(Hello! It’s me. I’m still writing. I had about 8000 words in the bank of the travelogue in its original, straightforward narrative form, but there was a problem. While I definitely have enough material to write a book about, writing the “state 1, state 2, state 3” just wasn’t working out. There was a lot of…empty spaces, just as there were on the trip. Which isn’t bad in and of itself, but I was getting to where I didn’t enjoy the writing, and I was pretty sure what I was writing wasn’t very entertaining to read, which isn’t good for anyone. So I’ve sort of changed up the outline of the beast, and it’s now more of a collection of essays. The final product will still be mostly linear in nature, but you’ll also be able to open it in the middle and read a random story and enjoy for itself. And this way I will be able to focus on the more entertaining and interesting parts of my trip. This is a rough draft of the first essay I’ve written, although it’s obviously not the first essay chronologically.)
I opened my eyes, but just slightly. They slammed close in response, and I waited a few seconds before trying again. My head hurt. A lot. Half of my body was laying on the edge of a blow-up mattress, with the other half dangling onto the hardwood floor. I forced myself to stand, assessing my situation. There were five or six other bodies scattered among the uncomfortable wooden floors, all using blankets, shirts, and other people to make their night’s sleep a little softer. There was another group of six or so, lucky enough to have passed out on couches, curled in the fetal position, making room for each other. Why they got to sleep on furniture and some of us didn’t, I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember.
Over on the plastic laminate kitchen countertop, I saw it. It made me think back to the night before. I had made the multi-hour journey from Manhattan to Clifton, New Jersey for my friend Chelsea’s birthday party. When I arrived, I was presented with a mason jar of corn whiskey. And it was not a small jar either. It was supposed to be this “Hey, you’re from Texas, and everyone from Texas is a slackjawed redneck who has a moonshine distillery in their backyard, so this will make you feel right at home!” gag. Luckily, I can take a joke with some graciousness, so within a matter of minutes I was drinking a concoction of corn whiskey mixed with Juicy Juice out of a plastic mug sporting pictures of monster trucks. Hey, don’t judge me.
The whiskey jar was, unsurprisingly, now empty. I fished my phone out of my pocket to see what time it was. Like the jar, the phone was out of juice, though the microwave told me it was eleven AM. I put my shoes on, grabbed the mason jar for souvenir purposes, and, without waking anyone to say goodbye, I left. I knew it would take me about two hours to get to Brooklyn, where I had left my car underneath the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and I wanted to reach my destination for the day, West Hartford, Connecticut, before it got dark. I did not know it yet, but that was not going to happen.
I walked from the apartment through the moderately nice suburban neighborhood, struggling to remember which intersections to turn at, not to mention which direction. This is because I had not reached Clifton the day before until 11 pm. Thanks to three different employees at the Hoboken terminal telling me to go to three different platforms, I had missed an eight o’clock train and had to wait two hours and change for the next one. After walking for ten minutes, I was relieved to see the Delwanna station. “Station” is a misnomer, as really it’s just a canopy covering a bench, but I didn’t name the thing. A train schedule posted on the ticket machine indicated that the next train would arrive in fifteen minutes. Twenty-five minutes later, it pulled up.
I sat on a middle row on the bottom floor of the double decker train, away from anyone who might want to make small talk on the twenty minute trip into Hoboken. I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out a crumpled up napkin. Upon the napkin were directions back to my car, that I had written the previous night while still in Manhattan.
“Delwanna to Hoboken. PATH to 33rd. At 34th, take F towards Coney Island. Exit at York Street stop.”
The ink had smeared, but thankfully it was still legible. Although I had been to New York before, this was the first time that I had braved the public transit system without being accompanied by a local, so the training wheels were off, so to say. Halfway to Hoboken, the train stopped at a scheduled stop, and stayed there for fifteen minutes. I didn’t know what was going on, but I could see a fat middle-aged guy was standing outside of the train, alternating between yelling at his wife and yelling at the conductor. For all the “asshole New Yorker” stories you hear, the angriest people always seem to be the tourists.
We eventually arrived at Hoboken, which is gorgeous. Being there makes you feel that we live in an older age, an era where rail is still the main form of transportation, which I find classy and romantic. I made my way to the PATH train, which uneventfully took me to my stop, 14th Street in Manhattan. I was actually supposed to take the PATH all the way to 33rd, but I had one stop to make.
There was a girl who I thought at the time was pretty rad, that ran a uniques booth in the East Village on the weekend with her grandparents. Despite the fact that I had seen her just the day before, I couldn’t in good conscience take the PATH within five blocks, and not stop by. Not that I was anything you’d want showing up on your doorstep at that point; I was hungover, sunburned, and still wearing the same shirt that I had put on the morning before. But I hadn’t gotten to where I was by making reasoned decisions, and I saw no use in trying to start then.
I walked the two short blocks and three long blocks, arriving just before one o’clock. The booth had not yet been set up for the day, which I told myself was because it wasn’t one yet. I walked up and down the surrounding blocks until one, and then one-fifteen. There was no sight of Girl or grandparents, so I told myself that they would probably set up at two. To pass the time, I visited the nearby Strand Bookstore.
