A Tour Guide is Born Excerpted from Chapter Two of the upcoming book Big Pond Written and Illustrated by Noah Diamond I LEAVE MANHATTAN IN 1999, I WAS LIVING on the Upper East Side with my then-girlfriend, Jen, and struggling with a play called Missing Manhattan and a musical called Nero Fiddled. I worked very hard on these, but I didn’t work very hard on anything else. In a smaller pond, I had been a big fish; in New York, I felt like seaweed. Besides appearing as Roy Cohn in Angels in America in college, I’d done nothing but write. Actually, Jen and I did perform Missing Manhattan, for one night, at the St. Mark’s Theatre. Ten friends came to see it, and they agreed that it was pretty good. That was it. And I dropped out of college. And I was broke. And stubborn. Incapable of betraying my muse with the indignity of a job, I soon received what New Yorkers call an eviction notice. Dazed and morose, Jen and I packed up our lives and went to stay with my father and stepmother in Connecticut. Jen went for a walk in the woods; I refused to go, claiming that I was terrified of getting lyme disease; Jen got lyme disease. Not long after that, our two pet mice, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, were dead. And every day, I paced back and forth, asking and answering the same agonizing questions again and again. Why did I get kicked out of New York? You didn’t get kicked out of New York. You lost your apartment. Why did I lose my apartment? Because you didn’t pay the rent. So I’m being punished for being poor! For being an artist! Money, that’s all they care about! Well, yes…they are a real estate management company, after all. When my play is a hit on Broadway, that management company is gonna be sorry. Why, exactly? Because they evicted a Great Artist! HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!! If you’re capable of Great Art, why are you incapable of maintaining a goddamn day job? Okay, so maybe I’m not capable of Great Art. I could go on for hours like that. Jen and I both got jobs in Connecticut pretty quickly, and began saving up to return to the city. Jen was waiting tables. I found work at a video store, which gave me the opportunity to watch a lot of movies. I was desperately homesick for New York, so I watched film after film set in the city. I started with Woody Allen. He and I have a very complicated relationship. When I was a teenager, Woody Allen was my Elvis. Throughout most of my high school years, I was making a conscious effort to look, talk, and act like him. So you can imagine how much fun that was. I still like his work very much. Taken as a series, the Woody Allen saga is a love story about a man’s affair with a city. It’s clearly had its ups and downs. Sitting in my father’s sunroom, I talked showbiz at the Carnegie Deli (Broadway Danny Rose), argued art in a Greenwich Village café (Bullets Over Broadway), and watched the sun rise over the 59th Street Bridge (Manhattan). Every time I needed a quick shot of New York City, I’d find it on the shelves of the video store. I attended the bohemian party which opens Auntie Mame. In Ghostbusters, I saved the whole city. (Last spoken line: “I LOVE THIS TOWN!”) Then Kermit the Frog and I stood together on top of the Empire State Building, in The Muppets Take Manhattan. In unison, Kermit and I cried out into the cold city night: “YOU HEAR ME, NEW YORK? THE FROG IS STAYING!” One day, prowling through the store after work, ravenous for another filmic souvenir, I discovered The Cruise. It’s a documentary directed by Bennett Miller and starring an iconoclastic tour guide named Timothy “Speed” Levitch. It’s shot on digital video, and it was one of the first such films to be released theatrically. It’s mostly presented in jagged, bleached-out black-and-white. The camera just follows Speed around. He conducts double decker bus tours of Manhattan. He conducts walking tours. He touches plants. He says that New York City is a living organism. He reads a poem called “Civilization” over slow-motion footage of crowds rushing off the Staten Island Ferry. He listens to the heartbeat of the Brooklyn Bridge. He talks about historical events in the present tense. Speed is a thin man, with glasses. He has long, curly hair, and his clothes are thrift shop chic. His face is pockmarked, and his eyes are dazed. He looks as if he were drawn by Jules Feiffer. His appearance also somewhat suggests the young Bob Dylan, and Zoot. He has a stylish, whimsical vocabulary, and speaks in great bursts of florid appositives. His voice, a lilting, nasal honk, brings to mind the voices of both Truman Capote and Big Bird. In one of the double decker scenes, he looks up at the Chrysler Building and informs the crowd that “the architectural critic Lewis Mumford called the Chrysler Building ‘uninspired voluptuousness.’” He pauses and then repeats the quote. “‘Uninspired voluptuousness,’ in the sun.” He looks up. It’s incredibly sunny. “Sunlight!” he