(Land of the homeless, free of the brave.)

I reckon they were mob. If they weren't then they were sure as hell living the image. I have a lot of Italian friends who love quoting scenes from the Godfather movies, they seem to just like the idea that they are connected in some way. And it was obvious from the first moment I met these guys that they were all heavily into that whole scene. I was out on Long Island, big hair, heavy jewellery, heavy accents. Not that the accents mattered so much, they all preferred speaking Italian anyway.

It really was sensational stuff. I was there by invitation, as the brother of one of my best friends in Guatemala was interested in having a look at Mexican silver with the idea we might be able to do some biz together in the big apple. This rooster was the full bottle. Smooth as they come, in that New York/Italian way. Snappy dresser, silver hair, gold chain of course and the fancy car.

He had made fairly excessive amounts of money in the family bread business over the years and now gone out on his own. Built himself a dirty great big fancy pastelaria. Marble floor, all the fittings imported from Italy at huge expense, bloody great fish tank. I mean really, why do you need a fish tank in a bakery for christ's sake, for a bit of fresh angel fish with your ciabatta? There was even a grand piano in the corner. A gesture I presumed, to a desire to try and convince people he was an opera oficianado. And the piano alone took up enough space for three Guatemalan corner stores. All in all, fabulous. American/Italian excess at its best. I loved the joint.

There were huge glass cabinets full of the things that make north Americans so fat. Boy they are big. In Latin America I feel a bit like Gulliver must have, but in the U.S. I felt like Johnny Fameshon would feel stepping into the ring with George Foreman. These folks are whoppers.
So I met la famiglia and once I got to know the crew I was invited to sit around in the office out the back with the guys. Drinking macciato's, smoking cigars and (as they call it) bullshitting. Conversation was mostly in Italian and they were wary of outsiders. Fortunately my contact was the head of this particular push so I was in. And I got a taste for it. Being in that is, not the pastries, they were like the women's perms, too puffed up and artificial for me. Anyone who has just the teensiest bit of dick-head in them can't help but love being in. Look at the Masons for instance. Maybe it's the need to feel wanted thing, the surrogate family, like bike gang mentality. Whatever, it was all blokes and macho bullshit, I was on the inside and reveling in it. So there I was, hanging out with the boyos, smoking the big smokes and breaking balls…..one of the most unfortunate of expressions they really like using. I was in New York and feeling good.

There was a wonderful scene one morning. We were sitting around the office and a little guy walks in, obviously a southern Italian, as different from the others who were all from the north. He does a lap, greets all the guys, in Italian of course, they all embrace, kiss, exchange ciao-buongiorno´s. During all this he includes in his greetings some questions to the others about who I am and if I speak Italian. Once he was assured that I was OK, (do you reckon that didn't half make me feel important, I can see how the wise guys get off on that stuff) he immediately started on about the New York Times headlines of the morning relating to a wise guy who had just turned states evidence and was about to hang a whole lot of his ex-mob mates out to dry. It would be fair to say that the general mood of the group was that such behavior was considered very poor form. Sensational stuff. It was killing me, but it would have been seriously bad news to laugh. These fellas do tend to get a bit frisky at times and I took it for granted that there was probably a bit of weaponry about.

But I've jumped ahead of myself a bit here. I should give you some more background on what I was doing in New York in the first place. I will elaborate, probably too much.
I meet lots of folks from up north and I have tended to find that I warm to New Yorkers. I've thought about it a lot and I reckon it's a mix of characteristics that I like in them. One in particular being that they tend to be more direct than people from the other parts of the country. I had heard all sorts of terrible stories from other yanks about how rude they were. That's crap, they are just like your average aussie. So……um…….yes that does mean your average yank thinks we are direct to the point of rudeness. I'll just digress here for a moment on that point.

