It took us three goes at asking passing cab drivers if they knew where the venue was before we decided to book a car, which is possible because we’re in New York. More specifically, we were in Brooklyn the first night of the three-week ‘holiday’ we’re currently on (‘we’ being me, the boy and an old friend) and our night-saving driver Wendy knew exactly where we were headed because, as she told us, she’d been driving around New York for ten years. We got in and, with that, it seemed we were now besties – so much that she proceeded to call her friend and tell him or her all about her kids’ problems, her money problems and that the combination of the two meant she felt helpless, all in our presence.
She gave us her number in case we needed to call her directly to come pick us up and we got out at a dead quiet industrial block somewhere between Greenpoint and Bushwick and made for the only place with noise coming out of it. It was the venue’s first night and it turned out it wasn’t really a venue as such at all, but someone’s top-level apartment with a stage built in and access to an adjoining rooftop. (And the men’s toilet was a doorway that led out to another level of the roof, which seemed somehow genius at the time, though perhaps I should have prefaced our ride with Wendy by explaining that we’d spent the previous two hours in bars around Bedford Ave, including the Greenpoint Tavern, which sells litre beers in giant Styrofoam cups.)
An local band called Small Black were already playing and the name wasn’t entirely lost: kind’ve ‘80s NYC street-scene post-punk beats with a wash of reverb but all in a cleaner, minimal dance way. They were followed by a San Franciscan band called Lemonade, who played kind’ve indie jungle punk beats.By the time they’d finished, I’d run into a girl from back home who’d been living in New York the past year or so; been preached the happy-making nature of the good Lord by a girl flailing around to the music by herself on the roof; talked the finer points of burger-cooking with a guy manning a BBQ; been approached to pose for a photo shoot about redheads and had a conversation with a stranger about job loss and the recession.
The following night we were in the East Village at Mars Bar, the only of the original punk dives still standing in Manhattan and still divey to the last. Pissing on the roof was more hygienic, but they have a long bar with stool, a jukebox packed with old punk and pour extremely ‘decent’ whiskeys, so we were good for however long it took the urge for a slice of margarita to take hold. Outside, I got talking to a guy named Ryan, who couldn’t get in because he was a few months off turning 21 in a city that is surprisingly diligent about checking identification. Ryan lived in Queens and was walking around down in the East Village on a Saturday night for “something to do”. His something to do turned out to be slouching around with a few Australians outside a dive bar, soon joined by a dude from Jersey, an old rasta who sold bud for a living and a dude who was either wasted or from Ireland – either way, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Ryan was soon telling us that he didn’t much like school, wanted to go to Berlin and that Queens was only worth visiting if you like suburban malls and wack people.
I serendipitously ran into a New Yorker I’d met once at a house party in Australia about a year ago just as we were all getting locked out of Mars at 4am who informed us of the shocking news that there’s nowhere to go in Manhttan after four thanks to “fucking Giuliani” (a phrase that was then repeated by about four of his ‘posse’). So we went and ate pierogi in a diner around the corner and took a stroll through Tompkins Square Park, the site of major demonstrations and riots dating back to its opening in 1850. It was completely empty and the irony of it occurred to me: this was the first time we’d experienced silence or vacancy since our arrival.
It’s nearly impossible to escape people in New York.It’s also not impossible to run into people you know and feel like it’s a small world in a city of eight million. And the way people who live here deal with that is by living together. Really living together. I’ve never had more personal interactions with strangers over a single weekend. Or more Brooklyn Lager, which is possibly the other way people here cope.
From September 2009
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