Anthology
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Well, the hotel booking agent at JFK told me he could put me in a room for a $100 a night. I told him thanks, but I’d find a cheaper way. He told me good luck, sarcastically.
Self-reliance.
There is a certain self-mockery which must be entertained when traveling this way, while foolishly bargaining with God for standby chance passage over the Atlantic, carrying your heavy and uncomfortable bags through drizzly foreign streets, racing to catch erratic trains, and now, finally, alone and at the last leg, riding the New York subway on the Fourth of July as the day approaches sunset, all of your possessions clutched defensively as sweat permeates your clothes and the only thing that you can think of, before eating, before calling home, before sightseeing, is finding some place where you can keep your things and sleep for the night.
I had the phone numbers of several hostels, but they were all booked. So I asked for more numbers that they might have. Finally, a man with an Indian accent told me he had a bed open for $22.00. I asked him for subway directions.
I returned to the subway, now with a sense of relief, and sat quietly watching people but not making eye contact. Many spoke Spanish and I tried to understand what they were saying. The car was crowded and I was the only white passenger.
As the train came to a stop, I grabbed my large bag and pushed my way to the doors. The whole ride had been a continued cycle of resisting the compulsion to look at my map, then succumbing to it, unfolding, then reassured, refolding, then again, the horrible nervous compulsion. It wore out quickly with rough and frequent handling. But at last I left the dingy ripe human smell of the over-occupied car and stepped into the dank basement smell of the vast concrete underground. I climbed the steps and stepped into the heart of Manhattan and smelled the rain and looked at the sun’s reflection off heavy clouds.
The streets were dark and empty. I had expected constant streams of cars screaming down the street, but instead, I was shaken by the sparse traffic. I only saw a few people as I walked, and their appearances made me question what kind of neighborhood I was in. But I decided that it would be dark soon, and it was too late to find another place, and that I could tough it out.
I found the place on the corner of 77th and Broadway, and studied its exterior. It was a tall old building and was covered in scaffolding. The entrance had a navy awning with white letters that read “Hotel Belleclaire.”
Inside were two reception desks. One was for a hostel that was housed in the same building that I had called. There were marker boards and bulletin boards full of fun activities and tours to go on at discounted rates. They accepted youths from other countries only, though.
On the left was the “International House.” I don’t know why it was called that. They had no boards and no activities and accepted anyone with $22.00 and a small deposit. The receptionist was a young, attractive heavy-set woman who told me that if I hurried, I could make it to the East River for fireworks, which started at nine.
I heaved my enemy, the bag, up a narrow, creaking staircase and found my second story room. I unlocked the dead bolt and entered an even narrower hall with two doors —one at the end of the hall and one halfway down on the right. As I passed the door on the right I read a sheet of notebook paper taped to the door with the words “Bathroom in here” printed on it. I opened the door at the end of the hall and entered what was new home base.
I felt, as I ventured into the core of this strange hotel, that I was connecting nicely with Eliot’s “Preludes,” as the day truly did feel like “The burn-out ends of smoky days” and that I was the “grimy scraps of withered leaves” somehow blown into this unknown place. I sighed as I surveyed the room, finding six bunk beds and one dresser, which was covered in all kinds of junk. There was one fan and one window, through which I could only see a fire escape and a dark building. As I would later learn, the window would only open halfway before its warped, beige painted wood jammed itself stuck. And the fan, sadly, only served tortuous decorative purposes. Oh, it was hot and the walls themselves seemed victims to a dry sweat, as beige paint was peeling off the walls in circular clusters, revealing the old soiled dermal white paint.
No one was in the room and three beds had new sheets on them and no bags, so I chose the top bunk closest to the door. It felt less confining and I hoped less hot. I heaved the enemy on the bed and took out some cooler clothes and headed to the East River, though I had no idea where it was.
Walking the streets was peaceful and leisurely without the burden of the wide-strapped beast and the pressing anxiety to find sleeping quarters. The sky was heavy and the air full of drizzle and I walked through it tired but content, following the masses of people who merged from the underground and other directions, heading towards the explosions and bright colors in the sky until I met the dense wall of Americans who bombarded the river’s shore.
After that, on my way to find a place to eat, I stopped by a pay phone. I hadn’t spoken to any of my friends back home in over a month, and I tried calling two of them, but only got their answering machines, so I told their machines that I was back in America and to have a happy Fourth.
