A Day In Manhattan

It's Friday morning, 0-dark-hundred. And foggy. 54°F. The day will be sunny with a high temperature in the upper 70s. In other words, very nice weather-wise. I got a decent night's sleep, though I've been awake for a while. I lay in bed thinking about stuff that doesn't matter. Like my first (and only) trip to Manhattan. It took place a lifetime ago. I was visiting Princeton, New Jersey, for six weeks to take some courses at a corporate education center, and one weekend I took the bus into NYC. My destination was the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I got off the bus and was approached by a young man who appeared to be in the throes of drug withdrawal. He was sweating and looked like he was not having a good day. He asked if I could give him some money. I told him no, and he went away.

But sometimes I do give people money. A young man with a young woman I presumed was his girlfriend approached me in a drugstore and gave me a sob story—which I knew was likely fiction—and asked for five dollars. I gave him ten. A man approached me as I walked up the steps to my place of employment and asked me for ten dollars to buy his baby some food. I gave him ten dollars. I know it only encourages them to do it again. Nowadays, when someone approaches me in a parking lot and tells me they need money because they're hungry, I take them into a nearby deli and I buy them takeout. They never turn down the meal, and they can't use it to buy liquor or drugs. It's food in a Styrofoam container. They said said they needed money because they were hungry, and now they're holding food in their hands. So why do they look disappointed?

But returning to my Manhattan story, I left the Bus Terminal and was walking down the street, when I noticed another man about my age walking in the same direction. I noticed his fly was open. So I said to him, "Excuse me, your fly is open." He zipped up, and we struck up a conversation. He was on his way to Central Park to watch an eclipse. That's what he told me, and he showed me some kind of contraption he had constructed for viewing the eclipse indirectly, thus not burning his retinas. His trip was about to take a detour, and it benefited me.

I told him I was a tourist, and he offered to show Manhattan to me. So we rode the subway, and I recall the subway map looked like a plate of spaghetti. We went to the Empire State Building and rode the elevator to the observation deck where all the tourists go to look through binoculars for a quarter to see the sights of the city from above. Then we went higher, into a glass dome, and below the windows you could see radio antennas sticking out of the building. At least, I think that's what they were. It would certainly have been a good place to put them.

I saw many small stores with sun-faded "going out of business" signs in their windows, and I wondered if the owners thought they were fooling anyone. Guys, at least put a fresh sign in your store window every few years. Don't use a sign that looks like its been there since the Great Depression.

We walked and rode to a lot of places that day. I saw Central Park. I saw the Kennedy Center. I saw the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway in the Theater District. I walked and rode the subway all day and into the dark of night. Of course, it being Manhattan, the time of day meant little. The streets were as crowded with people at 3AM as they were at 3PM.

At the end of the day we parted company. I think we both enjoyed the day. I was a tourist in town for a couple days, never to return. He was probably just a guy without close friends who was happy to be a tour guide for a day, lacking anything more interesting to do. I returned to my hotel room for a few hours sleep before going to the Bus Terminal for a ride back to Princeton. I spent a few more weeks in Princeton, New Jersey, before getting into my car and driving back to Burlington, North Carolina, where I lived and worked at the time.

And a lifetime later as I lay in darkness, fragments of that day would waft around inside my head, becoming fodder for a rambling anecdote.