by Alexander Clare
Follow me, says Carmen. There’s someone I want you to meet.
Hold the girl’s hand. She’ll lead. She’s always somewhere else, in another room, another State, the relationship before this one. She’s onto something, follow. Was that Liam Neeson? He talks about boxing, growing up in Ireland. Carmen steers me away from the Sopranos. Who’s he? ‘Big Pussy.’ He’s eerily in character.
What the hell is that? The giant’s bent forwards, listening to the 6ft midget. He’s got bodyguards. Brooklyn thugs in cheap suits, scanning the room. They’re tiny compared to him. The giant straightens and looks down at me.
“I’m a fan.” I squeak. “Oh? “ he asks, kindly, inviting conversation. His shoulders are enormous, in perfect proportion to his height. I wonder at the bravery of the men that face him. I sense Carmen laughing. I shake hands with his devastating right hand. It’s the hand that floored Razor Ruddock, a hand bigger than Ali’s.
What Lennox Lewis, three times Heavyweight World Champion doesn’t realise, is that we’re brothers. I’ve set my alarm for the witching hour to ring walk with you over the airwaves. I countered Evander Holyfield’s balletic assaults to your midriff, Lennox, guided that jab — the one you practiced on raindrops walking to school in Canada. We went down together to an Oliver McCall right cross, prematurely counted out, you in Wembley, me to sleep in the Welsh hills.
I wish I could speak Lennox, but my friend had a fight with an Elvis Presley impersonator last night, and I met Quentin Tarantino at 1am on a Soho sidewalk. Nothing seems real. Not you, and not Carmen, her dress flecked with blood. Not the Meat Packing District, where transvestites on stilts scream at Destiny behind the bar at Twilo. Destiny with her exploding afro and homemade clothes, who gives me her house keys and says meet me later. We grapple in her shower, then recover to Manu Chao Bongo Bong reverberating through her apartment as the dying days of the 1990s stream through the window.
Nothing wakes me. Marco the barman says he learnt French listening to fighter pilots through his headset when he flew jets in the Gulf War. Nicky went to an Elvis concert, featuring a real Elvis, and Kyle’s an actor. So are the waiters, George, and Jorge, and the lawyer Carloyn, needing a ‘creative outlet’. Carolyn fucks by the windows in her East Side skyscraper and doesn’t care who watches.
Jeff arrives from LA into a New York winter with a plan to conquer Broadway. Jeff says he would like me if I wasn’t an ass. He’s convinced that if he just ‘pushes, pushes, and pushes again’ he’ll make it in showbusiness. Jeff recounts how he stunned that casting director with his reading, how another was awestruck by his monologue, yet the acting jobs never materialise, so he waits tables, perfectly.
Then there’s Tia. She glides towards me in a white dress through the perfume department in Bloomingdales. She’s a stranded angel, a bride in search of a ghost. In her head, she’s an actress, a celebrity, always was, but for now, she works in the store and as a waitress ‘under the table,’ by night, surviving on tips hidden in her socks as she rides home on the subway. Tia ejects suitors from her Union Square apartment before dawn, but not before a famous men’s wear-designer, many years her senior, ejaculates on her.
In the mornings, walk on the Hudson riverbank at West 18th Street. The Titanic was to moor here, at Pier 59. The Carpathia docked at Pier 54. Look into the muddy waters and see the steel pilings that supported these ships, and perhaps still do. In a city where the ghosts are indistinguishable from the celebrities you’ll find company. The city or ‘ciddy’ is alive too. People talk of ‘suing the ciddy’ or say the ‘ciddy’s braced for rent hikes.’
I meet a Glaswegian by the Wollman ice rink. Gazing at Gotham’s snow-capped towers, she says: ‘I love the ciddy, everybody’s crazy.’ She’s lived in New York for three years and has adopted the accent. New arrivals proudly boast about how long they’ve been New Yorkers, in months and years, whether they have a visa or not, or if they have, in hushed tones, a Green Card.
The ciddy’s mine now, but it breeds hunger. Page 6 of The New York Post reports of local celebrity sightings, invariably in Manhattan restaurants. There’s Mick Jagger at such and such place, or ‘Jennifer Lopez and Marc Antony chowing down on a steak at Smith and Wollensky.’ Waiters are so hungry. It’s why they’ll finish your plate when it’s out of sight. Tia tells me of how a waiter mistakenly ordered a steak for a patron. The management made him pay $20 for the steak, a meal he could never eat, and a horrifying financial loss for someone on zero an hour.
Hector from Mexico waits tables and bartends. He’s 25 and is becoming a father. ‘Jesus Christ’ he confides, reaching for a cigarette. On the BBC World Service he listens to Prime Ministers’ Questions. He’s delighted by how opposition politicians address the government. It’s the first time I’m proud of Britain. But I don’t want Britain. Britain’s garage sandwiches and council estates and I don’t want to wake up. Across the water there’s The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and, beyond that, daylight. I try to walk across it but it’s too high, and turn back, to the ciddy.
Twenty five years later I look up Jeff on YouTube. He’s documenting his ‘journey’ as a dancer and has 19,000 subscribers. He’s exactly the same, only happier, and awake. I miss Carloyn, Destiny and Carmen but I can’t find them anywhere.
Ends
Some names have been changed
