3 April 1986: New York, New York

Thursday, April 3, 1986

Pickwick Hotel, 230 E. 51^st St.

 

I arrived at the Newark Airport yesterday afternoon following an uneventful flight with a plane change in Chicago.  Nanci Cohen, an old friend from Boulder, met me at the airport and drove us to her home some 30 miles northwest in Randolph, NJ.  Nanci works in Newark temporarily but was not used to driving home from the airport.  She was lost about half the time.  With our eyes on the setting sun, we proceeded in a west-northwesterly direction over narrow roads that wound past country estates, subdivisions, and suburban towns until she found familiar territory.  The roads in New Jersey are every bit as crooked and confusing as those in New England – and crowded too, I might add.  

Svelte, brunette Nanci and her red haired, bearded husband, Peter Copeland, have a large four bedroom, two-story home in an upper middle-class neighborhood with a nice view across a wooded hillside.  Peter took a promotion from Ma Bell a couple years ago to come here with the understanding (in writing) that they could return to Colorado within four years.  Nanci and Peter have a cute, almost three-year-old kid named Derek who is VERY verbal with an amazing vocabulary, including multisyllabic tongue-twisters like elephant and helicopter.  He can even read words like these especially if there is a picture above them.  Now, of course, I know even less about kids than W.C. Fields did, but this little guy is definitely precocious – a future starving writer, no doubt. 

This morning, Peter drove me down to the New Jersey Trans station at Morris Plains after dropping Derek off at kiddie-care.  In about 10 minutes, the 8:38 pulled in, and I dragged my load on to the car for the ride to Hoboken.  The electric rail car stopped at stimulating communities (excuse my sarcasm) such as Morristown, Short Hills, and Madison to gather an assortment of passengers most of whom had that certain Republican demeanor.  Peter had explained that even the singles here are Republicans.  As deciduous trees and tri-levels gave way to dilapidated tenements, abandoned factories, and polluted marshlands, we passed through tired cities like Orange, Newark, and Hoboken to the west side of the Hudson River.  There, at the end of the line, I had to schlep my three big bundles of stuff several hundred yards down to the PATH subway station for the ride under the river to West 33^rd Street in midtown Manhattan. As I emerged into daylight from the subway, ready to collapse from muscle fatigue, what should appear but a good ol’ yellow New York cab which whisked me off the Pickwick Hotel in the East 50s for a paltry five bucks.

My friend, Mary Ann Tavery, had turned me on to this little hotel which she learned about in a Denver Free University class on travelling.  $30 a night for a mini-room (8x12) with a bath down the hall.  Relatively clean and frequented mostly by non-English speaking foreigners.  Who says NYC is expensive?  I had a potato knish for lunch (75 cents), and dinner at a neighborhood restaurant near the UN Headquarters was $8 (including tip) for linguini with red clam sauce and 2 glasses of wine.  As I write this, I’m getting messed up in the head having polished off most of a split of Chianti which I purchased at a liquor store on East 2^nd Avenue.  When I queued up to pay for the wine, the shapely, black hottie with big hair in front of me was wearing tight leather black and white Everlast boxing shorts and a tank top.  If you ever watched NBC’s Friday Night Fights back in the 1950s, nearly all boxers wore Everlast.  Anyway, the hottie explained to the cashier that her husband had purchased the rights to use the Everlast name on this new brand of feminine apparel.  My goodness, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.     

The Pickwick Hotel in 2021.  It’s now called Pod 51 Hotel.

New York is really a kick.  It’s like, you know, very active.  As a visitor, I like the vibrant pace.  As a resident, I would probably go bonkers here in two weeks.  Despite all the distractions (intense people, snarling traffic, constant noise, and a feeling of being overwhelmed by it all), I managed to get a few things done in the afternoon.  My accomplishments included a visit to the Interpress News Service which distributes newspaper articles worldwide (they were potentially interested in my stuff) and the Zambian mission near the UN where I scored a multiple-entry Zambian visa good for six months. 

I phoned several travel magazines that I had written to several weeks ago.  They had interesting excuses for getting rid of me like, “I can’t find your letter” or “Writers’ Market is wrong. We don’t use any free-lance material.”  Most of these negative responses were from receptionists although I actually got through to a couple of editors who quickly brushed me off saying they weren’t interested in anything from southern Africa because of the violence there – not exactly conducive to safaris for Mom, Dad, Buddy, and Sis.  Or, they had already put together their Africa issue for the year.  I’ve just about decided that querying magazines is a waste of time unless you already have a personal contact on their staff or have some story ideas that they positively can’t resist like an eyewitness account of a nuclear attack on the Pentagon. 

I also talked to a couple of stock photo agencies, and they were a bit more receptive.  They are willing to look at your shots and, if they’re good enough for them to stick in their files, you get 50% of the sale price if they ever manage to sell anything to an ad agency, magazine, travel company, etc.  Do I really want my slides and negs to collect years of dust in an obscure drawer at one of these places or maybe push some product I don't like?

I guess I won’t take any of this crap too seriously.  Tomorrow night at 7:30, my SAA (South African Airways) 747 leaves JFK for Johannesburg and the real fun begins. 

Since I gave the balance of my herbal stash to my pal, Dr. Jim, back in Colorado, I’m getting high on the New York skyline while sitting on the ledge of my hotel window, ten stories above death.  I’ve pulled the window down to my lap for some security with my ass on the inside.  Wonder how many more cheap thrills I’ll have over the coming months.  From the canyons of Manhattan, here’s looking at you, kids.