2005-12-09 - 12:47 p.m.
Oh my dear Big Blue Blog-a-roo-ni! I must send to you many apologies – or, as we Italians put it, “apologias!” For at the last minute, as I left on my ten day trip to New York and then onto Venice, I decided not to take my computer along with me. Well, why would I, when the electrical current in Italy is different from that of the US and could fry my hard drive like so many hard boiled eggs? Yes, I suppose I could have brought an electrical adaptor, but I never trust those things – I have seen TV shows in which those things cause fires that turn the computers into rotting hulks of dripping plastic. So let me tell you what I did: I actually bought myself two big old notebooks and for the whole trip, I kept my blog as a – what is the word? A diary.
Like a teenage girl writing about how she wants to lose her virginity, I traipsed up and down the Italian lagoon, carrying my little notebook, into which I jotted all my feelings and impressions. And, over the next few days, I shall now begin the act of transcribing what I wrote. Believe me, it is long winded, and it shall take puh-lenty of work: You will probably not want to read more than a word of it, since more people have written about Venice than are eating chicken dinners, and what possible new thing can I say about it? Yet, I must have my say, and that’s the truth.
Meanwhile, I have returned to LA. And, let me tell you, as I sailed up the Grand Canal of Sepulveda Boulevard, I confess to feeling a strange sense of despair. But who wouldn’t? Venice is like visual opium: Every where you look, there is astonishing beautiful and history. It’s almost surreal – too much to take in at any time. This ancient canal, that ancient palazzo. Tiny, mysterious streets stretching into the darkness; odd shops in the middle of stone streets selling shining gems or weird masks containing bizarre expressions. The person who designed Venice clearly loved games: It’s all a maze. And there are quirky objects every where you look. And everything is so slightly run down: It’s the real thing.
Venice, you see, is the perfect city for me. For one thing, there are no cars! And what could be better than a place where you take a boat from stop to stop? Beyond that, there is so much beauty and art – and all of it is tinged with melancholy and brutality. Who wouldn’t love such a thing? The place is all history and all personality – unlike Los Angeles, which has a paucity of both. Ah, to trade a palazzo for an old El Pollo Loco on Pico and Lincoln Ave. To trade the Vaporetto for the Number 4 bus, filled with smelly bums and barking loons. It’s almost enough to make you weep.
Strangely enough, though, I didn’t come home with the usual “culture shock” that generally accompanies my holiday trips. I think the differences between Los Angeles and Venice are so great it’s almost like visiting different planets: There is no point of comparison, so there is no point in being depressed. They are just such different places –it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Like comparing a dog and a cat.
What has happened, though, is that my schedule is NUTS. Now that I am back home, I am on the perfect schedule – for Venice. I think I woke up at 3 in the morning today and god knows when I am going to sleep. But, again, since I don’t have any true employment until next Tuesday, what does it matter? Later on, I shall tell you how it all falls out, I suppose. First, however, now I must go back in time and transcribe the stuff I’ve written in my diary. It goes on a bit – and there is NO sex in it whatsoever – so perhaps you shall not want to read it. Or perhaps you shall agree with me – that I have a brilliant future as a travel writer. In any case, do let’s go back in time a week, shall we? It’s now November 29th…
-jd-
Well, this is kind of a first, isn’t it? You see, here I am in glamorous New York City. Dude! The city’s so nice, they named it twice! And, in fact, dear blog-a-licious blog, while my writing to you in New York is nothing particularly new – I have done it before on many a Manhattan trip, you know – writing to you in pen and ink, instead of typing directly into my computer, is an extreme and oddly displeasing novelty. I don’t think that I have ever written my blog longhand, utilizing my tediously messy cursive; and I know that I shall have incredible trouble reading my scrawl when the time comes to transcribe it onto the computer.
Right now -- at this moment -- I find myself at a coffee shop on Christopher Street, planning in a few minutes to head uptown to Times Square to seek out The Gaiety, which is, as you know, better known to many as The Temple of Cock. It is my optimistic hope to bathe my eyes on some sultry dancing boys, who shall gyrate naked up and down along a platform for my lecherous delight. However, the thing is, I have heard persistent rumors that the Gaiety has closed down. I am keenly interested to see if this is so: Indeed, I would have to say that I am on tenderhooks, if that’s the right word, too see if the place still exists.
