North America > United States > New York State > New York > Articles > New York Diary

Day One
On the day of my departure for New York the London sky is as low and grey as I am. I call the New York paparazzo, Patrick McMullen, who works with my alter ego, the mysterious Ariel, on ‘New York’ magazine. Apparently he will take me to the happening tonight, a rooftop barbecue hosted by the owners of Wax, the nightspot of the moment. "Hi,” he drawls, when I announce myself, "The party’s off tonight. You’re crazy to come here now. It’s the biggest holiday weekend of the year. Literally everybody is outa town.”

My friend David - whom I haven’t seen for at least 10 years - happens to be travelling on the same no-smoking Virgin flight and we share a yellow cab from JFK into Manhattan. There is a vivid red no-smoking sign and by now I’m desperate, but I have no light and the cab driver informs me that car lighters have been forcibly removed from all New York cabs.

David takes me for a late-night stroll in the humid East Village where many big dogs are being walked. Steam wafts up through the street ventilators, guys on the corner are eating pretzels and gooey pizza, some black boys are rapping in a car, and a man dressed in a white vest struts a peacock dance on some scaffolding to impress someone he desires. This is how I’d imagined New York - a place to make Friends in bars, coffee shops or simply on the street rather than meeting at married dinner parties. My spirits lift. It’s like being in a scene of a musical.

Day Two
Ariel lives on a busy street filled with discount stores and takeaways in TriBeCa. Her apartment is up a million flights of steep concrete stairs. It’s a big loft with a large stand-up fan next to the bed and a painting of the figure 4 in various configurations propped up against one wall. There’s a kitchen at the other end complete with an Asian can of what looks like slugs, and a dishwasher that flaunts yellow insulation foam and resembles a piece of conceptual art. She has left instructions for me to ring her friends, particularly a girl called Lucinda, whom she describes as "practically my wife,” and someone called “Malcolm the charming.”

Malcolm and I meet for brunch at Bubby’s in TriBeCa. I order the Florentine - eggs with cream over spinach on a muffin, with a huge glass of fresh orange juice. Malcolm (who is a writer for ‘The New Yorker’) tells me that Robert De Niro - who has a film studio nearby - is a regular. Today it’s packed with disappointing ‘outa towners,’ but Malcolm assures me that all the really cool people stay in town for July 4. I confide that I really want to bump into Woody Allen, but Malcolm says that Woody lives uptown. If you are cool you live downtown and if you are deeply cool you never go further north that 14th Street. Ariel and her friend Lucinda are the epitome of cool, he confides, always in the latest clubs. I am beginning to feel old.

Lucinda, Malcolm and I meet at Odeon on West Broadway for dinner; reputedly the bar serves the best martini in New York. The waitress says we can smoke unless someone complains. Lucinda, who is dressed in a tiny Mickey Mouse T-shirt, chiffon scarf, a long black leather jacket and slightly flared trousers, blithely lights up - no one dares object. She says everyone she knows wants to pay $3,000 per month to rent a grunge apartment and adds rather alarmingly, “It’s like everyone wants to live the life of a heroin addict without taking heroin.”

After dinner we discuss our options: a fashion-crowd bar, a lesbian club, an artist’s party. We opt to head for a place called Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge) in Brooklyn to find the artists. After a long, lost time in a cab, we arrive at a gruesome-looking abandoned factory building. We walk up 2 million flights of stairs and find an empty roof with a spectacular view and a few fitful fireworks. We walk back down the stairs and through a labyrinth of corridors and eventually find five or six lowlife artists hanging out with crisps and beer. I perch on a chair made of grass and am immediately reprimanded for sitting on a work of art. We walk back over Brooklyn Bridge, which is magnificent. Malcolm directs my eye to the Empire State Building, but my gaze keeps popping back to the canoodling couples courting on the bridge.

Day Three
I go uptown in a fast cab to meet a girl called Eliza outside the Plaza, which reminds me of my favourite children’s book, Eloise at the Plaza, about a spectacularly naughty girl who lived there with her nanny. Eliza is the antithesis of the girl in the story. With her straight blond hair and neat linen suit, she looks like the girl who was voted Most Popular in high school. We have coffee in Barneys department store and she tells me that she met her present boyfriend on a blind date.

“It’s not unusual to be set up on a blind date in New York,” she assures me. “I’ve been on three.”

We leave Barneys after a man in a clingy white T-shirt has made up my face with the latest green iridescent eyeshadow. On the way to a tarot reading we pass the Calvin Klein shop and stare awe-struck at the tall flower display in the window. Inside John Pawson’s shrine to Klein, glamorous women glide around and it is hard to discern who exactly are the shop assistants. At the Gypsy Tea Kettle Eliza and I have 15-minute tarot readings for $11 plus tip. A woman called Jeannie says a 23-year cycle is coming to an end and everything will be much better starting in about six weeks. Can’t wait.

We lunch in an uptown restaurant called the Bilboquet. It is so exclusive that it’s not listed in the phone book. I order a restrained endive and Roquefort salad. Eliza says that she once saw Andie MacDowell here, but today there are only women with fake Gucci shoes and diamonds as big as the Ritz.

Day Four
Charles the photographer and I meet Shari, a friend of Ariel, at the Coffee Shop in Union Square. I have sleek hair and a professionally made-up face left over from the shoot in Ariel’s flat this morning and Charles hovers paparazzo-close with two cameras. There is a general buzz of excitement and we are promptly given the best table, a converted corner booth by the window. Shari’s very impressed. A model hands us a menu and moments later a cute bronzed boy delivers an enormous Caesar salad. A funky Brazilian band is playing loudly by the bar. Charles from Utah has an appealing smile and Shari from Georgia has a carrot-coloured Penelope Pitstop hairstyle. No one I’ve met yet is a native New Yorker.

