Finding My Fix: Chronicles of a Travel Junkie

Park Avenue. My new employer gave me the address of the apartment where I would be tutoring a Colombian student.

4:30. I was early, I leaned against the molded cement corner of a building and ate my granola bar. People walked by, people with white skin and blond hair and lacy shirts and tailored pants. Other people walked by with skin the color of chocolate milk, speaking Spanish, wearing t-shirts and tight jeans, pushing strollers with children the same white color as the people in the lacy shirts.

I tossed the wrapper in the trashcan on the corner. I headed into the building, cutting off a woman with a sweater draped over her shoulders. I told the bellman who I was looking for, as I’d been told to do. He mumbled softly into a phone in Spanish, and hung up, making an affirmative noise in a hybrid language.

“Number four,” he said pointing at the elevator.

“Which apartment?” I asked, then quickly realized my mistake. “Oh.”

I stepped into the elevator with a barefoot blond girl licking an ice cream. I pushed the button, wondering if I was even supposed to touch it.

The door opened at the fourth floor, revealing a twelve-foot cloudy blue wall, polished floor a giant mirror and a single door twice my height. I walked through it where a man greeted me in Spanish and led me to a part of the apartment where the floor wasn’t stone tile, and the cabinets weren’t stained chestnut, but linoleum and simple pine, like any house I’d ever known. I snuck a peak through the door to the side and there was a kitchen the size of the house I lived in in high school.

The girl I would be tutoring walked in, and on her feet, over her sneakers were blue caps like the kind you wear on your head or over your mouth to prevent contamination.

Where the hell was I?

I desperately want to write, but have nothing to say and am too stressed at the moment to even have time to write or think of anything to write. I went for a run the other day. I ran to Shore Road from the house where I’m living in Bay Ridge. I got to the river, and “Ah ha! There’s Staten Island. There’s New Jersey. Where’s Manhattan?????” That hour I spend underground on a wobbly train everyday really does take me far far away from where I want to be. It takes me to a place where you can hear cicadas and leaves rustling in the wind and dogs barking in their backyards. It’s a far cry from the honking, screeching brakes and jackhammers of NYC. But man, I miss the jackhammers. Give me jackhammers any day if it means I can walk home from work.

Another thing I did recently was get sick on the subway… I hopped on having made the mistake of drinking coffee without eating. Two stops and I had to get off. I sat on a wooden bench in the sticky air of the Rector Street subway stop, and held my head in my hands, waiting for my insides to stop twirling. They didn’t and they weren’t going to, but I needed to get home. Did I have $50 for a cab? Hell no, so I got back on that train, and at Whitehall I had to jump ship again.

I headed up the stairs to the mezzanine and up the escalator into the cold black air. It was all I could do to walk straight as I found a Bon Pain and bought a bagel. I sat myself on a marble slab that held in a flower bed where I could stare at the bright blue sign on the glass windows of the Staten Island Ferry terminal. I inhaled my bagel.

My bagel and I headed back underground and slumped into a seat. My head flopped to the side as the train crawled under the river. Forty-five minutes of sea-sick agony; Bay Ridge is done for me. Time to move back to the city.

Sidenote: A piece I wrote has been picked up by New York Resident More photos from islands in the Swedish Archipelago.  Riding around in Tess's car, staring out the window, I lost track of how many bridges and ferries we ... [Continue reading this entry]