exclaims. “Powerful.” Another pause, and then he snaps back into tour guide: “The sun, another great New York City landmark, above you on the left.” Also in the course of the film, Speed reveals that he is basically homeless, crashing on an alternating series of friends’ couches. He worked part time. He didn’t pay rent. “If I had an apartment,” he said in an interview, “I would just feel incarcerated by it.” This was highly fascinating talk to me, having just been evicted. Apartments are incarcerating! But as it turned out, The Cruise did not lead me to homelessness. It led me to something even more surprising – regular employment. I was inspired. I sat there in Connecticut that summer and watched The Cruise over and over again. I thought, there’s a job I could stand! I might really enjoy that. I could make my money doing something tolerable, talking about New York, and I can do things right this time and not lose another apartment. I knew I would have to become more knowledgeable about the city’s history, not to mention its present, so I started casually studying. BACK TO THE APPLE EVENTUALLY, JEN AND I were able to return to New York. For a couple of months, that summer inferno of 1999, we lived in a sublet in Astoria. Much to our surprise, we wound up renting an utterly charming two-story apartment on Westervelt Avenue in the St. George section of Staten Island. I spent the next four years floating back and forth between Staten Island and Manhattan. But right away, as soon as we’d set down our bags in Queens, I began trying to figure out how to become a tour guide. At that point, everything I knew about the New York City sightseeing industry, I knew from The Cruise. Based on that, I knew I wanted to work for New York Apple Tours, and not its rival, Gray Line. In the movie, Speed is working for Gray Line, but he reflects longingly on his prior career (“the city belonged to us at Apple!”). Partly, my preference for Apple was because I knew Speed had worked at Gray Line up to at least 1997, when the film was shot, and I didn’t want to be around too many people who knew him. I figured my tour would be a lot like his, at least in the beginning. So I found the number for New York Apple Tours. I called them and said I wanted to be a tour guide. “Are you licensed?” asked the woman on the other end. Thinking on my toes, I said, “What?” “Licensed. Do you have a license.” “License?” Obviously, I had a lot to learn. She told me that all tour guides in New York must pass an official licensing exam before they can work, and that I should contact the Department of Consumer Affairs, at 42 Broadway, for more information. She also suggested that I study The Blue Guide to New York City. I went to Barnes & Noble on East 86th Street to pick up a copy of the Blue Guide, and while I was there, I applied for a job. It was clear that I wasn’t going to become a tour guide right away. During my interview, the manager asked what I was doing with the guidebook. “I have a friend who wants to become a tour guide,” I said. “That’s a crummy job,” he told me. “The fumes from those buses will kill you.” Barnes & Noble hired me on the spot. I didn’t like working there. The whole first week I was there, in the middle of a record-breakingly hot summer, the air conditioning didn’t work. And I had to wear a tie, and a nametag. I was surrounded by what appeared to be literature, but which, my “superiors” explained, was actually “product.” Naively expecting to be working alongside people who loved books, I was depressed to find that for all my co-workers cared, we could have been selling cheeseburgers. Even the managers were clearly not there for love of the written word. They had previously been managers in other kinds of stores. They were professional managers. I mostly hid out upstairs in the men’s room, studying the Blue Guide. It’s hard to study for a test under those circumstances. I don’t mean the Barnes & Noble men’s room – which was actually quite conducive – but the lack of specific guidance on what to study, and the vastness of the subject matter. The Blue Guide alone contains an overwhelming amount of information. Its author, the sagacious Carol von Pressentin Wright, goes into painstaking detail about every room at the Met; clearly her work, definitive though it may be, could not be read cover to cover with any hope of retention. I knew a bit about the physical city. I could identify the major structures and districts, and I had a good sense of where things were. I’d also learned a lot of New York history and lore from books and movies. I was confident that as a performer I could effectively embody something of the city’s essence. But the first time I marched into Consumer Affairs, I failed the test. I spent a couple more weeks with the Blue Guide, went back, passed, and was licensed. Armed with my new credential, I went to Apple Tours and applied for a job. Everyone I spoke to was very impressed that I was already licensed. They