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The brownstones of Upper Manhattan are as beautiful, in their own way, as the mid-Victorian terraces in the better parts of London, and as romantic, and they put you — me anyway — in mind of Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray in The Apartment. The old tenements of Midtown and Downtown, with their fire escapes at the front rather than at the back, are likewise romantic, in a way that they cannot have been to the huddled masses who once lived in them six to a room. But let’s not overdo it: on a grey day some parts of the city — especially on the West Side — can put you in mind of Kilburn in the 1950s. And the ‘Tudor revival’ stuff in the outer boroughs makes one think not quite of hell, but certainly of purgatory.
New Yorkers are supposed to be rude, but in my experience they are polite and helpful, and have a sense of decency and decorum. In Spanish Harlem I saw a big black fellow in a T-shirt proclaiming: ‘DON’T BRO ME IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME.’ New Yorkers are clever, too. They get things done, but they know when to give up. I got into a stew early one morning when I tried to use a pay phone and could not get my 25 cent coin into the slot. I appealed desperately for help. Those I approached seemed puzzled. ‘The phone won’t take my coins,’ I wailed. ‘What might the problem be?’ The consensus was that the problem might be that the phone was broken. The message: ‘Hey buddy, take it easy. Does your family know you are out?’
We — Mary and I and our son Robert — were in New York not just for the heck of it but to see Mary’s brother Bobby. For almost two years Bobby, who is 66, has been seriously ill and bedridden in a medical facility at the north end of Fifth Avenue. ‘How are you doing, Bobby?’ we say. ‘OK,’ he says, and then starts to tell us about the Holy Roman Empire and his favourite horror films (among them Killer Klowns from Outer Space). He shares his room with a black man who has been unconscious, ‘locked in’, for 18 months or so. This poor fellow is linked up to all sorts of tubes, which from time to time make gurgling and sucking sounds. His mother used to come and sing to him, but she stopped visiting a little while ago. She’d had a stroke, I was told, and was herself now incarcerated in a care home.
Bobby delighted in his nephew, and Robert delighted in his uncle. Robert is now 27 and last visited New York in 1997. On that occasion we were invited to dinner in Connecticut with the late William F. Buckley, Jr, quite the kindest and most courteous man I have ever met, and his extraordinarily glamorous wife Pat, now, alas, also dead. Rob was more hip than I was in those days, and still is. I regaled the table with tales of Tony Blair’s supposed homosexuality — it was a fantasy I shared at the time with Mark Steyn — and illustrated my talk by camping it up. No one at the table seemed amused, not even Pat’s bridge partners, two nice, witty, good-looking young men with jumpers over their shoulders. There was much earnest staring at plates. On the way back to New York, Mary said: ‘Are you crazy? Couldn’t you see that those two guys are gay?’ ‘Yeah, Dad,’ said Rob reproachfully.
This time Rob had less reason to be reproachful. He mastered the subway and most evenings went down to Greenwich Village to, er, chill. He smokes roll-ups and was constantly asked as he stood outside bars with his ciggie whether he was smoking dope. One observer, sensing a business opportunity, sidled up to him and said: ‘Hey, man, would you like some weed to go with those papers?’ ‘It was just like Peckham,’ said Robert. He loved it.
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