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Saturday evening I spent eight hours in Times Square. Alone. Of my own free will. And I would do it again.

I can say that, my dear subscriber, knowing that the rare confluence of circumstances that thrust me into the belly of the beast is unlikely to happen again soon. What happened was this: Both of my daughters had sleepovers, and my wife, Jean, had plans with her own friends. That left me flying solo from midday on—what was I going to do with myself?

This does not happen often. I’ve been married for a very long time, and we’ve had children for more than 16 years now. Which means that I’m never really alone. There’s always someone in the house working, reading, snacking, watching TV, playing Nintendo Switch, occupying the bathroom for mysteriously long stretches. I can hear them wherever they go and whatever they do—the apartment isn’t big. And when my family is around, there’s a very good chance I will be needed: to cook, to weigh in on a pre-calculus homework question, to weigh in on a social media caption, to discuss Attack on Titan or Frederick Douglass, to start the dishwasher or unload the dryer, to put up or take down the Muji suitcases from their storage nook, to replace a doorknob, or really just to be there, to be a person everyone can rely on. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy being that person, the one with the answers, the responsible one.

Once upon a time, however, I was often alone. From 2004 to 2012, when I was traveling all the time for work, often for weeks or months without a break, there was usually no one else around. Sure, I met up with friends and friends of friends (of friends) wherever I went, and forged new relationships with strangers, but the vast majority of my hours were spent solo. At times I felt pure freedom; at others I felt the crushing, merciless weight of loneliness. But through practice and endurance, I learned how to be by myself—how to handle myself, how to persevere, how to keep myself occupied, how to be alone with my thoughts, and even how to shake off solitude’s damp miasma and enjoy the feeling of unfettered movement. All possibilities were open to me—anything, anywhere!

But this solo Saturday was about to unfold not in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, or Bishkek but in Brooklyn, where I am, in theory, surrounded by friends and acquaintances, some I see frequently, others with whom I’m long overdue for a reunion. Still, I hesitated to make contact with them. Back in the day, it was almost guaranteed that most of them would be free, and we could all make plans for a movie or a drink without a second thought. Now, though, I’m 50, and my friends tend to be a handful of years on either side of that line, too: They, I assumed, were all dealing with the same constraints (spouses, kids, chores) from which I had just been released. Besides, I thought, I’ve done all that. Beers and a movie wouldn’t feel special; nor would staying home, cooking up my favorite home-alone meal (spaghetti carbonara), and re-bingeing The Expanse with a bottle of Barolo. No, this was my chance to do something different for once, but what would different mean?

So I took to Instagram and Facebook with a plea for ideas (“What should I do?”), and an hour later I was heading for Times Square to see a Broadway show.

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Times Square is both wretched and inevitable. Wretched because, well, obviously. It’s a seething pit of tourists and touts, costumed hucksters and misguided motorists, with nothing (or almost nothing) for actual New Yorkers but billboards, claustrophobia, stupidity, and woe. In Times Square you cannot move without rubbing yourself, body and soul, against the city’s worst impulses. Every year it’s gotten worse; it’s so purely contrived now, with so few organic businesses and phenomena, that the very thought of being there for any length of time, let alone having to pass through its streets, prevents me from crossing the East River. I say this from long experience: My first job in New York City was in Times Square, where I worked on the twelfth floor of the MTV building, and after lunch we could hear the teenage screams echoing up the skyscraper canyon from TRL, which was shooting below. Fifteen years later, I was back, working at Condé Nast just at the edge of the square itself; any time I needed to walk uptown, I took shortcuts through mid-block building lobbies and parking garages to avoid the mess. No wonder Condé’s cafeteria was so popular—who would dare face that scene?

To be fair, I did find the gems that spoke of another, more ancient, more human Times Square. I drank a martini at the last Howard Johnson’s and cheap shots at Siberia, ate rice and beans from Margon, slurped matzoh ball soup at the old Café Edison. I had cheap beers at Jimmy’s and mezcal Negronis at the Rum House. I met my editors at the hulking New York Times building, and over the years saw Liev Schreiber, Edie Falco, Daniel Radcliffe, and Wendell Pierce perform onstage. I’ve taken buses to and from Port Authority without the benefit of Lexapro, and I’ve run up Seventh Avenue, not long after dawn, to Central Park, in the NYC Half Marathon.