couldn’t believe it. “Usually we don’t make them get licensed till they’ve been here for a while,” I was told. My audition consisted of five minutes on the microphone, in the middle of another guide’s tour, in the middle of Times Square. The manager who accompanied me was Ed Raff, a tall, old-time New Yorker with a resonant, sarcastic voice and a wry moustache. After I had my moment on the mic, he said, “I can tell right away you’re going to be a natural. You gotta know your information, but I never heard anybody get off a bus and say, ‘Oh, he had such wonderful information!’” I took this wisdom to heart. “The important thing,” said Ed Raff, with his wry moustache, “is that you have a style and a personality they can get into.” And so, I wrote a long, silly resignation letter to the manager of Barnes & Noble, filled with obnoxious generalizations about fascism. This letter was then sealed with wax and delivered by Jen and our friend, playwright Marc-Anthony Macon. They were dressed as Jedi knights. I don’t know what to say about that. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, I was an Apple tour guide. TERMINAL BLISS I WAS HIRED for five days a week, Sunday through Thursday, and the hours were murder. When you arrived at Apple Tours in the morning, you never knew how long you were going to be there. They were willing to put you on one tour after another, until there were no more left. My first few months, it was not unusual for me to do four downtown loops – which ran two or three hours each, depending on traffic – and a night loop after that. By the time I went home, my voice was but a croak. Gradually I noticed that the guides who were willing to fight for their freedom got to go home when they wanted to, so as the months went on, I began to drop hints after two or three tours that I was available for eight hours and no longer. The Apple terminal was on Eighth Avenue between 53rd and 54th. It was a long, narrow storefront, with everything painted red. At each end there was a souvenir shop, overflowing with foam Statue of Liberty crowns, little red tour buses, and disposable cameras. In the middle there was a desk. Above the terminal there was a parking garage. I would arrive at the terminal in the morning and sit around for a while with other tour guides, exchanging anecdotes and tidbits. Eventually, one of the dispatchers would summon me to a bus, and I’d do a tour. At the end of the tour, we’d be back at the terminal, where we might be loaded up with a new crowd of tourists and sent around again. The fleet of buses possessed by New York Apple Tours was the most beautiful and terrifying series of vehicles I’ve ever seen. Many of them were vintage Bristol buses, with the steering wheel on the right. Some of them were pretty solid; others swayed back and forth in the wind. Some broke down regularly. On one occasion, I was doing the Brooklyn tour, and the bus broke down right on the Manhattan Bridge. Standing on this tall, open vehicle, suspended in the air above the East River, with Manhattan staring back at us for an entire hour while we waited for the Apple mechanics to appear, fifty tourists and I became more intimate with the Lower Manhattan skyline than many New Yorkers get in their whole lives. Besides breaking down, the buses had other issues. They were a nightmare in terms of fuel efficiency, and their ancient engines fumed. It was on this basis that the Bristols were eventually phased out. Also, with any open-topped double decker bus, there is always the danger of people standing up and getting hit by traffic lights, branches, and signs. You always heard stories. “Don’t jump to concussions,” I’d warn, cribbing a line from Groucho Marx. And more than once, I had to physically pull a spacey sightseer away from an oncoming disaster. “Please remain seated while the bus is in motion,” I’d tell the crowd at the beginning, “because I wouldn’t want you to get ripped off twice in one day.” There was something about those buses, though. At their best, they were perfect. Their dimensions seemed absolutely designed for sightseeing in New York, and the tour guide – usually dangling for dear life over the staircase – could easily maintain sightlines with both the crowd and the city. Best of all, because of the open top and the generous height, they allowed you to see both the street scene and the tops of buildings. There was even one tour guide I met at Apple who took the test and became a guide simply out of affection for the Bristol buses. He knew all kinds of facts about them, and I suspect that on his tour he said as much about the bus as about the city. He was from upstate New York. Many guides who specialize in scholarly, intimate walking tours have an elitist disdain for the double deckers. In a way, it’s hard to blame them. The frustrations of double decker touring, many of which are because of the companies which operate double decker tour buses, can be overwhelming. But for those of