New York City, Redux: Part 1 (3/16/22)

DISCLAIMER: This travelogue is going to be full of my usual stupidity, packed with exaggerations and made-up facts, but before I do that, I feel like I need to set the stage by providing a background for this trip that is mostly free of stupidity, exaggerations, and made-up facts:

Nearly seven years ago, in the summer of 2015, my cousin and best friend, The Rabbit, then a highly ranked competitive eater, asked me to go to New York City with him, to watch him compete in the annual 4th of July Nathan's Famous Hotdog Eating Competition. This trip also doubled as his bachelor party, and the first time in my life I went to New York City.
I dreaded the trip. I was raised on a farm in rural South Louisiana, and most of my conception of New York was formed through 80's Letterman monologues where he painted the streets as a hilarious dystopian nightmare populated by wily hobos, joke-cracking prostitutes, and rats the size of Jack Russell Terriers. At that point in my life, I was 33, and had been back in college for a couple of years, and on summer break. Though I had a wife and my son was then five-years-old, I viewed myself as a young man essentially starting over in life. The 19 and 20-year-old kids in my classes all assumed that my still fresh face belonged to the same age group as them to the point that when my Chemistry lab TA revealed my age to the class at the end of one semester, the girl with braces who sat next to me in my Chemistry lab cried. She cried.
I'm serious.
Again, I'm not even to the part of the travelogue where I just start blatantly making stuff up. 
I felt forever young at that time in my life, uncertain of the future, but at least enjoying myself as essentially Steve Buscemi from the fellow kids meme. Little did I know, that time was quickly coming to an end, with this 2015 trip to New York essentially acting as its denouement--and holy cow, what a denouement!
Despite my nerves and David Letterman-induced fear of New York City, something strange happened. I not only had the time of my life on the trip, but I felt a strange union with the city, as if we shared a mind. I got around the town without ever getting lost, always instinctually knowing where I had to go. I memorized a subway map after looking at it for 30 seconds and never took the wrong train. No one ever looked at me like I was out of place, and everyone I interacted with went out of their way to help me, to the point that on the bus ride back to the airport, a complete stranger I met on that bus and her son rode with me all the way to JFK, then GOT OFF THE BUS, AND WALKED WITH ME INTO THE TERMINAL TO THE TSA CHECK-IN LINE JUST TO MAKE SURE THINGS TURNED OUT OKAY FOR ME. AGAIN, WE AREN'T TO THE POINT IN THE TRAVELOGUE WHERE I JUST START MAKING STUFF UP, THAT REALLY HAPPENED.
At the afterparty for the hot dog eating contest, a group of NYU and Columbia co-eds we had met on the Coney Island boardwalk and invited to the bar chased me around like I was Brad Pitt, saying "Your wife is so lucky," which, if you've noticed the amount of times I've gone out of my way to mention that college girls were still into me when I was in my early 30's, probably isn't true, until I left early to escape temptation. When I called my wife the next day, my son was crying loudly in the background, and she was frustrated with him and the fact that our food-stamp card wasn't working. What was I gonna do, reply with SORRY ABOUT THAT, BUT THIS CITY IS IN LOVE WITH ME AND I'M NEVER COMING HOME? On the last day of the trip, my flight home got delayed six times, to the point that I wondered if the universe was telling me to just stay in NYC, get some managerial job and an apartment in Brooklyn, and start over. I had no job back home, and that coming fall was a complete blank slate, as it wasn't even a sure thing that school was going to keep working out for me.
Louisiana had failed me.
Maybe New York wouldn't.
I did go home, though. I wrote a travelogue just like this one you're reading right now, but for that trip. I beat Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze on the Wii U. The summer ended. I quit school right at the start of the fall semester because I received a great job offer, and that has led to the great position I now have at that same employer. My wife went to grad school that fall and now has a great job. My son got into the school of our choice that fall as a kindergartner, and is already in middle school there. We didn't need food stamps anymore. Everything seemed to change in an instant.
That fall of 2015, the first week of my new job, sweating in my dress clothes, beard grown out, I thought about how, just several months before, I'd felt like a 20-year-old college student, but now, in that office, a working man in my mid-30's. It's like I aged 15 years in three months. And now it's seven years later.
All the weird twists and turns in my life finally led to somewhat of a straight line. And the whole time since that trip before everything changed, from 2015 to 2022, all I have thought is, I need to go back to New York...and this time, I need to bring my family with me.
Well...it's happened. I'm 40 years old, and I've finally taken my family to New York. In celebration of that fact, here is the first ever travelogue I have written for a trip in which my family has joined me. But don't worry. It will still be stupid.

