I Can't Believe It's not Not Coffee

Had breakfast in the West Village at a cafe called French Roast. It offers about five hundred coffee-like drinks, most of which contain nothing poisonous or upsetting like actual caffeine because Americans seem to be frightened of the stuff. (I suppose a shot of real juice would put the already wired average New Yorker into some sort of jangly stratosphere.) With some trepidation I tipped the waitress $5 off a $15 check. She seemed quite happy with it. This I gathered by the fact that she didn't spit in my eye or explain how difficult it was to be an actress/artiste in this city.

`Hey, David,' I said. `Why do you think there are so few one-armed women in the world?'
`So few? Aren't there enough for your liking? To meet your needs?'
`No, it's just that the one-armed lady is a rare creature.'
`Of loveliness?'
`No, just rare. Look I'm not in love with one-armed women, I've never even met one. I just want to know why there are so few of them.'
`Maybe women don't drive Corvairs. Or operate heavy machinery. Or get drunk and walk into airplane propellers.'
`Yeah . . . If you only had one arm, would you pin your spare shirtsleeve up near the shoulder stump or just let it flop around?'
`I'd let it hang, man.'
`I knew you would! I'd pin it for sure. I'm too neat. God, I'd hate to have only one arm. Although you'd get to hear the sound of one hand clapping every time you went to the theatre. Did you go to the theatre last time you were here?'
`No, it's too expensive.'
`What did you do?'
`What tourists always do in New York City. Empire State, Statue of and all the galleries. There's a million galleries.'
`Where'd you stay?'
`The first two nights, I slept in an abandoned car. A Pontiac Grand Am.'
`Weren't you scared?'
`Not really. It had a doorman.'

I suppose you could call me a racist because I used to give money to the black doorman in our building. Now we've got a white guy, I don't give money.

White male, approx. 38

We wandered down a street composed entirely of shoe stores, three-quarters of which were going out of business. (This, I suppose, is a direct result of NYC's fondness for `districts': the Second-Hand Record District around Bleeker Street; the Art District of SoHo; the Immigration district at Ellis Island, etc. I guess it's convenient, but I'd sure hate to be a shoe guy tryna make a buck in this city.) We were looking for clothes because our slobby travel gear was making us feel insecure - doubly so since most of the people we passed were pretty well dressed - but I couldn't find anything not overpriced and in my size. So we kept wandering aimlessly, ducking into alleys to sneak a look at our tourist map to make sure we didn't end up like Sherman McCoy - in the Bronx with Melanie Griffith, a sure-fire recipe for trouble.

Down into a subway station where a black man did a terrific version of `I've Got You (Under My Skin)' accompanied by a paradiddle of hand claps and finger clicks. I gave him a dollar (no tax). He really was great. Into the subway car. Two stops down the line a thin, haggard-bearded white guy got on and announced that his right leg was crippled from a hernia and that he lived at the YMCA (pointing to YMCA t-shirt) and needed to pay his rent by 4 p.m. (displaying the rent form), that he didn't use drugs (revealing his apparently trackless forearms) and that it was a `bad emergency'. I only gave him 75ó because I'm not sure if hernias can cripple your right leg.

Anonymous Autonomous

There is, sometimes, a ticklish feeling of anonymity in which the foreign traveller may wallow; a kind of sly rootlessness which allows you to be anyone from anywhere or nobody from nowhere. This is most particularly the case in New York City, where there are already so many people who are not interested in anybody else, that the presence of two more persons - even from as exotic a place as Melbourne, Australia - is of remarkably little interest to the general population. And, indeed, the particular population: the woman sitting next to David and me who cannot help but notice our distinctive accents and think to herself, `Wow. Those two guys are British. I'll bet they've got some interesting stories to tell.' Or the guy in the bar who sees us drinking Victoria Bitter and wonders, `Victoria . . . isn't that in South Africa? Are those two guys racists?' And so on.

This never happens. Nobody gives a damn. (Which is fair enough - I couldn't care less if I sat next to a Frenchman on a bus back home.) But when you're overseas, it seems somehow wrong that nobody's stopping you and saying, `Hey, I haven't seen you around Manhattan before. Are you new in town? What do you think of the place? Come stay at my house. Here's some money.'

What all this boils down to is that while you're in a foreign country, you can be absolutely anything or anyone you wish to be. The problem for me is, I don't want to be anyone - I want to be someone. I want to be me. And in New York City, that's hard.

2.10 p.m.