us who have done our time in the trenches – particularly on the Bristols, and particularly at New York Apple Tours – that was the essence of tour guiding. There will never be anything like it again. WHEN I ARRIVED at Apple Tours in the summer of 1999, the company dominated its industry. There was Gray Line, of course, and there was New York Double Decker, but they lacked Apple’s vast fleet and street prominence. Gray Line had a reputation for treating its guides better, and even for paying slightly more; nevertheless, one guide after another seemed to defect, or return, to Apple, favoring its larger crowds and greater freedom. In those days, the downtown loop usually took a long break at Battery Park, whose eastern border was a wall of red tour buses, parallel parked, all day long. It was there that Apple and Gray Line guides mingled and got to know each other. Every so often, someone would switch to the other side. The Gray Line guides had little badges with their names on them, and under their names it said LECTURER. Not tour guide, but LECTURER. Gray Line was trying to cultivate the upper crust of tour guides, but operating under a system which favored seniority, it was a drag for initiates, and seemed badly lacking in fresh blood. Most of the Gray Line guides, it appeared, were tired old men wheezing lifelessly at indifferent crowds. Apple attracted a younger, hipper breed of tour guide, willing to deal with the renegade style of business management in exchange for the freedom which comes with managerial indifference. One of my fellow guides at Apple was Eef Barzelay, the lead singer and guitarist of the rock band Clem Snide. In a June 2001 interview with Philadelphia Weekly, Eef remembered Apple as “the company that kept hitting people, and was corrupt…that’s actually what was kind of good about working there, ‘cause they were so fucked up. I could just say ‘I’m goin’ away for three weeks!’ and they’d just be like, ‘All right!’ and I’d come back and they’d put me on a bus again.” Apple guides, at that point, also tended to be more of an ethnic and cultural mix than Gray Line’s – therefore, more reflective of the city’s population. It’s hard to think of a nationality which didn’t have at least one representative on the sightseeing staff of Apple Tours. In the very beginning, my tour was a pale imitation of Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s. I stopped myself from quoting him directly, but my whole concept of narrating a tour came from his example, and anyone familiar with The Cruise would have known instantly. Occasionally I asked about him; I was surprised to find that most of the people who worked at Apple had never heard of him or the movie. One or two people said they had heard something about it, but I couldn’t get any firsthand information, until I talked to Eva Lee. She was the tour guide dispatcher, or something, at that time. (It was hard sometimes to differentiate between jobs on the managerial level.) Eva ran the terminal. She appears for perhaps two seconds in The Cruise. She once told me that when she was eighteen, she threw herself in front of a Gray Line tour bus, and when the driver slammed on his breaks she asked how she could get a job at Gray Line. I don’t doubt for a second the legitimacy of this story. Around her neck, she wears a gold chain with a tiny double decker bus dangling from it. Like every former tour guide who had been promoted to an administrative position, Eva always said she missed being a guide. She’d worn a lot of hats in the business. She had worked at Gray Line and then Apple; later, she went back to Gray Line. She had been a ticket seller, a tour guide, a dispatcher, and a manager. “He was brilliant, but crazy,” Eva told me, when Speed’s name came up. “He would say incredible things.” And as I spent time in the business, I quickly realized that Speed had not stepped into a profession which particularly prized the self-styled urban philosopher. A lot of people expect the worst when a tour guide starts talking, and they automatically tune out. Others are perplexed to hear anything beyond the standard generic cheerleading. People don’t take tours expecting art, and I’ve always battled with the idea that maybe it’s presumptuous to give it to them. But if nobody is expecting a tour guide to be brilliant, it might be because so few of us actually are. Some of the tour guides I’ve met have been fantastic characters, vivid and verbal and original, who saw tour guiding as a form of expression. But the majority might as well be reading postcard captions. There are a lot of these bland, patronizing, tour-by-numbers guides, in the Disney World style, who get up and say, “How’s everybody doing today? Great! Did you know that the Empire State Building is 102 stories tall? That’s eight stories shorter than the World Trade Center! Wow! And while you’re in New York, be sure to try Ray’s Pizza. Mmmmmmm!” There are also a lot of highly intelligent, very