I Belong on the Cover of ‘Tard Magazine
When you’ve become accustomed to working from 8:30 in the morning to 6:30, 7:00 or 7:30 at night, the greatest thing about unemployment is the amount of free time it gives you. When I was told that my job was being eliminated, I felt the emotional shock arrow hit me in the chest as I thought, “I’m unemployed. Who could love me?” When the jolt lifted and I remembered that I’d been miserable for the entire two and a half years that I’d worked there, I realized that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. That job was killing me. Now I had severance, department of labor unemployment and two and half months worth of transit check unlimited metro cards. Was this ever sweet.
And now that I’d been emancipated from that midtown gulag, I finally had plenty of time to sleep, go out, look for a new job, and any tasks or errands I may have. Thusly, one Saturday, I woke up to realize that despite the fact that my daily allotted “me” time had been disrupted by three interviews that week, I’d completed any necessary personal tasks I’d had and had been left with nothing to do for the afternoon. And it was nice outside, sunny and cool. I can’t bear to be inside on a weather permitting day, it’s a trait that my mother branded into my brain by screaming it at me every non rainy weekend of my childhood as she shut off the tv and took away my comic books. Ok, so she was right about that, I just wish this had happened today, just so I could say, “Hey Howard Dean, wanna tone down the decibel level?”
Anyway, how to spend the day? I could walk to Best Buy and look at the big screen tv’s, dvd box sets and video games I can’t buy, dreaming about the day I have enough money to afford them. But now that I was unemployed, I could do the same thing just by going to the supermarket. Since I’d picked up my weekly supply of ramen noodles and generic Mac and Cheese the day before, that was out. Hmmmmmm. As I felt the specter of ennui approaching, a thought from the back of my head, one I’d apparently shoved down and tried to bury there, saw its chance to leap forward and be counted. And thusly, for no other reason that I could possibly fathom, I thought, “I think I’ll go to Hoboken.”
This Hoboken thought had obviously been languishing in the recesses of my mind long enough. It had lived in the shadows of ideas like, “I think I’ll go to Avenue A and hang out at Mo Pitkin’s,” “I think I’ll play Resident Evil 4 for an two and a half hours,” and “I think I’ll get stoned, eat salt and vinegar chips and watch Finding Nemo.” Now it was determined to have its day in the id. And the next thing I knew, I’d taken the subway to 14th and 6th and was headed for the PATH station.
I’d been coming to New York City ever since I was a kid and living here for nearly 10 years. In that time, I’d willfully explored or found myself in pretty much every neighborhood in the four boroughs I’d care to (I’m not counting Staten Island, as I don’t consider it part of New York City because you have to take a fucking boat to get there). It’s something I enjoy doing, it’s like exploring the world without leaving your hometown. My last neighborhood adventures had taken me to see the heavily Irish sections of Woodlawn in the Bronx and Woodside in Queens. I was also drawn to Woodside for Donovan’s Pub, which allegedly makes one of the best hamburgers in the city. I found mine to be good but nothing to sing from the top of the Chrysler Building about. But I don’t consider any journey to be a wasted one, plus it gave me a good story to tell a young lady I met soon thereafter. She would later go on to tell me she that was a vegan, but I don’t think she held my six-mile trek for tasty ground slaughtered cow meat against me. And if she did, well that’s living in the real world. I’ve been known to deny friend requests on MySpace because the person listed John Mayer under their favorite music. Even the most open-minded people have their limits.
So after all this time, I hadn’t lost my thirst for adventure, but I was running out of new places to go. One afternoon, I was so desperate to escape the monotonous familiarity of my own neighborhood that I went over to Morningside Heights, the area of northern Manhattan bounded by the Upper West Side and Harlem. My primary motivation was to check out the new Kim’s Mediapolis store on Broadway and 113th Street, but the more notable features of this sub-locale are Columbia University and Barnard College. It’d been about ten years since I’d ventured farther north than 112th Street (the location of Tom’s Restaurant, an essential stop for Suzanne Vega fanatics like myself) and that was to meet a girlfriend, who was a Barnard student. Being hopelessly in love as I was, I wasn’t really paying much attention to anything beyond the 5-foot radius around her body, so going back was essentially an all new experience. Years ago, native residents liked to refer to the neighborhood as “White Harlem,” but now it might be more accurate to call it “Columbiatown.” It’s like a little college town that’s been crane dropped into the big city. It’s cute. And by cute, I mean adorable in a sincere but condescending way. It might be in Manhattan, but it’s not New York. It’s an embassy for 18 to 22 year old diplomats. Nothing wrong with that, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s foreign soil.
