T A B L E_T A L K Ever been greeted by the unwelcome wagon? Discuss prejudice abroad in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Want to read more by Pico Iyer? Click here to find his books at barnesandnoble.com ___________________   R E C E N T L Y Cold front By Mona R. Washington An ugly encounter on a Viennese metro colors a winter's day (01/12/99) Behind the red curtain By Jeffrey Tayler A night at the official Communist Party hotel in China leads to everything but a good night's sleep (01/10/99) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/08/99) Mother load By Tanya Shaffer An invitation to stay with a woman's family in West Africa opens the door to more than her home (01/07/99) The men who moil for gold By J. Kingston Pierce A century after the race for the Klondike gold fields, a hiker traces the argonauts' northward course (01/06/99)   Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives     Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		NEW YORK SERENADE | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - D A Y__T H R E E In my chic, post-modern hotel, the Paramount, 20-cent stamps cost 30 cents, and trendy postcards go for $1.50. People sit over pear ginger muffins reading scripts, and every other word I hear is "show." Everyone here looks like a cable star from the Continent, or someone auditioning for a sitcom. Yet even the hotel observes the New York creed of making sure you don't mistake it for anything, or anywhere, else. At the tiny concession stand in the lobby, among copies of the Guardian and the Financial Times, they sell massage oils, candles, peach-scented lotions and other luxurious appurtenances of romance. The main books on sale behind the counter are "Erotica Universalis," "The Nude," a collection of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, and a large volume titled "Erotic Art." Every room comes equipped with a reproduction of a Vermeer and a video machine on which you can watch such classics (from the hotel's video library) as "Dyke," "Studio of Lust" and "Steele Butt." The Paramount has its own Playroom ("styled by renowned artist Gary Porter") on the mezzanine, and its own Fitness Center. To use the latter, however, you have to sign a form absolving the hotel of all legal responsibility for your body, and to learn a five-digit code to open the door. In the deliberately penumbral anti-light of the lobby, crew-cut girls and earringed boys float around like art designers and designed. Yet the place also contains, in New York's wonderfully unedited fashion, five or six aged residents from another era who refused to move out when the hotel bought up their apartment block. You see them often, with canes and shabby coats, hobbling past Miyake models and Berlin cinéastes, and throwing into question which is art and which is life. I go to the nearest branch of the library and find an "installation" (great New York word, like "loft" or "sublet") called "Entre Chien et Loup," a fine name for the city (though a sign explains that "Between Dog and Wolf" is the French term for "twilight"). The people gathered outside the restrooms here (both of them festooned with huge signs saying "OUT OF ORDER") are carrying books called "The Job-Getter's Bible," "The Psychology of Hope" and "Slam Dunk Resumes." I make pilgrimages to the places I've always loved here: the Gotham Book Mart, the Tibetan Kitchen restaurant, the streets around Gramercy Park. At a Buddhist magazine I visit (barricaded behind two locked doors in a warehouse), I am greeted by a yapping dachshund. "The thing about the Village," a filmmaker told me the previous night, "is, they don't freak out when you take your dog into the store." At a lavish, mock-colonial restaurant, a friend tells me about her 4-year-old's interviews for kindergarten. A teacher at the city's most prestigious school tells her, "This is a girl's school -- not a girlie's school. We don't believe in teaching manners, or how to dress like a woman." There are 40 places for 800 candidates. Back in my hotel I stop to buy a paper. "Piercing, schmiercing," says one of the buttons on sale. "I'm holding out for amputation." - - - - - - - - - D A Y__F O U R After only a few days in Manhattan, I find I'm wired, as they say, energized, speaking in the rapid-fire, swallowed, Cantonese-in-simultaneous-translation lingo of the true New Yorker, ready to take on (if not in) the whole swaggering metropolis. I'm waking up at 5:30 every morning, not from jet lag or insomnia, but just because I've picked up New York's forward-tilting strut, its impatience to be mixing it up with the world outside. After a while, I find, I'm negotiating my way through conversations like the kamikaze bicycle messengers who weave their way in and out of honking taxis and the turbanned cabbies who've learned all their skills from P.J. O'Rourke's "Third World Driving Hints and Tips." After a while, in fact, I start to think everything is sarcastic, and to take every compliment