In today’s Post, you can read about “my” New York, my favorite places and what I personally love about the Big Apple.
Yes, I love this town — even the aspects of it that I hate. Like last week’s street closings, cement barriers, stanchions, horses, cop cars, firetrucks, ambulances, motorcycles, black SUVs, escorts, “follow” cars, flashing lights and screeching sirens all day, 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. And mean-looking dudes with dark suits, dark glasses, lapel buttons and bulging hips who talk into their cufflinks. And all for what? Diplomats don’t work. They dip. Mostly into whatever sauce they get at whatever cocktail party.
Going west on 57th, Second Avenue had seven cops. One dodging traffic. The others schmoozing. Third Avenue also had seven cops. Two directing traffic. The others directing those two. Lexington, another seven cops. All forcing us to make way so some yutz from a country the size of a bidet could get through. We wanted to turn right onto Park but couldn’t. Fuzz with riot gear, plastic masks, helmets, flak jackets, guns and billy clubs waved the car on. I ended up so far west that — with apologies to New Jersey — I could smell Newark.
We were all late for appointments, all ended up with tension headaches, all had to get out and walk when traffic didn’t move and vehicles couldn’t get anywhere — all for what? For Khadafy, or however you spell that creep’s name, for Iran’s Ahmadupyourpoop, for Hugo Chavez, may his tribe decrease. We’re taxpayers. We pay US tax, New York state tax, New York City tax, sales tax, real-estate tax, and we’re treated like swine while those real pigs get more freebies than Oscar nominees.
But, like I say, I love New York. I am not one to knock New York. OK, so there’s garbage on the street. But that just shows we’re a great city. Look how much food we have. Or had.
But minus a few things like noise, pollution, rudeness, crowding, crime, the Second Avenue non-subway, high prices, low politicians, cabbies who don’t speak English, salesladies who don’t speak at all, our representatives who never ever stop speaking, are we not just the absolute greatest place on this earth?
There are so many New Yorks in this one city. The other night I went downtown. A drag show. Guys with less hair on their faces than I have were entertaining a joint jammed with customers of a certain persuasion. Same night uptown on the West Side, a poetry reading. Boy, was this group different. They were into the Bard, not the boobs. And none had hairless chins. Not even the women. Same night, a warehouse near Chelsea scheduled a chess match with four Russians who wouldn’t have looked up even if the city had ordered an evacuation.
The Broadway crowd has its own hangouts, its own discussions. Own lingo. Own guest lists. Own idols. And its own code, which means they previously sniffed at anyone not from the thittuh until such film types as Hugh Jackman, Daniel Craig, Jude Law, James Gandolfini and Sienna Miller came along. Even now they still look down on whoever doesn’t know a Stanislavsky from a Swarovski.
There’s the fast-food lunch crowd who dine walking, on the go, from plastic containers, and the hot-dog-pretzel-falafel-off-a-cart group. Then we have the skinny ladies who, when they wear a sweater all, it will do for them is make them itch. They eat leaves, and though the quantity is not even enough to burp, this type needs white tablecloths at Le Cirque.
Going from delis to Dalis, there’s the culture establishment. Say, for instance, a Sotheby’s art auction. That’s older gents in three-piece suits who can tell an El Greco from an El Crappo at 20 paces. The opera. That’s ladies of a certain age featuring clothing of a certain age with dentures of a certain age. The “in” clubs around the Meat Market district? That’s young females with bra straps as the main accessory and the kind of wardrobe that if it fits, it’s last year’s.
Fashionistas whose birth certificates were written on a bugle bead are a whole other ballgame. But then there’s those who go to ballgames and who look like a page torn out of GQ and to whom dressing means mayonnaise. We got us the stand-up comedy-club aficionados, horse people, sports people, balletomanes, health fanatics, the OTB crowd. We got Bolsheviks, we got capitalists.
We’ve got the hunters who’ve been married so often, the wedding dress is their native costume. The blond divorcees who are real-estate brokers and interior decorators. The bookish set whose literary output includes “How to Build a Swamp” and “Brain Surgery Self-Taught.” We go from jazz aficionados to the do-gooders who’ll work for the Care and Feeding Of Athlete’s Foot or raise funds for a gala to heal paper cuts if it means they can wear a new schmatta. Of course our city still boasts a few thieves — but crime is down. Possibly because we’ve run out of victims.
Because of high unemployment, a new cell has sprung up. Efficiency experts. They’re suddenly everywhere, like crabgrass. I know one guy who’s so efficient, when he was in business he went broke during the boom — and HE’S advising three firms.
At least today New York is back to its original quirky New Yorkness. Those UN bums have cleared out. And the best news is they did not go empty-handed. They took Khadafy with them.