Last Friday night, in Manhattan for the weekend, I was having dinner at the excellent Osteria Accademia on the Upper West Side with my son Booker (who lives in the neighborhood; I was nearly clipped by an aggro bicyclist when arriving at his apartment) and his godfather Michael Gentile, my longtime friend—we met in 1980—and colleague at two weekly newspapers and now Splice Today. The joint was mobbed, and in between bites of Caesar salad, meatballs, ravioli and a too-rich tagliatelle Bolognese (delicious at the time, but rough sledding the next day), we were jabbering about downtown architecture, the pitiful state of cinema and an incident that startled Michael that afternoon as he was sketching birds in a park. An elderly bum was staggering this way and that way and decided to rest right next to Michael on a bench. He muttered a string of vaguely hostile non-sequiturs and then, not precisely out of nowhere, he let loose a voluminous amount of puke, half of it landing on Michael. A rude experience, but Michael peppered the story with so many digressions and hand movements that the three of us were tripled over in laughter. That was fun, and better yet that it didn’t happen to me! (Michael’s a story teller in the best oral tradition, although I believe when he and Booker get together by themselves, the ribaldry’s kept at an R-rating.)
We moved on to illegal immigrants, congestion pricing in the city, Donald Trump’s herky-jerky start to his second term and when I gave halting approval to some of Trump’s actions, speaking loudly, Michael looked the other way and Booker gave me a kick in the shin with his suede loafers under the table. I asked him, “What the fuck was that for, big boy?” and he replied, “Dad, we’re on Amsterdam Ave., so any positive Trump mention could cause a very unpleasant stir!” (It was fortunate that the Trump/Pope meme hadn’t appeared yet, since I thought it was one more example of the Mar-a-Lago attention-queen’s stand-up routine that’s made once-popular comedians passe today.)
Fair enough, I reasoned, for when in a neighborhood where AOC/Hogg Democrats outnumber reasonable centrists 1000-1, it’s best to keep the yap shut. I did feel a pang of nostalgia for the lively conversations that took place with New York Press friends at restaurants that ran from budget to luxe—and got sidetracked in my mind about how much I loathed the “temple” Peter Luger—in the late-1980s and 90s when politics was a largely civilized sport, if not as entertaining as today, and even loud arguments were concluded with a hearty “You’re so full of shit, but anyway, let’s stop in at Puffy’s for a nightcap.”
I hadn’t been to the city for about a year, but aside from even more generic storefronts violating what was once this country’s most curious patch of land, not much had changed. For example, Booker had made a reservation at Accademia for three, but that was lost in translation, and the waiter said we’d have to wait, since he didn’t have two small tables together. Booker pointed one out that could be moved, the waiter resisted—until my son slipped a $20 bill into the guy’s jacket and suddenly it was “And can I offer you gentlemen some drinks to start off?”
At the start of my Acela Baltimore/NYC trip, I did witness a crafty con that would never happen if Amtrak was sensibly privatized, but was so outrageous that I smiled in admiration. Acela has assigned seating—just like at a wedding reception where you search for your name tag and inevitably get stuck sitting next to a bore, or boor—and the conductor was in front of me grilling a well-dressed, middle-aged lady who not only was in the wrong seat, but didn’t even have a ticket! She feigned broken-English, went 10 rounds with the official, who finally threw his hands in the air, and said, “Okay, okay, this is stressing me out, just sit here until we get to New York.” Once he left the car, the amateur Willie Sutton got on her phone, and if not in the King’s English, at least that of aged-out and apparently banished Prince Edward, snorted and said to a friend, “Worked perfectly. I’ll meet you at the Oyster Bar, meal’s on me!”
She heard me laugh, turned around, shrugged her shoulders as a victory lap, and said, conspiratorially, “What’s the harm! As if any Amtrak accountant will notice?” I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, argue with that logic, but I’ll bet if there was an “Acela Corridor” journalist on hand, he or she would pull a Gomer Pyle and cry, “Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!”
One of the evergreen stories in today’s media, buttressed by unspecified “experts,” and “anonymous sources” is that because of Trump tourism is plummeting in America. Not in New York, where the midtown streets on Saturday afternoon were jammed with overweight (or Asian) slobs moseying along, and at one point, Booker said, “Dad, find the hole,” meaning we’d dart in and out of the of human sludge and reach our destination. Have to admit, that advice was sobering, since a generation ago, in the Village or Lower Broadway, that’s precisely what I told Booker and his brother Nicky, as we ventured on our “Saturday morning special,” with stops at book and record stores, newsstands that carried manga, and always a street dog outside of Forbidden Planet. It reminded me of Ted Sorenson’s most memorable line in JFK’s 1961 inauguration speech that “the torch has been passed to a new generation…”
Undeterred, and zoomed-up-to-the-moon by two cold brew coffees from Pret A Manger (the Dunkin’ near my hotel, the Peninsula, was closed for renovations, to my unwarranted consternation) father and son made successful forays to decades-long staples for Mother’s Day gifts and then, chores completed, went to a Barnes & Noble on 45th St., where I hoped to buy John Boyne’s new Air. That was naïve, since the store more resembled an “I Love New York” tourist clip-joint than the bookstores of my youth in the East Village. I knew it’d be a bust but one memory from 1971 when I saw Johnny Got His Gun, after an Orange Julius and a perfect slice (a quarter) played tricks on me. I relayed this embarrassing anecdote that night at Gabriel’s when having dinner with my brother Gary and his family. The butt of a joke (although accompanied by sympathetic nods from Gary and sister-in-law Teresa, five years my senior) for 20 seconds, and then a long meal mostly devoted to the old days, meaning the 1960s and 70s. We did roast Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, New York’s extortionist cabbies and laughed at Trump the Pope, but that was quick: understandably we moved to old stories about Huntington, our parents, and the day I met Teresa as a 15-year-old in 1970. I learned something new: as a teen in the 1960s Terry wanted to be an astronaut, and has followed space exploration ever since, to extent that today Elon Musk is just alright by her. Gary and I also remembered, when I visited him at the University of New Hampshire in 1969, how we went back and forth on the vital question of whether or not Paul was dead. No determination was made, but outside Benjy the Woodchuck had a definite point of view, even as we waved away the fumes from my perfectly-rolled joint.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023