The train from Vermont to NYC was going well until the tannoy announced that a bridge up ahead was stuck open and that we’d all to get off here, in —as Megan would say— bumfuck nowhere. After wondering how the hell I was supposed to get to my destination, they ushered us back on to the train: the bridge had been fixed.
I spent my first night in the Big Apple alone. Alongside what felt like the rest of New York, I sauntered across Brooklyn Bridge as the sun set, resolving to walk the way back to my hotel in the financial district. This meant I had time to pick up some street meat in the form of a tiny hot dog which cost me a whopping six dollars. After paying a measly 25c for hotdogs in Burlington, I was pissed. I thus finished off my evening meal with a cheap burger from McDonalds. U-S-A! U-S-A!
The next day I called Kevin while I walked around Central Park. He was driving down from Buffalo to meet me in New York and I wanted to tell him the good news: I’d got up bright and early and secured us tickets to see Chicago on Broadway. Having already practically drained my dollar stockpile in the ticket office, I then mooched around the shops on 5th Avenue until my very dear and very unpunctual friend arrived.
With the daylight dimming, we made a couple of stops to spend our first night together. First was Dumbo Market, almost tucked under the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side of the water. The food was expensive and the people were a bit too hip, but it was a good spot to take a selfie to prove we were in NYC. Then I was dying for Kevin to experience the sandwiches at Katz’s Deli, which we washed down with some ice cream as we sauntered back through Manhattan like the cool kids we are.
Morning came around and with it the usual battle to get Kevin out the door. I succeeded eventually, and we stopped by Little Island to suffer a while in the summer heat while I took a few more photos, after which we ducked into a couple of markets whose prices meant that our custom was limited to the use of their bathrooms. Then it was showtime, where us two gays in New York had our fill of music, dancing, and camp tomfoolery. We loved every second of it, thus deciding to carry on our queer adventures with a trip to Stonewall for a drink and a boogie under a thousand rainbow-coloured lights.
That evening, optimistically nonchalant of the storm brewing overhead, I insisted we head out on one of the city’s municipal ferries. These are intended for use as transport between New York’s boroughs, but I surmised that we could make a return trip in order to watch the sun set over the city. As you can imagine, there was no sun to be set from under the storm clouds, clouds which then began to drench us through as the journey progressed. By the time we’d arrived at the end of the route, we’d to leg it down the dock and hide under a canopy until the boat set back off again. Drenched to the skin, we took it back down to the financial district, grabbed some more dodgy street food just as the rain began to lift, and dried off in the hotel while I greased up the bedlinen with my box of fried chicken.
It was an absolutely chaotic final night, and it could have happened in no other way for me and Kevin, who is chaos personified. Watching musicals, exploring the big city, and getting into this pickles certainly made for an exciting stint in New York, but I know that I could go to the dullest place on earth (Hull, say) with Kevin and it’d still be endless chats, laughs, and mischief. There’d just be less bagels.
