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My weekend break from complete sobriety continued as we popped into the Ritz Carlton for a light snack dinner and a couple of cocktails in a romantic wood panel lined room. Just like the old days. Except it was 6pm and we had a baby with us. We weren’t sure that we’d be allowed in with a pram and although she certainly lowered the tone, eating a banana and sprawling around and showing her nappy, none of the weird looking super rich people in the room seemed to mind. They were so rich that they looked like aliens, or at least like the background extras in some kind of futuristic sci-fi film like the Fifth Element. You know where a strange hairstyle or overly trimmed beard and mildly unusual fashion choice is enough to suggest otherness.
We didn’t fit in. With our pram and 2014 clothes. It did take the waiter about 25 minutes to come and serve us, perhaps hoping that we would take the hint and leave of our own devices, but once he’d taken our order our super expensive snacks and drinks arrived pretty quickly. I had a Manhattan and I was reminded of the potency of proper alcohol. Luckily we just about stayed in control enough to make one responsible parent between the two of us and we took our baby back to our hotel after two drinks, only walking a couple of inches above the rain-sodden pavements.
It’s fun to be wealthy enough to be an occasional tourist into this kind of lifestyle, though the bill for four drinks and two starters still helped to sober me up a bit. Imagine being rich enough for this Fifth Element lifestyle to be your norm. To think nothing of travelling first class on planes and paying £20 for some bread and humous, that you could pick up for under a quid at the supermarket.
I mean it would be lovely to live your life in that kind of luxury, but also you would have completely have let go of the tether that connected you to reality. Or to other people’s reality anyway.
I think the moment that you take this kind of life for granted, rather than extraordinary and bizarre is probably when it becomes bizarre. But who knows what elements of my own privileged life I have taken for granted.
I enjoyed being amongst these freaks for ninety minutes, but I wouldn’t want to stay with them all the time. They mainly seemed like pricks. But pricks who looked right through us. Interestingly not one of them smiled at Phoebe, which pretty much always happens in any room of people. Even that women with nothing prostrate on the New York sidewalk had time to smile at a baby. I think everyone in this room had hatched from an egg and thus didn’t know how to relate to a baby (or more likely just blanked us for bringing a baby into a place where they didn’t want a baby to be).
We’d had a good day going to the zoo and the Guggenheim Museum and then getting a bit lost in Central Park. Phoebe has been a bit ill and isn’t quite herself, but she still had fun and particularly enjoyed the seals. She slept through most of the Guggenheim (and to be fair I was with her on that). We’d been here seven years ago and never dreamed that we’d return with some of our sexcrement. I wonder who we’ll be with next time.
We tried to find a loo on Central Park. The app we had promised there was one nearby, but it turned out to be a phantom toilet that didn’t exist. We headed further down into the park and found another one. But there was an old man standing by one of the basis with his trousers off and I didn’t like the look of what he was up to from behind, so I decided to hold it in. But it was fun seeing an old man’s bum when I wasn’t expecting it. It was the kind of incident that would happen every day in Warsaw Indiana.
Later on 5th Avenue we saw an old man with his top off (meaning I had managed to see a complete naked old man on average, plus a completely clothed one) holding a one dollar bill in his hands and flicking it (in a similar way to how I imagine his bottom naked twin had been flicking something else into the basin). It was a strange and disturbing spectacle and I think it was an avant garde attempt to beg. Perhaps it had evolved from some successfully pan-handling technique of old, but it was hard to imagine that this shirtless money-masturbating technique garnered much more than the original dollar. Yet as performance art it was spectacular and terrifying.
Meanwhile in the Ritz Carlton men with top-knots and shiny gaberdines drank cocktails with a bored look on their face as if it were their birthright. I am no better than them, obviously.
New York certainly has it all.
I got sent a lovely photo from the Edinburgh Fringe of a reunited Trevor and Natalie. It’s nineteen years since they first came down the stairs together in the Edinburgh Fringe version of This Morning With Richard Not Judy (they also appeared in my play that year, Excavating Rita) and they scarcely look any different and are still very much easy on the eye.
