42 Hours in NYC, part 4

Part 4 – "Willy-Nilly Adventure" 01/18/04 2:15 a.m. (E.T.)

After the comedy club, Ross and I hung out at a truly Irish, Irish pub to watch a college basketball game that started at 11:00 p.m. By the time the game ended we were disgustingly tired and felt as if the "Dragon Coach" was a memory from three lifetimes ago. Everything past midnight runs in strobe fashion in my mind, so I won't bore you with it all. Suffice it to say, we were happy to be at our Broadway Avenue hostel.

Before this trip, I had never stayed in a hostel. I was so unfamiliar with hostels that I originally thought Ross was mispronouncing the word "hotels". Ross isn't a dumb man, so I guess it wasn't so much that I thought he was mispronouncing it, as I figured he was making his own clever play on words by calling hotels "hostiles".
Maybe he had a hostile run-in with a bell-hop the last time he was in a hotel. I dunno. The point is, as I look back on it, I was no smarter than Jessica Simpson in 2004.

I don't remember much about checking in except that the hallways smelled of coconut.

I remember the awful feeling of arriving at our 10-bed hostel room at 3 a.m., opening the door, finding that instead of 10 individual beds, it was really just five bunk beds and I'd been assigned the Letter J bunk. Which was cool except that the room was pitch black, completely smelling of overnight man-stink, and I couldn't see any of the bed assignments.
So imagine your old buddy Adam exhausted, sore, bordering on hallucinatory and feeling his way across a room he's never been in before like a damned hobo, praying that Bed J wasn't a top bunk bed.
It was.