I was reading a book by Paul Theroux the other day which included stories about a few months he had in Aus. One of the things I like about his writing is that by American standards he is not afraid to criticize. But it seems the folks in Aus were a little bit too direct even for him. There was a wonderful few lines where he said that "…….the Aussies are a pretty direct bunch, if they don't like you they will just tell you to get fucked. To your face!" Well…..yeah! The thread here being that if Theroux et al think like that about us, and criticize the New Yorkers for similar behavior then I reckoned I was on a pretty safe bet to like the locals. And I did. They are fantastic.

Another brick in the foundations of my extensive research into the personality of the locals was a joke a pommie mate told me. He had spent a bit of time in the place and I asked him what he thought of the natives. He replied with this joke……..you walk up to a New Yorker standing on a street corner with the idea of asking him the time and you say, "can you tell me the time please, or do you want me to just go fuck myself?"

Anyway, suffice to say that coming out of Mexico I had more than a few reservations, not only whether I would be horrified at the cost of things (which I was) but also whether I would be able to handle north Americans en masse. My only exposure to el norte, of a first hand nature, had been intermittent passes through the airports in Los Angeles and Houston. And I thought my unpleasant impressions of those two places would be unfair to use to judge the country and its people.

There would also of course be the language barrier. I speak what most north Americans consider to be an antipodean dialect of English, unintelligible to all but native speakers. In fact, in Latin America I tend to have problems whoever I try to speak with. The locals have terrible trouble understanding my appalling Spanish and if I happen to meet a foreigner, nine times out of ten they are either north American or European and in either case the result is the same as with the locals, but in English.

As for what would be acceptable behavior on my part, I figured I already had a pretty fair handle on this from watching so many US television shows and Hollywood movies. I knew for instance to be obsequiously polite to even the most vapid of arseholes. Particularly if they were not native New Yorkers, which accounts for ninety percent of the residents. It's so cosmopolitan that pretty much everybody comes from somewhere else. I also knew to be in awe of anyone who makes obscene amounts of money. Especially so if they happened to be done-good-deadbeats from film, politics, property development or stock broking. I should also break into spontaneous applause at the slightest sign of anyone doing anything worthy and not under any circumstances smoke anywhere other than in the most spectacular of wilderness landscapes. These things I took as givens.

Then there was the humor, would it be necessary to deliver a joke like they do in the U.S. sitcoms. Give a minutes notice that one is coming, deliver it slowly, clearly, very loud and then tell everyone when to laugh?

But these were minor concerns, the big issue, where I thought some serious tongue-biting practice was required (never one of my strong points) was the topic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Given where I live and what I do I presumed the topic might come up. How could I inoffensively describe the incessant meddling and that heavy footprint. How could I tip-toe around such an issue in a country where a much favored saying, of a very go-ahead people, is "get over it" but they seem singularly unable to "get over" Cuba? Could I make conversation in a non inflammatory way about the omnipotence of the eagle whose wing span casts an ever present shadow over its neighbors?

Even back around 1500 a bloke by the name of Erasmus had a handle on the connotations of the eagle as a national symbol. The bloke was a humanist, which naturally means he didn't feel great empathy for your average politician. He also scribbled a lot and this all-telling passage was one of the results. "At the screech of the eagle, I declare, the common folk immediately tremble, the senate huddles together, the nobles become servile, judges become obsequious, theologians are silent, lawyers assent, laws give way, and established custom yields: nothing can stand against it, not right, not duty, not justice, not humanity." So……would I be able to put all that stuff aside for ten days and just take the place and its people at face value?

