Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

HITTING THE STREETSof the Big Town ASAP is a requirement, especially when the Mrs. takes the family credit history off to all those big stores with one name: Bergdorf’s, Goodman’s, Saks, Bloomie’s, not a one of which is any better than our own Henworthy’s, which has been open at Seventh and Sycamore since 1952. For my money (a dwindling supply) those fancy places charge too much for just shopping bags. But give NY, NY, this—walking those streets is a show unto its own. I mean, where is everyone going ?

CENTRAL PARK, MAYBE?That big rectangle of greenery has more musicians than the East Valley High School Marching Band, but they’re all solo acts. Those sax blowers, horn players, violinists, accordion squeezers, and at least one Japanese samisen musician are all in competition with the fellow starving musical artist who performs a few yards away, making for a funky fugue that mars the relative peace of the park. Add in hundreds of serious joggers, power walkers, cyclists, an equal number of lollygaggers, tourists on rental bikes, tricycles towing passengers, and the horses and buggies that make the park smell of a petting zoo, and you’ll yearn for our own Spitz Riverside Park, with less postcard views, true, but at least our Tri-Cities squirrels look a lot happier. On foot, you cross the park from the East Side streets tall with former tycoon mansions to the West Side avenues jammed with Starbucks, the Gap, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Had I just stumbled into our own Hillcrest Mall in Pearman? Looked like it, but where was the convenient parking?

NOT WITHOUT MAGICis Metropolis, a.k.a. New York City, I admit. When the sun drops behind the towers and stops baking the pavement, it’s nice to cool one’s heels at a curbside table with a cocktail in your fist. That’s when Yankee-Town has the charm of our own Country Market Patio Bar and Grill. I sat and sipped and watched as a world of Knickerbocker oddballs strolled by. I saw a man with a cat on his shoulders, European tourists in the tightest pants imaginable, a team of firemen pull up in an engine, go into a high-rise apartment, only to come out later talking about a bad smoke detector, a man rolling a homemade telescope up the street, the actor Kiefer Sutherland walk by, and a woman with a big white bird on her shoulder. Hope she avoided the guy with the cat.

A CAESAR SALADis the true test of any hotel restaurant—write that down! Our own Sun Garden/Red Lion Inn at the airport serves a beauty, but at a Times Square eatery—pretheater dinner with the Wife and still-foxy coeds—my salad was limp and the dressing too tart. Hell, Caesar! After I picked up the check, the girls headed off to see the B’way production of Chicago —like the movie, but without the close-ups. I don’t know much about musical theater, but I bet cash money what the girls saw that night was not any better than the Meadow Hills Community College Drama Department’s production of Roaring-Twenty-Somethings, which went to the American College Theater Festival last year. Does the Great White Way beat out the best of the Tri-Cities? Not according to this reporter.

I F YOU’RE HUNGRYand crave a frankfurter, they’re for sale all over Manhattan—on street corners, every few yards in the park, in subway stations, with papaya juice. None of them beat a tube steak from Butterworth’s Hot Dog Emporium on Grand Lake Drive. A bagel in Manhattan is the stuff of theologians, but Crane’s West Side Cafeteria serves up a heavenly leavened bun to all in the Tri-Cities. Much is made of N’york, N’york–style pizza, but I fork my money over for a slice of Lamonica’s Neopolitan, and, yes, they deliver within a ten-mile circle of each of their fourteen locations. And speaking of Italian food, Anthony’s Italian Cellar in Harbor View has all the authenticity of any joint in Little Italy without the mobster rubouts.

ANYTHING NEW YORKhas that we lack in our own Tri-Cities? Not so much, since TV gives us all the sports and media in the world and the Internet provides all else. I admit the multitude of museums on Manhattan is fine, dandy, impressive, et cetera. Being able to walk into, say, an ancient temple from Dendur or a hall full of assembled dinosaur bones makes for a great excursion, even when you have to share it with schoolkids from all over the state and tourists from all over the world. I had a whole day of museums when the women booked facials, massages, and pedicures—a.k.a. hangover cures. I saw paintings I will never understand, an “Installation” that was nothing more than a room filled with torn-up carpet samples, and a sculpture that looked like a huge, rusted, dented refrigerator. Ars Gratia Artis (Art for Art’s Sake), moaned the MGM lion.

MY FINAL MUSEUMwas the place for Modern art, where I saw a movie that was nothing more than time passing—really, a lot of clocks ticking and people looking at their watches. I gave it ten minutes. Upstairs, there was a blank canvas with a knife slice down its middle. Another canvas was colored a light blue at the bottom that became a dark blue at the top. In the stairwell, an actual helicopter was hanging from the ceiling, a whirlybird frozen in flight. Up the steps a pair of Italian typewriters, large and small versions of the same model, were kept behind glass as if they were studded with valuable gems but they weren’t! Nor were the machines more than fifty years old. I couldn’t help but think the Tri-Cities could put together a collection of used typewriters and charge admission. The now vacant Baxter’s Ham Factory on Wyatt Boulevard is available. Anyone civic-minded enough to get cracking on that?

On a Monday morning in early November of 1978, as she had been every day for the past six weeks, Sue Gliebe was up and out of the apartment before her roommates were awake. Rebecca was asleep, eight feet off the floor in the loft bed in the living room, and Shelley, probably, was still conked out behind the locked door of the apartment’s single bedroom.

Sue had showered quickly and quietly in the half tub with the rubber hose running up from the faucet, the dribbling water a weak stream that was alternately tepid and then as hot as the surface of the planet Mercury. Since she had come to New York, she had yet to feel truly clean and her scalp had begun to itch. She dressed in the fog of the tiny bathroom, slipped on her shoes from under the living room sofa, where she slept, strapped her big leather purse crossways from shoulder to opposite hip, then grabbed the umbrella she had bought on Friday. Another storm was due, the news said, and Sue was prepared; she had already paid five of her dollars to one of the many men who appeared with boxes of umbrellas the moment the clouds grew thick with rain. As quietly as possible, Sue exited through the front door, making sure the lock clicked behind her. She had once failed to confirm that click and Shelley had angrily lectured her on the dangers of an unlocked apartment door in New York City in 1978. No click was a major no-no.

Her roommates had come to view her as an unexorcised poltergeist, one that had to be negotiated around. Then again, they were not really her roommates but her hosts, making Sue feel as welcome as an abdominal parasite. Rebecca had been so friendly the last summer when she was working costumes for the Arizona Civic Light Opera, and Sue, a local hire, was playing three featured roles. They were gal pals, then. On days when her duties were slack, Rebecca swam in the pool at the Gliebe family home and partied with the company on the Gliebe patio. She had offered Sue her couch for “a while” whenever—if ever—she came to New York City. When Sue showed up with three suitcases, eight hundred dollars in savings, and a dream, Rebecca’s actual roommate, Shelley, nodded her assent to the deal with a “yeah, okay.” But that was seven weeks ago and Sue was still spending every night on the couch in the small living room. The vibes in the one-bedroom apartment just off Upper Broadway had gone from benign acceptance to Arctic-level iciness. Rebecca wanted Sue out; Shelley wanted her dead. Sue hoped to purchase extra sofa time and goodwill with contributions of fifty dollars to the rent as well as providing milk, Tropicana orange juice, and, once, a thing called blackout cake that Shelley ate for breakfast. Such gestures were not so much appreciated as expected.