• Catching sight of monumental buildings suddenly. I never got jaded by the sudden appearance of the Empire State Building as I came around a corner, or looking down Sixth or Seventh avenues at the World Trade Center towers. It was always a thrilling reminder: You're in New York, Buster, and don't choo fuhget it. (When I next return to the city, I have little desire to see the crater downtown. All I'll need to drive the point home is to cross Seventh Avenue at Christopher Street, look south and see ... nothing. That'll kill me, I know.)
• Smells: from hot dog stands, from trash piles, from the marijuana dealers in the park, from the flowers in the community garden on Amsterdam, from the buses and trucks, from the bakeries, from the harbor breezes, from the garbage and excretions fermenting on the subway tracks, from the driver's seat of the cab, from the library stacks, from every single individual street. My olfactory sense has never had a better workout.
• Buying cold six-point (and sometimes 12-point) beer in the grocery store. And turkey burgers on every restaurant and deli menu.
• The sidewalk along Morningside Drive, on the edge of the cliff over the park. From 122nd to 110th streets, it's the neighborhood boardwalk – a promenade of folks all day long, jogging, walking, strolling, sitting. The morning and evening joggers. The secretaries and orderlies in their St. Luke's scrubs eating lunch on the benches. The Pigeon Lady and her bottomless bag of kernels. The evening dog-walkers and the old ladies who sit with their miniatures in the evening. The solitary homeless guy who sleeps on the granite benches at 116th. The tourists snapping pictures of the Harlem view. The car thiefs scouting at night. The countless days I sat there reading, eating, lollygagging, feeling very alive and happy.
• The Duplex, and Maria's sass. The Dublin Tap Room, and the two-seater wooden cozies. The Underground, and the Monday night open-mike. Saints, its pretty boys and their general lack of attitude. Siberia, and the way it realized its revolutionary roots the hard way – and won, with vodka shots all around.
• Piano bars and cabaret. Tulsa has concerts – upper-level entertainment – and crap club shows – low-level entertainment – but very little in between. I miss walking into a decent club and hearing some bellow over a piano or put on a little show just for the two dozen of us drinking cosmopolitans.
• Subways, not only for their ease of uptown-downtown movement but for the fact that they provide a designated driver 24-7. Get as drunk or high as you want in New York, and you can always get home safely. God bless mass transit.

Two men's trash

The final days in New York were a ridiculous blur, a rush of last-minute sight- and show-seeing and a sickening stew of mixed emotions. Suddenly everything became a momentous ending – the last Village Voice, the last breakfast at Deluxe, the last late-night fog over Harlem. Though it was profitable for information's sake, I became sorry I extended my stay a few weeks past the end of classes. People were leaving, gone; my fragile-as-is support network quickly scattered to the offshore breezes. There was a terrible lull in the nightlife – the post-school, pre-summer void during which half the city had hunkered down or left town.

The only Manhattanites digging this exodus were the homeless. Every morning I would walk down 119th past homeless men digging discriminately through incredible mounds of garbage piled on the curb. This was not dirty business. This was better than Wal-Mart. Futons, floor lamps, video tapes, jeans, unopened groceries, framed artwork, even a bicycle – the detrius jettisoned by students in their haste to evacuate.

We were no different. It's not easy to unload used goods in New York – that is, without a car – and you can't exactly have a garage or a lawn sale without garages or lawns. We recycled what we could with the people we knew, but on that last day, on Moving Day, we left a pile of debris outside our door that surely caused the most incredible profanity to come out of Carlos' mouth when he came by with the garbage cart that morning. The entire end of the hallways was heaped with stuff we couldn't take with us – a brand-new toaster, some clothes, boxes, a carpet broom, kitchen goods (my good tea kettle, discovered hours before the plane took off, and with nowhere to stow it), on and on. No doubt only a portion of it found its way to the landfill. A few days earlier, I had thrown away a bunch of things while packing. That afternoon, when I was in the basement returning a dolly, I noticed two of my things on the desk by the service elevator, obviously plucked from my garbage: a spent Zip disk and, er, a half-full bottle of personal lubricant. Why, Carlos, we hardly knew ye!

Coffee? Oh, I'll bet the coffee is good here!