Normally, this is as close to leaving the confines of my home state as I like to come. It takes a lot to get me to traverse our borders, being the obvious New York ethno centrist that I am. When I’m watching New York 1 and they get to their regular, “World Beyond New York” segment, I always think the same thing, “There’s a world beyond New York?” The 2004 Presidential election pushed my state bound jingoism even further. My old philosophy had been, “I don’t have to like Bush to love my country.” But after that November, I declared, “I am not an American, I am a New Yorker. I renounce any allegiance with a country who would willfully put that ignorant, corrupt and incompetent man back in power.” But now, over a year later, despite the fact that I’m still dreaming of the day that New York succeeds from the union, I’d actually decided to cross the Hudson River into alien territory. I’d exhausted the hamlets of Father Knickerbocker. I had to accept the fact that if I wanted to continue exploring the new, I’d have to branch out a little.
Hoboken carried the draw of, well, I didn’t know what, but it was close and easily accessible. I’ve always heard people from New Jersey rave about how great Hoboken was, but then again, they were people from New Jersey. An old coworker of mine once gushed with excitement over the new Hoboken apartment he’d just found. “It’s great, it’s so much better than New York, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper, it’s like the Upper West Side across the river.” About six months later, he told me he was moving back to the Upper West Side.
“But I though you loved Hoboken.”
“No, it’s a fuckin’ dump.”
I should have taken that as a warning, but part of why I’d become a happier person over the course of 2005 is the belief that if I want to do something, follow the instinct and do it instead of giving myself excuses not to. Whether it was walking up to a girl cold and introducing myself, singing onstage at an open mike or competing in the Mr. Lower East Side Pageant by doing yoga poses in my underwear in front of the packed crowd at the Bowery Poetry Club, this concept had served me well. Perhaps it was the lure of the unknown or the prospect of finding a McDonald’s where the items on the dollar menu actually cost a dollar, but going to Hoboken was what I wanted to do that day.
I boarded the PATH train and eventually felt the instinctual cruel shiver that told me that I’d broken the state seal and was now in New Jersey. I walked out of the station onto the sidewalk off Court Street and looked around. It looked unsettlingly familiar. I’d been there before, only then, it was nighttime. So this was Hoboken in the daylight. Didn’t make much of a difference as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything to look at. Just a newsstand, traffic light and some kind of bar or restaurant type thing across the street.
So I actually had been in Hoboken once before. Very briefly, and as it should be noted, against my will. After our boss’ Christmas party in Westchester, my friend Bill was driving back to New Jersey with his wife and fellow coworker Nicole, and offered to drop me off in Manhattan along the way. I got a little concerned when Bill’s wife lit a joint and passed it to him while we were rollin’ down the highway, but this dissipated shortly after she passed it to me. Bill handled his herb, plus, all the beer, wine and champagne he’d consumed that evening, well enough to avoid any life-threatening accidents. Unfortunately, his focus failed enough for him to miss the Manhattan exit. When we both realized what he’d done, Bill offered, no, issued, a solution I wasn’t quite expecting.
“Mike, you’re goin’ to Hoboken.”
“I’m going to Hoboken?”
“Yep.”
“But I don’t wanna go to Hoboken.”
“Don’t worry, it’s cool. Nicole lives there, I’ll drop her off and take you to the PATH.”
Bill’s plan came to fruition. I’d never taken the PATH before, but he assured me it was an easy transit system to figure out, and by that point, it was far beyond the level of choice for me. It was several hours past midnight, and I stood by the entrance on the empty, barren street, feeling like a five year old who’d come from the circus only to have his parents leave him in the parking lot and drive off saying, “You find your way home.”
And I said, “Bill, I’m gonna fucking kill you. And I am a smart enough person that I will do it in such a way that your body will not be found and I will never be caught.”
Bill said, “See ya Monday,” and drove off.
Before I could enter the station, I was approached by a young Hasidic man carrying a large plastic garbage bag. The image was more than a little odd and slightly frightening, but he was actually rather polite, “Excuse me sir, do you happen to be Jewish?”
It was 2 o’clock in the morning, 35 degrees outside, and this guy’s out on the town looking for Jews. In spite of my vice laden physical and mental state, or more likely because of it, I found this very amusing. So with great enthusiasm, I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I am.”
“Well I’m from the Chabad Lubavitch, we’re giving away free menorahs to anybody who wants one. All we ask is for is a small donation.”
And I thought, Hey, I don’t have a menorah. I’d like to have a menorah.
“Sure, I’ll take a menorah.” I fished a couple of singles out of my wallet and forked them over, then he reached into his garbage bag and pulled out a menorah made of bent sheet metal and box of menorah candles. I thanked him and made my way into the station.
