Showing Madame Butterfly on the JumboTron in Times Square

I moved to Manhattan July 1, 2005, so this is the first summer in quite a while that I haven’t spent in the New York area. After moving back to Virginia in February, I’ve had little twinges of nostalgia for the city, but by and large, I’m glad to be out of there for now. However, this morning my Google Reader seems to be conspiring to make me homesick.

First I read Ms. Single Mama’s account of what seems to have been her very first trip to the city, to visit her boyfriend’s brother. They stayed in the Bronx and commuted to the Financial District, a similar commute to the one I had when I first started working down there. The commute was absolute hell, but lord knows it was nice to get out of the Bronx for the day. But it wasn’t the commute that started to give me little pains; it was her description of Time Square’s stench.

Times Square in the summertime is unlike any place I have ever been. I worked outside for eight hours, six days a week from July until November of ’05. Tourists obviously love Times Square, and all of their sweaty bodies packed into a relatively small geographical space surrounded completely by buildings, mixed with the copious amounts of garbage bags on the sidewalks waiting to be picked up, created a smell that is singular to those city blocks.

MSM’s description of , “The Sahara with the smelliest, stinkiest odors oozing out of every corner. Puke. Garbage. Sewer. Rotting food,” starts to explain it, but leaves out the meat-on-a-stick vendors, with the smoke billowing from their carts, enveloping you and making the air so thick you can chew it.

You don’t notice the stench after a while, but the heat never goes away. My co-workers and I would take turns standing in bank lobbies, or pretending to look at ugly, overpriced clothes at Hollister, just to feel the central air for a few minutes. It would dry our sweat and shellac the filth right onto our bodies.

When I would return home at night, to the Harlem bedroom I was renting, my fingernails would have so much grime underneath them, that they wouldn’t come clean, no matter how much I scrubbed. If I was stupid enough to wear flip flops, my feet would look as though I had been wading in coal dust all day. My little window fan would do little to cool me off, and I’d lie in bed, watching TNT, the only station the rabbit ears on the shitty TV that came with my room would pick up. I was always hot and dirty.

In New York, the entire month of July is devoted to setting off very loud, illegal fireworks at all hours of the night, which gives the impression of living in a war zone. One night, over the cacophony of booms, and hisses of fireworks going off, I heard a melody. It was 11:00 at night, in the middle of the week, yet there was a tinny song that kept replaying, seemingly forever. It couldn’t be what I thought it was, because it didn’t make any sense at all, but sure enough, I went downstairs, and there was an ice cream truck just parked outside of my building.

Families had set up lawn chairs on the sidewalks, and toddlers were running around 137th street in just their diapers. I went to the Mr. Softee man and ordered some sort of cherry slush thing. I took it up to my room, and it was the single greatest food moment of my life. It was cool, and crunchy, and exactly what I needed. I ate it, and was finally able to sleep.

That night, so soon after I moved to the city, stayed with me. So when Gawker had a story about parents in Brooklyn wanting to ban ice cream trucks, I was tempted to go get Cooper out of his crib, drive up to Park Slope, and individually punch them in the face. The Mr. Softee man and air-conditioned retail stores are the only two things that got me through New York summers. I still dream of the chocolate-dipped cones that were priced based upon what neighborhood you happened to be in when you visited the truck.

I understand that they don’t appreciate the trucks parked around playgrounds and such, but I appreciate it! I appreciate it so much. All of the broke twenty-somethings living in New York, working a crappy job, dealing with a window fan and barely any television appreciate it.

God, I miss that place.