I Heart New York But I Do Not Heart Driving In It

Leaving Coxsackie I got right back on the Interstate. Audrey and I had eaten a wonderful breakfast of biscuits and honey that was sticking to all the right places and some of the wrong places, too, like my rapidly-expanding ass.

I toyed with the radio and sang along to almost every song, including Billy Joel’s "We Didn’t Start The Fire", which I have, in fact, heard before contrary to popular belief in Mexico. I also caught up on the new hip-hop joints that have come out in the last couple weeks too - I’ve been listening to Pete Yorn and The Frames almost incessantly since being in Geneva and after being in the thick of domestic bliss for days in Coxsackie I wanted to listen to gangstas rap about da Cristal and da hoes in da hood. You may not know this, but I can rap every Ludacris song on the radio word for word.

While driving southeast I listened to plenty of hip-hop being broadcast out of Concord, Connecticut, which I never thought of as being a mecca of urban African-American (yes, I am a bit obsessive about being politically correct sometimes) culture, just like I never knew about the huge underground wigger subculture in Burlington, VT. Erik told me there is a great wigger subculture pulsing in rural Vermont - "because there’s no black people around to kick their ass for being wiggers!" he says. It makes sense when you think about it.

Anyway, I was glad to know that Concord was diverse and not just a bunch of old crusty wasps playing tennis and drinking martinis. I bounced around in my seat to 50 Cent’s "Disco Inferno", singing "You can catch me swooping, Bentley couping, switching lanes - ha ha!" as I merged onto the exit for the Triborough Bridge in the Bronx. Okay, people who are unfamiliar with the Bronx, I’m going to do you a big favor right now by instructing you as follows: Do not drive in the Bronx. The Bronx was not meant for vehicles. Period. The roads were built back when horses and buggies were considered hot rides and to compensate for expansion all the city did was build more roads that are elevated over the hodge-podge of crappy roads already there. It is almost as bad as Boston but at least Boston has an excuse, the Big Dig. The Bronx has no excuse, it just sucks to drive in. Great to visit, man, but hell on wheels. Seriously, if you ever go, do yourself a favor and hoof it or get a cab with some other poor soul at the wheel trying to navigate.

I learned this the hard way. Being the brilliant person that I am, and blessed with such amazing foresight, I brought only a minimal amount of cash with me from Climax, which I quickly burned through on tolls. This left me bereft of cash and slumming through my change holder to get past evil-eye giving toll booth workers, so I made The Worst Possible Decision and exited on some random street into the belly of the beast known as Bronx street traffic. Bronx Expressway traffic is bad enough, but the street traffic is the one that will kill you.

So here’s little me, in a black Honda Civic, blonde as a sunray and pale as snow, trying to find an ATM without getting a) too lost, or b) to far away from the interstate. I failed at both and ended up almost at the Hunt’s Point Market, where (sadly enough) hookers brazenly march up and down the streets in broad daylight and being carjacked is as common as misplacing your keys. With all the valuables I had in my car - namely, everything I own - I wasn’t about to risk it. I flipped a U-turn and found the highway again, figuring I would write a check at the next toll booth if I had to.

The next toll was for the Triborough Bridge and as I weasled my way to the booth I strained to see who was working it, because that would define my approach. It turned out to be a middle-aged black guy, so I turned on the "Oops!- I’m-such-a-stupid-little-girl-and-I-tried-so-hard-to-find-an-ATM-but-I-got-scared-look-at-me-almost-start-to-cry-I’ve-been-traumatized!" act. Had it been a woman I may have tried the "Okay-look-you-know-how-it-is-I-just-ran-out-of-cash-and-couldn’t-find-an-ATM-so-come-on-help-a-sister-out?"spiel but this was a guy. And it did not work at all. He rolled his eyes as he sighed and said, "Okay, ma’am, I need your license and registration." I gave it to him and he begrudingly started copying the information down, instructing me to pull over to the side of the highway and wait there with my blinkers on. The New Yorker behind me was pissed off at the wait and honking, because, y’know, horns have been clinically proven to speed up many processes and this was clearly no exception.

As I pulled over to the side and out of the icy glare of the person behind me, I thought I was really in trouble and would be ticketed for not having cash, which I couldn’t afford, and started to tear up for real. Anytime I have to face cops, I don’t know what it is but I just bawl. Maybe it’s guilt over feeling like a criminal but sweet damnation, I do it every single time. When I got my DUI I think I cried for three hours straight, which was AWFUL because I was handcuffed the whole time and couldn’t wipe my face or blow my nose. I don’t ever want to see my mug shot, EVER. Although I’m sure was a big hit at the 2004 City of Laurel Police Christmas Party, where they probably showcase the ugliest ones from throughout the year.