It would be an almost inestimable tragedy if the Gaiety was shuttered: For one thing, it would represent the final true and total end of the “old” 42nd Street in this age of the Disnified Times Square. Frankly, I can think of no fate that could befall New York that would be more appalling. If the Gaiety shut down, it would make 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center look like a taffy pull. It would make the Asian Tsunami seem like a holiday picnic.
Because I am writing this diary by hand, I shall, of course, know the answer to the question of whether the Gaiety still exists long before I finish with this entry. Yet, I like the idea of keeping you in suspense for a while, as I regale you with the details of the rest of my trip. I shall conclude with the revelation as to the existence of the Gaiety when I am finished. It shall be like a cliffhanger. Very much like a cliffhanger.
All things considered, the flight to NY was rather pleasant. My mother and I flew Delta, which, I have to tell you, is less of a flying bus than it is a levitating garbage scow. Can you make those seats any smaller? And good grief: The plane was so dirty. Why, I detected three layers of blood and vomit on the chair next to me. And I could not help but notice that when we arrived for the flight in LA, a thousand passengers were disembarking, as the flight had just come in from New York. And when we arrived in New York, a thousand passengers boarded the plane for LA. There was not even the most perfunctory attempt to clean the plane and tidy it up: The plane just flew back and forth between LA and NY, day and night, night and day, the filth accumulating like detritus at the bottom of the sea. Even the most loathsome buses in Los Angeles get swabbed out with a firehose once a day.
The funniest thing about the flight, of course, were these horrid little videoscreens in the front of every seat. Now, for the most part, I truly loathe the advent of these atrocious videoscreens – and I truly resent being a sort of “captive audience” for whatever corporate pap propaganda the airline tries to force feed me. And, to prove it, I instantly lost my stewardess-supplied earphones, which prevented me from being sorely tempted by the endlessly repeated episodes of Frazier and Friends, and the showings of “hot” movies like THE ISLAND and THE BAD NEWS BEARS. Delta, nowadays being the post-bankrupt Hell Hole that it is, makes you pay for everything. You want to watch the re-broadcast of CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY? It’s 8 bucks. You want a nice rubber chicken breast, served on a bed of plastic lettuce? It’s 12 bucks.
However, I must confess to being rather a big fan of the in flight trivia game channel, and I admit that I was playing trivia all across the country. And I was good at it, too! Mind you, they were just about the easiest questions ever seen – questions on the lines of “What was Mr. Skywalker’s first name in the original Star Wars movie?” But the in flight computer pitted all the passengers against each other, creating a sort of intermural in flight trivia championship. And, even though I half suspect that the stewardesses gave hints to the players in First Class, I soon found myself in first place! I was the trivia champion! My mom was so proud. I leapt about in my seat, roaring, “I’m the king of the plane! I’m the smartest! I’m the Trivia King!” until I was sure that the hag-like stewardesses would taser me into submission and strap me into the bulkhead.
Upon arrival in New York, our first stop was a visit to Rich Grandma and Grandpa in Peter Cooper. They were so glad to see us! And we were quickly tossed a more than adequate supply of guilt-alleviating (for them, for ignoring us the rest of the year) Granny Bucks to squander during the trip. Well paid and well feted on lox, whitefish, and bagels, we settled down to partake of the grandparental conversation, which was the standard old lady stuff of hearing about various elderly people whom we go for years and years without even thinking of for a second.
How one day Ralphie, who lived next door to Rich Grandma, dressed up in women’s lingerie and lept off the rooftop of Peter Cooper. How old Miss Judy, now 80s and a friend of Rich Grandma since some time before the Paleozoic Era, just had her breasts chopped off from the breast cancer. How Crazy Cousin Zoey is back on the bottle, and has pawned Great Grandmother Minnie’s priceless heirlooms, personal gifts from the last Tsar, for a six pack and a can of sterno. While all this news was almost totally irrelevant, I found it pleasant and charming to listen to the wise words of my dear Rich Grandparents. And it is not as though we were not well paid for doing so, really. So that’s all good.