I continued meandering through Manhattan, looking at things that I had seen on television, realizing that I was really on more of a Seinfeld pilgrimage than anything. I returned to the hotel at one o’clock, completely exhausted, having been up and moving for about thirty hours straight.
From the light of the inner hallway, I could tell that there were four people in bed. I found my flashlight and semi-organized my things. The man who was below me was sitting up, hugging a radio with earphones. After a few minutes, he put the radio away and introduced himself to me. We spoke in low tones, to avoid waking the others. He said that his name was Frank, and I noticed that he had a French accent. He looked about twenty-five and was tall and solidly built with round shoulders. His skin was brown and he had dark freckles across the bridge of this flat nose. His clothes were nice, and on his bed I noticed a felt brown fedora with a black band sitting on top of a pile of clothes and newspapers and a book that said “Portuguese Grammar.”
All in whispers, he informed me that he was from Dijon but had traveled extensively his whole life. He became excited when I told him that I was from Texas. Like every other European, at the mention of Texas he said “Yee-Haw” and “Cowboys!” I gave him the obligatory smile and nod as I accepted the mythic stereotype and told him that my cowboy hat wouldn’t fit on the plane, gosh darnit.
We talked a while about different places, and I told him about my trip, and he celebrated New York but missed France and his family there, and then he wanted to know all there was about Texas, and so on, so I did my best to answer his questions.
He said, “I’ve spent time in Louisiana. Have you been there?”
I told him I had practically spent all my summers there as a kid with my grandparents. Frank said, “I prefer Louisiana to any other place that I have ever been, and I’ve been to many places. Very beautiful. The best is that they never rush. You ask for something, and they are like”—in a slow drone complete with arm motions as if he were removing a box of red beans and rice from a shelf—“Oh, here-you-are-sir.” He laughed infectiously and I happily joined him. “And everyone is so nice. Everyone you pass on the street will say ‘How are ya?’” Frank smiled widely as he remembered. Then the smile faded as he said flatly, “But in New York, no one speaks, no one really cares.”
He paused for reflection, I suppose, and I threw my bag to the floor and climbed into bed and pulled the sheet over me. He stood there, still talking about Louisiana.
“Yes Jake, I would love to live down there. But I cannot work there. No good paying jobs. But here, I will find a good one, soon.”
I turned off my light. I was tired and no longer felt like talking.
“I can speak Cajun too, you know, along with French, English, German, and some Portuguese.”
“Yeah?”
“You bet—it’s so easy. Only an old form of French you know. Do you want me to say something in Cajun for you?”
“Why not?”
“Well what do you want to hear?”
“How ‘bout ‘We’re going to party ‘til the sun comes up?’”
He looked puzzled at first but then collected himself and spit something out that was choppy but Frenchy enough for me and I congratulated him and told him that he was a regular coon-ass, which confused him until I assured him that I was being complimentary, and that I was all lost to my own legitimate Cajun heritage because I would always say “crawdad” instead of “crawfish” and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it. It was late, and I was mumbling into sleep.
In the night, carbon dioxide wrestled oxygen to the floor and pinned it under intense humidity, and sweaty temperatures, and thick odors, and the less than harmonic snores of heavy breathers. After a few hours of sleep induced by sheer exhaustion, I laid awake, sweaty and sticky. I discarded my sheet and tried to position myself away from the wet sweat spots I produced while sleeping.
There was no shade on the window, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I could see the room easily by the bright moonstrokes. I found myself fascinated and terrified by the man in the lower bunk next to Frank’s. He was extremely large and looked beastly. His head was huge and dark skinned, and he had thick fat lips that protruded forward and a black beard. The man seemed to be completely enclosed in fur. From the very top of his head, where there was a circular bald spot, to his shorts, he was covered in hair. It was black and arranged in tightly knotted twists. It seemed to rise half an inch off his back and shoulders, thinning only near his elbows and knees.
He was a terrible looking man. His body was large and cruel, even in slumber. He was the giant in fairy tales who scares children then eats them: scowling face, broad shoulders, hams for arms, barrel for a chest, and a big child eating stomach that didn’t make him look fat, only large. The only dainty thing about the man was that he wore socks in bed, and at that, they were a pair of those effeminate white ankle socks, complete with a red stripe right across the top.