I was holding it in as I watched a young Irish-looking cop approach my car in my rearview mirror. He spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent and laughed at me for getting so upset. "Ma’am, you’re not in trouble," he said. "You just gotta send a check for $4.50 in this envelope and you’ll be fine. Can you do that?" I managed a weak nod and asked him for directions to Northern Parkway, in Queens, which would take me to Long Island. He gave them to me and I drove off, cursing my teary-eyed reflection in the rearview mirror for being such a freakin’ baby about everything!

The cop’s directions were spot-on and soon I was speeding along the Long Island Expressway on the way to visit my grandma, my mother’s mother. Audrey and the gang belong to my dad’s side, so I was eager to get to Grandma Meiselbach’s and see if I could find out any interesting stuff about my mom’s side as well. I got there in pretty good time and soon my grandma was making me a sandwich in that perfect way that grandmas do.

When I was in high school and college my grandma always had some tid-bit about me to brag about. But once I graduated and moved to LA, it was as if that all stopped. Suddenly I wasn’t the Dean’s List Granddaughter with the Magna Cum Laude honors and shot at the big time. I quickly became more of the Lazy, Do-Nothing Chick Who Stores Her Crap In The Basement While She Waits Tables In Los Angeles For Who Knows How Long, and it was a little obvious. When I visited my grandmother during that time she didn’t seem excited to see me anymore, and I won’t lie, it did hurt. Now it’s not so bad that I’m writing this book, but it still makes me feel as though I’ll never return to that status. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll never be as skinny or as cool as I was in college for the rest of my life.

Being on this trip seemed to up my status in the eyes of The Grandma, though, and she seemed happy to see me, especially because I cleaned the stuff out of her basement. Going through those boxes was like opening a time capsule from three years ago. I realized just how much I’ve changed, how much I’ve grown in the past few years as I went through notebooks and journals and photo albums. When I left my New York City apartment it was under less than ideal circumstances. After my roommate got the eviction notice it was almost as though we were refugees fleeing the apartment and we tossed everything into boxes without stopping to decide whether or not we’d ever need it. Like paper towels. And stained coasters. Old bedding, spiral notebooks with class notes and love letters to my ex-boyfriend scribbled in them, unmatched Tupperware containers. My grandmother looked at me cock-eyed when I opened one box and she saw all of the random things in it, like plastic fruit and used tealight candles, as if to say, "This is what’s been taking up space in my basement for three years?" All I could do was shrug and give her the sheepish grin, the one that says you’re right and I’m wrong.

My aunt Bobbie lives with my grandma and she came home for dinner at five before going to her second job at Sear’s. While she was home we joked about the dynamics of our family, how my mom babies my brothers and how all three of my parent’s kids are clueless in their own way. We tried to figure out what my brother Kevin will be when he grows up - I said gym teacher, she said restaurant manager. After dinner she went to work and my grandma and I played a board game and I have to say, she got me totally hooked on it.

It’s called Rummy-O, but she calls it Rummy-O, maybe because she didn’t notice that there’s no tail on that Q. Anyway, it’s like a cross between dominoes and gin rummy, and it’s great fun. She even plays with a group of other women in the neighborhood, who’ve all lived there about 50 years and known each other for just as long. Rummy-O seems to be the new Bridge in East Northport, NY. Maybe someday they’ll have a section dedicated to it in the Style Section of the newspaper.

We had so much fun playing it and I’m so glad I was never one of those obnoxious kids who doesn’t know what to say or do around old people. I love the elderly, I’d actually prefer hanging out with them to hanging out with kids my own age most of the time. Most of the time they lack the drama and the vacuousness of the young. My grandmas are no exception, and they always have interesting stories to tell. This visit was great because I got to hear some new ones.

Bobbie came home around 10 as my grandma and I called it a night. She went to bed and that left me and Bobbie up talking. It was a somewhat frustrating conversation. I’m an idealist. My aunt is a realist. Quite a pessimist, actually. What followed was her lecturing me for 45 minutes on how everyone is out to get me, how no one, especially a man, is to be trusted. It was the polar opposite of the way of thinking in Coxsackie. She actually made a lot of sense on some points, like never give it up too quick to a guy no matter how sweet he is, but overall I disagreed with a lot of things she said. "All guys are after is sex, always, there’s no exception. Life’s a bitch, that’s all there is to it," she said. I didn’t have the heart or the energy to object, I just nodded and thought, "People are good. And it’s what you make of it" to myself.