I consider myself a book lover and transitively I find great joy in simply being in a bookstore. Seeing as Strand is about as famous as a bookstore can get, I figured it would be heaven for me. And I liked it, but not as much as I was expecting. My problem with Strand is that it’s too much. You walk in and there’s fuck-all books everywhere. There’s piles of books on every horizontal surface, including the floor. Upstairs, downstairs, there’s just books falling off other mounds of books. There might have been some semblance of organization throughout the store, but if there was, it escaped me. Not that I don’t understand why some prefer the chaos. The chance of enjoying something you find by accident is just as high as enjoying something sought out on purpose, and I don’t begrudge those who want to mine for literary gold. But I’m a picky reader, and there’s already a lot in bookstores that I don’t want to read. I generally know what I’m looking for, and randomizing the fiction section just doesn’t do me any personal favors.
After a good but shallow look through Strand, I went back outside to see if Girl had set up the booth yet. There was still no one out there, and the time was just after two. I waited until two fifteen, then finally gave up and headed back to the PATH at 14th and 6th. I would learn the next day that staying any longer would have been a waste of time, since they didn’t set up the booth that day, on account of how fucking hot it was.
I finished my PATH portion of the trip, getting off at 33rd, and walked across the street to the MTA station at 34th. I knew that I needed to take the F train in order to reach my destination, but when I found the tunnel for the F, I saw that it was also the tunnel for three other trains. Something in the back of my head told me I should check that I was headed the right way with someone who actually knew what they were doing. Located right by the tunnel was a Metro Transit Authority information stand, and I approached the lady attending it with my question.
“Hi ma’am, I was wondering, this is the tunnel for the F train, which goes to Coney Island, right?”
“Yeah baby, as a matter of fact both the D and the F go to Coney Island, so you can just get on whichever one comes first.”
Now, this was not an incorrect statement. Both the D and F trains do, in fact, go to Coney Island. The problem was that I had asked the wrong question. Not all trains that go to Coney Island are created equal, or in this case, take the same route to Coney Island. Unfortunately, the subtlety of these differences was lost on me at that moment, and when the D train pulled up, I strolled right on, and even found a seat. I was as happy as a pig in shit.
From 34th Street, the D train makes 22 stops before it reaches Coney Island. I’m not proud to admit it, but we were almost halfway to Coney Island before I started to suspect that something was awry. The precise moment that I realized I had fucked up was when the train’s digital display showed Coney Island as 12 stops away, with no sign of York Street in between. In my first act of competence of the day, I made the decision not to get off immediately and try to find my way across Brooklyn. If both the D and F trains went to Coney Island, then I reasoned that if I went all the way to the end of the line I could hop off the D and onto the F, which would take me back towards Manhattan, and subsequently to my destination at York Street.
When we finally reached Coney Island, I couldn’t help but laugh at the disparity between everyone else getting off the train, and myself. Most of the other passengers were families, some individual parents, all with kids, excited for a day of pleasantries. I was ready to fall over, having been traveling by foot and public transit for 5 hours at this point, and still had to take another subway back across to the other side of Brooklyn. But at least I wasn’t lost anymore.
The platform for the F train was just around the corner, and when it pulled up I made absolutely sure that it was, in fact, the F train before boarding. There were 20 stops before York Street, and every time we came to a halt and the train doors opened, I was reminded that everyone getting off was smarter than I was, as probably was everyone getting on. I mean, I had graduated from college, so in reality they likely weren’t all smarter than me. But at least they knew how to successfully navigate a fucking subway system.
After finally exiting at the York Street stop and walking a few final blocks, I found my car, still parked under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway where I left it. I was simultaneously filled with joy and astonishment. My car had not been broken into, and no homeless people had defecated or fornicated on top of it. It was 5 o’clock, and I was finally in a position to head up to Connecticut. Well, almost.
Though I was brave and/or stupid enough to leave my car parked under a Brooklyn bridge overnight, I was not stupid enough to leave my laptop inside the car under the same circumstances. I had left it in my friend Sloan’s nearby apartment while I was gone, but I couldn’t seem to remember which apartment building was his, and even if I had picked it out I couldn’t let myself in without a key, which obviously I didn’t have. My phone being dead, I had only one option: Pay phone. Luckily, on the same crunched up napkin I had written the transit directions on, I had written Sloan’s phone number, in case this very situation happened to arise.
For some reason, I was under the impression that in New York City would have a pay phone on every corner of every block. Which was the latest thing I had been wrong about in my day-long succession of being wrong about things. I walked three blocks without seeing a pay phone before I ducked into a grocery store to ask where the nearest pay phone was. It was six blocks in the other direction. Because why the fuck wouldn’t it be?
Finally reaching the payphone, I put my dollar of quarters in and dialed Sloan’s number.
“Hello?”
“Dude, fucking bring my laptop out to the car, please.”
I hung up before the laughter could subside. He was still laughing when he was walking towards the car.
“I was wondering when you were going to come back.”
“Don’t even ask, man. Don’t even get me started.”
We shook hands, and Sloan took a step away, then turned around.
“Oh yeah man. I put the down payment on Amanda’s engagement ring. Wanna be my best man?”
