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Trekking Up the Great White Way
2998 words
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A telephone rang and kept ringing. Where was that telephone? I opened my eyes, looked to my right and saw a telephone a few feet away, resting on a nightstand. Whose telephone was that? Where did that nightstand come from? Where was I? Oh, I was in a bed. I guess I should answer that call, shouldn’t I? I reached for the telephone receiver, pulling it from the cradle but clumsily dropping it to the floor; then I grabbed the cord and yanked the receiver up onto the bed, close to my pillow. But I couldn’t pick up my head, which seemed stuffed with cement, so I let the receiver rest on the bed a few inches from my ear. I could hear a man’s voice cheerfully making an announcement:
“Good morning! This is your wake-up call. The time now is five minutes past six, and there is snow falling over Manhattan! Have a wonderful day.”
Following that announcement, there was a prolonged dial tone and then an endless series of beeps; I fumbled with the receiver before managing to replace it in the cradle. Where was I? Whose bed is this? I rolled my body slightly to the left, and then I discovered that there was another man in the bed, fast asleep and snoring lightly. Could this be…is it possible that…? Oh yes, I know who that is. That’s Uncle Chick. Now I realized where I was, in the Essex House Hotel, sharing a king-size bed with Uncle Chick. I surmised that the family had reserved a room in advance for Uncle Chick, expecting him to be falling-down-drunk before the end of the evening’s wedding festivities, as he was at every family celebration, and when they found another guest who was falling-down-drunk – me -- they just decided to let the two of us sleep it off in the same bed.
I shook Uncle Chick’s shoulder but couldn’t arouse him. He kept on snoring, not perturbed by my presence. Was that wake-up call for him, I wondered? Or could it have been for me? And had I heard the announcement correctly, that snow was falling? Then I walked to the window and parted the curtains. The view – of Central Park South and the park beyond, and Columbus Circle off to the left – was shocking. Everything was white! There was snow everywhere and snow was still falling. How can this be? The forecast in the Sunday Times had made no mention whatsoever of snow, and anyway it’s late March, isn’t it? True, a few flakes had been falling when I arrived at the hotel in the late afternoon yesterday, but that seemed to be nothing more than an early-spring snow shower. Nonetheless, what I was now observing from the window was a real winter snowstorm, an actual blizzard – unbelievable!
I looked at the clock on the night table: the short, fat hand rested at “6” and the slender hand rested at “3.” It took a while for my brain to process the information provided by the clock, but I soon grasped that the time of day was 6:15. And that could only mean 6:15 a.m. And since the wedding had taken place on a Sunday, then this must be Monday morning, right? Yes, it is Monday morning, and the time is 6:15 a.m. and – holy shit! – I have a Physics midterm exam at 9 a.m.! That exam was to be the last of my midterm exams, and I absolutely had to show up and I absolutely had to pass that exam. Medical school admissions committees, my Columbia adviser had warned me, don’t look kindly on prospective first-year students who screw up during the last semester of their senior year. Yet, it’s snowing like crazy…so maybe I need not worry, maybe the exam will be postponed?
No, I decided, I can’t take a chance, I have got to show up at Pupin Hall by 9 a.m. It’s doable: I’ll get dressed, take the subway up to the Columbia campus and get to my dorm room by 7:30 a.m., which will give me enough time to shower and change clothes before arriving at Pupin by 9 a.m. It suddenly dawned on me that the wake-up call from the hotel front desk had been intended not for Uncle Chick but for me. Joan, bless her heart, had remembered my Physics exam and wanted me to be woken in time. How extraordinarily thoughtful of her, I thought, and how extraordinarily boorish of me to have gotten drunk at her sister’s wedding. I can only imagine what her family must think of me now.
I put on my dress shirt and trousers, never mind that they were a little damp, and then my tux jacket and shoes. Now, where are my overcoat and scarf? Oh, I remember, I left them at the coat-check in the hotel lobby. But wait, there they are, hanging from a coat hook on door! Joan had taken care of just about everything, hadn’t she? Now I was ready to vacate the room, but first I glanced back toward the bed and saw that Uncle Chick was still asleep, still snoring gently. Could I leave him alone like that? Shouldn’t I at least rouse him for a second to say goodbye? Would I ever see him again? Never mind, I decided, let the poor guy sleep. So, I just waved my hand in Uncle Chick’s direction, opened the door and set out on my way back to the college campus and what would prove to be, I suspected, a challenging confrontation of my addled brain with Physics 101, with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that.