I went downstairs to check my email on the house computer before going to bed. I got an email from my friend Corey - it was a chain letter with a picture attachment basically saying, "This picture was taken with only the guy in it and after it was taken he passed out and died. When the picture was developed there was a ghostly woman behind him. There are witnesses. They say there was no one behind him when the picture was taken. This is not a joke or a fixed image. Send this to blah blah blah...." Then I clicked on the image. I was so stupid to do it in the middle of the night, alone in the basement of a house I’ve always suspected was haunted, a seven-bedroom house with only two bedrooms inhabited and plenty of rooms for goblins to frolick in. It was the fakest, most horribly spliced Photoshop bungle ever, but still it chilled me. I am such a freaking baby, and I left all the lights on as I went upstairs to bed. I knew my grandma would be mad, but I was hoping the "I thought the house was haunted" excuse would work the next day over breakfast.

I went to bed late after working on my blog and woke up early to go walking with my grandma. I’m determined to lose some weight after tipping the scale at 140. Yes, I put that on the Internet. 5'6" and I weigh 140 pounds. And even my grandma made a remark about how heavy I looked when I arrived, and today when my mom asked how much I weighed and I told her, she said "EW!! That’s way too much for you!" so it’s time to start working out and eating less. My grandma pointed out all the houses being remodeled and for a second I wondered why they were. Then I remembered that to people who worked in the city, Long Island, strip malls and all, was the country.

We had to walk single-file on the sidewalk of the busy main road, where runaway forsythia branches reached over their owner’s fences and I remembered doing the same thing when I was 8 years old and my brother Tommy was 2, our littlest brother in a stroller as we walked with our mother. That was the summer we spent a month in East Northport, the summer after my grandfather died. I remember hearing my grandmother say she wish she would die too, playing in the hallway while my parents tried to calm her down in the kitchen. Now, years later, she can talk openly about his death but still mouths that silent prayer after saying Amen at grace, the one she started saying in 1986. Looking closely, I think the last words are "I hope you still love me."

We drove around, she and I, taking boxes of coasters and Tupperware and schoolbooks to Goodwill, and then going to the nursery for flowers. I can’t understand the logic of buying perennials only because I’m a lazy procrastinator. If I had a garden and bought perennials, they’d be dead before I got around to planting them. It’s easier in a Honda. Anyway, we ran errands and then later, after dinner, we played Rummy-O again - this time it was me, Grandma, Bobbie, and her awesome boyfriend Steve. It was so fun! And this time, when I went to bed, I turned out all the lights but kept my phone light on until I hid under the covers.

I was only at my grandma’s a couple days before heading into New York City on Friday morning. I camped out at a little coffee shop I used to work at in college with a soy latte and my laptop, waiting for my best friend, Dana, to get out of work. It was the coffee shop where I met my abusive ex and out of the corner of my eye I thought I could see myself from five years ago chatting up a Sean from five years ago. I could remember every word of that conversation and loved the innocence of it, a far cry from the curses and venom he would spit at me later, telling me to kill myself because ridding the world of me was the only useful thing I could do. The odd thing was, he said that a lot. And for awhile there, I believed him. My nurses were just glad it didn’t work.

Being there was like seeing the whole relationship unfold again, only with the benefit of hindsight. Days earlier, during that conversation with Bobbie, she thought I was crazy when I said I wouldn’t change a thing - every punch, every name I was called, it all made me who I am today and I like who I am. If I hadn’t gone through that, I may not be on this trip right now. And I know for damn sure that I will never settle for being treated like less than a goddess from now on.

I got a lot of work done, and it would have been more but I ran into an old friend. Eric was a production assistant when Sean and I had our own amateur production company and the two of them had worked together at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side. Now here Eric was, working at the coffee shop on the Upper East Side and saying, "Yeah, man, I haven’t seen Sean except for once, like, last year and he said he was living in Jersey or something." Ah, sweet, sweet karma. We caught up and he told me I was a freak for typing IM’s while looking at him. He mentioned having an anniversary of "one year clean and sober" and that he moved out of "that crackhouse I was living in, remember that one in Spanish Harlem?" It was great to hear that he was. Later on, he let Dana and I drink for free, "since I can’t anymore."

Dana and I picked up right where we had left off on Thanksgiving when we last saw each other and I realized why I don’t feel bad about not keeping in touch with anyone from college; she is all I need. We dished on how we hate the Bush Administration and loved people who hate the Bush Administration and I called my friend Patrick, who was visiting from Ireland. He and I met when I was driving across the country the first time, in Denver, and together with one other guy we drove my Accord through the Rockies to the Grand Canyon. I haven’t seen him since we got to Los Angeles and he went north to San Francisco, so I was excited to see two of my best friends in one trip. We made plans to meet at the 86th and Lex subway station.

I thought the three of us getting together would be so great, I had no idea it would be like putting baking soda in vinegar. Well, it wasn’t that bad, but Dana and Patrick didn’t get along as famously as I had imagined. I felt bad, but it’s just one of those things you can’t predict. By the end of the night, they buried the hatchet and we all had a fabulous 4 AM breakfast at The Viand, a Greek diner I’ve been going to since freshman year. All the waiters are the same and Manny asked me where I’d been. It was great.