Home Again

Dear Henry, I have been vicious, in the past, about the Gramercy Park Hotel, but it’s really one of my favorite places on earth. Where else could one get a bottle of Seagram’s VO sent to one’s room (Large Bucket of Ice and One Split of Soda included with each Bottle of Liquor–I find the Capitalization precious) as if it were the Eisenhower administration and one were waiting, in sock-garters and porkpie hat, for that never very desirable-sounding thing called a "loose" woman. Where else can you get a clean room with kitchenette for $135 a night? Where else does the room service menu still feature Mateus Rose, Melon in Season ($3.95: one can only imagine the presentation), "Tri-Colore Salad," Broiled Filet of Lemon Sole? Or "Fruit Compote"? You don’t see much of that, these days, much less a staff of glum dedicated lifers in cheap livery. The Gramercy is time travel, including Morlocks (the Chandlerian "House Detective" who sits in the chair "reading" USA Today), and–note to management–the fossil waft of marijuana smoke that assailed your narrator when he came out of the elevator. Who smokes marijuana anymore? No one. Marijuana ended with Frye boots, large belt buckles, "Spencer Gifts," the novelty of the "mall" and Aerosmith’s classic Toys in the Attic. I am surprised that I never stayed here at the Gramercy with my grandfather on those putatively Bronx Zoo/Statue of Liberty-oriented trips of my youth, but the Twenties, let alone "downtown," did not exist in those days, the same as, say, the East Fifties do not exist these days, and midtown never has existed, except as open sewers existed in the days of a strong Papacy, and as blackflies exist in Maine. Those trips to New York with the Senator tended to center not-so-mysteriously, in retrospect, around Times Square. By the Sixties, sex was free, but not for men who had served at Chateau Thierry, and who still thought that one had to hide liquor bottles, Tom Buchanan-like, in towels, as if no one could guess why you were upending a rye-emitting cylinder of terrycloth over a tumbler of ice, thought that there was such a thing as an "American" language, and that putting a pillow under one’s wife’s bottom (that is, whenever one could tear a moment away from sportfishing or "hooking" other men in the head–when’s the last time anyone "hooked" anyone in USA fiction? War-vet protagonists used to do it all the time) constituted acutely advanced sexual technique. At any rate, I adore the Gramercy.

Yes, I am in Manhattan. I arrived here yesterday afternoon, for a series of "meetings" intended to elevate the La Badarian profile in Manhattan. I’ll take any meeting I can get these days, Henry. I have even contemplated having a lunch with Jason Binn, who calls me continually at the SRO. Frankly, Henry, I’m bored with the country, and yesterday, on a whim, having noted that the A.S. Longwood business was thriving, and, forgetting that no one was in town, I decided to treat myself to a few days of La Badarian Manhattan style. (I should note, also, that I saw two of Mei’s brothers sitting in a van and looking at a map and decided that Northampton was a bit hot at the moment.) I took a car service to Springfield, MA, got on a train operated by the troubled Amtrak line (that mystical car of the La Badarian youth, depositing one at fraught Christmases, Providence pregnancy-scares). Amtrak is time-travel in itself. At Stamford I thought I saw my old girlfriend, the "passionate," yogurt-throwing Teresa, gliding, posed like classical statuary, gliding down the escalator behind the glary plexiglas, wearing the black knit "little" dress that she wore to see The Neats at Storyville in 1982. It turned out to be no muse or goddess, nor Teresa (who, Christ, must be 38 these days), but instead–I had to blink and guzzle brandy–an attitudinal Connecticut person with a bad complexion extending into her second decade. As we barreled through Old Greenwich station, I saw a guy sitting on the platform in full-on Eighties Goofball Outfit: neat belted shorts, lavender polo, boatshoes, sunglasses on an idiot-string. It was like seeing a guy in a suit of chain mail (and armor, socioeconomically, that outfit always was: and how many times worn hilariously over horrid Continental underwear in colors unknown to nature?), with, over it, a tunic emblazoned with the ensign of the Hospitallers. Time flies, Henry: Time flies. The world is not young anymore, and neither am I. But still the train has its old narcosis, its old eroticism (perhaps it is the movement), depositing you wherever you are going in a state of refreshed sexual