There is no such thing as free butter.
Earlier this month, the City of New York decided that nobody would be permitted into restaurants, movie theaters, or other indoor venues without proof of vaccination. Critics expressed concern that this would destroy small businesses and so forth, which has yet to happen. In fact, the new regulation has so improved my opinion of the great indoors that my spending increase alone has assuredly canceled out whatever losses the absence of the unvaccinated has caused.
Now, in the exclusive company of the vaccinated, I have slowly rediscovered the pleasure of eating restaurant food in air conditioning and going to the movies. (There is also, I have read, a regulation about gyms. This is of little consequence to me.)
It was in this spirit of vaccinated delight that I went last Saturday night to see a movie in a real theater. The concession menu advertised real butter — not the fake stuff (and don’t get me wrong, the fake stuff has its place but I like the idea of real butter as an ostentatious display of luxury) — available at no extra charge. My two great passions are butter and not spending extra money, and I was a happy man when I sat down in the theater with a bag of remarkably buttery popcorn.
The movie was about New York and it was the sort of thing a person would expect an independent movie theater to show for a small crowd late at night. “Do you ever feel like New York is talking to you?” one character asked on screen as I felt butter seeping through my shirt from the bottom of the popcorn bag.
(Exactly what New York was saying is unclear. Perhaps it was a warning about cholesterol. Perhaps the City, seeing me almost achieve something approaching contentment, needed to slap me down with its familiar lesson that constant paranoia always yields better outcomes.)
I scrambled to get a stain pen from my bag. I bring two stain pens with me everywhere in the same way that the President has aides carry a briefcase with nuclear launch equipment. Stain pens have saved me from dozens of catastrophes, but even they have a limit. The sheer quantity of butter that had spilled from the bottom of the bag was far beyond that limit. I sat in the darkness for another hour, resigned to my fate and watching a pool of butter grow on the floor.
Only the raising of the lights during the credits revealed the complete extent of the disaster. The shirt was mere collateral damage compared to the substantial and unfortunate stains on the front of my pants.
To a person living in a normal place, this is an inconvenience but not a terrible crisis. They might hold something in front of themself on the way to the car and pop the stained clothes in the washer on arriving home. To me, with neither car nor washer, a butter stain is The Apocalypse.
It was a journey of 100 blocks home on two subway lines with unforgiving lighting. I spent the whole time clutching my messenger bag in front of me. I thought I looked ridiculous, but there is stiff competition for looking ridiculous at midnight on the subway and I must have still been approachable enough to ask for directions. “This train doesn’t go to Astoria,” I explained, trying to hold my bag in place with one hand as I gestured to a map. “You need to go back to Fifty-Seventh and change for the N.”
My arrival home kicked off a multi-day festival of stain removal. I unleashed an arsenal of detergents and degreasers on the stains. I tried to do my laundry in the bathtub. (I had been to the laundromat just days before and was too emotionally exhausted to return.) I would emerge from the bathroom clutching soaked laundry and smelling like detergent, certain of my victory. Slowly, the pants and shirt would dry and the stains would reveal themselves once more, kicking off another round of battle.
By Tuesday, I started looking for a dry cleaner. In a literal sense, this is not a difficult thing to do in my neighborhood. There are dry cleaners on every corner. Coming from a town where Lemon Fresh remains the undisputed champion of dry cleaning and I was never even led to believe that there were other options, however, choosing among multiple dry cleaners is difficult. The question is one of finding a good dry cleaner. I found a good dry cleaner in June and it closed a week later, so I was starting from square one. I read through dozens of reviews and sob stories about ruined fur coats before making my choice. The ultimate calculus: it was the closest one and I was running late to work.
There is no more hiding in the cold fluorescent light of Wednesday morning at the dry cleaner. The pants go on the counter. The dry cleaning lady looks at you with pity and the bill is more expensive than the popcorn itself. The situation is beyond saving even if, as the red “STAIN” stickers are affixed to the unfortunate spots, you insist, “It’s butter — real butter.”
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor.
I spend a lot of brainpower trying to build coherent stories where none exist. It’s the human thing to do. We tell ourselves that America is “a shining city on a hill” and that West Michigan is “God’s Country” (is that just me?).
The Seal of the City of Holland includes the city motto: “Eendracht maakt macht. God zy met ons.” From the original Dutch, this means “Unity makes strength. God be with us.” It is Dutch. It indicates that the people of Holland are, naturally, the Chosen People. It fits the narrative. (The question of unity in West Michigan reformed church politics is a question for another time.)
The Seal of the City of Detroit says “Speramus Meliora. Resurget Cineribus.” “We hope for better things. It will rise from the ashes.” The narrative is one of renaissance, and they have named an office complex and a high school for the very concept.
New York is tougher to pin down. The designer of the Seal of the City of New York understood this and punted. Translated from Latin, “Sigillum Civitatis Novi Eboraci” just means “Seal of the City of New York.”
Like the designer of the seal, Craig Taylor is not trying to pull one cohesive narrative thread out of New York. To do so would be completely ridiculous. Instead, he interviewed 180 New Yorkers, transcribed the interviews, and published many of them in New Yorkers.
The interview subjects — investment bankers, people jailed at Rikers Island, subway conductors, museum curators, sommeliers, and bodega workers — build their own New York narratives. Taylor (who is a brilliant writer himself) ties them together with his own occasional interludes.
The city’s mysterious code is not cracked by the end of the book. It’s all much more than fits conveniently on a city seal. That’s the point. “In New York,” Taylor writes, “you will always get more.”
Daybreak Express by D. A. Pennebaker.
I do not know how I could have lived for a quarter of a century and not discovered Daybreak Express until last week, but that is tragically what has happened.
Sixty-two years before the Second Avenue Subway opened in my neighborhood (an addition of four stations to the subway system that took longer than the Transcontinental Railroad to build), the area was served by the Third Avenue Elevated. From 1878 until 1955, the Third Avenue El would have run less than five hundred feet from my apartment.
Two years before the line was to be demolished, D. A. Pennebaker filmed a sort of short collage of the line and set it to Duke Ellington’s “Daybreak Express.” (Ellington, Wikipedia assures us, “responded favorably to the film”). The result has since earned a place in the Criterion Collection and is, as far as I can tell, the closest thing to an American Night Mail.