There were very few people coming or going through the hotel lobby at 6:45 a.m. that Monday morning. Looking through the glass doors at the entrance to the lobby, I could see the figure of a hotel employee leaning on a snow shovel, enveloped in swirls of snow even as he stood beneath the broad hotel canopy. The doorman pushed open the door and I stepped outside. I counted myself fortunate that I had thought to wear an overcoat and a scarf when departing the campus yesterday, but I was otherwise poorly equipped for a blizzard. I didn’t have a hat or gloves or – most worryingly – boots to protect my feet. But hey! The Columbus Circle subway station was only one long block away, wasn’t it? And the station at 116th Street, where I would be detraining, was only a couple of blocks from my dorm room, right?
Surprise. The gates at all entrances to the station at Columbus Circle were shut and locked. An IRT employee stood at the head of the stairway leading down to the entrance on 59th Street and explained, to me and a huddle of other would-be riders, that the blizzard had caused a transformer to blow out, somewhere down the line, and that there would be no train service on this line “until further notice.” By now, a good six inches of snow had accumulated on the unplowed streets and sidewalks of Manhattan. There were scarcely any taxicabs in sight, only a rare cab that was equipped with tire chains, and those were already carrying passengers. But, somehow, I’ve got to get from where I am now, at 59th Street, to the campus at 116th Street, and I’ve got about two hours until the start of the Physics exam. Could I maybe hire one of those horse-drawn carriages on Central Park South? Haha!
I turned north on Broadway and started to walk. A few store-front-sidewalks had been hastily shoveled but most had not, and the snow was still coming down. I spread my scarf over my head, looped it under my chin and tucked the ends inside my overcoat. It probably looked like a babushka. I tried to keep my hands inside my coat pockets, but I found that much of the time I needed to extend my arms to help maintain my balance. My main concern was my feet, which I feared might become frostbitten inside my cotton socks and black dress shoes. But I did keep moving forward, plodding through what was, by now, probably more than seven inches of snow. It was very slow going, however, and after fifteen minutes of plodding I had advanced north on Broadway only as far as 65th Street. The north-south blocks in Manhattan, I reminded myself, are fairly short blocks. But still, there were many, many blocks ahead of me. How many blocks precisely? I did the math: 116 – 59 = 57, that’s fifty-seven blocks from the Essex House hotel to the Columbia University campus. I had walked farther than that on the West Side of Manhattan on a nice fall day -- but could I do it now? Fifty-one blocks to go. I plodded on.
“Broadway” juxtaposed with “lovely” would ordinarily be considered an oxymoron. But under the cover of freshly fallen snow – all of the sidewalks’ grime, trash and dog poop concealed by pristine snow – Broadway actually did look lovely. Was it a long-ago snowfall that had inspired someone to invent “The Great White Way” as an epithet? (Reminder to self: look into that someday.) Soon I heard the rumble of machines, and I saw several snowplows moving in both directions on Broadway, including one snowplow that was fast approaching behind me. I moved closer to the buildings on my right so as to avoid the avalanche that would momentarily be ejected onto the sidewalk. I did avoid total inundation, but my shoes were buried in wet snow which I couldn’t shake off entirely, so my feet soon felt anesthetized. While the snowplow did clear a lane on the street, the sidewalk became almost impassable because of the piles of displaced snow. But hey! Now I could walk in the street, on the one- or two-inch residue of snow, since there was scarcely any vehicular traffic. Every couple of minutes a taxicab or private car would pass, and I would need to move closer to the curbside snowbank. I also stuck out my thumb at every passing vehicle, but no driver ever looked my way.
I came to the subway station at 72nd Street with the wan hope that perhaps service on the IRT line had by now been restored; but I could see that, here too, the gates to the entrance were locked. And then, abruptly, a memory emerged from my brain, a memory of a beautiful spring day two years earlier, when I was a college sophomore. I could see myself, as if in a film, exiting the 72nd Street station and walking across Central Park, on my way to an art exhibit at the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue at East 71st Street, when I came upon – like a mirage – a flat expanse of meticulously manicured, very green grass, similar to a putting green. On this elegant lawn stood several men, dressed in knickers and Argyll socks and tam o’shanter caps, who were bowling. As I stood there, marveling at this exotic picture, two birds chanced to alight on the lawn, birds which I immediately recognized as scarlet tanagers. I had never before spotted scarlet tanagers – nor have I ever again spotted them – but here they were, posing amidst a group of men dressed in funny clothes who were lawn-bowling in the middle of Central Park. New York City never ceases to amaze, I reflected, whether it be lawn-bowling and scarlet tanagers in April or a major snowstorm in late March. But enough about bowls and birds, I had better concentrate on getting through this blizzard.
