They’re Loose!
East Coast USA
Signing Tour Diary
September 9th Tuesday
Despite it’s reputation I didn’t find wandering around New
York all that daunting, far less traumatic than your average
late night ride on the Fraser bus in Vancouver. Grant you,
I was only there a couple of days but I was beginning to think
that New Yorkers aren’t as hard as they pretend. On the
subways people are very good at checking each other out without
actually looking at one another. They seem nervous about me,
well, most people do, I’ve got this face…. Smart
people, these New Yorkers, I never saw such people for reading
and writing on public transit. We go for walkies with our
host, Joe, constantly casually coming across legendary street
names and historic sights, feeling like I’m in a Woody
Allan movie. Tinpan Alley (I didn’t know there was a
real Tinpan Alley, thought it was just an expression!) CBGB’s,
the birthplace of Punk, The Stonewall Pub where the riots
that launched the gay rights movement took place, The Blue
Note Cafe and Washington Square. Roberta goes off for a meeting
with an animation woman from Montreal and the rest of us wander
about. Donna’s in one of her "I don’t care
what we do" moods.
I want to shop. I buy some hard to find CD’s cheap, (Machine
Gun Edqueitte by The Damned! Aaaahh!!!) Unfortunately it seems
most of the used book stores are long gone from Manhattan
Island, driven out by high rents. At the Strand bookstore
I buy a history of WW1 in cartoons and the new John Keegan,
"Fields of Battle". Donna finds a battered copy
of the first Desert Peach graphic novel collection in the
cheap bins, signs it seraptiously and puts it back. A treat
for some bargain shopper. At five the office buildings disgorge
their occupants out onto the street and the comics of Will
Eisnar, with their teeming, sweaty masses, make a whole lot
more sense to me now. It’s exhausting and overwelming
just walking! Taking the side streets (there are no alleys)
we go to Chinatown, to Pearl Paint so I can buy some of those
nice Raphael watercolour brushes from France I like to ink
with. The irritating thing about service in New York not just
the indifference one is treated with but it seems it’s
more important to score points putting you down than actually
selling you stuff, to prove their intellectual superiority.
I don’t quite understand why it’s necessary to be
quite so rude. I try being polite as I can and sometimes the
clerks take pity on me, an obvious out of towner. Every store
has a bag check, if people stopped stealing tomorrow the unemployment
rate in New York would jump by 25% overnight. I buy a new
cheap watch… Japanese curry for dinner.
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