I was in my Simon and Garfunkel phase, certain I’d personally discovered the folk wonders of my parents’ era. For the past hour or so of our car trip, with my CD player cranked up to ten, drowning out the sounds of my family bickering over how exactly the Malone family was going to enter New York City in my first visit there. Had we missed our exit? Should we have approached from another vantage point?
I stared out the window, clicking to The Only Living Boy in New York as I self-importantly imagined myself poetically hovering on some sort of plane elevated above the earth-bound, directions-obsessed inhabitants of the front seat. I figured we’d get there eventually.
And I was right. Suddenly, as we came around a sharp turn, the vast glittering skyline of New York rose up above the concrete highway barriers. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, far outstripping my hometown Cleveland’s three paltry skyscrapers and even more imposing than Chicago’s vast high-rises. The cars whipping by us took on a new significance as I began to fantasize that this was a moment I would always remember as the prequel to my future existence, which would somehow involve me (in some as-yet-to-be determined career) becoming the proverbial toast of the town.
However, no such grandiloquence was flowering in the rest of our red Chevy Suburban, where my mother was close to panic mode as she struggled to get into the left lane for our upcoming exit. Every time my father waved her over, we were rebuffed by the quick horn blare of a not-so-shy New York driver, unwilling to give up even an inch for this hesitant red bumpkin of a vehicle. Finally, one kind soul (who can’t have been a native) let us in, and the car slowed, as did my dad’s steady stream of alternatively swearing and apologizing for his profanity. We weren’t home free yet, though. My mom had unwittingly gotten in the unfamiliar EZ pass lane, and her attempts to move over were greeted with a cacophonous symphony of horns, utterly discordant except in their mutual, resonant disgust for our presence.
I pulled off my headphones—time to take charge!—and began to join the chorus of people shouting directions at my beleaguered mom. Our angry and conflicting advice only resulted in her somehow wedging the car onto a low concrete divider, squarely between two lanes and targeted directly at the tollbooth. So much for a glamorous entrance and my “moment”—we’d officially become the beached whale of the interstate highway. After a couple panicked minutes, a state trooper strolled over to the car and motioned for my mom to pull down the window.
“What’s the problem, lady?”he asked in a thick Brooklyn accent.
“We’re from out of town ” she faltered, embarrassed out of her usual composure. He snorted, obviously delighting a little in the inferiority of the rest of the country.
“Yeah, I see’d you was from Iowa,” he said, gesturing at our Ohio license. “Awright, I’m gonna help you out, but you gotta drive careful from now on. People aren’t gonna cut you any slack here—this ain’t the cornfields.”
With several imposing flicks of his arm, he stopped the oncoming traffic and my mom swerved hard into the lane, our car making a horrible grinding sound as it came down off the concrete .
“Nice move.” The woman in the tollbooth rolled her eyes as she took our fare from my sheepish mom. We sailed in not as the toast of the town, but rather the roast of the town, judging by the bleating horns and single-finger salutes that greeted us. So that was my introduction to New York—it brought me down from my cloud of self-importance pretty quickly, but I suppose it wouldn’t be the New York I’d dreamed of if it hadn’t.