knowledgeable tour guides, who pride themselves on being encyclopedias, and who cram their tours with facts, but no flair. They have a smugness about them, and are always quick to pounce on whatever they perceive to be a factual error. “It was built in 1947, not 1948!” They confuse knowing the facts with knowing the city. In their laborious effort to get all the information correct, they wind up painting a highly inaccurate picture. Of course, a tour guide must know what he or she is talking about. I certainly agree that a guide should know a lot of historical and statistical information about the city. Of course. And if a tour guide becomes so familiar with the facts that he or she becomes an expert, wonderful. But in my opinion, a tour guide who transmits information without transmitting anything personal is inevitably giving a bad, boring tour. These tourists don’t want to know what year the Holland Tunnel was built. They want to taste the New York City experience. That’s why they come here. If, on your way to delivering that, you inadvertently mention what year the Holland Tunnel was built, in the service of some larger point, great. But information like that is available in guidebooks. A tour guide is not a guidebook. CACOPHONY ONE DAY, AFTER finishing work at Apple Tours, I met up with Jen and Marc-Anthony in Central Park. They excitedly presented me with a small slip of paper, on which the name TIMOTHY SPEED LEVITCH was scrawled, in rococo handwriting. Under it there were two phone numbers – one marked “vm” for voicemail, and the other marked “sublet.” They explained that they’d been walking around the Village and happened upon Speed, who was staring up at the sky. They told him they loved The Cruise, and Jen told him about me, and that I had become a tour guide because of him. Now she and M-A were telling me to call him. For some reason, I decided that the thing to do, really, was invite him to come read a play with us. I guess I wanted to work with him. So in one day I wrote Cacophony, a New York City apocalypse story. I’d read an interview with Speed in which he suggested that one day Manhattan would sink into the water and become Atlantis. So that became the premise of Cacophony. I wrote a character for him, a verbose supernatural entity named Schist – as in Manhattan schist, the bedrock of the city. Then I called Speed’s voicemail. His outgoing message: “I have recently been the recipient of an express communication from intergalactic space aliens, who said that energy emanating from this voicemail will in the near future be affecting the movement of polar ice caps toward New York City. So go for it!” We spoke on the phone the following evening. I expressed my admiration, and he thanked me. I mentioned that I was working at Apple, and we kicked that around a little bit, and then I invited him to come to Staten Island for a play reading. “Yes,” he said immediately. “I would love to participate.” Just like that. We arranged to meet in Greenwich Village on Friday evening; Speed suggested the Cedar Tavern, because there were “some post-Impressionist ghosts” there who he thought I should meet. As we were saying goodbye, he said he was looking forward to “tying up the horses and walking through the river,” and signed off with his signature line, “Keep it alive!” Friday night, Speed was nearly an hour late, so I didn’t trouble him about the post-Impressionist ghosts. When he appeared at the door of the Cedar Tavern, it was startling to see him in color. He was wearing a yarmulke and a bright blue feather boa. He reminded me that it was Rosh Hashanah, which explained the yarmulke, but not the boa. Amanda, who was at the reading, later told me that when she’d commented on the boa, Speed said that he liked the color. That’s when she decided Speed was sincere. He was wearing that feather boa because he liked the color. Leaving the Cedar, the first thing we did was go to a drug store, because Speed wanted to buy a hairclip to hold his yarmulke on. So we did that, and I reflected on New York City and its unpredictability. It was really not long ago, I thought, that I was in Connecticut watching this guy in a movie; now I was in Greenwich Village, waiting while he shopped for hairclips. The mission accomplished, we headed downtown to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Speed told me he had never been on the Staten Island Ferry before, which was exciting – here was my tour guide guru, and a classic New York City experience I could introduce him to. We stood on the outside deck like tourists and gawked at the Statue of Liberty, which we both agreed was the product of repressed sexual feelings. I was very interested in talking shop. I wanted to know why he’d switched to Gray Line, since in the film he spoke so much more highly of Apple. “One more dollar an hour,” he said, snickering. “It was pure capitalism. Which is funny, because Harry Grant [the founder of Apple] is the one who taught me