*     *     *

In late 2021, with our fifteenth wedding anniversary impending, my wife mentioned that Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the duo from the movie Once, were getting back together to play a few U.S. shows. "I've got to take a dump" I loudly announced, as one does, then ran into the bathroom, not to take a dump, but to look up the tour on my phone. Back in late 2007, when my wife and I were going to Blockbuster Video on a regular basis, and picking out all kinds of cool stuff to watch, she had picked out Once, an Irish romantic drama/musical about two buskers who fall in love. It's a very good movie, featuring original songs by Hansard and Irglová, and after we watched it, my wife made me buy her all their music. She is particularly fond of Hansard's voice, and that music has a lot of shared meeting for the two of us. Back in late 2021, after lying about having to take a dump, I leaned against the bathroom counter, and found through research that the list of the few cities Hansard and Irglova were hitting included New York City. A slot machine went off in my head with "Anniversary Gift," "See great concert," "Finally take family to New York," all rolling to a stop together, and I immediately bought a pair of the two few remaining tickets for the show at New York's Beacon theatre. Then I took a dump.
I surprised my wife on our anniversary morning, with the tickets, not anything related to a bowel movement, and she was very excited, as I'd also made plans with her good friend in Brooklyn to watch our 12-year-old son during the show, as he hates music. Yes, my wife and I are both musicians, I wrote a ten-year, thousand-plus entry series on my music collection for this very blog, and I have guitar picks hidden all over my body like John Wick has bandoliers, but our child would rather watch grass grow than watch live musicians play instruments. What can you do? Life is strange and terrifying.
Anyway, we bought plane tickets, ended up divinely coming into enough cash to cover an AirBnb and other trip accommodations, and I lost my driver's license and forgot to ever replace it. Flash forward to the night of 3/15/22(this travelogue has more dates than a middle school history test), and my wife called me on the way home from work, just to make to make sure we had everything together for our flight the next morning. 

 "I think so," I said. 

"Just make sure you have your I.D. ready for the TSA checkpoint at the airport," she said. 

"Well, that's not possible," I said, "Because I lost my I.D. before we ever even planned this trip, never thought once about getting another, and just figured that the TSA agents attempting to stop flightjackings would take my word for it when I told them who I was. I mean, they've got to recognize me from my famous stints as 'anonymous middle manager at a faceless corporation' and 'voted most likely to succeed in a graduating class of 57 people from a rural area 23 years ago.' No biggie." 

My wife wasn't exactly thrilled by this news, especially considering that the DMV was closed for the day, so instead of riding to the airport together that morning, my wife and son drove after telling me, "We're going on this trip with or without you," while I went to the DMV and stood outside of the door until they unlocked it, then rushed in, got a new I.D. and drove from Baton Rouge to the New Orleans airport using reasonable driving techniques and speed that definitely adhered to Louisiana traffic regulations.
Thankfully, I was able to get to the airport just a few minutes after they did, and our plane took off, with us on it, without a hitch.
Now I don't know if you've flown in a plane lately, but it had been a while for me even before the COVID-19 pandemic began. I remember seating being kind of tight, but let's just say that if a current domestic flight was a chicken coop, PETA would be filing a lawsuit. Thankfully, planes go fast, and before we knew it, we were looking down on the hazy NYC skyline.
No so thankfully, when our suitcase came down the luggage shoot, the handle was bent so badly from Delta Airlines' negligent violence, it no longer extended. No big deal, though, as I absolutely love stooping down like Quasimodo while dragging a suitcase so heavy, it could literally turn me into Quasimodo.