After lunch we drift around the Union Square Green Market. We stop by the cherries and the maple-syrup candy and leave Charles buying a $35 bunch of lilies for his lucky wife. Shari and I have a date at Elite Nails where Korean women dressed in pink perform hasty manicures and pedicures. Charles joins us later, and zooms in on my navy toenails and sky-blue fingernails. I hear a girl whisper, “Is she getting married?”

We meet up later that night at an art event: ‘The American Living Room Festival’ in SoHo. We are late and everyone but the vivid group in the Hotel 17 room has gone. Billy Candis, the manager of the one-time welfare hotel which is now a trendsetting hub for Bohemian types, has created a living room for the exhibition using intense colours and “film noir” furnishings. I perch in between a girl in black PVC and a woman with a white wig and enormous cleavage on a leopard skin sofa. A boy staggering around in 12 inch platforms and an itsy-bitsy fur jacket is sliding up and down the wall.

We go on to the eastern border of SoHo to an old bar called Milan’s where drinkers keep their dollars face up on the bar. I get talking to Bill, who looks like Robert De Niro at 75. He tells me he used to ‘run numbers’ and I fantasise that he is a mafioso, but later he tells me he was a bookie.

We pick up Shari and go on to a bar called Max Fish on the Lower East Side where we play pinball, a more-ish activity. The clientele is diverse - bankers wearing stripy shirts and camel-coloured shorts, a couple who look as though the heroin fantasy is a reality, and some arty types. The vibe is geared to living for the moment and the need to rush on to another bar before this one is no longer cool. This downtown scene feels very transitory, full of Peter Pans. Today I read a quote in The New Yorker: “Children are for people who can’t have dogs.” This explains the proliferation of dogs on the street and confirms my suspicion that Manhattan is not a place for a two-car garage and 1.5 kids.

My friend David is away and I have moved into his apartment in the West Village equipped with 24-hour doormen, yoghurt with acidophilus in the fridge and Julian Schnabel’s studio next door. It’s not that David’s flat is more glamorous, it’s just that he lives on the ground floor.

Brunch in my favourite area so far - the Meat District, which is bleak and spacious and reminds me of a Hopper painting. An English filmmaker and I drink watery Bloody Marys at a French cafè called Florent - open 23 hours a day, where post-club transvestites meet bankers on their way to work.

He rollerblades to Central Park, while I take the subway. We meet up on a field called the ‘beach.’ Rollerbladers have formed an open-air disco and Ziggy Marley is giving a free concert. Despite everyone’s being away, I feel claustrophobic; skyscrapers are looming on the horizon and there are too many people.

David is back and we meet his parents in Pravda, the bar of yesterday for model/actors and already slightly less cool today as the Euros have discovered it. David’s father orders caviar to go with the Russian theme of the place and laughingly says that he never goes further downtown that 14th and that coming to Pravda is the exception. We dine in TriBeCa on a great wad of sashimi and take in a late session of jazz at the Village Vanguard.

Day Six
Ariel’s friend Greta and I lounge languidly on the sofas in the Big Cup Cafè in New York’s Chelsea, while Charles summons up the energy to photograph us against the flower-power walls. This is supposed to be the way to make Friends in New York but all the Chelsea boys seem to be glancing at each other.

Then we’re off to the Printing House Gym hoping to swim in the rooftop pool. Unfortunately, the chlorine levels are too high and we have to resort to the outdoor gym.

In the evening I walk to a restaurant called the Grange Hall, in a quiet, pretty street of brownstones in the West Village. As soon as I enter a crashing storm erupts. A man approaches my girlfriend and me and asks, “Can I borrow your umbrella - for a couple of days?” General camaraderie ensues and another man replenishes our drinks and says the storm will sweep away bad times, before exiting coolly.

An émigré ex-boyfriend is hosting a dinner party at his apartment in the Meat District. He introduces someone called Austin as “a bachelor - he lives with a beautiful whippet.” A musician named Mark says, “I’ve made it. I’ve just celebrated my thirteenth anniversary of living in New York.” I look at him in astonishment before he adds, “No, hey, all but five of my friends have died of Aids or drugs.” Someone says they like Rimbaud. “The poet,” I observe, intelligently. “No, the movie.”

The musician says, “You seem very New York, very relaxed,” and suggests I move here. The storm continues, and I think maybe I will.

Day Seven
I’ve only been here six days, but as I insert my token into the subway, I feel as though I have lived here for ever. In the morning I walk miles to buy Converse One Star sandals, then have lunch at an empty restaurant with a Wall Street Journal writer, and pass the afternoon in the Frick Collection, a haven from the heat.

Drinks with my uptown girlfriend, Suky. We meet at the Royalton but, as I enter the lobby, I quickly exit, imagining I have arrived in a large hip bar. My mistake: the lobby is a large hip bar. Professional ponytail types and trophy girls sit around in designer armchairs downing cocktails and sophisticated snacks. It is rumoured that the men pee into a communal fountain in the men’s room.

A driver waits to drive me back to JFK. “I feel excited everyday,” he says. “You can do anything you want in this town, at 3am.” I feel recharged, radiant, but suspect that New York is like a caffeine fix - you’ve got to come down eventually. So maybe I’ll move here for a few months, when everybody’s back in town.

Articles

• More from Kate Morris