Ex-New Yorker in New York (Part 2)

 

Chapter 135: Doormen and Tacos

The reunion tour continued at full speed.

I met James for lunch in Battery Park City at one of our old haunts. He thoughtfully booked us a table by the water. When we arrived we discovered the river view had been replaced by… construction fencing. So instead of watching boats on the Hudson, we watched men in hard hats and a forklift.

Still, lunch was great. Gossip flowed freely, as it always does when two former coworkers meet without a conference call looming over them.

Afterward I walked across the Financial District to meet Janice for coffee. She had picked a café famous for Malaysian desserts, but the pandan cakes were already sold out. We settled for pandan lattes instead, which felt like the dessert version of compromise.

Janice gave me a fancy chocolate shaped like a tiny book. It looked so beautiful I felt morally conflicted about eating it.

She joked that she missed our old one-on-one meetings from work.  “I miss them too,” I said.  (I did not miss the work part.)

After coffee I had a couple of hours before meeting Nelson for dinner. Normally I would wander around downtown, but the winter cold made aimless walking feel like a bad decision. New York winter shopping is basically temperature whiplash: freezing outside, tropical indoors, then freezing again five minutes later. By the time I reached the subway I was sneezing like someone testing a foghorn.

While waiting for the train, I got a message from Eddie, one of the doormen from our Harlem condo.

“Just passed a package to your tenants. How are you guys doing?”

He even sent a selfie so I wouldn’t think it was a scam.

The message made me unexpectedly happy. So instead of heading downtown, I did something impulsive: I went to Harlem.

Walking from the subway back to our building felt surreal. The route was exactly the same as always. For a moment it felt like I was simply coming home after work.

When Eddie saw me his jaw dropped.

“I JUST texted you! I thought you were in Arkansas! How did you get here... Air Force One?”

We spent a long time catching up. The tenants were nice. The nightmare neighbor who hadn’t paid rent and left their dogs barking all day had finally been evicted. The suspicious “juice shop” downstairs had been shut down by the city.

Good news all around.

I even helped Eddie push a cart back to the storage room like his unofficial assistant.

It reminded me how much I miss doormen. Before buying the condo I thought having one would feel intrusive. Instead it felt like having a whole team of neighborhood uncles looking out for you.

Late flights, early flights, heavy luggage, bad weather... they were always there, opening doors, helping with bags, wishing you safe travels. When Nelson traveled for work and I came home late, seeing a familiar doorman waiting by the door made the building feel safe.

That Modern Love episode about the doorman being your main man? Completely accurate.

As I left, Eddie accidentally texted me a message meant for his friend saying how happy he was about my surprise visit.

“Did you mean to send that to me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, laughing. “I was just so happy.”

Honestly, I felt the same.

Eddie my man!

Later that night Nelson and I met up at Los Tacos No. 1, still my favorite taco place on earth. No chairs, no waiters, just standing shoulder-to-shoulder eating perfect Tijuana-style tacos.

The first bite confirmed it: still incredible.

After tacos, Nelson suddenly wanted soft serve ice cream, which led us to a completely unglamorous stop at McDonald's in FiDi.

Of all the places in New York, we ended the night at McDonald’s gossiping over ice cream.

Honestly, it was perfect.

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Chapter 136: Too Much Food (Which Is Exactly Enough)

Friday was the culinary highlight of the trip.

I met Andrew for a late lunch at Casa Mono near Union Square — the kind of place that’s annoyingly hard to book.

Andrew is a serious foodie, which meant I knew two things going in: the food would be amazing, and we would order too much.

Both predictions came true.

Our tiny table quickly disappeared under plates of tapas. Every dish was better than the last. It felt unreasonable for two people to be eating this much good food at 3 p.m. on a Friday.

Between bites we caught up on everything... his new job, travel plans, family updates, relationships, and yes, plenty of gossip. I was also relieved to learn that the reference I gave for his job apparently hadn’t ruined his life.

At one point the manager came over and gently suggested we might want to leave.

We did not.

Eventually he came back again, less gently.

So Andrew paid the bill and we relocated to Union Square, where Andrew surprised me with a stop at Breads Bakery.

When we first met years ago we bonded over two things: trains and babka.

This time he bought a special Lunar New Year red-bean babka.

It sounded questionable. It was incredible.

We stood outside in the cold talking for another half hour before finally saying goodbye in the subway station. Five minutes later we were texting each other from opposite platforms.

Great catch-ups do that.

Back at the apartment it was time for party prep. Don and Lilian were coming for dinner.

Cindy had planned a seafood feast, and earlier I had spotted a massive whole fish waiting in the fridge like a centerpiece.

My assignment was seared sesame-crusted ahi tuna, a dish I apparently made for them years ago.  Things were going well until the sesame seeds started burning.  Suddenly the kitchen filled with smoke and the pan looked permanently ruined.  I stood there horrified while Thomas calmly reassured me that nothing in life cannot be fixed with Bar Keeper's Friend.

Fortunately, everything else turned out amazing. Crispy whole fish. Clam miso soup. Thomas made an incredible tofu dish with shrimp and fermented black beans.

We later discovered Thomas and Don were both allergic to shrimp.  Lilian was avoiding cholesterol.  Nelson didn’t feel like peeling shrimp.  Which meant I ate an unreasonable number of shrimp that night.

No regrets.

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Chapter 137: Leaving Winter Wonderland

Saturday was our last full day in New York, so Nelson and I intentionally kept things quiet.

We walked around the neighborhood, bought cough syrup for my increasingly suspicious sneezing, and picked up groceries for dinner. I had promised to cook my “famous” Hainan chicken rice.

The afternoon was mostly spent hanging out with Becca the greyhound, who proved once again that greyhounds are basically gentle noodles with legs.

I had never made chicken rice without my trusty Tatung rice cooker before. Using a normal pot felt risky.  To my surprise, the rice came out perfectly.  Dinner was a success. Plates were emptied quickly, which I took as a compliment rather than a sign I hadn’t cooked enough.

Afterward we played the board game Trailer Park Wars. Cindy somehow won despite extreme jet lag. Thomas came last despite doing an impressive amount of trash-talking before and during the game.

Never enough table space for this game LOL

Eventually we packed our suitcases.

The next morning we had an early flight and one additional concern: a massive snowstorm heading toward New York.  At the airport our plane sat at the gate for nearly an hour with mechanical issues while snow began falling outside the windows.

Not ideal.

When the plane finally took off, I felt an immediate wave of relief.  Hours later, as we descended toward Northwest Arkansas, the landscape looked completely different. Brown fields. No snow. Familiar roads.  And surprisingly, I felt happy to be coming back.

After years of moving cities, and now vanlife, the idea of “home” has become flexible. Less about a specific place, more about where life currently happens.

Right now, apparently, home was Northwest Arkansas.  Which, in vanlife terms, really just means:  home is wherever you park it.

(New York, meanwhile, got buried under snow shortly afterward.). Beautiful.  But I was very glad we escaped. Winter and I were officially done with each other.