Once inside, I discovered my gifted IQ was sufficient enough to plan Bill’s murder, but not enough to overcome the double-edged substance blade and figure out how to buy a PATH ticket. The coke-machine styled automatic ticket vendor I’d submitted my dollar to had produced nothing. Admitting failure, I opened my wallet for another go, only to discover it was now empty. Turned out I’d been abandoned in Hoboken with just a few dollars in my pocket, and had unknowingly given all but one of them to menorah boy. Without a transit employee or ATM in sight, I stood there in frozen panic over the prospect of being trapped in this desolate, foreign land that god forgot called New Jersey. Fortunately, I finally noticed a light on the turnstile by the machine that seemed to indicate that my dollar had unlocked it for safe passage. It was my first correct deduction for quite a while, and soon I was on my way back to my safe Manhattan home.
Now, years later, I was standing on virtually the same spot as I was when I threatened Bill’s life and took candles from a stranger. Well, it was time to create some new memories of our little friend across the river. Time to discover the real Hoboken. I crossed the street and continued down the road, desperate to find something worth looking at. To my dismay, but not my surprise, I failed miserably. Mostly just a long concrete side walk and empty walls. Except for the occasional restaurant front, bank entrance and a parking lot, it was more like an oversized alley with traffic lights than an actual street. Eventually I came to a park, but not much there either, except for some children’s swings, monkey bars and a couple of young girls I couldn’t help noticing. They looked about 18, which in these times of mass-distributed milk saturated with bovine growth hormone, meant they were probably about 14 or 15, which meant turn the fuck away and keep walking.
As I prepared to go to hell, I moved off Court Street and shifted over to Washington Street. Apparently this was the cancer-ridden heart of this delightful burg, as it was lined with stores and pedestrians. I headed north, clinging to the hope that I could find something interesting. There were a number of restaurants that might be described as cheap, affordable, modest or shithole, depending on your level of income and condescension. I also spotted a few shops that sold nothing of interest to me, and a whole lot of small run-down convenience stores. I hesitate to call them bodegas because the term always implied New York. These places were in New Jersey, they didn’t have the right to be called bodegas. And as uniformly crappy across state lines as they were, at least New York bodegas had their selling points, like the pot and crack behind the counter, at least in the pre-Guiliani days. I couldn’t imagine these places storing anything illicit that appealed to the general public of Hoboken, except for maybe bootleg cd’s of The Dave Matthews Band.
Venturing further, I saw a building with a large golden statue of a deer outside it. Now here was something interesting. A beautiful animal, big and shiny, and no one around enraged enough by it to smash the Ten Commandments on the ground. Then I got closer and discovered that the building housed Lodge 74 of the Elk’s Club. I’d like to repeat that, THE ELK’S CLUB. The organization with a mission to inculcate the principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love and Fidelity; to recognize a belief in God; to promote the welfare and enhance the happiness of its Members; to quicken the spirit of American patriotism; to cultivate good fellowship. All I really knew about those types of places is what I learned from The Honeymooners and The Flintstones; that apparently they consisted of grown men in stupid hats who used it as an excuse to get away from their wives and drink beer all night, with a chain of command that harked back to the backward days of feudalism. It sounded like a club for middle-aged frat boys who’d advanced thirty years without bothering to grow the hell up. It figures there’d be one here.
Carrying on, I saw a bunch of twenty something dudes drinking on the stoop of one of the many brownstones that lined the street. Or, maybe it wasn’t right to call them brownstones. These were walkups. Brooklyn has brownstones, not New Jersey. A brownstone is a walkup with an attitude; it says, “welcome to my home” but will just as easily shout, “get the fuck off my steps.”
Anyway, these guys were drinking beer out in public, which I gathered from their lack of concern was fine as long as you were behind your gate. Or that in a place as badly in need of an urban defibrillator as this, nothing ever happened to warrant the need for much law enforcement. These guys were clearly future Elksmen; baseball caps, sweater vests, shorts in January, and the self-impressed sneers on their faces that come with their stockbroker commission checks. One of them was even wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. Now, that doesn’t bother me because I’ve been a Yankee fan since I was nine years old and every blood cell that pumps through my veins carries a sheer hatred for the Red Sox. I happen to love the city of Boston and bear no malice against genuine regional Bosox fanatics. It’s the sudden influx of Red Sox paraphernalia that mysteriously appeared on the streets of New York the year the Red Sox won the World Series that makes me lose faith in humanity. It begs the question, was there an unforeseen mass emigration from New England into New York? Did they decide it was time to leave once the curse of the bambino was broken? Or is it more likely that there was a preexisting legion of asshole pseudos that lack the individuality to pick a fucking side and stick with it? If you don’t like sports, fine. If you do, don’t be so transparent that your idea of loyalty and strength of will is to knock over the flower arrangement and jump on the horse in the Winner’s Circle. Especially if you’re a Met fan. No disrespect, but don’t just shift your loyalties up north for the schadenfreude of cheering on the club that makes Yankee fans suffer. It’s not our fault that your team hasn’t won a world series in over 20 years. Well, it kind of is because we beat you in 2000. But regardless of the motivation, the Red Sox hat has become the uniform for the New York phony. If I were from Boston, I’d be pissed about this athletic perversion. As for this guy, it seemed fitting that the lodge wasn’t far down the road. It couldn’t far down the road for him metaphorically either.
