The New York Read Online Free
Author: Bill Branger
He is mean, vindictive, and a complete asshole, but those are qualities shared by most of the club owners. Howsoever, George was dumping a salary and it didnât make any sense unless there was a lot more going on that I didnât understand.
While I was hanging around that week, waiting for George to call me with the contract, I did my usual sightseeing.
I have a studio apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Itâs a nice view, of the city and the prices there are about half, so I keep the studio year-round, I was not going to renew the lease that fall, but that changed when George offered me another year at the Dance.
Iâve got a Buick Park Avenue only four years old that Jack Wade sold me down in Houston, and I park it in the open lot of the Holiday Inn up the street from my building. They never check the lot to see whoâs parked there, so it doesnât cost me anything. One nice morning, I drove across the George Washington Bridge into the city and down the West Side Highway to Midtown.
Maybe itâs my Texas eye and appreciation for absurdity, but there are things to love about that city. Like the West Side Highway, which used to go downtown, that now stops at Midtown because the rest of it collapsed a few years ago and everyone thought it would be a good idea not to rebuild it. So they didnât and the traffic just funnels into the city at 56th Street through this gauntlet of black men wielding spray bottles, towels, and window sponges. They insist on washing your car windshield whether you want them to or not, sometimes even when itâs raining. This is car washing through intimidation and it annoys the suburbanites backed up at the lights off the West Side Highway. The car washers usually give me a pass because I got Texas plates and Texas people are crazy about their cars and about not wanting strangers to lay hands on their windshields.
I park in a pay garage on 56th Street. It costs more to park in Manhattan for a day than it does to rent a room at the Motel 6 in Amarillo, which tells you something about both places. After I park the car, I get this spring in my step and go out on the sidewalk to see the parade. It is held every day of the year. I jest wander all over that island, watching the parade. It steps off with a bang on Mondays and itâs dried-up, pale-faced, and crushed in the shoulders by Friday afternoons. Never saw people work so hard as New Yorkers. It makes me tired to watch them, bet itâs a pleasant kind of tired, the way you get when you were a kid in summer and spent the whole day jumping in the swimming hole with your buddies, getting burned deep to a lobster shade and, after everyone is called home, just falling asleep under cool sheets, dreaming little fever dreams. I think about things like that, watching people running around working so hard.
You might think a hick like me goes to country-western bars or wears cowboy boots on Broadway. True, I do wear boots in Texas, bet when in Rome, dress in togas. I leave it to the New York fellas to wear snakeskin boots under their three-piece suits and to top it off with black cowboy hats. I generally wear a nice little corduroy sports coat with leather on the elbows. You might mistake me for a college professor. Charlene says it is the expression I wear when Iâm watching the parade that makes me look like a college teacher she once had, I think it was in modern American literature.
âWhat expression?â I asked her once.
âBemusement. Not unfriendly, just sort of amused and uncomprehending at the same time,â she said.
âYou mean I donât get it?â
âI mean more like no one else gets it, bet thatâs all right, youâre just there to see the show,â she said. When she talks like that, she gets very thoughtful and still. Itâs like sheâs seeing something else when she says it, not me listening to her.
I walked all
While I was hanging around that week, waiting for George to call me with the contract, I did my usual sightseeing.
I have a studio apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Itâs a nice view, of the city and the prices there are about half, so I keep the studio year-round, I was not going to renew the lease that fall, but that changed when George offered me another year at the Dance.
Iâve got a Buick Park Avenue only four years old that Jack Wade sold me down in Houston, and I park it in the open lot of the Holiday Inn up the street from my building. They never check the lot to see whoâs parked there, so it doesnât cost me anything. One nice morning, I drove across the George Washington Bridge into the city and down the West Side Highway to Midtown.
Maybe itâs my Texas eye and appreciation for absurdity, but there are things to love about that city. Like the West Side Highway, which used to go downtown, that now stops at Midtown because the rest of it collapsed a few years ago and everyone thought it would be a good idea not to rebuild it. So they didnât and the traffic just funnels into the city at 56th Street through this gauntlet of black men wielding spray bottles, towels, and window sponges. They insist on washing your car windshield whether you want them to or not, sometimes even when itâs raining. This is car washing through intimidation and it annoys the suburbanites backed up at the lights off the West Side Highway. The car washers usually give me a pass because I got Texas plates and Texas people are crazy about their cars and about not wanting strangers to lay hands on their windshields.
I park in a pay garage on 56th Street. It costs more to park in Manhattan for a day than it does to rent a room at the Motel 6 in Amarillo, which tells you something about both places. After I park the car, I get this spring in my step and go out on the sidewalk to see the parade. It is held every day of the year. I jest wander all over that island, watching the parade. It steps off with a bang on Mondays and itâs dried-up, pale-faced, and crushed in the shoulders by Friday afternoons. Never saw people work so hard as New Yorkers. It makes me tired to watch them, bet itâs a pleasant kind of tired, the way you get when you were a kid in summer and spent the whole day jumping in the swimming hole with your buddies, getting burned deep to a lobster shade and, after everyone is called home, just falling asleep under cool sheets, dreaming little fever dreams. I think about things like that, watching people running around working so hard.
You might think a hick like me goes to country-western bars or wears cowboy boots on Broadway. True, I do wear boots in Texas, bet when in Rome, dress in togas. I leave it to the New York fellas to wear snakeskin boots under their three-piece suits and to top it off with black cowboy hats. I generally wear a nice little corduroy sports coat with leather on the elbows. You might mistake me for a college professor. Charlene says it is the expression I wear when Iâm watching the parade that makes me look like a college teacher she once had, I think it was in modern American literature.
âWhat expression?â I asked her once.
âBemusement. Not unfriendly, just sort of amused and uncomprehending at the same time,â she said.
âYou mean I donât get it?â
âI mean more like no one else gets it, bet thatâs all right, youâre just there to see the show,â she said. When she talks like that, she gets very thoughtful and still. Itâs like sheâs seeing something else when she says it, not me listening to her.
I walked all
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