Before Autumn in New York City

The sun was radioactively orange, emerging from the silhouettes of old factories whose destiny within the decade will be live-work lofts. The color felt unreal, only elsewhere available in the artifice of nail polish or Halloween hair dye, and so it made the morning feel gritty and polluted, apt for the crossing from industrial Queens to pristine Manhattan. JFK, like most metropolitan airports, is in a kind of hellhole in the far outreaches of one of the city’s forgotten boroughs.

I’d taken the red-eye from Oakland and it was packed, likely because it was a good dollar deal and because it’s the only way not to waste a day in transit. We arrived before 6am and so it was still dark out. The sun rose between terminal 6 and the Jamaica Station. From there, I took the subway because I was saving money again, and I drank an overpriced grapefruit juice from the terminal shop. I emerged from the B line onto a shiny flagstone street, between the north end of Central Park and the beginning of Morningside Drive. I walked carefully – my bag was heavy and my shoes flimsy – and arrived at my friends’ apartment at breakfast time.

I slept until noon.

Eventually, we went walking in the neighborhood, through the Ivy-like edifice of Columbia. There were three kids manning a table and speakers that pumped out hip hop. The stone building with columns behind them read “The Library at Columbia” and it held the administration offices, not the library. Butler Library was across the quad. Everything was brick and columns and had a grand feel.

One of the two friends I was staying with is teaching a course in classic literature this term. It’s required of all freshmen at Columbia. I have never read The Iliad or The Odyssey or any of the other books he’ll be teaching. I am reading the Master and Margarita though, and I was pleased to hear he read that in his own required freshman course many years ago.

My friend and I walked in Riverside Park and talked about schools and kids, salaries and jobs, friend groups and getting out of New York City for the weekend.  It all felt very grown up and like we were 30.

I should have been hungry but the red eye had confused everything, so I just kept drinking coffee. I had a latte from Joe Coffee, at the corner of 120^th and Broadway, which had been voted best this and best that by several city and national publications, and I felt it might deserve those. The latte was sweetly foamed and the espresso rich but not overwhelming or burnt.

One trick about making a good latte, besides buying good espresso, is to foam each cup of milk separately. You can’t ever re-steam milk and think it’ll be as good as the first time you foamed it. It won’t and the coffee drinkers will know. This is my pet peeve, re-steaming my milk for a latte. I have been known to ask people to use fresh milk when I see them about to re-steam. I look pretentious and high maintenance but I get a decent drink in return.

Anyway, the latte in my hand was good. We were in Riverside Park and the city-dwellers were wearing bikinis and laying in the patches of sun. The roar of traffic along the highway jumped through the thin curtain of trees, and beyond that the river was fairly serene.

We walked some more, down the long waltz of Broadway and over 109^th. We stopped at Whole Foods for bulk oatmeal and coffee beans, then meandered back to the apartment.

In the apartment, the street noise was a constant low din and sometimes a siren would come through from the hospital next door. This was New York: never quiet, full of the echoes of city life. I did some yoga and tried to push through a new wave of jet lag.

For dinner, we walked down the embankment in Morningside Park and trolled the Senegalese streets, looking for a good restaurant. The one with good internet reviews was closed and the other one we couldn’t figure out how to get into, so we went to a small place with lots of people and ordered too much food. There was no menu, but there were only three choices anyway – lamb, chicken, or fish. They all came with the same mustardy vinaigrette and chopped tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers. They also came with plantains or yams, so we ordered some of each.

The plantains were gooey sweet from the fryer, and the yams were chalky and thick, leaching the moisture from our mouths. We ate all the plantains and left the yams. We ate the chicken and half the lamb with a grain called (and I’m writing this by ear) “a-chi-ki”. The waitress described it as like couscous, but not. It tasted almost like couscous, but slightly fermented.

All the West Africans in there mixed a cube of flavoring – I thought maybe it was bouillon – into the a-chi-ki, poured the chicken and dressing on top of that, then ate it all with one hand. I felt this gave me permission to pick at my salad sans fork, and to suck at the chicken bones.

Everyone spoke a lilting West African French and it made me want to try.

Afterward, we took the long walk home and tried to figure out why voter ID laws were necessary. It seemed difficult to organize mass voter fraud based on IDs. Maybe one could do it at the city level – which is the argument, I think, that voter fraud has been achieved in local elections – but we couldn’t see how to possibly manage it on the national level. ID laws seemed a great way to exclude more people from the political process, however, so we figured someone must be benefitting from the new laws in Texas, Pennsylvania and other states.

We went to a speaker series at Riverside Church. It was cavernous and I felt like I was in Europe. The church was taller than the Santa Cruz redwoods and the people looked so small. Cornell West gave a rousing talk about revolutionary love, militant tenderness, and subversive sweetness.

We walked home and the jet lag conquered me. I slept a long and glorious sleep, and the subversive sweetness gave way to sleeping dreams of Black Rock City. You perhaps leave the playa, but you don’t ever leave the playa.