I walked as far down Washington as I could bear, desperate to find anything that could have justified the price of my PATH train ticket. But I found no success. When I even glanced around for indicators of signs of life after sundown, there wasn’t much that I could find. Enthused Hobokeners always talk about the active bar scene. Maybe they’re all talking about the same bar. Maybe there was one magic bar in this drought of urban worth that convinced the locals that they shine in the shadow of Manhattan. Yes, Hoboken was just like the Upper West Side, without the sea of pubs, without the good restaurants, without said Tom’s Restaurant, access to Central park, the Museum of Natural History and Lincoln Center. Without the attempt at urban hipness that’s debunked by the yuppie demographic and kept in check by the family domesticity and small town feel, enough to keep it from becoming too unjustly self-impressed. Without all the things that make it a place where I would never live but actually, not such a bad place to visit. Hoboken is a place that actually makes me defend the Upper West Side. I think that says it all.
And when I was passed by a BMW that was blasting some pussy emo band like Taking Back The Brand New Story Of The Hawthorn Heights or whatever, I knew I had to get out of Hoboken as soon as possible. In New York, you’ll often hear hip-hop blaring out of car windows, and it’s fitting. It’s is the music of the streets. Apparently, the music of the streets of Hoboken is Fallout Boy. Emo, screamo, whatever the fuck you want to call it, is not punk rock. It’s the hair-metal of the 21st century. The kind of crap makes a pretense of being the loud, hard and edgy battle cry against the establishment, but is really just a non-threatening genre smokescreen that attracts weak poseurs by convincing them that they’re being rebellious rockers. They’re hardly exclusive to Hoboken, but the German yuppiemobile was the roaming audio proof: they’re here. And judging by everything else I’d seen, probably in great numbers. These are the same people who clog the arteries of downtown Manhattan, looking for their martini lounges and hookah bars. The ones who turned the phrase, “Go back to Jersey” from an astute, observational witticism into one of the most heinous insults you can strike with on the streets of the empire state. They can’t handle life in a real city, but use my home as their playground. And for some reason, for some motivation I could not explain, I had returned the favor. Why did I come here? Why did I do this to myself? Why did I spend three dollars to remind myself why I’m a misanthrope? ‘Cause I’m an idiot, that’s why. I could be home, lying across my bed, drinking iced tea and watching Mythbusters. And not just any episode, an episode with both the cute redhead and the pretty blond with the body who can fix cars. Just as I realized this, I passed a shop that was called “Greetings From Hoboken,” and was forced to wonder, who would send anyone a greeting from Hoboken? Isn’t that an open admission that they’d actually been there? Who would admit to that? I’ll tell ya who. ME, that’s who. In cultural circles, we call this, “suffering for our art.”
I was scampering back to the PATH station with a power walk that could have gotten me on the Olympic track team when I looked up and saw it. The one good thing about Hoboken. The view of New York City. Looming past the Hudson River is a clear shot of southern Manhattan, the sated infrastructure of buildings shooting up out of the smooth surface of the water like a lush garden of steel and concrete blooming from the garden soil. You don’t get to see New York like this when you’re there, it’s a shame that you have to go to New Jersey to do it. Back in August of 2001, while on my way to a concert at Liberty State Park, we surfaced from the PATH station at Exchange Place to see Jersey City in one direction and a breathtaking view of the southern tip of Manhattan in the other. Front and center were the Twin Towers, standing proud and tall like the all-powerful patriarch of architecture. We were in a hurry to catch the Light Rail, but I remember thinking that I’d have to come back there to take some photographs. I had plenty of time because I was off from work the following week, but I never got around to it. Then, just three weeks later, the towers were gone. The view would never be the same again. And I’d missed my chance to capture it. You really don’t appreciate what you have or where you are until you leave it, and maybe you need to do that every once in a while, no matter how painful it is. You know what they say about “when it’s gone.” Maybe there really is no such thing as a wasted journey.
Wasted or not, my travels that day were done. I hopped the PATH to the 6, and made my way back to my apartment. I collapsed onto my bed, grateful to be back to the sanctuary of my New York home, and watched my taped episodes of Mythbusters. They made a crossbow out of rolled up newspaper, homemade glue, a piece of a cafeteria tray and underwear elastic. How fucking cool is that?
