with the rough appearance and demeanor of zombies, dotted here and there with the gregarious and/or legitimately insane, who do entertaining things like sing, dance, swear violently, slaver elaborately, or huff as though preparing to blow a house down. Franklin Station, as far as these things go, is unexceptional, and so I spent a long time -- a LONG time -- sweating and trying not to stare at the gentleman in a Miami Heat jersey who was threatening to kill “him”, whoever “he” was -- God, by the sound of it, given the scope of what this person seemed to hold “him” responsible for. But then we boarded the train, which went to Prospect Park, and I felt like I was almost home. Back on track, not that far from my hotel.

It was at Prospect Park station that I discovered that it had begun to rain, politely at first, and then with increasing enthusiasm, progressing onward toward Biblical violence as I negotiated the transfer to my next, and last, train. Oh yes, let me tell you about that: down a hallway, up a staircase, up another staircase, down another hallway, up a staircase, over a street, decide not to take an elevator, turn down an offer of help from an Israeli gentleman I suspect of trying to steal my bag, up thirty-four more staircases, and then get on the wrong train for a second before realizing my error and dashing for the next one and just getting on it. And then, two stops, and voila -- I’m home.

Except not. I got of at 7th Avenue, assuming that my hotel, which is in the 600s on Union, would be not more than half a block west of the subway stop. Oh, so naïve! Such a downy innocent! Turns out nothing is NEARLY that simple around here, and to top it off, the rain has neither abated nor even appreciably relented, AND every few seconds there is a bright flash followed by a percussive clap of thunder, so as I wander through Park Slope -- beautiful neighborhood, by the way, all venerable brownstones and leafy trees -- with no coat, sweating, my glasses sinking a little further toward the tip of my nose with each step, I am alternatley pelted by rain or harrassed by lighting. I’m not usually frightened of thunderstorms, but I’ve got to tell you, this was a bit much.

But, eight long, wet, hot blocks later, I arrived where I was going, and eventually sank gratefully onto a bed in a cool room and stared at the ceiling. After a while, I conceived of a yen for beer, and sprinted out through the rain to a shop about a block away, where I paid rather too much for a beer that wasn’t that great. (Brooklyn Lager, not bad but not worth ten bucks, not even in New York.) As I exited the shop, and glanced to the left after traffic, I noticed something:

A subway stop.

Ah, well. That’s what I get for having no plan, at least on my first day. Here’s hoping the rest of the adventure is somewhat more salubrious. I’m safe and sound now.