So I passed in and out of sleep for hours. When I woke, I would look at the ogre, as I called him, or would look at the white cracked ceiling, exhausted and trying every trick I had ever used to force myself into sleep. A lack of circulation, which made the room musky, and with six people, air scarce, made me greatly despise the mocking irony of the ornamental fan, only feet away, laughing.
I woke for the last time at five and lay there an hour before I decided that there would be no more sleep. I took a shower in the private room where a man a woman slept and then left my room as the sun was beginning to penetrate the clouds and shine through windows. I look at the faces of the people in the room: two women and three men. Their faces were hard even in sleep.
At two o’clock I returned to the room to get some papers that I needed to plan my flight home. Onle ye ogre was in the room, and he still lay in bed, still in his shorts and socks. He was awake and his eyes followed me around the room. The room was well lit with sunshine, and the day was beautiful. I hurried, but accidentally made eye contact with him, so I asked him how he was.
“Good. And you?” he also had a French accent. He sat up and put his feet on the floor and extended an enormous hand towards me to shake and said, “I am Michel.” He asked me where I was from and was pleased to know I was from Texas, as his dark brow lit and he said, “Oh yes, you do sound American!”
He said that he had been in the hotel for a week and that I was the first American that he had seen here. I let the conversation drop as I rummaged through my bag, but felt his look, his wanting me to talk to him, and I decided that even if he was the ogre, he seemed nice enough and I realized that I had barely spoken all day anyway. So we made small talk about this and that, and I learned that he was from France but that he always changed the subject instead of talking about himself. He asked me my business in New York, and I told him that I had been traveling in Europe and had never seen it but had always wanted to. He then grew thoughtful and said, “on your travels, did you visit France?”
“No. Only at night, on a train.”
“But France is a beautiful country, full of fine culture. Gorgeous. Why did you not stay?”
I told him that World Cup soccer had packed the country with tourists and that it would have been too expensive and difficult to find a place to stay. Another time, I said, a time when I might know some French, too.
The Hotel Belleclaire
I had made no preparations for the weekend. I guess I was trying to be a survivor or something like that. Somewhere, on the road, my concept of self-reliance twisted into some sort of neglectful, reckless spontaneity which produced only anxiety at first but later did turn out to be a greater sense of confidence.
Well, the hotel booking agent at JFK told me he could put me in a room for a $100 a night. I told him thanks, but I’d find a cheaper way. He told me good luck, sarcastically.
Self-reliance.
There is a certain self-mockery which must be entertained when traveling this way, while foolishly bargaining with God for standby chance passage over the Atlantic, carrying your heavy and uncomfortable bags through drizzly foreign streets, racing to catch erratic trains, and now, finally, alone and at the last leg, riding the New York subway on the Fourth of July as the day approaches sunset, all of your possessions clutched defensively as sweat permeates your clothes and the only thing that you can think of, before eating, before calling home, before sightseeing, is finding some place where you can keep your things and sleep for the night.
I had the phone numbers of several hostels, but they were all booked. So I asked for more numbers that they might have. Finally, a man with an Indian accent told me he had a bed open for $22.00. I asked him for subway directions.
I returned to the subway, now with a sense of relief, and sat quietly watching people but not making eye contact. Many spoke Spanish and I tried to understand what they were saying. The car was crowded and I was the only white passenger.
As the train came to a stop, I grabbed my large bag and pushed my way to the doors. The whole ride had been a continued cycle of resisting the compulsion to look at my map, then succumbing to it, unfolding, then reassured, refolding, then again, the horrible nervous compulsion. It wore out quickly with rough and frequent handling. But at last I left the dingy ripe human smell of the over-occupied car and stepped into the dank basement smell of the vast concrete underground. I climbed the steps and stepped into the heart of Manhattan and smelled the rain and looked at the sun’s reflection off heavy clouds.
The streets were dark and empty. I had expected constant streams of cars screaming down the street, but instead, I was shaken by the sparse traffic. I only saw a few people as I walked, and their appearances made me question what kind of neighborhood I was in. But I decided that it would be dark soon, and it was too late to find another place, and that I could tough it out.
I found the place on the corner of 77th and Broadway, and studied its exterior. It was a tall old building and was covered in scaffolding. The entrance had a navy awning with white letters that read “Hotel Belleclaire.”
