Steam was rising in columns from the sewer lids on 8th Avenue - as though it were boiling and sizzling beneath the black asphalt, as if on account of a stumble made when crossing the street against a red light, you could fall right through a manhole cover, straight down into Hell. Marilyn Monroe had been winking from Times Square, as I leaned out into the humid, sweltering August heat from the room's air-conditioned chill. I tried ignoring her over there with her tits pressed up against the man's white shirt, hands on hips and soft thighs packed into a pair of Levi's, straddling a cup of "Eight O'clock Bean Coffee". "Why don't you just go for walk?" Louise had asked, since I kept stirring around in the bed - after a bit of groping about which she, still half-asleep, brushed off. And finally, I stood there a little annoyed, staring out the window, with a semi-boner in my shorts. "Well, we've got to go up and look at Andy Warhol's pictures tomorrow morning, right, so I want to be well rested", I mumbled several minutes later, drowned out by the sound of sirens and motors from the street twenty stories below. Because that was something we had been planning - something we had talked a lot about back home, before we left.
Louise had been working as an au pair with an American family in upstate New York, and she really knew her way around the city. Enthusiastically, she had led our first expeditions as a tourist guide for a bunch of hicks -up to the top of the Empire State Building, all the way down Broadway and boating around Manhattan for hours on end - bursting with anecdotes about the first time she was there with this or that person. Especially with this or that American guy from the au pair period, the quarterback of the football team, and what not. "It's just like coming home!" she had howled from the Empire State's observation deck, flinging her arms out to both sides as if to embrace the horizon - my very own Statue of Liberty with scintillating eyes, belly pressed up against the iron railing, butt jutting out in tight jeans and hair blowing around in sun and wind. "I'm B-A-C-K!" I was standing a few yards behind her, with my back glued to the mass of the building, slightly dizzy and nauseous, balls shrinking every time my gaze crossed over the edge, down into the abyss, and I tried to suppress a mad urge to shove her aside, leap up on to the railing and jump out. If I hadn't at last suggested taking the elevator down, she just would have kept right on standing there until they closed up for the night. Or until I had jumped... Unflaggingly, she pushed on - dragging me through the streets in the heat, in and out of cafes in the Village or designer shops on Fifth Avenue. But soon, I found my own favorite spots. Buried myself for hours in books and records in dusty side-street stores, bought a ticket for a Woody Allen film in a movie theater where most of the other people in the audience looked exactly like the actors, and drank draft beers and watched baseball games with loudmouth Irish blue-collar guys in a bar where I felt very 'authentic' when one of the lads greeted me after I'd been there a couple of times, even asking me what I thought about the Yankee's chances for winning the pennant. I started to understand her fascination with New York. Started to feel right at home in the swarming streets in the shadow of the skyscrapers, and even started trying to walk, stare and talk like a real New York motherfucker with that certain inbred mixture of aggression, cool purposelessness and hell-bent humor ("ah, fa-get-about-id!", as they constantly moaned in the bar every time the Yankees blew another one). Even though she, obviously, was so much more on home turf than I, as she bantered with a waiter about "how terrific it was at the Tunnel last fall", automatically ordered her eggs over easy in the diner in the morning or effortlessly changed from one subway line to another in the noisy, stinking inferno under the ground.
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