Ornoth

My first trip to New York was on November 11, 1984, for a gathering of Internet chat users. Mind you, this was well before IRC was written, or Relay (IRC’s predecessor). In fact, the Internet really wasn’t there yet; it had no interactive messaging facility. I grew up on something called BITNET, one of the consitutent networks that eventually evolved into the Internet. Anyways, this was arguably the first ever Internet chat get-together.

I wasn’t in the best of situations going into it. See, there were these two girls from UConn—Cathy and Randi—whom I was flirting with. Oh, and then my good friend Lothie was coming up, and she and I were kinda getting together somewhat, too. Oh, and have I mentioned that amidst all this bounty, I had my eye on this really cute chick who showed up with someone else? Yeah… That was Linda, my future wife. Those were the days, huh?

That was also the visit where Lothie and I went over to Godiva Chocolatier on 5th Ave, then got caught in one of those abject NYC downpours.

The next trip I remember was three months later, when I took the bus down from Maine to surprise Linda at the computer center at Queens College. I managed to get from Grand Central onto the subway line to Queens all by myself very late one night. Then at one stop, all these huge dirty black guys came on the train with axes and picks and stuff. I eventually clued in that it was a track crew, but it was enough to really scare the little boy from Maine!

There are various memories of trips down to the city while Linda and I were together. Initially, Linda’s parents refused to meet me, so I had nowhere to stay. I remember staying one night at the Bitnic offices, and other nights at a student hostel near Madison Square Garden. In the meantime, I bowled a nearly perfect game at MSG’s bowling alley. I stayed one night on Staten Island with my friend Hillary, and spent several nights during Purim in the basement of an orthodox Jewish household. That was the setting for the worst illness of my life, after I was food poisoned after eating bad Chinese food in Chinatown.

One morning Linda and I were supposed to meet at a subway stop in Manhattan. It was the morning of Hurricane Gloria, in October 1985. Linda didn’t venture out in the storm, but I did, waiting several hours for the storm to pass before I finally gave up and took the train out to her parents’ house. Meanwhile, Linda had left to go look for me, and her folks had no other recourse but to actually answer the door. Thereafter, they loved me, and we didn’t have any more problems with their denying my existence.

Those trips to New York with Linda were great. Hanging around the Village and Washington Square, ice cream at Swenson’s. visiting Tower Records and Forbidden Planet and Star Magic and the Compleat Strategist. Hanging around Astoria and Ditmars Boulevard. Taking the Merritt/Hutchinson River Parkway to the Whitestone. New York pretzels. Each time we returned from Pennsic, her parents’ house was where we got out first warm showers in more than a week. Watching the Superman balloon’s severed hand floating gently to the ground when he got caught in the trees when we went to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade…

Her parents were… unique. Her mother would buy us all kinds of garbage which we had no use for from the Home Shopping Network. In a house with only three people, they had four televisions, and all of them had to be on and blaring at least 98 dB, or else one of them would come into the room and turn it on and start flipping channels. “What! Don’t you like television! Here! Here’s a science program! I love science programs!” And wearing rubber boots is bad because they’ll make your feet swell up and they’ll have to cut them off your feet. Yeah. What do you want; they read and believe what’s written in the New York Post.

After Linda and I separated, I went down to New York a couple times with my buddies Barry and Sean. We did a little clubbing, and I remember hitting a show at the Knitting Factory. We also caught a Blue Man Group show back around 1992 when they were still a small three-person local outfit, and we sat in the absolute back/top of the multi-floor theater, so we got to initiate the big TP-storm at the end. More good times. Well, except for the Fourth of July, when you couldn’t differentiate between the fireworks and the gunshots, and the concussion made all the car alarms in the city go off simultaneously…

Around 1995 I spent a week living in co-worker Steve C.’s West Village apartment while working on a project for Wells Fargo out of Sapient’s Jersey City office. That was a fun time. And I seem to recall hitting a BDSM club on the west side sometime around then.

But my trips to the city were few and far between after that. Alan L. hosted the 1999 DargonZine Writers’ Summit in New York, which included a trip to Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, which Linda had always promised to take me to. We also spent a couple hours on the roof of the World Trade Center towers, enjoying the sun, the breeze, the view, and the surprisingly total silence. Two years later, they (the towers) were gone. It’s still kind of an eerie feeling to have been there not too long before they came down. I haven’t been back to the site since.

I don’t think I went back to New York for eight years after that Summit. About a year ago, I took the Acela down in early December to visit a client—a prestigious lingerie retailer—in midtown. I didn’t have much time, but managed to snag a pretzel and wander around a little.

A month or two ago I had to go down for another meeting with the same client, and had a little more time to walk around (and it was significantly warmer than it had been in December). It was nice, although I still would enjoy spending a week or even just a weekend down there.

In case you can’t tell, I miss New York. It is a cool place to visit and hang around, and it was especially good when I had Linda to serve as a native guide. You couldn’t pay me enough to live there—Boston’s a much more manageable and friendly town—but it’s no further away than Maine, where I go every 4-8 weeks, so I really should be making trips down there more often than once every eight years.