Manhattan Notebook
New York is the most charmingly old fashioned place imaginable. Manners still exist and so does elegance. Any form of thanks is always answered by 'You're welcome' and only the men refuse to give up their seats on the buses and subway. In Uptown Manhattan the streets are alive with stunningly well-dressed women, and even some men, and the shop-girls all smell of French perfume, Living in New York you soon come to realise that there is no such thing as an 'American'. It starts with the cab-drivers. To be a cab-driver all you have to do is produce 4,500 dollars, The Greek cab-driver tunes into the Greek radio-station as you ride the waves of the road downtown, the Italian cab-driver says `Scusi?' when you ask for the Metropolitan Museum. The only foreigners you never see in New York are Indians and Pakistanis. The English contingent consists mostly of art academics, You will find them any day buying socksuspenders in Bloom ingdales.
Wildlife abounds in Manhattan. The apartment of my hosts stands high over the East River and is besieged by ants. I return from a stroll down Lexington Avenue with a series of the biggest bugbites I have ever received outside of the Camargue. A friend tells me he supported.several species of butterfly on his roof-garden through the summer, as well as bees and other insects. Wild Canada geese and other migratory birds break their journeys to rest in Central Park. The last day I am there a large cockroach wanders past in a French restaurant. It must have come in off the streets', says the waitress, quietly trying to trample it to death as she takes our order.
The day of his fight with Earnie Shavers, Muhammad Ali strolls down Park Avenue with his son at 5 pm. The new Madison Square Garden is too huge for boxing, The excitement of the ring is lost even in the hundred dollar seats. The celebrities are Penned in like cattle by steel crush-barriers. Ali souvenirs are hawked throughout, as well as hot-dogs and ice-creams, Blacks and whites mingle good-naturedly. Three men walk past wearing Grouch° Marx masks.
arry Carpenter is positioned two seats from the end of the row in a neutral corner. No wonder his commentary tends to be so at variance with the evidence of the cameras, At the end of the fight Floyd Patterson can be seen politely trying to make 'Its way through the crowd surrounding the champion. When he reaches him, he only has time to pat him briefly on the shoulder before being pushed aside once more by the mob. In the paper next day I read that he is now employed by All as a 'commissioner', a job that entails delivering the gloves to the weigh-in and other such menial services. Last time I was in New York I watched Ali cruelly taunt the injured Patterson over twelve rounds for being an Uncle Tom. The audience in the cinema was predominantly black, bereted and disturbingly quiet. This time I land up afterwards at P.J. Clarke's bar. Irish Mick is outside with his famous horse and cab. `Jeez!' exclaims a senator stepping into the gutter, 'what's that?' 'Horseshit!' says Irish Mick with relish, Notices in New York are both more conversational and direct than here. On the bus it says: 'Meet Bob Dillon (large photograph) — Drama and comedy writer, archery, trap and skeet shooting enthusiast. The TA-0A Big Wheel for October chosen because passengers on his M104 bus tell us he really cares about them. We're proud of him. Tell us about your favourite.' Elsewhere a more school-mistressish tone is apparent, as in the litter signs throughout Manhattan: 'Littering is filthy and selfish so don't do it!' But at least it is clear. So was the door marked 'Lavatory' on the train up to New Fraven, and what other country in the world would feel the need to ask its subway passengers 'not to travel outside the train?' You can also be locked up for six months and fined 500 dollars for smoking in the wrong part of a cinema.
On the buses in Washington there is a message, personalised by his signature, from 'Jimmy Carter': 'Thank you for travelling on this bus and conserving energy.' A slight air of embarrassment creeps into the conversation when mention is made of Carter. The indignity of his addressing the nation while wearing a sweater is still commented on, and his ignorance and lack of experience of Washington is frequently marvelled at. No one mentions that he commanded a nuclear submarine.
An essential place to visit if you are in the US is the new shrine: the Aero-Space museum in Washington. As you enter you are welcomed by Wright's first plane, Lindbergh's 'Spirit of St Louis' and the most famous of the spacecraft. These are unbelievably small and cramped like the cabins of tanks, affording the astronaut no standing room at all as he lay strapped into his reclined seat as nothing more than the most sophisticated of the technological elements involved. Only the undersides of the lunar craft, charred from where they burnt back into the earth's atmosphere, give any indication of the perils of the adventure.
Violence, as Peter Ackroyd recently reported, is a nostalgic memory for most New Yorkers since the disappearance of drugs. People are very law-abiding and there are even children in Manhattan, though I never saw an expectant mother. The former yowls and howls of the sirens are now mannerist whimpers in deference to the new peace and quiet, and even the muggers and burglars who do persist have greatly refined manners and tastes. 'Your money or your life', said a quivering Puerto Rican boy touching a knife to the back of my friend's sister-in-law as she fumbled for her key one night. And as she giggled in disbelief he carefully took all the money from her bag but left without asking for her jewels. Another person reported that one weekend she returned to find that only her contemporary drawings had been stolen.
In the 'fifties the most famous New York artists were heterosexual and great drinkers. Then in the 'sixties the next wave were homosexual and more interested by drugs. Today there is a status quo; if anything domesticity seems to be the thing, and for the thrills of old you have to go to California, Arizona or, best of all, Texas. There is a new musical on the subject shortly to be released called Oklalzomo.
Like everywhere else of course the more traditional aspects of New York are daily threatened. The Racquet Club no longer serves dinner in the evenings and those gamebirds that used to go for two dollars extra because they were advertised to have been shot by Prince Philip are no longer on sale at Shaffers. Hammecher Schlemmer is nothing to what it was though you can still buy a sedan chair, and even Bloomingdales is on the slide. But there are still more extraordinary shops than anywhere else in the world, and most things continue to be instantly available. Umbrella sellers appear like magic at the street-corners as soon as it starts to rain.
John McEwen
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