New York City, Newark and American Airlines Can Eat My Shit

Niceties first:

• Over Memorial Day weekend, we attended a beautiful wedding, watching the last of my un-hitched college friends get married.
• We visited dear friends and family.
• I brought Amy to my high school in the Bronx and reconnected with teachers and administrators whom I haven’t seen in 18 years.
• And I ate perhaps the best slice of pizza I’ve ever had.

Everything else was horrible.

We knew ahead of time that it would be a whirlwind of a trip, fitting in all of the above in three days. But I, the optimist, found comfort in the fact that we would not be flying with Jake or waking up with him. That mattered little. Our hopes of relaxation were dashed by the chaos, heat, filth and shitness that is New York City.

After being solicited by nine unlicensed and over priced vigilante drivers, we took a real cab from LaGuardia Airport that had no air conditioning. Fifty dollars and an hour of screech and go later, we checked into our claustrophobic and dangerous Columbus Circle hotel room. While inside the room, I felt like I was in the trash compactor scene in the original Star Wars. The walls weren’t closing in, but I had no reason to believe there wasn’t a garbage monster living in the blue carpet. The beds (Yes that’s plural, because why put one fucking bed in a tiny room?) had wooden frames with jutting corners as sharp as spears. Each time I moved, one of the corners jabbed my shin.

At least we had a view of the place where junkies come to die.

Walking the steamy, rank streets of the West Side, I couldn’t avoid a corner where someone wanted me to buy something. Peddlers peddled anything: bus tours, homemade postcards, shirts, electronics, shawarma. Ice cream trucks called Mr. Softy stopped in the middle of the street (the middle of the street) to feed amorphous Ohioans.

Great city planning Mayor Bloomberg. After dissolving term-limits and declaring yourself Absolute Monarch, did you get everyone together and say, “Men, let’s turn this city into the largest flea market in the world!”? 

I wanted to bring our luggage down to the streets to see what we could sell, but there wasn’t enough time.  Say what you will about Chicago politics, but Mayor Daley doesn’t put up with that shit in the city. Our streets are clean. Repressed Amish teenagers on their Rumspringa can stroll Michigan Avenue unapproached by some pushy vendor trying to sell them picture frames.

Still, I kept trying to like New York. I lived in the Bronx as a teenager and loved taking trips into Manhattan. I romanticized New York City as the creative center of the world  where the greatest opportunities lay. Even on this trip, I found myself awed by Broadway, the Carnegie Deli and the global headquarters of major corporations. But to call this place the greatest city in the world is absolute horseshit.

When the mugginess causes my balls to stick to my leg, I expect the greatest city in the world to be air conditioned. Except for our hotel room, where we spent the least time, nowhere—restaurants, drugstores, cabs, buses—provided air conditioner. It’s like a thing in New York, and it was intolerable.

Call me overly utopic, but I think the greatest city in the world should try to contain vermin. After dinner one night, we grabbed dessert at the famed Magnolia Bakery in a posh West Side neighborhood. There wasn’t space to eat inside (Shocker!), so we stood on the sidewalk lined with small trees that sat in beds of mini bushes. A mouse scurried out of the one closest to us to snatch a crumb and returned to the bushes. Okay, I thought, big cities have mice. At least it wasn’t a rat. Not one second later, like a digitized special effect, up to 30 mice zipped out.

“Oh Christ!” I shouted and jumped in Amy’s arms.

Even more disturbing, the mice hung around; they weren’t afraid of people. Does Chicago have mice? Yes. Are there terrifyingly plump rats. Absolutely. Do they brazenly hangout in front of Alinea, Tru and Roy’s? No, because we have alleys. We don’t pile our garbage in front of our businesses. We give a shit.

Our flight was scheduled for 4 p.m. on Tuesday, giving us enough time to visit Fordham Prep in the early afternoon. We were food, alcohol and heat fatigued, but we had enough energy for one final event. We arrived, I shook hands with the alumni relations director, and Amy got a call from American Airlines that our flight was cancelled due to weather. But there was a chance we could go on standby for a later flight.

“But it’s sunny here, and it’s sunny in Chicago,” Amy told them. Right, they said, but there was bad weather everywhere between. Of course.

We carried on with the tour of the school while trying to come up with a plan. Jake would be fine because he was with my in-laws. We’d have to make arrangements to miss work and to find a hotel in Queens for the night. We would have to cover the cost of transportation and the hotel. American Airlines is not monetarily responsible for what they term an “Act of God.” I wondered if I could make diarrhea on the face of Gerard J. Arpey, Chairman, President and CEO of American Airlines and claim it was an act of God. Arpey. What kind of name is that? Asshole. Fuck you.

We took a sixty dollar cab ride to LaGuardia from the Bronx to learn that all American Airlines flights to Chicago for the remainder of the day head been cancelled. Our only option to get the fuck out was a United flight that left Newark. We took a fifty dollar hour-and-a-half ride in a van shuttle thing with no air conditioner to Newark Liberty International Airport. We waited in line at security, placed our carry-ons in those bins on the counter, separated our ziplocked liquids, removed our belts and shoes, and the X-ray machine broke. I’m not FUCKING KIDDING. We put on our belts, shoes, repacked our carry-ons, walked to the next security area, nearly causing an insurrection as the TSA allowed us to cut the line.

Amy was livid, but I had nothing left. I just took it like a whipping boy.

“Let’s have a drink and a good dinner,” Amy said.

Naturally the terminal in this vomit of an airport had neither a bar nor any restaurants. We were determined, so we took a shuttle to the Continental terminal and found a pathetic sit down joint where a man who looked
like a down and out Vincent D’onofrio ate lemon wedges at the table next to us. We waited back at our terminal through two delays. I stared out the windows. Newark, like Northwest Indiana, is a place that shouldn’t exist.

Amy’s mom met us at our house at 10 p.m with Jake, but not before we got stuck at a railroad crossing waiting for two trains. When we leave him behind, I always fear he’ll resent us a little when we take him back home. Amy opened the door to her mom’s car, and Jake gave us a tired smile.

“Hi,” he said.

That was the best part of the weekend. Even better than the pizza.