Inside were two reception desks. One was for a hostel that was housed in the same building that I had called. There were marker boards and bulletin boards full of fun activities and tours to go on at discounted rates. They accepted youths from other countries only, though.
On the left was the “International House.” I don’t know why it was called that. They had no boards and no activities and accepted anyone with $22.00 and a small deposit. The receptionist was a young, attractive heavy-set woman who told me that if I hurried, I could make it to the East River for fireworks, which started at nine.
I heaved my enemy, the bag, up a narrow, creaking staircase and found my second story room. I unlocked the dead bolt and entered an even narrower hall with two doors —one at the end of the hall and one halfway down on the right. As I passed the door on the right I read a sheet of notebook paper taped to the door with the words “Bathroom in here” printed on it. I opened the door at the end of the hall and entered what was new home base.
I felt, as I ventured into the core of this strange hotel, that I was connecting nicely with Eliot’s “Preludes,” as the day truly did feel like “The burn-out ends of smoky days” and that I was the “grimy scraps of withered leaves” somehow blown into this unknown place. I sighed as I surveyed the room, finding six bunk beds and one dresser, which was covered in all kinds of junk. There was one fan and one window, through which I could only see a fire escape and a dark building. As I would later learn, the window would only open halfway before its warped, beige painted wood jammed itself stuck. And the fan, sadly, only served tortuous decorative purposes. Oh, it was hot and the walls themselves seemed victims to a dry sweat, as beige paint was peeling off the walls in circular clusters, revealing the old soiled dermal white paint.
No one was in the room and three beds had new sheets on them and no bags, so I chose the top bunk closest to the door. It felt less confining and I hoped less hot. I heaved the enemy on the bed and took out some cooler clothes and headed to the East River, though I had no idea where it was.
Walking the streets was peaceful and leisurely without the burden of the wide-strapped beast and the pressing anxiety to find sleeping quarters. The sky was heavy and the air full of drizzle and I walked through it tired but content, following the masses of people who merged from the underground and other directions, heading towards the explosions and bright colors in the sky until I met the dense wall of Americans who bombarded the river’s shore.
After that, on my way to find a place to eat, I stopped by a pay phone. I hadn’t spoken to any of my friends back home in over a month, and I tried calling two of them, but only got their answering machines, so I told their machines that I was back in America and to have a happy Fourth.
I continued meandering through Manhattan, looking at things that I had seen on television, realizing that I was really on more of a Seinfeld pilgrimage than anything. I returned to the hotel at one o’clock, completely exhausted, having been up and moving for about thirty hours straight.
From the light of the inner hallway, I could tell that there were four people in bed. I found my flashlight and semi-organized my things. The man who was below me was sitting up, hugging a radio with earphones. After a few minutes, he put the radio away and introduced himself to me. We spoke in low tones, to avoid waking the others. He said that his name was Frank, and I noticed that he had a French accent. He looked about twenty-five and was tall and solidly built with round shoulders. His skin was brown and he had dark freckles across the bridge of this flat nose. His clothes were nice, and on his bed I noticed a felt brown fedora with a black band sitting on top of a pile of clothes and newspapers and a book that said “Portuguese Grammar.”
All in whispers, he informed me that he was from Dijon but had traveled extensively his whole life. He became excited when I told him that I was from Texas. Like every other European, at the mention of Texas he said “Yee-Haw” and “Cowboys!” I gave him the obligatory smile and nod as I accepted the mythic stereotype and told him that my cowboy hat wouldn’t fit on the plane, gosh darnit.
We talked a while about different places, and I told him about my trip, and he celebrated New York but missed France and his family there, and then he wanted to know all there was about Texas, and so on, so I did my best to answer his questions.
He said, “I’ve spent time in Louisiana. Have you been there?”
I told him I had practically spent all my summers there as a kid with my grandparents. Frank said, “I prefer Louisiana to any other place that I have ever been, and I’ve been to many places. Very beautiful. The best is that they never rush. You ask for something, and they are like”—in a slow drone complete with arm motions as if he were removing a box of red beans and rice from a shelf—“Oh, here-you-are-sir.” He laughed infectiously and I happily joined him. “And everyone is so nice. Everyone you pass on the street will say ‘How are ya?’” Frank smiled widely as he remembered. Then the smile faded as he said flatly, “But in New York, no one speaks, no one really cares.”