Immediately after dinner at L’Expresse, which is this fabulous little all night bistro that serves snails and steak (in different courses, not at the same time, silly) 24 hours a day, we retired to our little hotel, The Larchmont, on 11th and 6th. The rooms were smallish, but quite comfy. And they seemed really very clean. This turned out to be an error in observation, though, as I discovered the next morning that I had been bitten from head to toe, port to stern, by the hideous and voracious bed bugs that were running roughshod in hotel rooms all over Manhattan. Zoiks!
The next day, up mom and I went to Riverdale, to the Hebrew Home for the Aged, residence of Blind Grandma, who was planning a whole hootenanny of relatives from my mother’s side of the family. There would be Cousin Prunyface and her husband Raoul, and their young daughter Princess. And there would be Rabbi Ishmael Darlingstein, our great-cousin, who is merely the latest continuation of our family’s 160 generations of Rabbis, dating back to Masada or Adam and Eve or maybe the fall of the Great Temple or something.
Cousin Prunyface and her famille rode up with us, taking a LOOONG subway ride and then a LOOONG bus ride. My mother has always felt unaccountably jealous of Cousin Pruny, for reasons past understanding – and the feeling, I have long since noticed, is returned with some vigor. What the two envy in each other I do not claim to get -- it’s probably some womanly thing that I really could not follow if I tried.
Yet, even a non-compassionate baboon such as myself can tell that my mother feels keenly envious of Cousin Prunyface’s young daughter Princess, who would be just the right age to be her granddaughter if I was straight and had had a kid 10 years back. And Cousin Prunyface is madly jealous of my mother’s career in the movie biz, such as it is. My dears, always remember that the grass is greener on the other side of the street. And no one is ever satisfying with what they have. But then again, with no kids and no career, I am in an amusing position to have no opinion on other situation.
I have quite a soft spot for Cousin Prunyface in spite of her neurotic uptightness and her default position of uptightness, which would make anyone nervous. How she and her husband dote on the Brat Princess! And what a terrifying person this spoiled and cunning child is going to become when she grows up. She is actually the sole offspring of the entire maternal wing of my otherwise extended Jewish clan, so she is the repository of every single bit of lavish affection that the family’s formidable pack of alter kochers has to offer. And she knows it, too! She’s spoiled almost to the point of being a strapping young piglet.
At one point, the Princess stared covetously at the amber necklaces that my mother was wearing. She cooed, winningly, “After you’re dead, can I have your necklaces?”
My mother, mildly taken aback, smiled and noted, “Of course, my dear. But you know, I’m likely to live another 30 years!”
This made no difference to the child, who cooed, “Oh that’s fine. By then I’ll only be 38.”
At the Hebrew Home for the aged, irascible Rabbi Darlingstein, who promptly made me feel utterly inadequate, as was his intention. “And how are YOU, Johnny Darling?” he asks in his booming voice, then responding, without waiting for an answer, “And let me tell YOU that my son Mordecai has just opened his brain surgery offices on Madison Avenue, my son Rufus is the new Supreme Court Justice, and my daughter Rebecca has just been named the managing editor of the New York Times Travel section. But enough of me! What are YOUR achievements?”
There is, of course, no way to sensibly reply to any of this, so of course I did not even try. Blind Grandma, by the way, is doing very well, thank you for asking. However, I must confess that I am starting to suspect that she is faking blindness to get sympathy. Yes, she acts as though she’s all blind when she stumbles about her room, arms outstretched, often wailing, “Aiii, my grandson! Johnny Darling! Take your grandmother by the hand and guide her to her bed. Fetch me a glass of water! For, dear child, woe to me, being forced to sniff and feel my way through the world, with my ancient staff of wood!”
Yet, when the Brat Princess tossed an apple at her, Blind Grandma caught it in her left hand with commendably quick reflexes -- and then she quickly looked around to see if anyone caught her. But we must let an old woman have her joke – and if she needs to pretend to be blind so as to get a single room at the Hebrew Home For The Aged, well, who wouldn’t do that? More power to her.
Anyway, I shall tell you more anon. This is enough transcription for one day!
