New York missive no 24 - Gay pride

Last Sunday the tighter, brighter and more minimal the attire the better for Gay Pride. A day when heterosexuals are a minority. I didn’t see the parade itself but caught its before and aftermath. The previous night, slender male bikinied bodies erected white screens on the brick wall at the corner of Weehawken Street where they projected florescent visuals. The next morning, expectant mixed-age crowds lined the length of Christopher Street, penned in to an extent by police barriers. Old women perched on deckchairs, selling rainbow flags for waving. Then on the way back later that night the street heaved with a headiness enhanced by the torrential storm that had drenched the procession at around 5 in the afternoon. Coming down through Chelsea I passed a many-kiloed man whose T-shirt, stretched over his rolls, said “fat and sexy”. It was true. It’s a day when everything and everyone is sexy. A pair of black transvestites in skimpy floaty things swung up the drunken street making everyone else’s get-ups look tame. A group of friends sitting on a West Village stoop – usually the territory of the occasional pampered pooch or heeled and handbagged Jessica Parker aspirant – dialled a friend on a cellphone then shouted down it in unison “Happy priiiiiiide”. When I reached my doorstep, standing on it was a giant of a man wearing nothing but a red G-string.

********************************************************

“Where’s the pattrain?” the young Indian guy asked me as I turned into Christopher Street from 7th on my way back from the gym one evening. I didn’t catch what he said.

“The train, the subway station? It’s just here,” I took a guess.

“No, the pattrain. The pat.”

I thought a moment. “Oh, the Paaaath train.” His eyes widened with a mix of relief and surprise and I suddenly felt very conscious of my long a’d English accent just as I’d been conscious of not understanding his. Here were two people in New York but definitely not yet New Yorkers finding a way to communicate with each other.

I told him it’s a few blocks down on the right. We walked along the road next to each other, half-talking half-staying separate like strangers as we weaved in and out of the huddles that are always on the pavements outside the bars. I imagined him having just emerged in New York off a plane from India, heading through New York to New Jersey to be met by relatives, experiencing that giddying sensation of arriving in a city you’ve built such clear pictures of and which on arrival presents bits of those pictures but tricks you with how utterly different it is to them, so much closer. “You just arrived in New York?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Where from?”

“Chicago.”

I went into a corner shop to buy a banana and pointed him to the Path stop that was just half a block further down. When I came out of the shop, he was waiting outside looking agitated. “I can’t find it.”

I was beginning to wonder if in fact the Path stop had suddenly disappeared overnight. But no, there it was, the old stone doorway and stairwell leading down to the trains. Off he went.

********************************************************

Sailing last Saturday. This time with Dutchman Mic rather than with B, who was having the day off to play softball – and with J and D from the previous week. In the morning there was a steady wind and bright sunshine. (I got burnt, lobster style. Attempted to tone down the red traffic light effect with some makeup that evening when I went to M’s leaving do in Hell’s Kitchen – she’s been re-located back to Seattle. I decided, however, just to rely on the darkness of the bar to disguise the large bruises on both my knees from bumping around in boats).

By the afternoon the strong tidal currents had picked up and the wind had died. Not a good combination. We drifted steadily Northwards and found ourselves having to paddle some of the way back, dragging ourselves up the Western edge of the river. Then lots of boat-towing and manoeuvring as NYCSA is shifting the Solings over to some moorings round the corner from the marina because it’s cheaper. There’s something melancholic about the fact that that the Solings – that people actually sail – are being shunted out to make way for yet more fibreglass monsters of motorboats that never move because their owners, having splashed out on a boat, don’t take it anywhere either because they can’t afford the astronomical fuel costs or they’re too afraid of damaging it. Then, when we were in the bay tying up the Solings, a torrential thunderstorm. The kind that soaks you to the skin in seconds. Exhilarating. To top it, a perfect rainbow arched its way over the whole of Manhattan. The illusory pots of gold were at the Northern and Southern tips of the island.