He paused for reflection, I suppose, and I threw my bag to the floor and climbed into bed and pulled the sheet over me. He stood there, still talking about Louisiana.
“Yes Jake, I would love to live down there. But I cannot work there. No good paying jobs. But here, I will find a good one, soon.”
I turned off my light. I was tired and no longer felt like talking.
“I can speak Cajun too, you know, along with French, English, German, and some Portuguese.”
“Yeah?”
“You bet—it’s so easy. Only an old form of French you know. Do you want me to say something in Cajun for you?”
“Why not?”
“Well what do you want to hear?”
“How ‘bout ‘We’re going to party ‘til the sun comes up?’”
He looked puzzled at first but then collected himself and spit something out that was choppy but Frenchy enough for me and I congratulated him and told him that he was a regular coon-ass, which confused him until I assured him that I was being complimentary, and that I was all lost to my own legitimate Cajun heritage because I would always say “crawdad” instead of “crawfish” and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it. It was late, and I was mumbling into sleep.
In the night, carbon dioxide wrestled oxygen to the floor and pinned it under intense humidity, and sweaty temperatures, and thick odors, and the less than harmonic snores of heavy breathers. After a few hours of sleep induced by sheer exhaustion, I laid awake, sweaty and sticky. I discarded my sheet and tried to position myself away from the wet sweat spots I produced while sleeping.
There was no shade on the window, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I could see the room easily by the bright moonstrokes. I found myself fascinated and terrified by the man in the lower bunk next to Frank’s. He was extremely large and looked beastly. His head was huge and dark skinned, and he had thick fat lips that protruded forward and a black beard. The man seemed to be completely enclosed in fur. From the very top of his head, where there was a circular bald spot, to his shorts, he was covered in hair. It was black and arranged in tightly knotted twists. It seemed to rise half an inch off his back and shoulders, thinning only near his elbows and knees.
He was a terrible looking man. His body was large and cruel, even in slumber. He was the giant in fairy tales who scares children then eats them: scowling face, broad shoulders, hams for arms, barrel for a chest, and a big child eating stomach that didn’t make him look fat, only large. The only dainty thing about the man was that he wore socks in bed, and at that, they were a pair of those effeminate white ankle socks, complete with a red stripe right across the top.
So I passed in and out of sleep for hours. When I woke, I would look at the ogre, as I called him, or would look at the white cracked ceiling, exhausted and trying every trick I had ever used to force myself into sleep. A lack of circulation, which made the room musky, and with six people, air scarce, made me greatly despise the mocking irony of the ornamental fan, only feet away, laughing.
I woke for the last time at five and lay there an hour before I decided that there would be no more sleep. I took a shower in the private room where a man a woman slept and then left my room as the sun was beginning to penetrate the clouds and shine through windows. I look at the faces of the people in the room: two women and three men. Their faces were hard even in sleep.
At two o’clock I returned to the room to get some papers that I needed to plan my flight home. Onle ye ogre was in the room, and he still lay in bed, still in his shorts and socks. He was awake and his eyes followed me around the room. The room was well lit with sunshine, and the day was beautiful. I hurried, but accidentally made eye contact with him, so I asked him how he was.
“Good. And you?” he also had a French accent. He sat up and put his feet on the floor and extended an enormous hand towards me to shake and said, “I am Michel.” He asked me where I was from and was pleased to know I was from Texas, as his dark brow lit and he said, “Oh yes, you do sound American!”
He said that he had been in the hotel for a week and that I was the first American that he had seen here. I let the conversation drop as I rummaged through my bag, but felt his look, his wanting me to talk to him, and I decided that even if he was the ogre, he seemed nice enough and I realized that I had barely spoken all day anyway. So we made small talk about this and that, and I learned that he was from France but that he always changed the subject instead of talking about himself. He asked me my business in New York, and I told him that I had been traveling in Europe and had never seen it but had always wanted to. He then grew thoughtful and said, “on your travels, did you visit France?”
“No. Only at night, on a train.”
“But France is a beautiful country, full of fine culture. Gorgeous. Why did you not stay?”
I told him that World Cup soccer had packed the country with tourists and that it would have been too expensive and difficult to find a place to stay. Another time, I said, a time when I might know some French, too.