Marty After Dark - Almost Live...From New York

Entries in Car alarms (1)

Monday

Jul112011

July 11, 2011

My family has moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan and tonight we’re all going out for dinner. I’ll put up a few photos and then I’m going to write a short story about my first couple of weeks in New York City.

Okay, I'm meeting my family in midtown for dinner, so once again we're starting out in daylight on this edition of MAD.

I love this store that sells the two staples of life: Cigarettes and candy.

iHate all three of those things.

Ha! This is perfect for my upcoming short story, you'll see if you read it.

Okay, we're almost to my parents hotel, there's always a line at this Halal food cart, even late at night.

This one's for you, Uncle Waltie! My mom and dad with drinks. Sip ahoy!

See, I told you there's always a line here!

And it's off into the night to go home and write my short story. And look, there it is, right below this sentence!

-------------------------------------

Car Alarms Over Broadway

As I wrote a few days ago, my 18th anniversary of moving to New York City happened last week on July 7th and I’ve been thinking a lot about my first couple of weeks here. I’ve always been a nervous person and I remember my nerve endings feeling especially jingle-jangled those first two weeks out here. I had moved to New York City where I had no friends, no family and no job. And soon, I would discover, I was going to have almost no sleep the first couple of weeks I lived here.

My first day in New York, I signed my lease for my apartment and then I went to a used furniture store and bought a cheap futon and a black wooden desk. They were going to be delivered the next day. I then went to a hardware store and bought an air mattress. I went home, blew it up and then went out to explore my new neighborhood. I didn’t want to sit in my apartment, it was totally empty and there was nothing to do in there but sit and think and obsess if I had made a huge mistake in moving to New York City. My mind races sometimes and all I was thinking about was what was going to happen to me and it was all a little scary. So to quiet those thoughts, I headed out and went to the P&G Tavern a couple blocks away.

I ordered a beer, told the bartender I had just moved here and a few of the regulars at the bar welcomed me and soon we were buying each other drinks and joking around. Much later as I was feeling no pain I felt like maybe I belonged in my little chunk of New York City. I stumbled home and laid down on the air mattress and passed right the fuck out. About fifteen minutes later a loud honking sound woke me up.

HONK HONK HONK...

I opened my eyes and said to myself, “What the fuck?”

Then I heard a series of ear screeching beeps.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP...

Then I heard something that sounded like a siren and then more honks. Then I realized they were car alarms going off. My apartment faced Broadway and I had a large window that looked down on the busy street. It was a great view, but not so good for soundproofing from those fucking sensitive car alarms that would go off if somebody so much as sneezed near the car. All through the night I would fall asleep for about ten minutes and then...HONK HONK HONK...another one would go off. And then another one. And before I knew it the fucking sun came up and I was thinking about my move to New York, was wracked by my nervousness about my future and got the fuck up. I went down to the corner deli and got a couple of diet Cokes to help me get through the morning. The caffeine helped to get me going, but didn’t do much for my wired and frayed nerve endings. I was jumpier than Art Linkletter’s daughter after eleven hits of acid.

Around ten o’clock in the morning my futon and desk were delivered. I set up my computer on my desk and went to work putting writing portfolios and cover letters together and then went and dropped them off around town. I started looking for freelance work with the weekly papers in Manhattan. There was a lot of them (this was pre-internet days) and while I knew the pay wouldn’t be much, it would be easier to get published in them and then I would have a few New York pieces with my byline to take to magazines and the daily papers along with my clippings from Peoria.

That night I was tired and fell asleep on my new futon around 11 o’clock at night. Sometime around midnight the car alarm symphony started once again. Honks and beeps and alarms, oh my! This happened every stinking night. I tried earplugs, sleeping with the pillow over my head, but nothing would silence the nightly chorus of car alarms. I wondered if I would ever get a full night’s sleep again.

After about a week of fitful and sleepless nights, I got a call from an editor at a fairly new New York weekly paper called aptly enough, NY Weekly. She told me she was impressed with my portfolio and wanted me to write features for them. I was thrilled! In less than a week in the big city I already had a writing lead. Then she asked a favor of me. It seems that a writer had bailed on going to a screening of a movie for that afternoon and she needed somebody to go and write a review of the movie. She asked if I had ever written movie reviews. I told her I had written a lot of them in my writing career. In reality, I had never written a movie review in my life, but I wasn’t going to blow this opportunity.

She told me my name would be put on a list at the theater and I could just go there and there’d be tickets waiting for me. I ended up going, then selling my tickets to a couple I met there and wrote a review that was totally made up. I even gave high praise for the “best boy” listed in the credits. I thought this was hilarious, partly due to the fact that if it got published, my first New York piece of journalism would be totally bogus. I was sure that if it got printed, they’d edit out the “best boy” credit, but I told myself that if I could pull this off, all would work out for me in New York. I then told myself that if it didn’t and I got busted, I had made a mistake and probably wouldn’t last long in the Big Apple. It was kind of a game I set up to see what my future would bring. Don’t ask me why I did this, probably because I had had about seven hours of sleep combined in the last eight days.

I went home and wrote the review (you can read the whole story and review here) and I went and turned it in. Two days later I picked the paper up out of a box on the street and laughed out loud when I read my “review.” They published it word for word and even left the “best boy” credit in. I’m sure people thought I was completely mad, standing on the corner of Broadway and 75th Street laughing my ass off while reading the review and in a way I was. I hadn’t slept much in the last two weeks and had been nervous out of my mind about making the move to New York City. But seeing my byline in a New York newspaper made me immediately think that things would work out one way or the other.

That night I went to the P&G and showed my first published New York piece to some of the regulars and told them the story of how I sold my tickets and just made the review up and everybody was howling about it. That night I went home and laid down on my futon and I felt relaxed for the first time since I moved to the city. I fell asleep and instead of the car alarms waking me up, they lulled me to sleep and they never bothered me again.

About six months later I went back to Peoria, Illinois to spend Christmas with my family and see my old friends. By then I had written stories for a slew of the weekly newspapers in Manhattan and had even graduated to the daily papers. I had penned one feature for the NY Daily News and three feature stories for New York Newsday. One of the features for Newsday was their lead feature for the day and it was a four page article on a shoestring, ragtag All-Star Wrestling weekly event in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I felt pretty good about what I had accomplished in a half a year in the big city, and was anxious to show everyone back in Peoria my New York City clippings.

The very first night back in Peoria was spent how I end up spending a lot of nights there. I sat and watched TV and drank beer while my parents fell in and out of sleep until 10:00 pm and then they went to bed. Then I drank the rest of the beer in the refrigerator and went to go to sleep in the front bedroom of their house. I remember it was about one in the morning and I had drank a lot of beer, but I just laid there and couldn’t get to sleep. I tossed and turned and finally figured it out: It was too fucking quiet. I actually missed the chorus of midnight car alarms going off through the night. It brought a smile to my face and I knew right then and there I made the right choice in moving to New York City.

Someone once told me that true New Yorkers were born true New Yorkers and that it just takes some people longer to get there than others. It took me 35 years, but I’m grateful I finally made it out here.

Beep beep ‘em beep beep yeah!

Further reading: Tenants Services, nyc.gov, Sounds of New York and New York Noise.

You might also like: K Mart, Murray the K and Special K.