as an insult with a kicker. New York is a great downsizing mechanism, bringing you down to earth, and size, and refusing to put anyone on a pedestal, not even itself. This is one city that sells postcards, in stark black-and-white, of policemen performing arrests and homeless souls holding up heart-rending placards. I go into a photo store to have a passport picture taken. "Thank you," I say when the man stops clicking. "Don't thank me," he replies. "You haven't seen how they turned out." The accent is American, though the tone is common to every quick-witted operator from Bombay to Beirut. A pretty, leopard-skin-clad girl puts two rolls of film on the counter. "This one I just found on the street," she says. "I don't know what's in it." "Uh-huh," says the man after she leaves. "She just found it on the street!" "And it just happened to show her in full police gear," says his partner. "And her boyfriend in the altogether." "Just happened to find it on the street." The sign on the shop I enter says, "Egress" on its back, and the posters advertise open-mike poetry readings at KGB and Limbo. The ad on the subway says, "The official souvenir of the city that never sleeps," and features a photo of a condom. In the East Village, burly men are burning sticks of incense and selling Hindu gods along the sidewalk, as if they were priests in a cathedral of doubt, a Durbar Square of the Ungodly. Nearby there are bars with sofas where you can recline, and pasta restaurants with candles that seem designed to conjure ghoulish spirits from the dark. Back in my black-light lobby, where lamps wear rainbow-colored hats, a large man with a ponytail is engrossed in a book called "A Dog's Mind." - - - - - - - - - D A Y__F I V E New York is just attitude in block capitals, I think, as I get ready to fly back to bleary California; a city with a sense of humor, too, and enough irreverence to undercut (and validate) its strut. New York is a city on speed, a whole metropolis with a kind of gay -- or at least Madonna-tinged -- sensibility: quick, witty, sardonic, always on the brink of shouting, "So what's your problem?" "Give me a break" or "I don't have time for this" are its mantras. The "Have a Great Day" I see on a license plate feels nearly confrontational. New York is a comedy routine, a place of nonstop chatter, a city with its feet decidedly on the ground. "There's something democratic about it," says a thoughtful editor who's fled here from Toronto. "Everyone yelling at everyone else all the time." New York is egalitarian in the sense of everyone being in the same sinking ship, survivors of some Boschian inferno, exchanging friendly cracks with an edge. When I lived here, many years ago, I found it was too harsh to separate myself from the city, to live apart from its diminishing values. New York is a crash course in humility, and a noisy refutation of the very notion of a meditative life. To me it was all too easy to recall what Lorca wrote more than 60 years ago, when he called it "Senegal with machines." In New York, he wrote, they "believe that man is the most important thing in the world," and on Wall Street there is "a total absence of the spirit ... And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, and that it is their duty to keep that huge world running, day and night, forever." In New York, I felt, I could not be myself. But now, after a few years in California, I see something bracing and tonic in New York's violence, its closeness to reality, its acceptance of everything human and its embrace of the same truths known in all the difficult ancient cities of the world. New York is the Human Comedy writ large, and it does not give you the space to live inside your head. Where California waters you down, New York sharpens you up, a hip-hop, abrasive refresher course in truth. New York is a celebration, after all, of "smarts" -- the quick-on-its-feet, worldly wisdom that fuels Hong Kong and Calcutta. And as I drive back out of the city, noting the Trump Luxury Hotel and Towers in Columbus Circle, calling itself -- of course -- "THE MOST IMPORTANT NEW ADDRESS IN THE WORLD," and passing strikers everywhere we turn, huddled up in layers and babbling in Spanish outside the Marriott, around Washington Square, in Midtown, and taking in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School for International Careers and the names of airlines I've never heard before (Ryan Int'l, Rich Int'l, Air Ukraine and Servivensa), I realize that nothing energizes and stimulates me like New York, and nothing gives me such a blast of vital, raw intelligence. My life takes me often these days to London, Los Angeles and Tokyo, but New York is the only regular stop that leaves me hungry, awake and full of every sign of human life. SALON | Jan. 13, 1999 Pico Iyer is the author of "Video Night in Kathmandu," "The Lady and the Monk," "Cuba and the Night," "Falling off the Map" and "Tropical Classical." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.