We hailed our Uber using our phone hands, then rode through an hour of sweltering traffic from JFK to our Air BnB in Koreatown, trapped behind a plastic wall the driver had erected between himself and the passengers, as we loudly said things like "It's so hot, I can't breathe" and "If I can't catch a breath, I will die in the back of this van and quickly begin to decompose like in one of those timelapse videos of roadkill that ends with maggots chewing off all the flesh until only sun-bleached bone remains," until I stripped myself near naked, while using my removed clothing on a failed attempt at damming the ever-flowing waterfall of sweat pouring off my brow, until I finally said, at the exact same volume as I had said phrases like, "I wish this stupid piece of shit van had some sort of climate control we could utilize to prevent our eminent deaths," "Isn't there some way you can turn on the air-conditioning back here?" to which the driver responded by saying "Yes" and pressing a button which sent great torrents of cool air cascading over our faces. I guess I should have asked him to do that instead of just assuming he knew that cocooning your humans in Saran wrap in 80-degree weather without a breathing hole isn't the best way to keep them alive, unless you want to turn them into human moths, which isn't a thing. Welcome to a The Nicsperiment travelogue.

We made it to our AirBnB in an old apartment building I soon learned was one of the oldest buildings in the city, possibly constructed before the Civil War. We put our stuff down in our tiny little studio apartment, and then walked into the New York City streets I missed so badly. These streets, though...weren't quite the same. The last time I was in New York, marijuana was illegal, and I think I caught a whiff of it twice. It's legal now, but you're supposed to have a license to sell it. You're also not supposed to just stand on the street smoking it, but boy oh boy were people blowing clouds of it into me, my wife, and my 12-year-old's faces, and yes, I AM THAT PERSON NOW, but put a pin in that.
I noticed a lot more people were smoking regular old cigarettes and looking anxious in general, and I can't imagine what in the last seven years could have possibly attributed to that, maybe the cigarette companies brought back Joe Camel or something. Anyway, our place just happened to be right next to the Empire State Building, and that being an architectural wonder and all, not to mention the inspiration for Louisiana's State Capitol, which, no arguments accepted, is the best state capitol, we had to go there, particularly because the sun was setting.
Back in 2015, after an incredibly late night out, I walked ten blocks from where the Rabbit and I were staying without so much as consulting a map, found The Empire State Building without any difficulty, paid for a ticket, and got to the top in no time. That's not how things work now. Now you've got to wait in line after line, to get from one section of the building museum to the next, until you are finally allowed to ride an elevator to the top, where you have to go through another museum to get to another line to ride another vehicle to the 86th floor, where you can go out and get a beautiful outdoor view of the city, for his is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.
This all essentially renders the museum as a place you just want to hurry up and get through so that you can get into the next line, which is a bummer because it is an incredibly cool museum, and as I stated seven years ago, that first King Kong movie has a major place of importance to my childhood, and I particularly love the King Kong section, though we had to run through it to get into the next line, so all of my pictures of it look like this.

To add insult to injury, with the day being unseasonably warm, whoever was manning the AC was even more aloof than our Uber driver, turning the entire tower into a massive column of concrete and sweat. To offset the lame trek to the outside viewing area, at least I had these two with me.



Considering the company, the view, and the fact that the cool air 1100 feet up felt glorious, you'd think that my thrill-seeker son and I would have wanted to stay forever, while my often cowardly wife, who won't even acknowledge that roller-coasters (or dinosaurs, or outer space, which are whole other things) exist, would have wanted to quickly leave. However, my son and I both starting having a strange, nearly uncontrollable urge to throw our phones from the Empire State Building. I'm not sure what is wrong with us, but apparently, wanting to throw your phone from the top of the ninth tallest building in the U.S., while simultaneously being terrified of the fact that you want to throw your phone off the top of the ninth tallest building in the U.S. is genetic.
"Can we please leave!" we begged. "We can't fight this temptation much longer!
"But it's so beautiful," my wife said, sun setting behind her.
"We'll do it!" we insisted. "We swear we'll do it!
Mercifully, she allowed us to leave. We got stuck yet again in a line on the way down, but we had a great conversation with one of the guides, who told us he'd been furloughed from the start of the pandemic until two months ago from a job he'd held for 16 years. I recognized the guy from my visit seven years ago--he's a distinctive guy who seems some type of spectral creation conjured from, by, and of the city itself, rising from the soul beneath its streets to the top of the tower, and I hope we don't have another surge, so that this man can continue in the task he was clearly created to carry out. Also, here's a picture from a waiting area window featuring a near full moon coming up over the Chrysler Building, so maybe I should stop complaining.

