Welcome to New York bleepin' City

Father and son spend six hours in the city of eight million stories

Hanging from the awning of a cramped clothes shop on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village is this black tee shirt with white block lettering across the chest: “New York Fuckin’ City.” It caught my eye and the closer we (Steve, my 17-year-old son and I) got to it the more I wanted to buy it. It sums up the city in a word. You won’t find a “Los Fuckin’ Angeles” tee shirt or a “Fort Worth Fuckin’ Dallas” tee shirt or a “Phila-fuckin’-delphia” tee, a “Washington Fuckin’ DC” tee or even a “Las Fuckin’ Vegas” or “New Fuckin’ Orleans” tee. And those last two towns are harsh, sleezy and slimy. What “fuckin” means to me in the sense of a metropolitan area is this: New York is the most emphatic city in the country. No doubt. It comes down hard on you. The natives talk loud, talk fast, emphatically, assertively, declaratively. They don’t much care what you happen to think. In other words, they’re fuckin’ edgy, opinionated people.

Then I thought, no, I can’t buy this shirt. First, I couldn’t wear to the mall, to the Y or to Barnes & Noble, or to mow my lawn. And then, what message am I sending my kids? I don’t particularly like them dropping the f-bomb in the house. Finally, I’m 54 years old — today — and a rebellious adolescent is still down deep somewhere, but the neighbors don’t need to know. Of course they’d shun me out of the ‘hood when I walked the dogs ‘round the block with a “New York Fuckin’ City” tee shirt on.

So we walked past the tee. We were searching for a CD store in the Village. If there was a vintage CD shop to be found anywhere, it had to be in the Village. But we had no luck and were wandering around aimlessly. At the NYU bookstore I asked a coed wearing NYU purple behind the cash register if she knew a CD store nearby. After a prolonged silence it seemed evident I was some old archeologist to her on an expedition irrelevant to her world. She was at a loss what to say. Steve was getting impatient with this expedition, I could tell. On East Fourth Street I ducked into Rivington Guitars, “NYC’s Best Little Guitar Store,” figuring if anyone knew where a CD store could be found, it would be musicians. This fellow Howie by the door shakes his head. “They’re all gone. Used to be two across the street, they closed.” That’s what I was afraid of. I have a four- or five-year-old street guide that lists CD stores on St. Mark’s like Mondo Kim’s and St. Mark’s Sounds. Gone. Then he says: “Wait. There’s Rainbow CDs over on First Avenue by Eighth Street. Go down Fourth to First Avenue, turn left, go four blocks and it’s across the street. Tell ‘em I sent you. They’re good guys.”

Rainbow Music 2002 Ltd. must be where all CDs go to die. A tiny, narrow slip of a shop, you can’t open the front door fully without hitting the first floor-to-ceiling tottering stack of random CDs. Rainbow is only 15-20 feet wide. Perhaps, what, ten thousand CDs could be inside. It’s impossible to guess. Along the sidewalls, which extend to the back 40 or 50 feet, piles of CDs climb until the top ones are jammed right beneath the ceiling. Four or five people were in the store and we had to turn sideways to slip past each other, like walking through a submarine. I’m knocking CD jewel cases to the floor, and that’s even after I took off my backpack. Steve seems mortified. This CD junkyard or graveyard is as far from his orderly world of iTunes as could be.

Rainbow Music, mess that it is, would seem to be under the ownership of a three-year-old, or a couple of college dorm mates. But no, Mel, the wizen, stooped proprietor, greets every customer coming through the door the same way: “Hi. Whatcha interested in? I got country along the side here. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash. Got blues in the back. You like blues? Jazz along that wall. You like jazz? Art Pepper? Got a lot of Art Pepper back there. You like African? Gotta lot rap, you probably don’t like rap,” he says to me. Actually, I like steel guitar players, I say. Got any? Mel looks at me blankly. Maybe in the back with the blues.

