fun in nyc - scenes

By Robbie on May 21, 2010

Hello from the swanky 8th floor of the Hotelio Fellacci (everything in Manhattan has a Starbucky, bogus-Italian name these days), and here are some things that happened to me this week.

1. DINNER WITH A COMEDIAN. I was strolling down Lafayette Street just after soundcheck when to my mild surprise (with certain extreme types one is never adamantly surprised when and where they spring up) a cab containing D. and his lady friend screeched into my path. "Get in!" they commanded. D., a beloved funnyman friend, was three days in the bag and rather looked it. The lady was in total control of her senses. The cabdriver was gamely taking whatever provocative commentary issued from D.'s lips. (Upon turning onto a bumpy brick-paved side street: "Horses love this shit!" Upon a young woman stepping into the street as we rounded the corner toward her: "Hit her!") Narcotics work only to open D.'s verbal throttle.

The ride ended at a bright kandy-colored yellow building housing opium addicts, the elderly, and other creatives. We were searching -- they were searching, I was only hungry, and increasingly dubious about being drawn into a nightmarish bacchanal -- for a party full of comedy network executives, at which D. was to...it was unclear...give a speech, submit a script, salvage his reputation, something along those lines. We eventually found the assemblage, only after D. had imperiously ripped the epaulets from the shoulders of a doorman who was unable to direct us to the event, telling him, "You, sir, are no longer a thing." The "party" was nothing but a loud beer garden packed with uninspired youngsters, and I turned quietly but firmly on my heel. I was in the grip of a terrific hunger, and the prospect of "little sausages and pretzels" in the beer tent dismayed. How happy I was when the sloshed funnyman and his pretty friend followed me to a quieter place; and for the rest of the hour we amused each other with bawdy quips and heavy, I've-been-drunk-three-days silences.

2. CELEBRITIES EVERYWHERE. I've done three shows since coming here, and in the audience at one, so I'm told, was Michael McKean, and at another, LL Cool J. How exciting is that? And what is it when you brag on a blog, blagging? I guess that's what I'm doing, but what I also mean to do is reiterate my old point about playing in NYC. You can hardly avoid performing for notables here. They live here, and they have to do something after dark, something besides sit in their parkside apartments counting their money and looking at their Wikipedia pages. Wait, that's what I do at night. But I do those things with deep worry lines contorting my features.

3. DID YOU SEE ME NAKED IN THE ADMIRALS CLUB BATHROOM THE OTHER MORNING? Let me explain. At O'Hare my outgoing flight was several hours delayed. Propitiously I ran into my stately friend J., headed also to NYC but on a different flight, over in the K terminal. "Come on," he said. "It's all noisy televisions and commoners here -- off we go to the Admirals Club."

Up in the Admirals Club all was mellow lighting and tasteful Crate and Barrel decor. A table held many board games which I had never heard of, names like "Telestations." The patrons were "in the sere and yellow leaf" and the starchily outfitted staff tended to their cranky needs with all appropriate delicacy. If you follow the picture I am trying to paint you, this is not the kind of establishment where you would think to check, before sitting on a toilet, to see that paper had been provided in advance. So many non-necessaries were in abundance that the budding thought never cracked the mind's soil. Forgive the metaphor.

I waited until the room sounded empty before venturing out of the stall, pants at ankles. The coast looked all clear. But as soon as I had proceeded two feet beyond the door, a sudden whooshing kind of noise spooked me, and back into my stall I ducked. Five minutes longer I waited, until the next perfect-sounding silence fell. At this point, I had had enough tomfoolery. I was, I felt, in a state beyond the reach of shame, aggravated beyond mortal limit. It was in this mood that I walked confidently, as confidently as a man with clenched buttocks and pants and boxers shackling his feet can, out of the stall and toward the next one, and it will surprise no reader to hear that this was when the most distinguished looking gentleman in the history of the universe barged into the bathroom. We beheld each other for a brief but imperishable moment before I nodded smartly and tippy-tottered into the neighboring stall, where there was paper enough for a returning war hero's parade. Something about all this seems to embody the zany roller-coaster of metropolitan living. One day you are a degraded unclothed beast gimping around in a rich-man's outhouse, the next you are entertaining the author of "I Can't Live Without My Radio" -- what a ride!