2002-10-29 - 11:44 p.m.

New York, New York

Today, yet again, I went down to the Brooklyn Public Library to do more chess history research. However, unlike the previous times I decided not to waste money on a hotel room down there and just drive out and back on the same day. I was originally quite daunted at the prospect, but I didn't see how it could be worse than my previous bad experiences. As it turns out, the driving today went without a hitch, I didn't get lost once and made good time both out and back.

My main concern was that in order to arrive at the library close to its 9AM opening time I'd have to drive through morning rush hour traffic in Manhattan. I hit my first traffic jam at the start of the Palisades Parkway, but it eventually cleared up. I'd say that traffic added at most 45 minutes to my trip, which is damned good. I got to the library at 10 minutes to 10, but that's mainly because I got a later start than I would have liked.

Driving into Manhattan wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been fearing. I didn't mind getting stuck in traffic at all. I kept thinking: "I'm in morning rush hour traffic in one of the busiest cities in the world, and nobody's killed me yet! Yay! I'm a success!"

I have a healthy fear and respect for city driving.

So I have no tales of travel trauma. I had a pleasant trip, the only bummer being that I was very, very tired toward the end of the trip home, it being 11PM and I'd been up since 5AM. I'd anticipated this, and wasn't worried since once I got to the Thruway, the driving was pretty easy.

On the way back I had a choice. I could have dinner at the Boston Market on 23rd Street the same as the previous two weeks, or I could look up my favorite pizza places in Greenwich Village. Now pizza is totally verboten on this low carb diet, but once again I was operating on the justification that forbidden food is okay just so long as its really hard to obtain. What the heck! Pizza it is!

I'd occasionally had trouble finding the pizza place, because I made the assumption that because it was called St. Mark's Pizza, it was on St. Mark's Place. No, no, no. It's on Astor Place, as it turns out. However, I did remember that it was a couple blocks away from the big Tower Records store on lower Broadway, and knowing where that was I was able to find it pretty quickly. Parking was a little problematic, especially since I was driving such a relatively large vehicle. Still, after a few minutes searching I found a space with a meter about two blocks away.

St. Mark's Pizza is a little hole in the wall, but it's a hole in the wall that's been there for at least 20 years. The inside is long and narrow without many places to sit, but it's really all about the pizza. Frankly a slice of their pizza is the equivalent of 2 slices of any other pizza and two slices would be practically worth 2/3 of someone else's large pizza.

I went in, ordered two slices of mushroom, and the guy asked me if I wanted them off the pizza he had just taken out of the oven. Oh, yes. Please.

I haven't had any pizza at all since Lily went away, and this was so good, I nearly started to cry. Oh my, my. So very naughty, but worth every bite.

While I was munching on my slices I thought about New York City and what it meant to me. In the mid-1980s I used to go down to New York frequently, to visit some high school friends of mine who lived in the financial district, near the World Trade Center. I haven't seen them in years, but one of them called me on the phone a couple weeks ago.

The feeling among my friends was that the logical thing to do with one's life was to get out of Frown Town and move to Manhattan, since that's where the action was. It's simply what was done. For years and years I felt that that's what I should do too, but what would I do there? Write? Act? Who knows?

The trips down to Manhattan were always fun, and I sort of viewed the place as a big amusement park. My friends and I had all sorts of adventures, and I enjoyed living in the Big City vicariously as they told me about their daily lives. However, you VISIT amusement parks, you don't live in them.

On one of my last trips down there, I remember sitting in one of our favorite breakfast hangouts, the Moondance Diner. Yes, this is the very same diner that Mary Jane worked at in the Spider-man movie. What a shock it gave me to see that on the screen! Anyway, I was sitting there, half awake, eating my incredible French toast, while a couple of guys were having an animated conversation behind me. The were talking very aggressively and they had thick New York accents. It suddenly occurred to me that I was never going to move to New York. I really didn't have what it took, the aggression, the drive. People like the guys sitting behind me would just eat me alive. I could never keep up with them.

I eventually stopped going down to New York. Part of it was the fact that my girlfriend at the time, Lilac, really didn't like my friends because they made her feel inferior. Well, everything made Lilac feel inferior. But also to a certain extent I felt like I was losing touch with them myself. As they spent longer living in the city while I lived in Frown Town, I started feeling more and more like their bumpkin country cousin that they had to put up with. We started having less and less in common as our shared past became longer and longer ago. My friends kind of drifted apart and I haven't talked to several of them for five or six years. That's sad, but I have no idea how to get in touch with most of them now.

So trips to New York are partly an exercise in nostalgia for me now. New York: a nice place to visit, but I wasn't able to live there.