Hyx from the Styx - Part one
It’s Monday morning. The business center at the Barclay charges fifty cents a minute for an online hook-up. I haven’t checked the rate charged to use the room’s ethernet jack. Beth’s up there asleep and I’m making notes on TextPad in a comfortable straight-backed arm chair in the lobby, a grande skim latte on the little marble table to my side, Dell Inspiron 8600 in my lap with a big WTF sticker obscuring the logo on the screen back.
When I heard the bad news about the $30 per hour charge at the business center, I figured I’d switch to plan B, find a Starbuck’s, sit down with a cuppa, and uplink on the mojo wireless via their highly touted
I’m a study in deprivation. I’m used to high speed access to the net anytime. When I type a brand name I like to be able to Google it, link to it, perhaps smirk at a witty intentional irony and drive on. I like to be able to haul up a map on a whim, perhaps to locate a Starbuck’s with wireless… there’s a depressing recursion here… but, like a junkie I have a determined confidence that I’ll set up the new supply channel here in the new city in short order.
Sunday afternoon I left David Isenberg’s WTF and took the train from Chappaqua to Grand Central Station. I hoofed it north a few blocks, checked into the Barclay, unpacked and cabbed down to Penn Station where Beth came in fresh from a weekend busting out lath and plaster at her brother’s place in New Jersey. Much hugging, a taxi ride back to the hotel, unpacking, dithering over maps and guide books… after settling back together we departed the hotel for a walk to Rockefeller Center, a complex with all the structural integrity and cultural iconographic familiarity as Katie Couric’s well preserved and ever tightening face. Katie, Bawbwa, MTM… American media is creating a new breed of herd animals, people whose eyes are migrating to the sides of their heads in a single generation evolutionary leap. One suspects that uplift through the facelift won’t breed true.
It was palm Sunday, a Christian holiday larded in an ironic triumphalism that exalts the humility of Jesus… we ducked in the side door of St. Patrick’s and toured the cathedral. The church, while not crowded, sheltered dozens of the faithful and the prayerful.. The space begged for running children, shouting to test the echo potential of the great vaulted ceilings. Alas, all was pryerful reverence, flickering candles, girls kneeling before statues of obscure Christian kings and cardinals, the beatified honored in marble representations, waiting above in G-d’s presence to intercede for the faithful who stuff a buck in the box, light a candle and mutter a prayer or a pleading: “St Louis, hear my prayer for victory over the heathen in foe in Southwest Asia and the middle east, and watch over our thousands of boys whose lives have been changed forever by painful burns and amputations. Welcome the over six hundred American dead into the bosom of the lord and consign the enemy to the fiery depths of eternal damnation. This we pray in Jesus’ name… no shit.” A modest bobbing of the head, a graceful rise from the kneeling to the standing position accompanied by a flush of righteousness. A lot was going on… servitors in maroon jackets sat at the Information desk tieing palm fronds into little cruciform representations. The cardboard florist boxes nearby gave hints of an obscure market and a highly specialized supply chain. Buckets of burned out candles near the door spoke to a recycling opportunity.
Souls washed clean, cleaner anyway, we exited the front door and walked across the avenue to Rockefeller Center. There, a man drove a Zamboni around and around the skating rink while skaters waited patiently for a chance to resume their sport. We watched him groom the ice for a while. Spring weather makes this a losing proposition. How long before it all turns to slush and they bring in the summer furnishings?
Walking home we watched for a place to have dinner, but we found ourselves either underdressed for the nice places or mistrustful of those that might serve us. What kind of a restaurant would be open at 9pm on Sunday night. Dean and DeLucca might have worked, but they had started to clean up and the fare looked a little tired and old. I was starting to feel that way too. We ended up eating in the hotel, but we certainly won’t make that a habit. You can guess what the seared ahi tuna costs at a place that charges fifty cents a minute for internet access.
