I Don't Want to Wake Up in the City That Never Sleeps

Recently, a friend asked if I wanted to go to New York City for the weekend for another friend’s birthday. I couldn’t go for a number of practical reasons: bad time to take off from work, will probably be taking time later in the summer, it’s too damn hot, etc. But another reason is one I don’t always like to admit. I don’t really enjoy visiting NYC. This makes no sense really. I’m a city person. I love big cities. My vacations are always in cities. I love museums and NYC is chock full of them. What is my problem with NYC. It’s not any of the issues that people usually have with NYC (too big, too loud, too dirty, too many tall buildings, too many rude people, etc.). I’m actually originally from NYC. I was born there and lived there until I was four. I’ve returned many times over the years to see relatives, and I have many happy memories. My aunt had a great apartment on the Upper East Side and I used to stay with her there (until she inexplicably decided one day to up and move to Florida). My grandparents, who lived right outside Manhattan in Queens, used to take me to the city all the time when I was little and I loved it. They took me to the Empire State Building, all the big department stores, and Broadway shows. Over the years, the trips became less fun as my grandmother’s agoraphobia grew and every visit to the city was a huge project (and particularly mortifying when I was a teenager). But that’s not why I’m unenthused about New York.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I’ve traced my issues with NYC back to the ex-boyfriend I like to call Mr. Ex. Our first trip to New York was to see an exhibit at the Whitney, which was closing that day. He insisted that we had to do the trip in one day. This didn’t make any sense. Sure, hotels are expensive, but we weren’t broke at the time. And we never went anywhere or did anything, so it wasn’t like we were spending a lot of money. We probably could have even stayed with a friend. But he just flat out refused, and I fell into the pattern that defined much of our relationship: I stopped arguing and went along with his plan because it was just easier in the end. We got up at a ridiculously early hour to make a 6:30 a.m. train. We arrived in NYC around 10 and went straight to the museum, where we had to wait on line for a couple of hours to get into the exhibit. That sucked, but the exhibit was worth it. By the time we got out, we were both starving, and since he was one of those people who gets really awful when his blood sugar plummets, he was a complete jerk until we got lunch. I was walking on eggshells to try to keep him from getting angry (although I hadn’t done anything wrong). We spent the rest of the day going to a couple of other museums and wandering around and went to some very cheap place for dinner (he had purchased a book called Eating in New York City for under $10; I should have run screaming at that point). We headed to Penn Station to get our train. While waiting, he announced that he had a migraine. I felt awful, because I get migraines too and they’re the worst, but I couldn’t help but think that if he hadn’t insisted on doing this entire thing in one day, he might not be so worn down. The whole trip was really draining, and I was exhausted from packing too much into one day and tiptoeing around him.

You would think I might have learned my lesson after this trip, but I went to NYC another time with him two years later. He made plans to go there for a couple of days by himself, insisting that he wanted some time alone. Then he generously decided that I could come, but there were some restrictions. I could go up with him on Friday, but I had to leave Saturday afternoon, so he could have the rest of Saturday and Sunday to himself. I agreed to this (don’t ask me why). We took the train up Friday morning at not quite such an un-Godly hour. Although it was November, it was utterly freezing when we got there. We made our way to our hotel in Little Italy. I had let him do all the hotel planning stuff, and he insisted he had found this great cheap hotel (did I mention that he was very cheap?). Well, it was cheap, but there was nothing great about it. When we arrived, they said we could have a room with a shared bath down the hall or a room with a bathroom, but with no windows. We stood at the reception desk (which was behind what looked like bullet-proof glass) and argued about this. When I agreed to this cheap-ass hotel, he had assured me that we wouldn’t have to share a bathroom with anyone else. Now, he wanted to do the shared bath because he didn’t think he could live without a window. Windows be damned, I had no intention of getting up several times in the middle of the night to traipse down the hallway in my PJs to pee (I’m a very light sleeper with a very small bladder). In the end, I prevailed (one of the few times that ever happened in the relationship) and we took the windowless room. It was clean, but depressing. The TV was small and chained high up on the wall. The furniture was all kind of small, not quite child size, but not quite for adults either. The whole place was bizarre and had these twisting hallways that were easy to get lost in. It was hard to sleep because people were stomping up and down the halls all night. The whole thing was very David Lynch.

On Saturday, we were meeting friends of his for lunch. He made me walk, with my suitcase (because I had to leave that afternoon), all the way from Little Italy to the start of Central Park. This is probably 50 or 60 blocks, but in 20 degree weather, it felt like 400. I begged to take a taxi; I said I would pay for it, but he was so cheap that he couldn’t even stand to have someone else spend money on a taxi. By the time, I got on the train back to DC, I was really happy to be leaving. Mr. Ex apparently spent Saturday evening alone in his hotel room, bored. Whatever.

This all sounds so awful now, but at the time, I thought it was pretty normal. When you’re in a relationship like that, you lose perspective of what’s normal. I put up with things I would never put up with now, but I suppose that is part of being young and learning and growing as a person. And I know it’s not NYC’s fault that my boyfriend was a cheap bastard, but sometimes it’s hard to separate the memories from the place. Maybe I need to take another trip there to make some new memories to exorcise the old ones.