I resigned myself to walking another forty-four blocks. And I managed to keep up a pace of at least one mile per hour, maybe close to two miles per hour. Okay, I mused, here’s a thought problem for a physics student (albeit a tenth grader, probably): If a student is walking north on Broadway at a pace of two miles an hour, toward the campus which is forty-four blocks away, and the campus is moving toward him at one mile per hour, at which intersecting street on Broadway would they meet? My long walk also afforded me ample time to ruminate about another problem: How did I come to be in this predicament? What rational person, knowing that he was bound to show up for a Physics midterm on Monday morning, would allow himself to get stinking drunk on Sunday evening?
The snow continued falling, and I continued walking. I would later learn that by the end of the day the accumulation of snow would come to a total of twelve inches, which was a springtime record for New York City. I passed subway stations at 79th Street, 86th Street and 91st Street, all locked down. After that I didn’t even look at entrances to the stations but just plodded ahead. Finally, I looked up and saw the gates to the Columbia campus, at Broadway and 116th Street, and I pulled up the cuff of my overcoat to look at my wristwatch. The time was precisely 9:01 am. The Physics midterm exam had begun. My feet were numb, and I could only hope that immersion in a tub of hot water would bring them back to life; but I no longer had the option of stopping first at my dorm room for a bath and a change of clothes – I had to get to Pupin Hall immediately.
The pedestrian paths across the campus had evidently been swept earlier in the morning, but by now another two or three inches had accumulated, and it took me seven or eight minutes to walk the short distance from the gates at 116th Street to Pupin Hall. That delay of seven or eight minutes might prove to be my undoing, I reckoned, since Physics was my weakest subject and I always needed a lot of time to figure out the solution to a simple problem. And would my still-addled brain even be able to recall the basic equations that I would need to use for the solution of any problem?
At last, I opened the front door to Pupin Hall, and I was immediately overcome by the heat. I could hear the steam hissing through the overhead pipes, and I remembered that this building was always overheated in the winter. (It had always been a challenge to stay awake during the Physics lectures, partly due to the heat, partly due to the lectures themselves.) My first impulse was, of course, to take off my overcoat before entering the lecture theater, where the midterm exam had already been underway for nine or ten minutes – but would I, a solitary figure in a soiled tuxedo, dare step through those swinging doors wearing a tux and make an exhibit of myself in front of a hundred and fifty students, all seated in rows facing the entrance?
So, I kept my overcoat on, unbuttoned but pulled around me tightly enough to conceal the tux that I wore beneath; and, contriving to put the most earnest expression possible on my face, I cautiously pushed open the door to the lecture theater. And to my amazement, no one laughed at me, no one snickered, no one reacted at all – because no one was there! That is to say, the rows of seats ascending to the top of the theater were all vacant, and there were no students scribbling in blue exam booklets. There was a dozen or so students hanging out in the well of the theater, just standing around and kibitzing or sitting in the front row and reading newspapers. Two guys were standing behind the podium with a deck of cards and playing blackjack.
“What happened?” I asked a guy whom I knew, Herb, who had his face buried in the sports section of the Times. He looked up, blinked twice at the sight of my stained dress shirt, and said, “You’ve been partying? You shouldn’t have left the party, because the Physics exam has been postponed until next Monday.”
“When did they decide to do that?”
“About six a.m. They posted notices in all the dorms, and an announcement went out on WKCR. But a couple of dozen guys, mostly commuters like me, didn’t get the message and showed up. Some have left already, but the rest of us are waiting for the snow to let up. Let me tell you, it was a bitch getting here. Where are you coming from?”
“I’ll tell you another day, Herb. I’ve got to get back to my dorm room.”
We had a bucket in our dorm room, which we used to fill with ice when we needed to chill a bottle of milk or some cheese -- a luxury like a refrigerator being as yet a fantasy in the Columbia dorms -- and now I filled the bucket with hot water to soak my feet. My feet were numb and bluish when I first removed my shoes and socks, but they gradually pinked up after immersion in the tub for half an hour. I then took a shower and, finally, collapsed into my bed. I didn’t awake until six p.m. when my roommate – who had been stranded on Long Island for most of the day – arrived and roused me from my sleep, just in time for us to grab some pizza in the dining hall.
I did show up for the Physics exam the following Monday, and I did pass. Joan, generous as always, did forgive me for my awful conduct at the wedding, and we continued dating until graduation. Then it was Goodbye, Columbia…and Goodbye, Sweet Joanie, and Goodbye, Uncle Chick. Six decades later, I am both proud and embarrassed when I recall my foolish yet intrepid trek -- in the face of a blizzard and a hangover -- up the Great White Way.
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