COME STAI, NEW YORK?: Eat, drink and smoke 'em if you got 'em

New York City in the mid Nineties and we – my then-partner Jenni and I – are staying in a cheap but serviceable hotel downtown. It's noisy at night with car alarms constantly going off but it is just around the corner from Chinatown and Little Italy, where we want to be.

I do some interviews (notably Ornette Coleman), see some gigs (in the original Knitting Factory, the Blue Note and so on), catch a truly awful Yoko Ono musical play entitled New York Rock (which she insists is not autobiographical) and day after day expect to get conformation of an interview with her.

It arrives as we are checking out and the taxi to the airport is waiting.

Great times, interesting encounters and . . .

One night we are in Little Italy looking for a place to eat. We tarry too long outside a busy restaurant looking at the menu and are almost physically welcomed in, taken through a corridor and then the kitchen to one of the long tables out the back in a large room where a dozen or so others are obviously enjoying the wine and food.

We sit at the table which seats eight and at the far end is another couple who nod and smile. They are well dressed, neatly groomed and appear to be in their early 40s.

We have barely settled in when a huge plate of bread arrives and within seconds a very large bottle of red wine, notably without a label.

Before I can say “we didn't order this” the waiter has swept off, so we shrug and pour a glass.

The man at the end of the table tells us that is what happens here, they have a kind of set menu and it will just arrive. And it does: salad, pasta, some scampi thing, water, more bread . . . .

And it is all terrific.

We chat with the other couple who are just finishing up and they move in closer so we can be heard over the happy laughter around us.

They are curious about our accents (of course) so we fill in a little background as to what has brought us here, they tell us they are over from Jersey for the night. They ask how we met and then Jenni asks the same of them.

He – who sets up Yuletide displays and Santas in a number of shopping malls in the weeks before Christmas and doesn't appear to work the rest of the year – says he recalls seeing his now-wife at an AA meeting.

“Yeah, and then I saw you later at that NA meeting.”

And so their story – sketched in – is of addiction and dependency prompted by the stresses of their lives and jobs, mutual support and regular AA and NA meetings to keep themselves clean and straight.

I say it seems to have worked, congratulations, you both look extremely well and healthy.

They thank me, small talk resumes and at that point – because people were smoking – Jenni pulls out her rolling tobacco and papers.

A few days before this had caused some consternation in a downtown police station when we went in to report her stolen bag.

“Honey, you can't do that in here,” said the large black police woman with something between amazement and amusement.

Something similar happens with the happy couple until Jenni explains it is merely tobacco and hands over the packet for them to look at.

The woman said she had heard of this but had never seen any.

And then . . . she asks if Jenni can roll her a cigarette.

The man looks alarmed.

Jenni rolls one and hands it to her.

She takes a deep drag.

Now anyone who hasn't smoked a roll-your-own without a filter won't know what can happen: a cold chill, a state of brief euphoria and some dizziness.
The woman got light-headed and started laughing, and within minutes was inviting us back to their place across the river.

And a minute after that her husband had hustled her to the door leaving us with the image of his angry, accusing glare and the thought we may just have undone her years of work on her addictions.

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These entries are of little consequence to anyone other than me Graham Reid, the author of this site, and maybe my family, researchers and those with too much time on their hands.

Enjoy these random oddities at Personal Elsewhere.