Mel cannot stop gabbing. Used to be 20 CD stores in the neighborhood, now it’s down to his and one other. He’s getting flooded with CDs coming in almost every day from Wall Street guys selling their CDs for a couple of bucks because they can’t afford their 5,000-square-foot homes. Mel played Wall Street since he was 12, 13, if I’m to believe him. Now stock prices are coming back to what they were when he started, Mel grins. But he’s doing all right, he says, has stock in food and pharmaceuticals. People still got to eat, got to take their meds in this recession. I ask him if he thinks the economy will ever be what it used to be. The economy will come back he says. But it will never be like it used to be. Of that he seems certain. “There are more than 80 stores closed around here,” he says. “Too many of ‘em were selling the same thing.”

“What do you do?” he asks me. “I’m a writer, a journalist,” I tell him while I’m down on my knees, craning my neck to read CDs on the floor. “Newspapers… Jesus,” Mel just about moans. “I remember when newspapers used to be cash cows. Can’t believe what’s happened to newspapers.”

Steve seems, no, it’s clear, he’s ready to bolt this cramped chaos of CDs where you could easily spend an afternoon trying to find titles, what with CDs upside down, sideward, on the floor, up to the ceiling, stacks blocking other stacks, stuff in boxes. The whole place seems a house of CD cards ready to collapse. As we check out, you hardly see Mel ringing up the sale. He’s hidden behind a wall of CDs on the counter. There’s but a small opening to see his head and hear his constant patter. Behind me a young man and woman speaking German try out CDs on an old boom box. I’m blocking the front door from people who want to come in. “That guy, he’s a good customer of mine. Comes all the time,” says Mel. But they open the door and see us jammed by the cash register, like elevator doors opening and finding no place to slide in. “Pretty soon it will start getting busy,” Mel says. Friday night. After the workweek guys like to go out drinking, and once suitably buzzed, they come into the Rainbow for impulse buys. “I’m open seven days a week, twelve to ten on Sunday and Tuesdays, twelve to eleven Wednesday and Thursday, twelve to nine on Monday” Mel tells me. “Friday and Saturday it’s twelve to twelve.”

OK, NYC is obviously so vast I have no idea where we are when we step outside Rainbow Music. The cabbies are your guides, unless you’re a city regular or can decipher the subway numbering and lettering system and navigate the maze of tunnels, stairs and turnstiles. We are somewhere down in the Village, in a neighborhood I haven’t been to before. But all one needs to get around the Big City is a destination. We hop in a cab, say, “Pennsylvania Station,” and we’re off, watching the small TV monitor with grainy newscasters and rolling headline text. With luck we’ll catch the 5:39 p.m. to Philadelphia. These screens are embedded in the back of the cab’s front seat. It’s been years since I took a cab in New York, and they weren’t wired like this. I rely on Steve to push the touch-screen buttons and read about Tiger Woods muddling through the second round of the Masters. Simultaneously, video shows a lost whale somehow turned around in the Hudson River and making its way back to the ocean.

Earlier in the day, after a tour of Madison Square Garden and a peek inside the Knicks and Rangers’ locker rooms and standing cramped in a super suite with other tourists, mostly foreigners, watching — the last thing I expected — the grand finale of the Ringling Brothers Good Friday matinee performance complete with the train of 16 elephants trundling out the tunnel along with the tumbling clowns and acrobats and trapeze artists, the elephants coming to a lumbering halt with each raising a front leg and placing it on the back of the elephant in front, after the loud crescendo of the live band and the ringmaster concluding, “Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you, thank you very much,” Steve and I got in cab to find a spot to eat lunch. “Steve,” I said, “there are few things weirder than seeing 16 elephants in a room, I don’t care how big the room is. Elephants aren’t meant to be indoors.” Sure enough, protesters outside the Garden hold posters claiming the circus kills baby elephants. “Wait a minute,” a mother tells her young daughter, “I want to ask a question,” she says, pointing to a protester.

A foreign cabbie, perhaps from Eastern Europe, looks at me blankly when I ask if he knows where The Mean Fiddler sports bar is on the Upper East Side. OK, how about Mickey Mantle’s sports bar? I might as well been chewing a huge wad of bubble gum my mouth. He can’t make sense of me. How can anyone drive a cab in New York and not know Mickey Mantle? OK, just drop us at 57th and Madison and we’ll wing it. I had written the address of The Mean Fiddler and Mantle’s and other spots to hit from Internet searches I had Googled this morning before we took the 10:37 a.m. Acela up from Philadelphia, but damn, the paper slipped out my back pocket somewhere.

