Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Tour of New York City

Dave was our tour guide. We were on a bus with 45 other people set to ride around Manhattan for 8 1/2 hours to see the sights.

There were two guys from India, a couple from Chicago, a group of women from Scranton, PA, a family from Paris, a young couple from Brooklyn on their first -- and probably last -- date, a few women from Erie, PA, some people from someplace in Georgia, but I couldn't figure out if they were from the country or the state, and then there were the "Koreans," Dave called them. They were from somewhere in New Jersey, born and raised in the U.S., but Dave grilled them for nearly 20 minutes -- I'm sure we missed a lot of the sights -- about Korea. The driver of the tour bus was named Pancho -- or that's what Dave kept calling him. Pancho said, just before we left the tour bus, that "If I had a gun, I'd shoot him" about Dave.

Now, Dave does not play the harmonica very well -- or as well as he thinks he does. He didn't play any of the three harmonicas he brought with him very well. And I'm sure that in real life, that is, away from his tour guide job, he is at least as obnoxious as he was on the tour, if not more so. He is a well-traveled man, I will concede, because we heard something about the 42 countries he has visited around the world -- and not much about Manhattan.

So, if he was not blowing into one of his three harmonicas or showing us his photos of him riding camels with Bedouins several times, apparently so we would not forget easily, or talking about Istanbul, which was called Constantinople, you know, and Paris, in French, of course, or Cincinnati, which he thought would enamor the two Clevelanders to him, or any of the other ports of call he mentioned, he did point out the ice-skating pond at Rockefeller Center that wasn't there because it was springtime and passed around a rock he claimed was right from Central Park.

He could have been more timely in pointing out the various sights of Manhattan. He paused the mutant Harmonikat routine long enough to tell us that if we would have looked down that street we just passed, we would have seen the Chrysler Building; although, he did tell the driver to stop so that he could point out an apartment building in which he once lived in Greenwich Village. He was on the fifth floor and used the fire escape to get in and out. He took us for a walk down Wall Street and near Trinity Cathedral; so, I saw where Alexander Hamilton is buried and the nondescript New York Stock Exchange building.

Dave shined at the waterfront. He was in his element -- the waterfront. He was a seaman, inspired to sign on after he read Moby Dick. He pointed out something about Herman Melville, but I didn't catch it because he forgot to turn on his microphone. The quiz -- we wiped up on the quiz -- first line of Moby Dick, name of the first mate, who made the coffin -- no prizes, though. We boarded a boat for a tour of New York Harbor and the East River, checking out Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge, among other things. There's a pizza place near the Brooklyn side of the bridge, which Dave said was excellent; and I wish we would have stopped there for lunch instead of where we were headed after we got off the boat.

I don't recall the name of the place that served lunch; but it wasn't the bad lunch that accelerated the downward spiral, it was our guide, Dave. We're in fucking New York -- there should be some good food, not a dry burger on a bun with Ore-Ida fries badly made -- but then there as Dave. I get this second-hand because I went to get Stacey's what-Dave-called-quesadillas. Dave announced that the people who ordered the quesadillas should get up to get them: so, I went up. Dave apparently wasn't happy with that arrangement because he saw Stace sitting there. She heard him say, "Momma?" And you have to understand here that Dave must have been approaching 80 years on the planet, give or take a couple. "Momma?" he said again, and Stace didn't pay him any heed because why should she.

"Momma?" the voice got closer, until she looked up and Dave, his gray hair flying away from his head in all directions, stood over her, "MOMMA?" I heard her say, "WHAT?!!!" from the food table across the restaurant. The man should consider himself very lucky that she didn't reach up and slam his head on the table or run him through with her Leki Wanderfreund. That was it, as far as she was concerned. The fucking tour was over. Dave was a fucking lunatic, apparently thinking that his contemporaries are the only people who have a monopoly on assistive devices to keep their balance while they walk. Fucker. Then he announced, "Any more silverhairs want to go up first, go on!" Who the hell was he talking about, the couple from Chicago? I don't know.

All I know, lunch was not pleasant. The food sucked. And my lovely wife wanted to kill Dave.

We headed uptown. Dave did show us a couple things. Grand Central Terminal. WE should have told Pancho to let us off at the Waldorf, but we didn't. Mistake. This was the ride by Rockefeller Center and Carnegie Hall and Central Park. He wanted Pancho to stop to see if Yoko Ono came out of The Dakota, but Pancho ignored him. Dave recounted the Lennon killing to us.

We headed into Harlem. We drove up and down some streets; Dave described the rowhouses. Then we headed over to The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Stace stayed on the bus. I wandered around myself inside the church, which was being restored, away from Dave. Stace found out that Pancho wanted to shoot Dave and that the first date wasn't going well. I came out and wanted to head over to the Hungarian bake shop across the street, but returned to the bus. Speaking of the bus, I thought that if we were going to be looking up at tall buildings, the bus would have a glass roof or no roof or be one of the double-deckers we saw, but no -- it was a fucking bus to go on a cross-country trip.

I got back to the bus -- I don't know where we were going next and didn't care at that point. We decided to leave Pancho to shoot Dave in front of two fewer witnesses. We grabbed a cab and headed back to the Waldorf, getting there before Starbucks closed, and sat down to relax, watch new arrivals at the hotel, and enjoy one of the last performances of the singer/piano player in the lobby until we left for LaGuardia, in time for further adventures.

Posted by Bill at May 8, 2008 11:28 PM