As it turned out I needn't have worried one bit. No one asked. I had made the mistake of thinking that people might actually give a shit about what goes on in other parts of the world.
But I'm being a bit harsh……nothing like the pleasures of a good old bit of yank-bashing. And in the process I'm giving the wrong impression. That's all the old baggage I was carrying around in the past. The fact is I fair dinkum loved the joint and the people.
So I landed in New York. JFK in fact. And I couldn't help but warm to the idea of flying into a place that names its main airport after a womaniser from a family of Irish thugs and drunks. It sets the right tone for entering a fun town. I got into JFK (I had to say it again, like the Italians, I love being able to connect myself with such internationally famous names) and organised a ride on a shuttle service into downtown Manhattan. There's another one…..Downtown Manhattan …..I was definitely entering the domain of the rich and famous and was sure Woody Allen would be in the shuttle with us. A famous bloke like that, he must fly about the place a bit, need a lift into town etc. Although, come to think of it, I guess he would be too paranoid to fly. Anyway, he wasn't in the shuttle.
The wait for the shuttle was actually about five times as long as it's necessary to wait coming out of Guatemala city airport and ten times the price, but that's just being petty. It was certainly comfier and safer. And very efficiently and politely organized by a neatly uniformed woman who was labeled Shirley.

I'll just go on and relate the rest of this little leg of the journey as it set the tone for me (along with the airport name) of how I would warm to the place. So stick with me a minute.
During the extended wait for the shuttle I took the opportunity to call my work partner, with whom I set up our little enterprise in Guatemala. She returned to New York last year and we had arranged that I would camp on the couch at her joint in Brooklyn for the first few days.
After completing the phone call I realized why there was a forty minute wait for the shuttle. That's how long it takes to make a call from a public phone. The public phone system has been privatised to the point of such efficiency that all it is possible to speak to……well, listen to actually, is recorded messages. And any call to a destination further away than the distance it takes to change the language spoken between barrios within New York is considered long distance. To make such a call, which takes forever by time you get past the sickeningly polite, obstructionist, recorded messages, requires a pretty fair supply of dimes. I use the name dime familiarly, which is not actually how it was between them and I. I didn't ever really work out what the value of a dime was when converted back to pesos, but I did establish that finding them is very similar to asking for change in a shop in Cuba. You can forget it. Anyone who actually has a few is only going to part with them under considerable duress. Or -and here in lies the three card trick-unless you decide to buy a twenty cent packet of something from the nearest shop or stall, which inevitably costs seventy cents. In which case you might be lucky enough to get the odd one of them in your change. But if you see the shop assistant starting to count out smaller coins to make up your change, don't make the mistake of being silly enough to ask for more of the ever elusive dimes. That will only inflame an already serious situation.
As you can see, my time was already passing constructively. Within the first half hour of arriving in consumptionopolis I had an immediate insight into the increased efficiencies of leaving everything up to private enterprise. In Guatemala I would have been inclined to mutter obscenities about incompetent thieves setting themselves up in comfy troikas, but I knew better in this case.

The shuttle into town proved to be every bit as cosmopolitan as I expected the great metropolis itself would be. There were pom´s, frogs and people from little cold countries. And the driver was a Mexican. In fact, the driver was pretty busy and I could see he had obviously been well schooled in his trade before deciding to chance his arm in el norte. Before we got around all his pick up points the mini van was full. This was a dilemma for him. It was obvious company policy was preventing him from asking us all to squash up so he could put in at least six more paying punters. And at fifteen bucks a throw the loss was tearing him up. It was directly contrary to everything he had learnt plying his sardine-packing trade in the buses south of the Rio Grande.

Now this had all taken a fair amount of time and I was getting a bit fidgety, as I had arranged to meet my partner at her office, right in the guts of downtown within an hour. This was quickly looking like a pipe dream as the service was door to door and we were obviously about to spend at least an hour and a half dropping off passengers while crawling all over Manhattan in the permanent peak hour traffic.

