TEX AND I IN NEW YORK

Standing on Fifth Avenue in New York City I craned my neck upward and wondered how the hell they get the toilets to flush on the ninetieth floor! Think of the water pressure it must take! A moment later a postal worker trundled a wheeled bag through a door. In a regular town a letter carrier’s route is horizontal. Like house to house, you know? But in mid-town Manhattan it’s…vertical.

            I’d flown in that morning on a 747, the first time I’d flown in a plane big enough to have its own zip code. I was on assignment, an interview. Talk, talk and back the next day. No time to see the Statue of Liberty. 

            I defy anybody not to be overwhelmed the first time they see New York City. But then the tallest building in the town I was living in at the time was only three stories tall which made me pretty easy to be overwhelmed.

            Standing outside the hotel I saw my first real-life New York doorman. He wore a crisp white uniform with enough gold braid for a South American general. Two generals!  I wasn’t sure what the protocol was. Was I to tip him when he opened the door?

            I was rescued by a friendly voice behind me, a colleague who wrote for a paper in Texas. He wrote elegantly, his prose graceful, each word carefully chosen. But when he spoke it was with a Texan twang strong enough to hang laundry on. "Don’t worry," he assured me, “lessen they call you a cab or somethin’.” The interview was the usual pantomime, the subject doing his/her best to look excited as I asked the same questions the previous five journalists had asked. Afterward I met up with my Texan friend in the lobby. With a little spare time I wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. Too late, closed for the day.

The hotel concierge, hearing Tex’s drawl, sort of sniffed and suggested that we “gentlemen” might enjoy a nearby music club known for its western ambiance. Maybe he thought we’d be more at home there. In any case we walked the four blocks (to the concierge’s horror. Apparently people don’t walk in New York, they “cab.”) to the club.

A band on a small stage was laying waste to a perfectly respectable Hank Williams tune. The floor was filled with twenty-somethings in jeans and Stetsons drinking beer out of long-necked bottles. Tex (who hated being called that) ordered us a couple. When the crowd heard his west Texas twang they were entranced. “Say something else,” they pleaded. 

But when I took out my credit card to pay it brought down the house. “Look,” someone cried. “It’s got a stagecoach and horses on it!” Well, yeah, we (Wife and I) happened to bank at Wells Fargo. So?

“I reckon,” yelled Tex, “they figured that when the automobile got invented the Wells Fargo folks burned the stages, turned the horses loose and went out of business.” In any case neither of us had to pay for a beer the whole evening (kind of wasted on me since I don’t really care for beer).

The next morning, I boarded a plane home with an I (Heart) NEW YORK coffee mug for Wife (no Daughter yet) in my camera bag. The 747 roared into a cloudbank. I peered out the window searching for the Statue of Liberty below. But all I could see was cloud. To this day I still haven’t seen the Statue of Liberty.        

                  

Dad out.

See more of me on: http://oldguynewblog.tumblr.com/