One of my compatriots in Brooklyn, Bob Dumont, a friend of a friend and a Tulsa native, lived in Morningside Heights once upon a time many years ago. He would often wax nostalgic about the neighborhood where I then lived, and one day he and I walked around and he pointed out the sites of his first New York experiences. He became a regular at La Rosita, the Cuban diner I often praised, and several years back he wrote a nice long narrative about the place, which if I remember correctly was published somewhere. He shared a copy with me, and now I'm sharing it with you. It's called "Morir Sonando."

The mayor? Oh, Mary!

Click here for an amusing discussion of Mayor Giuliani's personal woes as he began to exit office in '01. He was getting a divorce, and he'd been staying with a gay couple. The town was all a-twitter.

On stage

The final flurry of shows ran the gamut from comedy (riotous comedian Jim David at Caroline's) to a CD release party for intense spoken-word poet Alex Olson (at the Bitter End, and featuring Alix Dobkin as a bonus). In between all that, there was some serious rock 'n' roll.

Or not so serious, as the cases might be. First, we finally took in the latest lounge show by Kiki and Herb, a volatile drag queen-and-piano man duo at the sub-basement Fez club in Nolita. It became painfully clear right away, however, that this was no kitschy lounge act. This was punk cabaret. The opening number: Peaches' "Fuuck the Pain" with Kiki – spectacularly brutal with her enormous painted age-lines, broad shoulders and lion's roar – shouting, "Fuck the pain away! Fuck the pain away!" From then on, Judy Garland or any typical drag-queen crap was banished to the basement with the rest of the bodies. The set included Pat Benatar's "Fire and Ice" (with Herb slyly slipping in some Peggy Lee near the end: "Is that all there is to a fire?"), Journey's "Open Arms," the Style Council's "The Paris Match," Springsteen's "I'm on Fire," and encores of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Reunited," with Kiki appropriately bookended the show by shouting, "Wu-Tang, motherfucker! Wu-Tang, motherfucker!" Let me tell you, you haven't heard hip-hop until you've heard it covered by a drunk, demoralized drag queen and her fiesty, off-key boyfriend. The high point was mid-set when Kiki got serious on us, began sipping her Alize martini and rambling through her theory that everything evil comes out of Colorado. She punctuated her claim with a long and bizarre story ripped from the headlines about a young girl who was drowned during "rebirthing" therapy in Denver. Then, without missing a beat, she began singing Kate Bush's paean to the difficult virtues of motherhood, "This Woman's Work." I got chills just typing this and remembering the segue; it was a strange and intensely chilling moment, and her rendition of the song was tearful and affecting. But don't worry, her next song, a sobering Nick Cave ballad, brought me around right quick-like.

I braved the Times Square (and, thus, MTV's TRL) crowds one steamy afternoon for an in-store performance by risen-from-the-ashes Weezer. The last I heard of Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, he'd left orbit and was sitting in a recording studio for days on end motionless except for bouncing a ball against the wall. Suddenly, the band pops up with a grace-saving third album (self-titled, referred to as The Green Album) that manages to validate the enormous success of the first record (also self-titled, referred to as The Blue Album) while also, somehow, transforming the band's utterly wretched, miserable failure of a sophomore CD, Pinkerton, into a hardcore cult favorite. The in-store followed the band's MTV Movie Awards appearance, but this one lacked the absurd volcano flame throwers. Just as well, Weezer's a band that needs to be seen in close quarters, as Cuomo's terrified, darting eyes and subtle expressions of introverted paranoia and self-mockery are half the show. He has the air of a 10-year-old Mensa prodigy suffering a high-stakes corporate media blitz for his cancer-curing invention, and he looks like Lucas Oswalt crossed with the kid from A Christmas Story. In other words, he's the poster boy for geek rock, and 90 percent of the crowd wore glasses. That same percentage also filmed and/or recorded the 45-minute show with a variety of digital devices. (Sure enough, the next day there were at least three MP3s on the Gnutella network marked "Weezer (live 06-06-01 NYC)." Not necessarily worth downloading – it rocked, but you know, as much as an in-store can – save maybe the instrumental I'd never heard, "Burndt Jamb." The show was capped, of course, by the new single, "Hash Pipe." It's a song about a drug-addled transvestite whore, yet MTV thinks the worst part of it is the word "hash." The video bleeps the word. How skewed can our priorities get?

