thispresentsojourn

I stow up my luggage after an hour waiting for it to spin around the belt. I’d foolishly forgotten to mark it, as such a generic piece is easily lost in this Queens-center-of-chaos.

I somehow locate it in the shuffle, pick it up and look to the glass doors that lead outside, each breaths brimming with an thick insecurity and anxiety.  I live here.

I signaled for a cab, trying my hardest to look as if I know what I’m doing.  I’ve hailed a cab only once before – when I was heading to this airport from Harlem a few days ago. The cab driver’d taken advantage of me I suppose because he could surely sense I was neither a native or a resident yet.   I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

I slid onto the black plastic seat in and false-confidently demanded – as I thought one must here – a ride to Spanish Harlem.  I would not fall for the “road fee” trap again, or whatever the story was.

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My father and I drove to the city by way of the Blue Ridge Mountains only two months ago, and somehow I feel like I’ve already lived in New York City more than a year. In those two small months I’ve already moved on the Island three times, spending some time in East Village, and finally finding a more permanent space in Spanish Harlem with two other participants in the church I’ve come to serve.

Both guys have a background in investment banking, which is a job title new to me before meeting Allen and Ryan.  Ryan quit his job after Conversion and quickly accepted the call to serve on the Apostles Church staff.

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Riding in the cab through Queens, I’m realizing I’ve not yet gained a sense of “Where” as everything looks relatively the same around me — a lot of lights, speeding cars, and a lot of people who seem to know exactly where they need to be – and in a hurry to be there. What I do know is that none of the buildings are tall yet, and that this must mean we haven’t entered Manhattan.

We pull onto a four lane road, and my cab driver increases his speed to 70MPH.   I swim up next to the window and peer out like a curious dog (trying to keep my tongue inside my mouth).  I can see the Chrysler Building in the distance, and I see all sorts of basketball courts that look something like what I’d seen in Dangerous Minds.

I really do live here.

The first ride on the FDR is an inexplicable experience, unless of course it’s one you’ve had.  I think what makes it so remarkable is discover that what you’ve naiively thought of your entire life as no more than a movie set is – well – a real place. New York is real city in which millions and millions of people work and call home.

Glaring up through the window of a speeding, wreckless yellow cab, my stomach was in turmoil, and I staved off vomiting from the mere grandeur of the place.

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Growing up a suburb kid, the City is a dream.  Maybe this is no more than my propensity towards dreaming, but one of my largest issues is a silly belief that Where I’m not is The Where I would be most happy. I think my affection for the city was something of a compression of that. 

When my friends and I were old enough to drive, we made it to Deep Ellum in Dallas as frequently as we could — lust over the city lights and the somewhat foreign and romantic idea of city living.  We had no concept of the people there.  Our city was no more than the stage for idealistic mind-play.

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Driving down FDR that first time from LaGuardia, I could feel the weight of Place.  Of lives lived in a context.  It was really my first time out of my Texas stronghold, and within seconds I sensed that my entire worldview needed adjustment.  Perhaps the very primary stages of culture shock, to use the common language. I could feel the history of the place in my chest – I could feel the cries of injustice that Dallas seems to silence its efforts towards comfort and security.

The sensation was so strong I could feel it in the very tips of my hair.

I had arrived, and I had, never before in my life, felt this small.

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We swung a hard right on the 106th Street exit, which I recognized vaguely from my trip to the airport in late July.   We flew through a yellow-to-red light and quickly hung a right on 2nd Avenue, which runs south.  As we pulled on to 97th Street, I wrangled for my backpack straps and felt my heart pulsing heavily.  I fumbled through a clump of cash to secure a tip for the cabbie, and yelled “HERE IS FINE,” again trying to let on tha I was more a resident than I really was.

He halted in front of 57 E 97th at a gap between the scaffolding and a dumpster full of old furniture.  I reminded the cabbie to open the trunk so I could hoist out my luggage.  I opened the door, and stood against the Manhattan wind.

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I took a trip to Russia once, and ever since then I have gauged all awful smells by my experience there.  The smell “Russia” is a simple odor; a synthesis of boiled cabbage, vodka, and cigarette smoke.  I never thought I would endure a similar smell unless I visited there again.  And to my surprise, here I was, on the street I now called “Home” taking into my nostrils the heavy fumes.

The cab zoomed off, leaving me solitary in the street, and I walked up to the wood-and-glass entryway to my Harlem brownstone.  Shuffling through my keys, I found the one that opened the outside door, inserted it, swung open the door.  Opening my mailbox after a few days absence from the city, I found six letterrs addressed to Reingardt, my apartment’s previous tenant.   I stuffed the pile into the front mesh pocket of my backpack and began the five-flight-walkup to my apartment.

I entered #19 to find the apartment completely black.  My roommates were out somewhere, and the only thing lighting my way down the hall were those from “Manhattan’s Best Laundromat” which blared through the living room window from below.  An ambulance screamed by (A sound I’ve grown accustomed to), I went into the kitchen to drop the Reingardt’s mail on top of the microwave where I’d begun a pile of “Previous Tenant Mail.”

Entering my 8′x10′ space, I slipped underneath the covers on the mattress Reingardt sold to me.  I stared at the ceiling, which was slightly lit by a tungsten sliver coming from in between the curtains of my neighbor’s kitchen across the shaft.

“Is this really where you’ve called me?”

“Jesus Christ, intercede?”

And I knew. In my shock and in my insecurity and in my total lack of understanding of context – here in a city where I knew nothing and hardly anyone – that this – this “place” where I was in control of nothing – is exactly where I am supposed to be.

It is precisely where We are supposed to be.