Ross had the bed right near the door and was asleep before I had even made it halfway across the room. By the time I found my bed, I slammed my foot so hard into the side of it that I tipped over and fell onto my lower bunk mate. I not only woke him up, but I accidentally backslapped him as he sat up. I frantically located the ladder leading up and climbed like there was no tomorrow.
Like lava was beneath my ladder and climbing.
Like wolverines were snapping below me.
Like a robber dodgin' bullets and hoppin' rooftops.
And when you consider the way I shook the entire bunk as I climbed it, and as angry as I was probably making the faceless male who was to be sleeping under me for the duration of the night, I was fairly convinced I would not make it through the night.
I felt like Tom Hanks in 'Big' when he moves into the ramshackle apartment in New York, eats the filling out of the Oreos, pushes the night table against the front door and cries himself to sleep wondering what he was doing in such a big city without his family to protect him.
I too, cried myself to sleep that night.
And when I awoke, I was too confused to cry. I spent the first minute-and-a-half of my groggy first-morning-in-New York existence trying to figure out what I was doing high up in the air, in a room I had never seen before. I must be the only person on Earth who goes to sleep, wakes up with no idea where he is and has literally never seen the room he spent the last six hours sleeping in and none of it was due to drugs or booze.
But it was here at the hostel where I really felt the sense of adventure. But there is a big downside to adventure; adventure makes you filthy. I smelled like Irish pub, comedy club, cigarettes, perfume, hostel and morning funk all at once and had not packed anything but a toothbrush and deodorant as tools to getting rid of it, which meant I was going to only be adding to my current rank, not erasing it.
We packed our bags, left the hostel and headed for Times Square to see about getting tickets to a Broadway show. Please indulge me as I discuss Times Square for a moment. Some of you have been here and some of you have yet to allow the bombardment of commerce to enter your delicate sensories. Not having ever been to Tokyo, I can honestly say that there is nothing like Times Square. Everything is big, everything moves and clicks and pops and twirls and glows and shimmies.
Coca-Cola is sexy.
Lingerie looks classy.
Men have 40-foot crotches that follow you like eyes in paintings.
Fast food chains have 16 floors to eat on.
Musical advertisements are as big as the biggest buildings in Baltimore.
Things that I might ignore in magazine ads, I became mesmerized by when it was flashing at me from the side of the Hershey Building!*
I suddenly became hyper interested in fashionable shoes from 9 West! I was totally taken in by the flashing and the nudity and the carefully placed blinking lights (and I'm not even talking about the Times Square advertisements anymore!)
I'm from Chicago okay, I'm not some bumpkin from the Dakotas, but when you create anything to be building size and put massive amounts of flashing lights around it, you can't help but think, "Why gee, these people must really believe in their product!" By the way, one of the biggest billboards told me that the final season of 'Sex In the City' started two weeks ago, so if you haven't done so, you should probably tune in soon.**
My God, was Times Square beautiful (in a completely awful, ridiculous, garish kind of way). It really made standing in-line for tickets a lot more bearable.
I guess now would be a good time to explain what I was standing in line for tickets for. There is a booth (much like a circus tent) called "TKTS" set up in the center of Times Square, whose only purpose it is, is to sell half-price tickets to Broadway and off-Broadway shows the day of the sale.
The booth opened at 11 a.m. and there were several hundred people standing in-line. It was raining and I can admit to being surprised that so many people were waiting in-line on a Sunday. According to one of the scalpers trying to sell Ross and I two tickets to 'The Producers' for $250 per ticket (not gonna happen), lines and crowds like this aren't uncommon at all. He went on to say that lines are often longer on the weekends and that weather has no effect on New Yorkers. I asked him if he was from New York. The man looks at me and asks; "It's rainin' out here. D'you see me wit'an umbrella?"
"No sir, I don't see you with an umbrella. My apologies." There was an awkward pause and then Ross asks the scalper, "How 'bout $200 for both tickets?"
The man didn't answer and went after some geezer with a leather porkpie hat.
After 30 minutes in line, we walked away with third row balcony seats to 'Rent'. I'd always heard fantastic things about this musical. Back in 1997, it was unstoppable, loud, rumored to be socially important, and for the youngsters.
This seemed like a perfect show for me to see as I had always described myself using those same parameters. I was so enamored with the idea of seeing an actual real-life Broadway play that I could have gotten tickets to Elton John's 'Aida' and still felt excited.
We were stoked.
What was even cooler was, the show was in less than an hour, so all we had to do was maybe get a bite to eat, and go to the theater. As luck would have it, there was a Ray's Pizzeria near the Nederlander Theater, where our show was.
There are certain places that the locals tell tourists they have to go if they come to town. Chicagoans tell tourists to head toward the Wiener's Circle on Clark Street for the best hotdogs in the world. Philly folks tell outsiders to head straight to a Wa-Wa's for the best cheese steaks (or is it just steaks?) and New Yorkers tell everyone else that they must head to Famous Ray's Pizzeria for the best pizza in the world.
Now, apparently, there are over 15 different Ray's Pizzerias in the city (we saw five of them) and they all claim to be the original. I know from research that the one on 11th Street actually is the original. But we didn't eat at the one on 11th street, in fact, we didn't even see it. We ate at the one on 41st and Broadway and we liked it. We overpaid and were crowded out of the building by other overeager tourists, but it was damned good pizza. Make no mistake about that.
I won't describe the musical itself too much. I will say I enjoyed it immensely. On a completely unrelated note, there was brief nudity in 'Rent'. No one warned me about this and I feel as if this is something that one must absolutely be warned of. I knew this was a musical for the X and Y Generations, but live performance nudity is a jarring thing to see no matter what age you are and it really threw me off. There's a big flashy full-cast musical number right before the intermission. Everyone is buzzing and flinging themselves through the air, then all of a sudden – BOOM – one of the lead actresses pulls her pants past her derriere and shakes it tauntingly at another one of the actors…
…

…I don't know what happens after that because my brain would not continue processing anymore data after that point. We had good seats for such a display too. We were right there in front of it. It didn't help either, that we were on Broadway, so not only are all the actors and actresses talented as all get-out, but they're beautiful too. I bet a lot of people in the audience missed the nudity because there was so much other stuff going on, but not me. I already had my eyes glued to "Maureen", but I never thought she'd moon me! Thank God, there was an intermission soon afterward or I may not have been able to follow anything else that happened in the play!
Anyway, I highly recommend 'Rent'.

Concluded tomorrow with Part 5 – "33 Down, 9 To Go"

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* By the way, is anyone else surprised that the Hershey Building isn't in Pennsylvania?

** This was written three years ago. Tuning in now to catch the final season of 'Sex and the City' would prove fruitless. My apologies. Rest assured, the final season was awesome though.