It was time to curry favours. I had the good luck to be sitting just behind our pilots right shoulder. I took a punt and initiated conversation in Spanish, sufficiently laced with Mexican slang so as to try and sound like a sympathetic bloke from his homeland. Pretentious crap…..absolutely. But if something is worth fighting for, it's worth fighting dirty. It turned out he was much happier in Spanish than English, what a surprise. It seemed like everyone else spoke other languages so I took advantage of the situation to play on what I reckoned it would be a safe bet to presume would be a fairly well ingrained bit of Mexican macho. I turned my holiday come business meeting into a hot date and alluded (in a way I am not proud of and I am sure my business partner would be disgusted by) to the ramifications of not arriving on time. He didn't even ask anyone else where they were going. Fifteen minutes, first drop, straight to the door. I had my first U.S. experience at overly generous tipping and replied as warmly as possible to the nudge and a wink suggestions of hoping that we had arrived in time.
So that was my arrival and as I say, set the scene for me. In fact, I soon found that with the sorts of folk I was hanging out with, in the areas I was frequenting, that any time I had problems with people understanding my English all I had to do was change to Spanish and everything was fine. It was one of the many things that gives the place such a lovely cosmopolitan feel.

To everything there is a flip side of course and in this case I had what I thought was a taste of it while walking through a very swanky part of town one evening. Hispanic doorman opens door of seriously fancy apartment block for extremely well coffuiered elderly gent. Gent gives overly polite nod-come-half-bow to doorman and labours out a carefully annunciated graa-si-aas. Gave me pause for thought.

On which note……I was amazed to see how deeply entrenched the racism is. Never again will I tolerate the overly polite but needling, questions from a yank about Australia´s treatment of the Aborigines. All that crap I had read or been told about race relations in the U.S. is the work of the spin doctors and the politically correct. And the locals all liked telling me what a culturally accepting melting pot the big apple is. So I reckoned it was fair to presume it was further ahead in that regard than other parts of the country.

If that is the case the rest of the country must be a sorry place for those unlucky enough to have been born with a dark complexion. The fact is that the blacks and Hispanics do all the dirty work. Hardly any of them hold the better paid or more responsible jobs. You see virtually no good looking white women with blacks as lovers, the obvious message being that if you are in a position to pick and chose then you take a whitey. And thirdly, on the subway, which I spent quite a lot of time on and is the most egalitarian of places, you see very few blacks and whites hanging out together in a social context.

It would be fair to say I was surprised. The northerners fought…..and won, a civil war over this issue. At first I thought I must have been disoriented and still been south of the Mason Dixon line. I had only been in the town for a few days though and I figured I might be way off the mark, so I raised the topic with a few friends who were natives. They said I was right on the money and that racism was still very heavily ingrained in society.
Enough on that topic. My first morning in town was a sunday and my partner, Erin is her name and her sister Shannon, (obviously not Italians) with whom she shares an apartment, thought they should have a few friends around for brunch. This was a fabulous affair. The half dozen heads were all involved in the music/arts scene and they sat around for an hour or two discussing, in what sounded to me like a very informed manner, all the latest showings, artists, films, music and books.

I was enthralled and said as much to Shannon. I told her I was deeply impressed to see that locals actually behaved just like protagonists in Woody Allen movies ……who still hadn't shown up by the way. She professed to be enthralled as well, as it was the first time she had been involved in such a round the table discussion in the eight years she had lived in the city.
And while on a cultural theme…...I did the compulsory bit of museum hopping, which was impressive almost beyond what I had imagined. One evening there was an opening at the Whitney museum which my partner wanted to see and thought I should attend, for the sake of experiencing a New York opening. All the more so she said, because it was of contemporary work. I suspect she thinks I am an old fuddy-duddy. Possibly true, but at the time I thought it was unfair. I was trying so hard to be cool.

The show was the biennial display of contemporary works from within the U.S. Nice show, bit of out-there rubbish and a bit of out-there fabulous stuff. That's by- the-by. The interesting thing was that after about half an hour I realized the show was very much a secondary consideration. I was strolling around in the swankiest meat-market I had ever been in. Everyone was on the (culturally aware) make. I was fascinated. It really was a great New York contemporary show. In fact everything was on show. I broached the topic with my mate. She looked incredulous. I had obviously just confirmed that I was indeed an old fuddy-duddy. She just gave me one of those all knowing, completely disarming looks, nodded slowly and walked off…..after a stray bloke.