about capitalism.” He said that he missed the double deckers a little, but could not abide Gray Line’s new mandatory uniform policy, and was enjoying giving walking tours. “The double decker tour is like a symphony,” he said, “but the walking tour can be a beautiful violin solo.” We talked about New York Harbor. Speed said his favorite explorer was Verrazano. I expressed awe at the thought of Henry Hudson traveling up a river which would eventually bear his name, and Speed smiled and said, “We’re all traveling autobiographical waters.” He also talked a lot about a guidebook he was working on, which an independent publisher had commissioned “for very little money.” And he talked about the Burning Man festival, from which he had just returned. He said that it was difficult to be back, after the experience of New Rock City, where he had attended a wedding ceremony under the auspices of the Church of Holy Fucking Shit. The reading of Cacophony was fun, and some of us did hang out with Speed once more, about a week later, but true friendship never ignited. I was too much in awe of him to really be comfortable, and the degree to which I was still emulating him made it awkward. I left a couple of messages on Speed’s voicemail weeks later, but he never responded, so I backed off. It was okay, and probably just as well. I felt grateful for having spent some time with him. LABOR DAY NOT LONG AFTER THAT, I was given an exciting assignment by Cy Ross, one of Apple’s tour guide supervisors. Comedy Central was doing a big Labor Day 2000 marathon, throughout which there would be comedy spots wherein comedian Mark Curry (the star of the sitcom Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper) would interview people at work. They wanted a double decker tour guide. For about an hour, Mark Curry and I riffed back and forth on a tour bus. I would do a few lines from my standard tour, and then we’d joke it up. We sang “Take Me Back to Manhattan” by Cole Porter. The Comedy Central people asked if I ever did standup, and I said I had, which was true. Then they had me sign something and told me to watch for my appearance on Labor Day. When I saw it, I was horrified. I hadn’t seen myself tour before. There I was, on national television, on a double decker tour bus – acting like Speed Levitch, talking like Speed Levitch, and even looking a little like Speed Levitch. I felt stupid. Halfway to the big time, and I was doing someone else’s act! Well, maybe not halfway to the big time. But it was definitely someone else’s act. I couldn’t believe I’d been so unoriginal. I threw down the remote control in disgust. Leaping madly to my feet, I shouted, “Curses! Why must I have this chameleonic quality, sometimes, when I’m exposed to pop culture heroes?” Suddenly, to my great surprise, the ceiling opened. Bits of plaster fell to the floor, and the room became saturated with blinding white light. Then, I heard the deep, resonant voice of Woody Allen. “The secret isn’t being us,” he said, “it’s being you.” “Right!” I said. “That’s what Bogie told you in Play It Again, Sam. I’ve memorized the entire thing.” “I appreciate that,” he said. “Really. It’s good to be a fan. But when you emulate someone to a degree that is, let’s face it, totally psychotic…you submerge your own identity.” It made perfect sense. Woody was saying that if I acted like Speed, I couldn’t possibly be acting like myself, because I don’t act like Speed does, except when I’m acting like Speed. “Thanks for clearing that up,” I said. “It’s no problem,” he said, in that familiar booming voice. “Just ask yourself, how would you conduct a tour of Manhattan?” “I will,” I said. “Thanks a lot, Woody.” “Oh, please,” he said. “It’s Mr. Allen.” AND SO, THAT LABOR DAY thing on Comedy Central was really the end of the Timothy “Speed” Levitch portion of my touring career. I still really admire his work, and I’ve followed his subsequent projects with interest. When I read his book, Speedology, I was happy to find references to the Staten Island Ferry, and other bits I recognized from the night of the Cacophony reading. I like thinking of Speed as a mentor or a guru who inspired me in the beginning. Once, a few years ago, I randomly left him a voicemail, letting him know that I was doing well and wishing him the best. I didn’t leave my number. After Labor Day, it was hard to tour for a while, because I was rethinking my approach; it was like starting over. Bit by bit, I began to deconstruct the tour, and reconsider the city, and find fresh takes on things. As time went by, and I continued to navigate the choppy waters of my twenties, my experiences in the city kept giving me new angles. A personal New York City gospel began to emerge, and I started to develop a tour of my own. The preceding selection is an excerpt from Big Pond: Adventures of a Little Fish, an upcoming NYC tour book and sightseeing memoir by Noah Diamond. Stay tuned to noahdiamond.com for updates and information!