Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I had never been in a room where I could touch all four walls at once. I did all the things
you do in hotel rooms-played with the lights and TV, looked in the drawers, smelled the
little cake of soap in the bathroom, put all the towels and ashtrays in my suitcase-and then
wandered out to have a look at the city.
The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I
came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were living there then. They had an apart-
ment in a strange, Kafkaesque apartment complex in Queens called Lefrak City. It consis-
ted of about a dozen identical tall, featureless buildings clustered around a series of lone-
some quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain puddles stand for weeks and the
flowerbeds are littered with supermarket carts. Each building was like a vertical city, with
itsowngrocerystore,drugstore,laundromatandsoon.Idon'trememberthedetailsexcept
thateachbuildingwastallerthanthetallestbuildinginDesMoinesandthatthetotalpopu-
lation was something like 50,000—bigger than most Iowa towns. I had never conceived of
so many people gathered in one place. I couldn't understand why in such a big, open coun-
try as America people would choose to live like that. It wasn't as if this were something
temporary,aplacetospendafewmonthswhilewaitingfortheirranchhouseinthesuburbs
to be built. This was home. This was it. Thousands and thousands of people would live out
their lives never having their own backyard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out
thebackdooratmidnighttohaveapeeinthebushesandcheckoutthestars.Theirchildren
would grow up thinking that supermarket carts grew wild, like weeds.
In the evenings, when my brother and his wife went out, Stan and I would sit with binocu-
lars and scan the windows of the neighboring buildings. There were hundreds of windows
to choose from, each containing a ghostly glow of television, a separate glimpsed life, an-
other chapter in the endless story of the naked city. What we were looking for, of course,
were naked women-and to our amazement we did actually see some, though usually this
resulted in such excited grappling for control of the binoculars that the women had dressed
and gone out for the evening by the time we got their windows back in view. Mostly what
wesaw,however,wereothermenwithbinocularsscanningthewindowsofourbuilding.It
was all very strange. This was August 1968. In the background, I remember, the television
was filled with news of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and Mayor Daley's men
kicking the crap out of demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was a
strange time to be young, full of lust and bodily juices.
What I particularly remember was the sense of menace whenever we left the building.
Groups of hoody-looking teenagers with no place to go would sit on the walls around the
complex watching anyone who passed. I always expected them to fall in behind us as we
