People and Music and Me

He was a big, mixed-race guy with tight white curls and wire-rimmed glasses, hands folded over his belly as if he’d just finished a three-course lunch. He sat with his chess pieces, waiting for the next gullible fool to come over. Me.

You can never be bored in the Park. The jittery heart of the Village, Manhattan. Everyone passes through here – students, downtown office workers, men in battered workboots - and chess players, stationed stoically at their tables, who will outwit you with a hefty slice of wiseguy charm. It’s the one of the best, and most stationary tours you can get of New York City.

Like most people in New York, Joe loved to talk. He’d been a teacher, high school English, he said, taking another pawn. He asked if I was studying and when I said I was far too old, asked how old I was, tucking a knight into his palm. He said I didn’t look a day over 23. I gave him my bishop on a plate for that.

After a while I made a move that foxed him. He looked at the board, shaking his head, saying ‘I am not happy.’ But this was a man who comes here every day from April to October, unless it was raining.

He let me play two games, with the spring sun dolloping down through the leaves on us, even though I always forgot to press the timer. He coached me on a few moves and when he’d finally had enough, killed me stone dead in two seconds.

I handed him my ten dollars and stood up. ‘Nice playing with you, Joe.’

‘You too, doll,’ he said.

Forget the boat to Staten Island. The neon nausea of Times Square. Broadway. If you want a slice of real Big Apple Pie, you can do no better than to come and sit here on one of the first hot days in May, when everyone takes half their clothes off and crams onto the grass, the benches, the pathways.

If you don’t play chess, just shut your eyes. Conversations about baseball, sewers and late night escapades mix with the hip hop, rock and pop spitting out from people’s phones and the barking of one million tiny dogs. Walking around the central fountain is like turning a radio dial – mopey acoustica becomes bebop sax, which becomes a collection of old-time folk musicians jamming traditional tunes.

Buy a book from AIDS-charity bookstore HousingWorks on Crosby Street, get a coffee from Stumptown Coffee – there isn’t much in the way of refreshments in the park - and settle down in the sun. People make a city, after all.

Oh, and make sure you’ve brushed up on your chess moves. Or bring a spare ten dollars.