Two weeks into the shoot, and for reasons that escape me I've become the de facto driver for the show (the name of which I am forbidden from mentioning but which, uncoincidentally, is a perfect anagram of "I am a worthless maiden, heed me"). The logic, for lack of a less sarcastic-sounding word, of putting someone who can count the number of months he's been in this city on both middle fingers in charge of piloting a massive 15-seat van through the traffic-choked streets of New York escapes me, but the upside is that every hour I spend screaming at some asshole triple-parked on Bowery is an hour of not being screamed at by a drug-addicted, alcoholic multimillionaire.
Short of the odd drunken taxi ride, I'd literally been in one car since coming to New York before starting this job, and my impression had been of a city composed entirely of tunnels. The subways are in many ways wonderful, as much for their convenience (which is ample) as for the voyeuristic, fight-or-flight thrill of being surrounded on all sides by an army of lunatics. And yes, yes, there's a certain...well shit, magic, to emerging from the dank tiled murk of the subway to find yourself suddenly in a different part of town.
And so for me this city existed as a series of islands. Go down into the subway and emerge in Harlem, Central Park, Union Square, Greenpoint, Bushwick. There are points of reference, yes -- the spire of the Empire State Building, the gaudy flash and bang of Times Square -- but the bits and pieces that make up the city never quite fit together. The Bronx is up, the Battery 's down. Everything else gets a bit hazy.
In the beginning, it's this simple dislocation that makes being anywhere for the first time so exciting. The simple act of decoding the geography of a place, of figuring out which roads take you where, is the first step to penetrating its mystery. Said mystery is stabbed, set on fire, pushed down a flight of stairs and then given the finger by a cabbie the minute you start driving. Yeah, the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, and between them, an endless sea of douchebags.
Central Park, once a sanctuary of calm in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the city, is now just a big green road block in between where I am and where I need to be, and shit, now I need to drive all the way the fuck up 66th to get over to the west side, even though the place I need to go to pick up the lens is on the same fucking street I'm on now, and jesus, for some reason the fire department has the street roped off so now I gotta go all the way up to -- the fuck?! The light's green you fucking moron! GO!! Don't honk at me, you prick, I'm not the asshole staring at a green light with my thumb up my -- Move your goddamn car! Yeah, you! And then once I have the lens I have to get all the way the fuck up to the Bronx to pick up some dry ice, of all fucking things, then back down to the lighting house in Greenwich that won't have our stuff ready until after lunch, which I'm goddamn missing right now, by the way, and after all that I have to make it back across the Williamsburg Bri--No, YOU fuck YOUR goddamn mother, lady!
4 comments:
This is pretty much how i always drive. I feel your pain.
I don't suppose you read my thing on New York driving, did you? At this point, you probably don't need to.
It's Martha Stewart, it's gotta be..and how come you never wrote me an email jerkface!
If Morgan Freeman can get an Oscar as a driver for a white woman, I think you should at least get a raise
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