The last show, in my last days in the city, couldn't have been more appropos. Lloyd Cole for the last 17 years has been a principal architect of my perconceived notions of New York – those arty friends "down in the cellar with their government grants," all the way to that girl who got off the subway at Astor Place. I remember talking to him about New York – himself a transplant from Scotland – when I interviewed him in '91, my first serious music interview, for that awful entertainment reporting class at OU. I bought Cole's new album here – with his new band, the Negatives, featuring Jill Sobule on guitar – and rediscovered him old and new, meanwhile hoarding mp3's of all those lost B-sides. Cole was even my first connection here, indirectly. Years ago, in high school, I bought an edition of LP magazine (an actual vinyl album with an LP-sized magazine attached – British, of course) solely because of the Lloyd Cole and the Commotions track, "Glory," a Tom Verlaine cover. The enclosed article featured a black-and-white photo of Cole peering from behind a paperback copy of a Montgomery Clift biography. Still in the throes of idol worship, I sought out the book, devoured it, loved it. When I arrived in New York, our program director hosted a cocktail party for the newly arrived fellowship class. I found myself talking to an older woman, Patricia Bosworth, here to work on her Jane Fonda biography. She discussed some of her early projects ... the lightbulb went off ... she wrote that Clift bio!

At the Village Underground, I arrived late and had to stand by the bar – my preferred location, anyway, and fortunate tonight. As we waited for Sobule to start her set, I heard his accent asking for a Red Stripe. There was Lloyd Cole, right next to me, pale, fatherly fattish, still with that delicious shock of hair in his eyes. He was talking now to a friend behind him. "I want to be sure and see Andy and his children," he said, scanning the club.

I seized my brush with greatness. "As in 'Andy's Babies'?" I asked.

His eyes drew magnetically toward the reference to a very old Commotions B-side. "Oh dear, a real fan," he said, smiling out of pity or possibly relief that such people still existed. His friend set off in search of Andy. "I thought everyone here tonight was someone I know. You don't look old enough to be someone I know, or to know that song, for that matter."

"Sodden to the core, I'm afraid," I said. "Enjoyed the session on the radio today." He had played "Man on the Verge" on WFUV.

He rolled his eyes, passed some ones to the bartender. "You're kind," he said. A grateful sip. "This is my first dabble in New York this year since getting off drugs." I chuckled. I've never heard of a drug problem with him. He glanced sideways over the bottle. "You think I'm kidding."

A nervous pause, at least on my end. He sighed, swigged, nodded toward the "No Smoking" signs plastered around a pillar. "That doesn't help," he said. "This is new for New York. You can stink the place up with chicken wings, but you can't smoke. I'd rather cough than smell chicken fat up there all night long."

His set showed his edginess – largely in personality, rarely in playing – and when the set was done, Cole bolted from the room. The crowd clapped and stomped and shouted for an encore ... for several minutes. Soon, we wondered if we weren't going to be graced. But he bounded down eventually, from the upstairs lounge – where you can smoke.

Lacking any real radio-recognized hits, his set meandered happily through his extensive catalogue, hitting the necessary milestones ("Perfect Skin," "No Blue Skies") and dredging up some delightful surprises (a beautiful, delicate arrangement of "Brand New Friend," with some exquisite guitar flourishes from Sobule, and a jangly, purely-for-his-own-pleasure version of "Hey Rusty," an obscure track from the long-deleted Commotions album Mainstream). His songs are literate on every level, from the lyrics to the quotations of other songs that tend to slip into his riffs and refrains during live performances (Dylan, Springsteen, etc.). When I conducted that interview in '91, he boasted, only mildly pompously at the time, "If anyone's the new Dylan, I am." His career and the sharpness of his brooding, romantic songs now bear that claim successfully, from Charlotte Street to Rue Morgue Avenue. This show was beautiful, and I was so happy.

I left in the middle of his “That Boy” encore, just as he sang, “Could you forgive that boy?” in the second chorus. It wasn’t because of my aching feet. I just didn’t want the show to end. I didn’t want him to walk off. I didn’t want the lights to come up and hear the management instructing the crowd which door to use to get the hell out of the bar. I wanted Lloyd to still be there, to always be there, so that just as A.A. Milne wrote that somewhere in the woods a boy and his bear will always be playing, for me somewhere in New York Lloyd and his band will always be playing. Always.

Only in New York

Took the cat to a vet in Morningside Heights a few days before we left; she had to get a health certificate for the plane, yadda yadda yadda. The experience of carrying a meowing bag down Broadway was hilarious enough, but the best part was when the veteranarian was discussing her sedative options for the trip and suggested accupuncture. For the fucking cat. "It really helps reduce stress," he said.