On Valentine�s Day, Nya and I went back to the scene of the crime � downtown Brooklyn, New York. We stayed at a new Marriott that opened a few years back by the bridge and had dinner at 5 Front Street. We originally planned on going to the River Caf�, right next to the Brooklyn Bridge footing, but it was insanely expensive. Maybe we really don�t want to give money to them anyway, as they used to often call the cops on us as kids because we were drinking and partying right next to them under the bridge (UTB!).

Of course, my father drove us in and took forever on a roundabout route. (This won�t really make sense unless you understand New York geography, but since he didn�t want to go through Manhattan, he took the Whitestone Bridge from the Bronx into Queens. Fair enough so far. But then, instead of taking the BQE into downtown Brooklyn, he went all the way across Queens on the Van Wyck and then went northon the BQE and Gowanus.) It was very frustrating, but I didn�t say anything. After all, I�d be out of there once he dropped us off.

We met a Saint Ann�s classmate in the hotel lounge. She was my best friend in later high school and tore up the town with me in San Francisco the summer of 1994. She went to Brown for college and used to sneak me into the dining hall (the �Ratty�) when I visited (visiting her is why I was in Providence for that riot in �93). Her partner is getting a position at Cornell, so she�s moving to Ithaca which is even farther away than New York City. I miss her so. I should email more often.

After she left, we went up to the room. I went to use the toilet and it exploded. When I flushed, still sitting down on it, it started overflowing beneath me. Gah! I jumped up away from it, grabbing onto the grab bar on the wall on my left. But I couldn�t hold myself up long and collapsed into the corner on the water-covered floor. Damn! Nya was especially furious. We hadn�t paid hundreds of dollars for this! She called down and screamed at the front desk. They sent up maintenance and a couple of hotel detective-types, who checked me out to make sure I was okay (one of them was a big fan of Chicago for some reason and appreciated it when I told the story of meeting Mike Ditka).

After that excitement, we rented a pay-per-view movie and fell asleep watching it. When we got up, it was almost time for our dinner reservation so we changed into fancy clothes and called a cab. The short drive to the restaurant was through the wilds of DUMBO, a neighborhood that didn�t even exist when we were kids. The area (mostly uninhabited buildings and decaying warehouses back then) had a perfectly good name: Fulton Ferry. But that didn�t sound like the uber-desirable Soho, so real estate brokers dubbed it with the horrible acronym DUMBO � Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Ugh, terrible.

The restaurant was very pretty inside, but didn�t have the skyline view I thought it would (it was facing the wrong way). Ah well. We all know what the New York skyline looks like anyway. It was a five-course menu. I got pork belly as an entr�e because, even though it was hard for me to cut, I think it�s my favorite cut of meat. I also got a Brooklyn Lager, the beer of my youth. At the end of the meal, they gave us a complimentary champagne toast. Nya can�t have champagne (she got ginger ale instead), but I drank mine. After the champagne and a pint of beer, I was pretty toasty. Like I�ve said, I�m sort of a lightweight these days.

After we came back to the hotel, we went to sleep. (Well, first we did the sort of things you do in a hotel on Valentine�s Day�) In the morning, we had breakfast in the hotel restaurant and took a car service to the airport. Our flight back was delayed five days, but I think that�s a story for another time.

� 2007 Geoff Gladstone

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