New York, Part 1

2004-11-22 - 8:11 p.m.

I'm packing, because I apparently move this week. I hate upheaval.

I also recently re-discovered an old rule about travel: if you lose track of a banana at any time while travelling, that banana will be rediscovered three days later mouldering at the bottom of your backpack/suitcase. And then your backpack will smell like rotting banana forever. I'm not sure how many times I'll need to learn this valuable travelling tip before I die, because this has happened three times to me so far, and that hasn't quite been enough.

Times Square was my first New York moment. From the second I got off the plane at La Guardia airport, I was looking for a definitive New York moment. I tried to explain to the rugby guy (have I given him an alias, yet? Ah hell, we'll call him "Bubba", because of his redneck pretensions (at face value he's like the anti-redneck, but he grew up in the mid-west, is a gun enthusiast, and loves Jeff Foxworthy, so what are you going to do?)) who met me at the airport what I meant. I wanted a moment that couldn't really be duplicated anywhere else. So, like, the fact that the airport signs were a different colour than the signs in Toronto wasn't going to do it. Even riding on the subway couldn't be called a "New York moment" by me, because, well, a subway really is a subway if you're just using it to get from point A to point B. I wanted a moment that said "Yep, you are certainly in New York, Magus. Deal with it."

My first New York burrough was Brooklyn, because that's where Bubba was staying and he wanted to drop his stuff off before we went into Manhattan (where I was staying). It took us longer to get from the airport to Brooklyn than it did to get from Toronto to New York, but that was okay, because I was busy looking for that moment.

And then...Times Square, which is pretty much just one great big giant commercial. It's a little bit like finding yourself inside an over-produced movie. Oddly, it works in New York. I think I was in a little bit of shock, or maybe that's just how the city works, because Times Square seems bigger in my memory than it did at the time. I was definitely dazzled.

And that was pretty much Friday night. I made my way to where I was being billetted (in Chelsea, which is (I'm told) the rich-gay-man's neighbourhood), chatted with my billetter (not having much experience with the different forms of the word "billet", we rugby players did the best we could: billetters, billetees, billetting, to billet, to be billetted by...), and then went to sleep.

Once, about two years ago, I went to Ottawa on a protest. We were all forced to crowd into some room at a university to sleep, and the next morning a woman mentioned that I had been trying to spoon her throughout the night. That's got to be one of the most embarrassing things to happen to me. Consequently, since me and another guy had to share a bed while being billetted, I didn't sleep well. I was worried about sending the wrong signal, or doing something equally embarassing. Turns out I needn't have worried, because my co-billetter snores, breathes funny, talks, mutters, moans, shouts, moves, steals blankets, and places his head on peoples' crotches while he sleeps. The second night there, I awoke to his head resting on my (clothed and blanketted) groin. I have personal space issues, and so I may have been a bit rougher than necessary when I pulled his head up by the scalp and then rolled over and pretended to still be asleep when he woke up. I accidently told this story to a couple of the rugby guys, and now I'm regretting it. The guy I was co-billetted with isn't the most attractive fellow, and he has awful teeth, and he's a bit annoying, so now everyone thinks it's fun to laugh at my awkward situation. Which is fine, except that I don't like it when laughter comes at someone else's expense. So, lesson learned: I will only tell funny anecdotes to some of those guys if the anecdote doesn't lend itself to picking on someone. So far as I know, my co-billiter doesn't know about my distress, but I don't want him to overhear someone telling the story and realise that people are still making fun of his bad teeth.

Saturday was rugby day. I got up bright and early and went with my billetter to the pitch. Our team, as is our custom, was pretty much the last one there, so me and the three or four other guys who showed up early stood around and watched the other teams warm up and start to play.

It was cold! But as soon as you ran a couple of laps, it actually was pretty nice. We played our first game at 10:40. I had a great 15 minutes or so, and then, in a scrum, one of my teammates wasn't low enough, or wasn't binding enough or something, and basically drove his head into the bottom of my rib cage. I realised something was not right when I heard three crunches, that sounded/felt like cartilage rubbing against cartilage. The image in my head is of two chicken drumsticks being forced together. I'm pretty sure that the real injury has nothing to do with drumsticks.

I played the rest of the half (20 minute halves, half as long as regulation games) in pain, and then played the second half in pain. I didn't enjoy it, mainly because I was afraid someone would run into my ribcage. In rugby, someone is always running into someone else's ribcage. I wussed out on a few tackles, and wasn't as much of a presence as I would have liked to be. I ended up sitting out of the rest of the games, which really, really sucks. The field medic looked at me, said that nothing was broken, and he massaged the muscles underneath my ribcage (if that makes any sense) to stop them from siezing. The pain was gone for about two minutes and then crept back. Damn.

Anyway, I got to be the official photographer for the rest of the day. I enjoyed it, since I got to use really expensive and high tech cameras and video cameras, but I have no actual photography training, so the whole time I worried about doing things right.

Our team lost all of our matches, our best game being the first one (22-12 or something). I wonder how much of a difference I might have actually made...

There was a party after the games at a club called the Eagle. I'll talk about that later, because it brings us nicely to the halfway point of my New York trip.

Cheers,

The Magus

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