I had the pleasure of being camped just off the edge of Central Park and was pleasantly surprised to see that there was no one actually camped within the park. It seems the bloke Guliano who was in the chair as mayor for a fair while had instructed his force of wallopers to make the place safe for tourists, such as myself, to stroll through at night. And it was. I started with tentative, over-the-shoulder-watching little forays into the edges. But soon built up the confidence to cross from one side to the other late at night. Not a problem and I wasn't doing a Mr. Magoo, there were plenty of people doing the same.

Once I had spent a bit of time in the park though I came to realise that it was not just because of New York´s finest that there were no bums and thieves in there. It's also because of the squirrels! These are very small, furry critters, with very large, prickly amounts of attitude. They know where they are living. The little sods are like all other New Yorkers, very real estate conscious. Central Park is their barrio and they don't take no crap from nobody! I didn't actually see one mug a small child for his peanuts, but I am sure it would not be beyond them. And I swear I saw one staring at a really cute jogger as she jiggled past.

A number of people asked me if I had visited the twin towers site. It had evidently become a popular tourist destination. I didn't visit as I thought I would have felt like a voyeur…..which I am and accordingly self conscious. Also I had quickly tired of hearing about the firemen whom various locals told me were dining out on the hero worship. I had the misfortune of coming across a few, as I was in town for St. Patrick's day. It seems the fire brigade is a bastion of Irishness and they were doing what paddy's are prone to do, they were making pigs of themselves.

One thing very high on my wish list was that I wanted to see a gig in some smokey jazz joint or equally nefarious venue. Quintessential New York. My tour guide done good. Erin managed to decipher the huge entertainment guide and actually work out not only where something was on and what time the show was, but even managed to find out a bit about the performances as well. This was an exercise in code breaking and using that bloody phone system, which would have been totally beyond me.

The venue and artists fitted my expectations perfectly. The Mercury Lounge is an old joint, down in the Lower West Side, or East Side, or…..something lower anyway. I just love using those names. The entrance was through a long, narrow, wooden bar leading to a low ceilinged room out the back with enough space for about a hundred and fifty punters to stand with a beer in hand.

The place was full and the curtain raiser was a particularly quirky C&W woman who seemed rather uncomfortable in front of a crowd. This was my image of a very New York experience and I was having a fat time. The main act was a rooster by the name of Robbie Fulks. He started out with a bit of C&W and just a base guitarist helping him along. Then as his backing band grew he gradually moved into rock and roll and raised the tempo. In fact….. raised the tempo is a bit too delicate a description……they went friggin wild. He seemed to want to keep pushing both C&W and the rock and roll numbers towards a bit of Punk. All sounded good to me and I'd only had one beer. The joint jumped and I was in tourist heaven.

As if that wasn't enough, the gig finished about midnight and when we got outside it was snowing. I was like a kid in a candy shop. I have skied before but I have never actually seen snow falling. It was too much like a New York movie for me. I lost my heart to the city. I also suffered mild hypothermia! One of the pleasures of living in Mexico is that I haven't seen a winter in three years. I arrived in New York with clothing as thin as my blood has become and suffered accordingly.

It was all a mix of the magical and fascinating, but it was time to head south. My wallet and credit card had been drained……and completely wrung out…….and then some. And the business deal with the mob had not jelled. Which at the time I was disappointed about, but with the wisdom of hindsight, might have been a good thing.

As much as I was looking forward to being warm again, as different from overly centrally heated, there were numerous things I was going to miss, despite having only been in the place for ten days. Not least of which, was that my new found Italian friends had a family wedding coming up on the weekend and were trying to convince me to stay the extra four days so I could attend. Can you imagine? An Italian wedding is something special anywhere. But a New York, Italian, mob wedding! It was going to be bigger than Ben Hurr. And indeed I could imagine it. In fact a vision occurred to me of getting a gut full of grappa and good wine, trying to snog the daughter of a mob guy and coming to the same unhappy end as Sonny Corleone.
I made my plane.

www.nangana.com