Home from NYC

[Note: Sorry this is late, everyone--just remembered I should probably wrap this up, since all of this happened almost a month ago.]

I woke up the next morning, a Saturday, at the ungodly early hour of 11:30 and headed uptown to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where I missed the tour of the premises by eight minutes. Begun in 1892, the cathedral is still under construction (locals call it “St. John the Unfinished”), and about a third of the structure was wrapped in scaffolding or showed the unfinished look of walls under construction. As one of the largest Christian churches in the world, however, St. John's Cathedral is still an impressive sight.

From there I took the metro back downtown to the site of the World Trade Center. A massive hole in the skyline with the city flowing around it, the site was fenced off and difficult to see into. What small chinks there were in the fencing were crowded with tourists, snapping pictures through the chain link fence. The sidewalks around it were lined with the usual array of T-shirt tables and trinket sellers that accompany any of the tourist attractions in New York.

Perhaps all of this is because of what was happening inside the fence. What was a few years a go a heap of rubble is now a bustling construction site. The American way is one of quick funerals. We had our day of weeping and wearing black. But, though (as the t-shirts read) we will “never forget,” we are already moving on, already building something new in its place. It is perhaps this spirit, this bustling momentum, this loud but brief fear of death, and this stolid dedication to construction, birth and forward motion, that identifies the American people as what they are.

I sat beside the bay, looking out at the Statue of Liberty and across the water at the New Jersey shoreline as the sun set. I had originally intended to take the same bus back to D.C., which would have left around 6:30 the next evening. Because I didn't feel like getting into Washington at one in the morning and trying to find a ride to my apartment in northern Virginia, I had arranged to ride home with the friends I'd met on Friday from where they were staying in Dover, New Jersey. That meant I had to take the New Jersey transit system out from the city at seven the next morning, catching the empty return on the trip that was part of the mass commute from New York's surrounding counties into jobs in the city.

With no real chance of getting a decent night's sleep, and the possibility of sleeping through my phone alarm and missing my train, I made the only logical choice. New York is the city that never sleeps, I thought, so why not see what that means firsthand?

So, I picked up the rest of my things at my friend's apartment and headed out. With plenty of time to kill, I made for Times Square and the endless parade of faces there. I sat for some time against a wall just watching people—drunks stumbling happily out of a ritzy nightclub, three platinum blondes asking a more than friendly police officer for directions, little clusters of tourists from all over the world moving here and there, taking pictures, the flashes from their cameras little more than glimmers against the glare of the city's lights.

At around two in the morning I happened upon two large black men in what looked to be tasseled robes embroidered with stars of David, and hats that looked somewhat, but not entirely, like turbans. One of them was ranting to anyone who'd listen, while the other simply nodded in agreement and through in the occasional affirmative phrase. Turns out they're the (somewhat) famous “Black Jews” of Times Square. Homemade placards at their feet demonstrated how the real twelve tribes of Israel were actually various American and Caribbean black slave groups, as well as several Native American tribes. They also showed a dozen or so supposed black emperors of Rome, and how Obama was going to bring the apocalypse. “This book right here,” he said, waving a Bible at me and the handful of other listeners at two in the morning, “says that the Lord appoints a king over the nation. Well, the Lord didn't appoint Obama, the Illuminati did. And you know what that means!”

I tried to take a picture, was told I had to “pay tribute,” didn't have any cash, and kept walking. I walked, in fact, for the next two hours, just watching people, watching the way the mood and look of the city changed, the way that, by four in the morning, the only people out were tired people walking home from late night shifts, and lost clusters of tourists somewhat awed by the great dark city around and above them.

Finally, I gave up and walked into Penn Station, where I thought I'd try to get a couple of hours of rest before my train left for New Jersey. By now my phone—which I needed to contact my friends—had died, so I searched the station for that perfect combination of a place to lie down and an electrical outlet. I finally found one and dozed off for a few moments. I awoke to an odd sight—that of an old homeless man who had apparently fallen asleep while searching through a nearby trash bin. He was leaning heavily on it, head down, slowly falling to one side and then starting, half-waking, and straightening himself.

Then I noticed others, leaning against walls, against other trash bins. Only one was laying down, feet wrapped in plastic bags, across the room from me. As I watched, a police officer walked by and nudged the man with his foot. The man got up, protesting, and shambled out.

A moment later the cop was standing over me. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “You're going to have to find a place to sit up.”

Then it was clear. Being the last few days of November, the city was frigid, and this was one of the few warm places open at this time of night. Were the station to allow people to lay down and sleep as they waited for their trains, they'd be overrun and unable to do business. To stay open, they were forced to keep people standing—to keep them, in other words, awake. The technique is used in prison camps to torture prisoners into talking or insanity. It's hardly surprising that, after years and even decades of life on the streets, there are so many of the homeless with the psychological and mental problems they have. Later I saw a cop prod some teenager who was dozing off in a corner and chew the kid out for mouthing off. When he came to the homeless man sleeping in a chair a few days down, his voice was gentler—and, I noticed, the cop waited until the last possible moment before the ticket booths opened and the passengers started filing in. The plight of these homeless, at least, was not caused by cruel police officers or an unfeeling corporation. Their plight is, very simply, a flaw in the system.

I slept most of the two hour train ride out to Dover, New Jersey, and was awakened suddenly. “End of the line,” the conductor said, and I stumbled blearily out into a frigid wind and ground covered in ice, bleary gray skies in every direction. My friends from Patrick Henry were staying at the home of Rebecca Beach, a half hour drive from the station. She picked me up there and we met with the others at her house for a home-cooked breakfast.

And then home, on roads covered in ice and traffic almost as frozen. What was usually a five hour drive took us nine, including a stop for horrendously greasy food at a “family-style” roadside diner along the way. Whoever the family was, I suspect they've long since died from heart failure and clogged arteries.

But at last we arrived back in small town northern Virginia, with an evening to spare before classes began the next day. All in all, another Thanksgiving break well spent.