The Ride

Frame: I just got back on Sunday night from a trip to NYC for the big NY Con, with Big T. This was my first time back in the city in several years, and my first foray back into the comics world in about 10 years. I blogged through the weekend, writing longhand, and will transpose some of those notes here over the next few days. So the days blogged here will not correspond to real time.

Yesterday Big T and I took a ride from Mass down to NYC, my old stomping grounds. Actually those stomping grounds consisted mostly of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, and where we’re actually staying is on the upper West Side, but it’s the same idea. Okay, it’s not at all the same. But I’m here nonetheless.

The ride down was notable as it allowed some Dad-Son talk time, but also notable in the fact that there wasn’t a lot to talk about. We touch base a few times a week at bedtime with the typical “How are things at school?” “How’s your Teacher Mrs. M?”, “How’s your buddy D doing?” “How’s your writing going?”. It’s a crap shoot, where sometimes he’s waiting to unload, and at other times ever ready with a ubiquitous “fine” at every turn. But without setting up the scenario now, I’m going to get less-than-“fine” when he turns into a close-mouthed teen whose annoyed at those kind of questions. Anyway, because we talk, we found here that there wasn't a lot to talk about. The ride then became all about anticipation of going into the city, which Big T had done more recently than I had. So I guess the anticipation, and the trepidation, was all mine.

I never had those kind of talks with my Dad, and just really started to in the weeks before he died of the big C. We had a strange relationship growing up as I was the last child, and clearly unplanned, and I think coming at a time that he had assumed he wouldn’t be having anymore kids. We talked about, but never achieved, some father-son hunting trips (I’ve never been hunting and don’t think I missed much), some father-son fishing trips (we managed two of those and I was never the kind to get up before the sun to go out in the cold to fish. I still love fishing while camping, and I think Big T and Lil T also both enjoy it.

The biggest thing that my Dad did for me was, when I was at a pre-college program at the Philadelphia College of Art in the summer of my Junior year of high school. I was going out to see a movie with some friends, two girls and a guy I didn’t like very much. He was about two years older than we were-again the others and myself being sophomores and juniors in High School, and he being old enough to have graduated, but nonetheless in the same summer program. The key to the story here is that he was old enough to buy, and unbeknownst to me had bought a bottle of wine to drink before we saw the movie. I believe it was Quadrophenia, playing at a revival house. So we took the train, and got off near the theater, and he led us into a local neighborhood to get buzzed before the movie. Something about drinking cheap wine out of a paper bag sitting on a curb didn’t fit into my self image, so I opted out. It seemed somehow desperate, and sad. But at the same time I didn’t have the self possession to just walk away from them or tell them how stupid I thought it was. So as a result, I’m standing a few feet away while they drank, and the guy got rowdier. An old lady kept peeking out of her curtains at the group, and the guy got the brilliant idea to flip her off. Minutes later is when the cops showed up.

We were all brought into the local station, and the guy, being of legal drinking age, was the only one who was released. I had to call my parents in Mass, three states away, and explain in a “I barely believe myself, so there’s no way you’re going to buy this” voice that I got picked up for underage drinking when I hadn’t even actually been drinking, or even touched the damned paper bag. The point of this story is, my Dad came down, and got it straightened out, and I never had to appear in court. The charges were dropped. I was never sure how, or if he did it, but in a town as racist as Philly was in those days (my experiences with that are another story) it felt like an accomplishment. And the best part was, he never questioned whether I was telling the truth. I never lied to him, and he never doubted me. And that said something, to me, at the time.

Anyway, there we were, riding through the Bronx toward Manhattan. I suddenly had this tremendous sense of Deja Vu, from my first ride into town with all my belongings for my freshman year of college. The city was odd, like riding into a foreign land, and trying to recognize your position by the road signs was difficult, feeling almost like they were in another language. There was a large lot of city busses lined up, looking to me for some reason, like cattle ready for some bizarre slaughter or rodeo show. I had an almost overwhelming sense of other-worldiness, which let me know how far I’d come from my first days in the city, and how far I’ve grown from this city which felt like the home of my soul. I glanced back at Big T, and he was interested in the surroundings, but I didn’t get a sense of awe from him that I felt and recalled. It wasn’t alien to him at all.To the contrary, he piped up with an excited point at his first spotting of a bit of graffiti on a nearby building, before the colume of it shredded the novelty. I guess the experience of television had made this all already real for him.

I guess it’s just becoming so, for me.

More to come.