With that pretty major box checked off the list, we then went on my least favorite kind of hunt, even more than that one deer hunt I went on as a kid where I stepped in a swamp hole deeper than the national debt, a Squishmallow hunt. It turns out, not only did my son inherit my strange urge to want to throw a phone off the Empire State Building, but also the urge to collect, except thank God they didn't have these abominable Squishmallow stuffed animals when I was young. Squishmallows are these kind of ovalesque stuffies based upon both real life and fantastical animals that all have distinct names and written out personalities, yet essentially look vaguely the same and I hate, hate, hate them and want to throw them all in the lake behind our house except then, where would the water go, I guess to put out the fire at the Squishmallow factory when I burn it down.
For some reason, they have these things at Walgreens, wait, excuse me, I forgot I was in fancypants New York, for some reason they have these things at "Duane Reade," and my kid mapped out every single Walgreens within ten blocks of us on his phone that I actually wish he had thrown off the Empire State Building. All the Duane Reade's in Manhattan are two-floors, I guess because Manhattan is a vertical borough, which is an okay, but not great name for a late-90's alternative band. After going to approximately 8,000 Duane Reades and coming up pretty much empty, we decided it was time to go to Nintendo New York, an incredible flagship store and mini-museum that is run by Nintendo itself.






My son has wanted to visit Nintendo New York since I regaled him with tales of it from my trip there, back when he was five. Unfortunately for my son, this first trip was doomed, as when he is on a Squishmallow hunt, he is incapable of eating, meaning he hadn't eaten anything since an airport pretzel at 10 am central time, 8.5 hours before we went to Nintendo. This hanger combined with his disappointing Squishmallow hunt and his expectations of the Nintendo store that had grown to encompass a realm far outside of reality over seven years of waiting, and meant that I had as much fun as The Nicsperiment at Nintendo New York, while he just grumbled and complained and couldn't enjoy the store for even the amount of time it would take for your phone to hit the pavement from the top of the Empire State Building or for me to write this blathering sentence.
Thankfully, my wife corraled him so that I at least could enjoy myself, and I did, buying some shirts and looking at some of the cool remodeling Nintendo had recently done. Thankfully, my son and I returned a couple days later when he was considerably less hangry, and I'll get to that later. For now, he was hangry, and my wife and I were at the least, hungry, so we decided to try to find a place to eat, stat. What does stat mean? Like, it can't be short for statistics in this case. Statistics take a long time. I am so confused. Anyway, we went to Junior's on 49th and Broadway.


To this day, I haven't had a bad meal in New York City, and Junior's wasn't about to change that. A sort of hybrid Jewish deli/cheesecakery/bakery/BBQ/Burger and random other cuisines Art Deco diner, Junior's is a visual delight, at least at this location (there are several around NYC). I decided to be a weirdo after Googling "What to eat at Junior's" on my Throwing Off the Empire State Building Device, and ordered the Something Different. My philosophy when I visit a new restaurant has generally been, "What is this place known for/known to have the best of, I'll order that," but I think what I actually did at Junior's is order the weirdest damn thing on their entire James A. Michener novel-length menu. Now I'm not saying that this two-pound monstrosity of a sandwich was bad--it was pretty tasty, and DEFINITELY different.

I am saying that instead of ordering "Brisket of Beef on Potato Pancakes with Mushroom Gravy and Apple Sauce," cuz yes, that's what the Something Different at Junior's is, I should have followed my wife's example. My wife ordered a Reuben, which was also about two pounds worth of sandwich, and after I mostly finished my Something Different (I didn't make much of a dent in the random applesauce), I took a couple bites of her leftovers and thought, Damn, I shoulda got a Reuben. It was incredible. Junior's is most famous for their cheesecakes, but we were so full by that point, we just ordered one to go, and brought it back to our AirBnB, which thankfully had a full fridge and kitchenette in it's 200 square feet. Also, I have no idea what a kitchenette is, or if I just used that word correctly. On the way back to the AirBnB, we stopped at 30 or 40 more Duane Reade's, and my son finally hit Squishmallow paydirt, which he always does, because how can you not when you go to literally every store that sells them. We also swung by the outskirts of hell, aka, Times Square, but I did see this awesome The Batman ad, and I like The Batman.

We then got into our side-by-side Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory beds, my son set up his loot, and we all crashed, excited for the next day.