Johnny Census with J— in The City

Sometimes people are their own worst enemies (as who would know better than I?). This morning I made the mistake of knocking on the door of someone I’d called on already in my Johnny Census mode, a crabby old (a couple of years older than I) black woman who lives alone at [withheld]. You might have imagined she’d have welcomed a little company, but when I first gathered the requisite facts ‘n’ figures last week, she gave me approximately the look she’d have given a case of food poisoning as she allowed me into her living room. A very large number of respondents have been watching TV, even in the gleamiest part of a gleamy early afternoon, while I’ve interviewed them, but she was the only one content to glare at the static graphic you get with one of the digital radio channels, in this case the easy-listening soul one.

In other news, J—, now officially my best friend in New York now that Claire has gone, drove down to The City yesterday to buy clothing. On the way down, J— became gently incensed with me for disputing many of his views about British fashion and imperialism and fashion imperialism, but the rain stopped just as we began looking for a parking place in what may be described as (Much) Lower Hell’s Kitchen. We walked hastily to Daffy’s in Herald Square, but it wasn’t one of those weekends when they were selling stylish Italian attire for peanuts. J— nearly bought some $4 Florsheim socks, but my noting that I commonly get three pairs for a dollar at Idolatry (as I enjoy calling Dollar Tree) took the wind out of his sails.

We repaired lickety-split to Conway, home of the ghastly fluorescent lighting and an escalator that hasn’t worked since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. J— marveled at the low prices and post-apocalyptic Third World gloom, but there wasn’t time to buy anything; not with an expensive parking ticket itching to be left under my windshield wiper.

We went down to Soho. I drove around and around and around looking for a free parking place while he conferred and conferred and conferred with the manager of the gallery at which he exhibited back in March. I got pissed off, but enjoyed the fantastically nutritious sack lunch he’d made us. I actually welcomed the friction; much as I believe you can’t really know whether you and a lover have a future absent a screaming, door-slamming fight, and that you don’t really cease to be acquaintances with someone and start becoming friends until the relationship has been stressed. We talked a lot about sex not only as we munched our sandwiches, but even at the Monet show on 21st Street. I’m not a huge Monet fan, but I’ll take his water lilies over Robert Rausch’s blank canvases any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

I’d warned J— that Uniqlo, which had stores in both of the big retail areas between which I lived in the UK, is pretty much a (very slightly) livelier Gap, but he needed to see for himself, so we headed for the West Village, absolutely swarming with frantic consumers — many of whom, J— thought, seemed to imagine I was Karl Lagerfeld, the 76-year-old German fashion designer. J— could hardly wait to get out of Uniqlo, no easy undertaking in view of the frenzied mob. We headed for Trash & Vaudeville in St. Mark’s Place, which turned out to offer pretty much the same fetish, goth, and punk staples as your local Hot Topic, plus a wide selection of T-shirts depicting Sid Vicious, The Clash, and other late-70s icons, and the usual whimsical footwear — pink winklepickers, and so on. I found sobering the realization that all this — and the T-Rex album they were playing — must seem wonderfully quaint to younger people, rather than nostalgic, as it seems to me, and sat outside phoning my pornographer friend in Florida and resting my perpetually (since that girl knocked me down with her car in September 2008) aching left knee.

After a restorative pit stop in Starbucks, we walked back to Vandam Street, where we’d parked, through a hurricane. Boulders kept getting under my contact lenses and blinding me. As we began the long drive home, we agreed that The City can be pretty exhausting, and that Beacon was likely to seem gloriously tranquil in comparison. I had never before heard politesse in a casual conversation.

I had intended to go to the big jamboree on Main Street last night in hope of adding to my scanty list of local friends, but found myself too exhausted for anything other than staring numbly at the Lakers-Jazz game. I was in bed by 10, and got through only the first seventh of my nightly prayers.

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