We crossed in the morning, the sky a slate of misinformation. Our provisions were secured in carry-ons, a military term usually only shared on Signal chat groups. We kept our papers, our documentation, our laisse-passers within reach, as the orange and puke-green Beck taxi glided into Toronto’s Island airport. The green for puking is not the colour of the vomit. It’s the colour of the person vomiting.
Green for Puking is the name of a plant nursery with very angry service proffered from a post-slacker Gen X couple. The plants, like Seattle and Halifax grunge, are still vital and the last time anything new happened around here. It is a disordered nirvana. They changed the name of the nursery after a lawsuit effectively negated the aspirational and reverential Soundgarden. They are still upset about it, in that way that they are secretly overjoyed at the corporate repression. It validates the theory of Gen X and our resilience. We can handle it. Their children loathe them in a loving way they have learned from them.
…
At Billy Bishop airport, named for a Canadian who flew his prop plane elbows up, we eschew the vintage ferry, once the sole conveyance to the runways and descend the massive elevator to the tunnel, an underground north/south escape route from Toronto traffic and the robust tent city in the park abutting the environmental catastrophe of prop planes we cherish.
We are flying to New York and our mobile devices have been prepped for scrutiny for activities deemed seditious. So Signal chat groups are removed, as is the weather app from Environment Canada.
The first time my attorney and I walked from our home base to the island airport and crossed over by ferry to sprawl in the capacious neutrality of the airport lounge and after a quick espresso boarded the small plane and took off over Lake Ontario it felt like we were in the coolest city in the world, and therefore the known universe, which is not much, like you know a shadow in the rain. It’s a known unknown.
…
The mission is ill-advised. Our destination country has made its antipathy to our existence known, and the longest undefended border in the known universe is a lawless fever dream of uniformed state power. In the Interzone we will be defenseless, and, if detained, our detainers are under no obligation to mirandize us. They have opened a branch in Managua. The republic has gone banana.
So it’s good I’m with my attorney, currently so alive with coffee they might punch a hole through the tempered plane window. It’s Porter at 9:15 am so we go for two beers and two glasses of red, to properly organize our thoughts. The flight attendant recognizes the urgency of our mission and so offers us both a violently sweet chocolate chip cookie.
Suitably inebriated and, thanks to a generation of training, in total control of our basic motor functions, we approach the customs officer, her cheerful demeanour an obvious cover for the penetrating inquisition to come.
“So what are you guys up to this weekend,” she asks, summarily, or maybe summerly, she is that fake nice.
“Some theatre.” Am I lying? Thanks to my training, even I am not sure.
“What play are you seeing?”
“Glengarry Glen Ross.” Is that even a real thing? It sounds plausible. My passport picture glares at the constable like an angry Oklahoma bomber.
“Oh yeah.” She is inscrutable. Does she know this play? Her composure is the indifference of a well-fed cat. “Have a good one.” That sounded Canadian. Is she a plant? Is this Tinker Tailor Goalie Spy?
In any case, we are on the other side of the iron shower curtain. Let it rain.
…
New York is New York, to apply an extraordinarily effective tautology. The subway is inviting like a 70’s porn cinema, decrepit, forbidding, and full of raincoats. The visibility of the infrastructure suggests that nothing here is hidden, and indeed, a considerable array of society is up on the screen, from the most noble poverty to the charade of adidas hipsterdom in a country about to be so deep into recession they may start speaking Latin.
Lugging luggage, we emerge from the subway at 8th & 16th .
The drop point, carefully disguised as a hotel, is an immense lobby of bookshelves and an impossibly friendly front desk. The charming fake hotelier takes our equipment for storage deep in the hold of the Maritime Hotel, with its evocative giant circular windows and clumsy free breakfast of yogurt and regrettable breads.
We are in Chelsea. So let’s Chelsea.
…
If you are going to hide in New York, and that is always a very fucking good idea, be the beautiful girl barely visible behind the raised desk of the Chelsea art galleries. These massive display bunkers are womanned by creatures of magnificent hair and unequalled indifference to your existence. At once the luckiest ideal body types in the known universe and totally fed up with this insanely boring job, they offer no interaction with the scarce visitors who enter to confront in the awesome quiet a pageant of undeniably interesting and adventurous and accomplished works, because this is fucking New York, with its desperate talent and driving, productive competition.
We stare at art and are summarily edified. The counter girls couldn’t care less. They have merged with their handheld devices into a formless new entity, omnipotent and brutal. The massive glass doors of the nameless galleries swing shut silently. It is Kubrick’s 2001. I keep waiting for HAL to ask where Dave is.
…
The play is the thing, the reason we are here, so the border guard can sleep easy, if that is a thing in Manhattan. Maybe it still never sleeps and maybe now it stops to rest. Pandemics invite New World Orders and change is the only constant.
The play is the Mamet chestnut, Glengarry, made viral after its commitment onto celluloid with Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Jonathan Pryce, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey (before we didn’t like hm anymore) and of course, Alec Baldwin (before we… how do we feel about him again?) with his watch and steak knives, in a scene that is not actually part of the original stage play, but lives on as the second most famous monologue in the known fuckin universe, after President Bill Pullman’s Independence Day rouser.
I have been seduced to this Broadway iteration by its ingenious casting, so let’s drop some more names: Bob fucking Odenkirk. Bill fucking Burr. Kieran cutie pie with a steak knife Culkin. Patrick Marber directing. I bought the tickets minutes after they went on sale at a price that makes hardened salesguys weep. I didn’t care who was fucking President. Such is the prerogative conferred from international espionage.
…
The play crushes from the go. The Chinese restaurant. The banquet seating, the lanterns. The three leads each take a turn chewing scenery like a huge plate of the best fucking egg rolls in New York.
The words are Mamet boilerplate. There is so much fucking you might be in a 70s porn theatre. It’s all men, so you can draw conclusions about the sexual orientation.
The first curtain goes down surprisingly early, the earliest intermission this anti-critic ever saw. Like the rest of this fucking masterpiece, it’s a setup. The second act (which there absolutely are in American lives, F. Scott) unrolls in the sales office, where a bunch of angry suits compete to get rich selling worthless garbage.
“It resonates with the times.” – Next Play.
We emerge onto 47th, into the Blade Runner advertising glow and the Stars and Stripes hanging now like iron curtains.
CODA
Monday at the New York Public Library. Another place of words. A fucking temple to whatever is left of the enlightenment.
An autodidact librarian, a nice little Jewish lady from New York who seems to know fucking everything, shows to curious visitors some of the formidable objects in the collection. It includes an early Madison draft of the Bill of Rights. It is hermetically sealed under tempered glass. I want to smash it open and let it breathe.
Discovering that my attorney is a now rare visitor from Canada, the librarian grasps her hands and looks up to meet her eyes. “I want you to know” she quite literally implores, “we are so, so sorry.” She is emotional. So now, is my attorney. I am an empty suit.
ALWAYS BE CLOSING
· Alive in the Superunknown
· For scholars of nineties indie: Nirvana at Foufounes Electriques!
· Leonard Bernstein’s kids say the show goes on.
ON NOW AT LARRY’S FOLLY
· Hall & Oates! But I love this version with Montréal’s Chromeo.