We wandered 57th Street heading west not knowing what we were after, and came upon Shelley’s Tradizionale Ristorante di Pesce; it seemed as suitable as anything. Steve took a look around and asked, “Isn’t this a little fancy for us?” The maître d was dress in an impeccable suit and crisp tie, hair greased, the tables were draped with thick white linens, ten-foot mirrors lined the walls, chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, but what the hell, they had hamburgers on the menu. At the table to our right two overweight young women talked about Florida, Palm Beach, the former FedEx chairman who has a plane and a hanger on his property somewhere, just like John Travolta, one of the woman said. Yeah Steve, we are a bit out of our depth here. Two tables to our right slouched a thin, red-haired, middle-aged woman by herself, who kept eyeing her Blackberry for messages at least several times every minute.

We have better luck with a knowledgeable cabbie who drove us from uptown to NYU. Konte from Mali. Came to New York to live with an uncle after graduating from high school. He is two semesters away from getting his degree in finance and investment from Baruch College. He absolutely hates driving a cab, which he’s been doing for four months. “Too risky, too much risk,” he says. He starts in on his arch nemesis, the bus driver. “This I don’t understand. The buses, they go where they want. They block me. They go across lanes. A bus runs a red light, the police do nothing. I run a red light, I get a $350 ticket. I stay away from the buses. Too big. Once a bus smashed my window.”

Today Konte’s been driving since three in the morning. It’s now past three in the afternoon. Yesterday a passenger puked in his backseat. Couple of days ago he got tricked into pulling over to pick up a young girl in front of a restaurant at night. He stopped his cab, the girl disappeared, and four very, very large men squeezed in. “Any one of them could’ve eaten me. Eaten me,” Konte says. They want to go to Brooklyn. Konte says he is not moving, not taking them anywhere. “But you have to, it’s the law,” they say. “I will call the police,” says Konte. “See, over there, the police. Get out. Get out of my cab now.”

I knock on the Plexiglas panels that shield Konte from the rear and right side passenger seat. “Don’t these protect you?” He laughs. “These, these mean nothing to some of the bad people I pick up. Sometimes I drop them off in places I don’t even want to wait to get the fare. I just want to get out of there. Too much risk. This job, too risky.” Not long ago Konte picked up two young women, so gorgeous that if he met them on the street, he said he’d be too embarrassed to talk to them. The beautiful girls wanted to go to Brooklyn. “I don’t know Brooklyn well,” says Konte. “That’s all right, we’ll guide you,” say the girls. They get to where they want in Brooklyn, a $40 fare plus tolls. The girls open the doors and dash down the street. Konte wants to run after them, grab their purses and get his fare. But he remembers what his uncle told him. Do something like that and the girls will say you were trying to rob them. The media, the police, who do you think they will believe? Konte tells a story of a cabbie who took a man and four girls to the Staten Island Ferry. The girls skipped out, too, running away. The guy, who maybe picked the girls up in a bar, ran after them to get his fare money. The cabbie ran after the guy, thinking he was the one who should pay. They got into a fistfight. Two months later, the guy, the customer, is still in a coma. The cabbie, he lost his job.

“What about your good customers?” I ask Konte. “What are they like?” Ah, the rest of the story. “Ninety percent of my customers are good people,” says Konte. “They ask about my life, tell me about their life, they encourage me to keep studying. They talk. Only ten percent are bad people. This is a good country. People can be nice, very nice.”

Before Konte drops us off by Washington Square he mentions a shooting that happened a few blocks away a few weeks ago. “You know, everybody in this town has a story,” I say to Steve after we get out of Konte’s cab. “Yeah, even if you don’t want to hear it,” Steve says.

Steve and I make our way across Washington Square, buzzing with students and neighbors on this cloudy, mild early April day, a day to be outside. The cherry blossoms are a wild riot of white, along with the striking yellow Forsythia. Bare trees are just starting to show a tinge of light green. “I don’t think I’d want to go to a city school,” says Steve. “You can’t get away. It’s not relaxing.” No, you don’t come to New York to unwind. “I know one thing,” I say. “My idea of four years at a college is not sitting around talking about who got shot a couple of blocks away.” New York Fuckin’ City indeed.