So on Friday my across the street neighbor calls me up and says “Hey Bear, my sister is in town from Arizona, she’s going to go to New York City soon and she’s never been. Would you come over and tell how to get to the Empire State building?”. He says this in the most thoroughly wasted rural drawl ever. I say, “Sure, be right over”, and neglected to realize that I was still wearing my ‘Death to False Metal’, Off Bowery t-shirt that I just never wear in the city because I get too many dirty looks from Williamsbeard Bros. Since no one really cares how metal you are here, I rock it for about three days at a time.
I walk out my front door and down my knoll. As I look across the street I see a large RV with a cab attached and the whole family is having a good ol’ time on the porch, beers in hand. There are frolicking little kids playing with a miniature Lassy named (get this) Lady. My neighbor’s daughter is there with her sunburnt, shaved head boyfriend who for once in the two years of relationships we’ve seen her go through from across the street, is not of any other ethnic persuasion besides, semi-scary-built-white-contractor; the glare in his eye could mean that he doesn’t like you or is just high on something (and is smoking savory Newports). Over walks the black kid with the cut-off Dickies, canvas shoes, and the DTFM tee – all of which I would catch wreck for on the L,J, or 6 lines.
My neighbor’s sister has been in this RV driving around the US with her husband since may, they reside in Tuscon. They’re you’re classic midwestern couple that look alike. The only thing seperating their outfits from being almost exactly the same is that she has her shirt tucked it, while he is letting his dangle above his pot belly. They’re both clad in denim shorts, almost the long hood’ kind, and are sporting running shoes that have seen better days. I shake the wifes’ hand, she’s sitting on the steps, and she does the long handshake joke where she won’t let go, and is trying to read my shirt aloud as my neighbor waves drunkenly from the couch on the porch. His daughter and her boyfriend are off to my left with the kids and are being busy young drunk parents who are chain-smoking. The husband, and his potbelly, are in between me and the younger parents. I say hello to him and he gives me a limp fat mans quick shake. I can’t wait to talk about New York.
They tell me that they want to see a Yankee game, go to the Empire state building, and see the Statue of Liberty. They want to do this in four days. The first day the want to find a cheap hotel and then go to the game. They will be taking the coach bus there, not driving their massive RV. They are opposed to taking the train and insist that they will cab it. I let them know that midtown may not be the best option for hotels and then bring up the phrase “downtown”, (screeching sound of a car breaking to a halt). I then have to explain that Yankee’s stadium is uptown, they will be arriving in midtown, and that the statue of liberty is downtown (pretty much the sound of a car crashing). I then spend thirty minutes repeating that same sentence with interjections from the husband about where everything is, a la, “so I wanna get a hotel uptown?”, “so ahh the stadium is downtown?” etc.
I give up and whip out my blackberry to google cheap downtown hotels. I’m reading them off to the husband. The whole time this going on, pilled-out-contractor dude is backseat driving my virtual tour. I calmly ask if he’s ever been. First he says no, and then brings up that he had a girlfriend in Brooklyn years ago (FLASHBACK to the days where internet dating had no commercials and people where in “relationships” that consisted of talking way too much over 56k and sending pictures of themselves to each other in .zip files through a “direct connection”). The wife comes out and is more coherent for about three minutes until she starts saying “I don’t know”, whenever I mention the word subway.
Lets check this out for a second. That whole trip could be done in a day with the subway, a hostel in Harlem or Downtown, and a smartphone. Plus it would be super fun if you’d never been to New York before. This is where I was punched directly in the face by the generational gap between me and these people because after an hour of talking about it, the husband was pretty much over it and the wife was still muttering “I don’t know about thaat subway and getting laast (read lost).” ”WHOA!!”, is what I was screaming in my mind, here were two people who had practically driven across the country who were afraid to go to the most exciting place on the planet (sorry Tokyo). I kept trying to convince them that it was a good idea, relatively simple, and with the money they would save on cabfare – which they were willing to pay from a hotel in the financial district to Yankee stadium – they could get wasted really nice at the game. They were simply uninterested.
After talking about Tuscon a bit and getting a tour of the mobile home, I walked back across the street to my house. I sat in front of my open Adobe Creative Suite windows and thought, what will I have nothing to do with in the future if it gets to complicated. I then thought directly afterwards, “fuck that shit is going to scary as hell if its going to be too complicated for my generation”, which is true. Am I going to have to climb into some mech-machine and shoot at a hole in the ceiling of that last human city – domed off in secret – where a bunch of man-farming robots are coming to enslave us and I’m just going to be like “fuck it, I don’t know how to work this thing”. These people where afraid of the locomotive. Are they going make (read release) that Beam Me Up Scotty shit and I’m just going to be late for everything like people who take the stairs because they’re afraid of elevators? Or will there be air cars and I’ll be hated by my kids for sending them on the chartered-plane-bus to school because I won’t buy one, and the only reason I’ve got is “They give me the aero-nausea”.
Los Angeles – Known Gallery is proud to present new works by BOB ROBERTS and BERT KRAK | LADIES WELCOME
