When I was little, I dreamed of New York. I kept telling my parents that one day, I would walk the street of the sprawling east coast metropolis. Some dream of Los Angeles, Hollywood, glamour and tragedy. I dreamed of yellow taxis, infinite crowds and the lights of Times Square. When I stepped inside the plane last Friday, I thought that going to New York would represent some kind of milestone in my life. I would pound the streets of my childhood dreamscape. More than a decade after, I would finally be in the place where I escaped during my teenage years in a small, cold mining town of northern Quebec. A lot of water has flown under the bridges since then, but I still wanted New York to live up to the unbelievable promises it made to my teenager mind, through the television screens, my favorite songs and novels.
It lived up to every single one of those promises. Sometimes a bit too much. New York left me wanting some more.
Bad.
For four days, I walked down Broadway, the 7th, the 8th, the 29th, the 44th, the 86th, the 92nd, 12th, Spring, Columbus, the 14th, the 6th, Park, I walked the high line, I took the subway, I walked in Central Park. I took the pulse of Manhattan with Josie as a tour guide. And everything was like I imagined. Even better. I would walk randomly and come face to face with a landscape of my youth. The Ed Sullivan Theater, the headquarters of New York Times, of ABC, the Radio City Music Hall, where I saw Roy Jones Jr. beat up David Telesco on ESPN, the Great Jones Street of Don DeLillo, the John Lennon memorial. Everything was there and came up to greet Josie and me with a welcoming smile.
I'm a city boy. Concrete, pacing and noise are a language I can understand and no other city I've been in speaks it better than New York. By far. It made me feel like a young boy on his first job interview. The employer is a beautiful, sympathetic and talkative woman, but I can't, for the love of me, know whether she liked me or not. I have seen Manhattan island only. I have no doubt I'm missing a considerable part of the action. Have I seen only its business face? I've been caught in traffic, saw men in uniform wielding automatic weapons, been harassed by street vendors, bumped into countless other tourists, but none of that has mattered to me. It's still a dream. It's still MY dream, MY New York.
I want to go back.
Find out more.