I'm leaving on a jetplane...
And headed to New York for seven days and seven nights, before flying back to Richmond on Sunday. The days I'm going to be spending on the Seventh Floor of the Empire State Building, attending an AutoCAD 2006 bootcamp, and every night but the last I'm probably going to spend at the hotel. If I was going as a tourist that would be a dreadful waste of a wonderful opportunity, but I'm not - I'm going to attend school and, with a bit of luck, network so that I can escape this tedious round of short term contracts I'm stuck in.
But that last night, after school's over... who can say?
I don't know what I expect from New York. In some ways it's been in my dreams since I was a very small child, when I first fell in love with the idea of America that I saw presented in the TV shows of the sixties and early seventies. They formed my internal impression (completely unshaken until I actually came here at the age of 43) of what America was. The ones I remember clearest are Hawaii 5 0, the Flying Nun, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, CHiPS, Columbo... A collection of Icons, if ever there was one. Later there were others, of course: something about a guy who could become different animals... the Bionic Man (Woman, Dog, Hamster).... and the never-to-be-forgotten A Team....
Not something, as I discovered when I finally got here, to base any kind of realistic expectation on. So I know that the fleeting mention New York gets (but I have the impression it got many mentions overall, like some sort of secret lodestone of culture, to which everything was drawn in the end) is no preparation for the reality - and even then, I'll only be seeing tiny fractions of it, miniscule slices from the corpus of the Monster...
If any of you have read Stephen King's The Stand, you'll remember Trashcan Man and his imaginary city Cibola, that was also the real seat of an evil empire. New York feels to me both like a real place - but also like my Cibola, the hub and nerve center of a secret Empire of the perverse, the obscene, the cruel, and the terrible.
I sure hope so - I really do. Half my nervousness, at least, is due to the fear of disappointment, that like Times Square everything will prove to be family-friendly and Disnified to the point where fantasy simply won't be able to sit in the same place with reality.
I sure hope not. I hope New York will prove to be my House on the Borderland (one of the very few truly disturbing books - right up there with The Naked Lunch - that I've read), a place where what you really, really love walks on the sidestreets every night, grinning at you through the blood on its teeth when you finally meet.
I hope its going to prove to be my Dis (isn't that a wonderful name for a city? If I ever finally manage to write the novel I can see in my head but can never manage to get out on to paper, it'll be set in a City called Dis) - whose city walls mark the boundary between upper and lower Hell in the Divine Comedy.
In general - that is to say, in general among the few Americans I've met, among the ones I mingle with in public places such as stores and work - there is no reek of corruption; of that peculiar, sensual and sexual, perverse and unthinking hedonism that characterizes Britain. Yes, I know we're supposed to be staid, unimaginative and passionless - but that's only because the British (the English in particular) are obsessed with hiding what they actually are. We are deeply perverse; though nobody else would know it we like to fuck in public - it's called dogging - and takes place mostly in the parking lots of the English equivalent of malls.
It's a cliche that English Public Schools (which are actually private schools) are hotbeds of homosexuality. It's a cliche because it's true - find and watch the movie If - it's a little dated now but still a reasonable expression of the sexual mores of the English Public Schoolboy. Just as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange correctly depicts the English love of violence, as well as our love of secret societies and alternative cultures. We complain about them endlessly (among ourselves, never before strangers) but we love them, to ittle-wittle-bits - just the same. Any study of English soccer violence will you that the 'hooligans' involved are drawn from every section of society, often involving highly educated, very successful people. They get involved so they can indulge in a good kicking of any one who isn't like them - everyone else in the world in fact, but carried on by thrashing proxies in public - the fans of an opposing team.
At the bottom of the black, black heart of England is a sentiment very much like the one my Wife Sabrina expresses in relation to herself: there's me - and there's the rest of you. That's how we are, deep down. It's not that we regard ourselves as superior to the rest of you - though it often comes across that way - it's more that we don't give a damn whether you live or die unless a) we have some use for you; or b) we have some sentimental attachment to you.
The English, to a man, are horribly sentimental - and that too we don't really want anyone else to know... because you might use it against us. Sentimental, cynical, perverse and, when properly roused, utterly ruthless and entirely cruel. Churchill wanted to drop anthrax bombs across the length and breadth of Germany - the islands in the Shetlands where the prototype bombs were tested is still uninhabitable to this day - and would have, except that you Americans dissuaded him.
See? See how nice you are? I really really hope that New York manages not to convey that otherwise overwhelming impression of your niceness as a people that I have. There's something fundamentally honest and fair in your national psyche that doesn't sit well with the jaded and corrupt souls of Europeans; it grates on our nerves and annoys us. And, jaded as we are, we can never convince ourselves that you're sincere - which is why we suspect everything America does. And even if you did one day manage to convince us, we'd still half-believe that it was a front.
So what is it that I do want from New York? a sea of criminals waiting to cut my throat at every turn? I'd really rather that was not the case - and that if it is I manage to avoid them all. In some ways, I'm something of a Voyeur. One thing I intend to do - if I do nothing else at all - is go as late as I can to the top of the Empire State building and look out over the city by night. I want to behold the Towers of Manhattan (in itself that will be strange, there are no cities of skyscrapers in the UK) and beyond them a fevered sea of orange light. For reasons I won't go into here that dirty-orange glow is, to me, the absolute color of the most ferocious, frenzied, savage sex. And that kind of sex, it's hallucinatory quality, the way it makes sweat and blood taste different, is something I hope for from New York. To smell the stink of the old and the savage and the hyper-real beneath the niceness.
See, I'm not going to have time to go exploring and searching for a physical experience of this kind, school is far too important. But I still want it, something to take me to the far side of myself and to the end of everything, the edge of all the worlds, even if only vicariously and voyeuristically, something that reaches through sight and smell and sound down into the guts of me.
Something real in the way I appreciate reality.
See why I'm nervous about being disappointed? I know my expectations are high. I've dreamed America - and now I want her to come to me with her cunt wet and dripping, her teeth smeared in blood and semen, ready for the bite of the lash, the siren-note of cuts made with razor-blades, ready to grin and scream and grin and bleed and bite as we ride each other to some apocalyptic point of self-destruction (my destruction) and renewal (my renewal).
I don't want much - only everything.
I'll let you know what happens when I get back.