What I had never done in Times Square, at least until last Saturday, was stand on line at the TKTS booth. For an hour. It moved slowly, the line, and in the afternoon light I tried to appreciate the scene: the quartet of Spanish girlfriends ahead of me, the selfie-stick-wielding tourist who without a word put his arm around me for a photo then moved silently on to someone else. The billboards pulsed with 3D AI energy. A crowd cheered dancers I couldn’t see. I wanted to see it all as if it were new—Bubba Gump, the Pélé soccer shop—but the thing is, it wasn't new. You can only watch these visitors so many times, listen to their languages and accents, observe their outright joy at having arrived at the center of New York Fucking City before it all becomes an undifferentiated background, a scramble of color and sound that can only be ignored. I put on my New York “Don’t talk to me” face. For a few minutes, I fell into my phone before extricating myself. No—not the phone. Instead, as the line inched forward, I chose to treat it like the subway. I pulled a novel from my bag—Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions—and made steady progress, glancing up at the TKTS board only occasionally to wonder what I should see. Sunset Boulevard, highly recommended by R., the Instagram friend who suggested Broadway in the first place? The Book of Mormon, whose soundtrack is a favorite on our family road trips? Betty Boop did not appeal, and neither Glengarry Glen Ross nor The Portrait of Dorian Gray was on offer. When I finally reached the booth, I chose Redwood, the new Idina Menzel musical, partly because my friend P. is an investor but also because IDINA MENZEL.

I had time to kill before curtain, so I dragged my Vonnegut to the shittiest, quietest Irish tavern I could find—the Playwright Celtic Pub, whose sad four-story building is surrounded by construction sites and whose young, tattooed Latino bartenders all wore bright green T-shirts. Hey, it was almost Saint Patrick’s Day! In some ways this was all I wanted from my Hall Pass—to read 100 pages of a good book over a couple of pints of Guinness and fries, and to do it both in the middle of everything and in the middle of nowhere. There’s something I love about reading in the center of a storm—I’m there amid the action, but I’m also elsewhere, deep in an alien story. I think this may be one of those psychological tricks that allows me to evade the discomfort of travel: Call me Schrödinger’s tourist.

With 30 minutes to go and 20 pages to read, I hurried four blocks south to the Nederlander, where a mere $97 had landed me in the fourth row, one seat in from the aisle, close enough to see the stars’ clouds of saliva as they sang. (Pandemic’s over, right? Right?!?) Redwood opened just a month ago, so here’s the story: A grief-stricken gallerist (Menzel) drives from New York to Eureka, California, where she falls in love with a tree. More or less. The production is fantastic, with a sloping stage, a massive sequoia, and immersive video effects that spectacularly convey the immensity of the forest and the exhilaration of scaling its heights. The spoken dialogue, among Menzel, her character’s wife, and the tree scientists she meets in Eureka, is pretty snappy, with Menzel gamely demonstrating she can act as well as sing. But, you know, she can also sing, and in Redwood she’s singing—belting, really—almost the whole show. Which is, of course, why I was there, why everyone was there, to let her voice, that voice, wah-ah-ah-ah-ash over us for 110 minutes. So what if the lyrics were flat and unmemorable? For one night, I could let it go.

🪨

Ten o’clock. A misty rain speckling midtown. Dense, slow, uncomfortable crowds. Hunger. In my list of Times Square gems above, I left out my favorite, saving it for now: Hagi. Since 1985, it’s been a raucous, warm, crowded izakaya, open late and open to all. Until about a decade ago, it was in a basement on 49th Street, a gritty, smoky dungeon where you’d drink too much beer and shochu, feast on sashimi and endless skewers of yakitori, and wobble back up the steps sometime in the wee hours, not entirely sure whether you’d emerge into Times Square or back-alley Ginza. I want to say I used to go there often, but let’s be honest: I probably hadn’t been there more than half-a-dozen times.

And in the latest interim between my visits, Hagi had moved—to 51st Street and a shiny, aboveground bar and dining room, adorned with Japanese pop culture tidbits, heavy on anime. Not quite as atmospheric as the old location, but what can you do. I took a seat at the corner of the bar and ordered a Sapporo, hamachi sashimi (served at just the right temperature), fried oysters with a thatch of shredded cabbage, and an array of yakitori. To my left was a visitor from New Hampshire, in town to work for a company shooting video of the elite women running the NYC Half Marathon the next morning; we chatted a bit, and I was going to buy him a drink to keep him around, but he was pretty buzzed and I didn’t want him to miss the race.

To my right was a trio—and this, my readers, is maybe where it gets weird. Because how do you approach this situation? You’re at the bar, and three interesting-looking people in their mid-thirties are talking right next to you. Do you ignore them, focus on your food, watch the Knicks lose to the Golden State Warriors, and head home? Do you say to yourself This is my night alone and stick to that singular program? Do you maybe not even notice them, not hear them mention Valencia and Yangon and Facebook and human rights, not wonder if maybe they’re your kind of people?

Because I can’t not do that. I don’t know if it’s my background as a travel writer, when I needed to navigate these situations all the time, or if it’s because I’m just a friendly guy, or if it’s because I’m a raging egomaniac who can’t help inserting himself into situations where he maybe doesn’t belong. All I know is that my mode adjusted, my ears perked up. I ate my food and drank my Sapporo and half-listened, then three-quarters-listened, and at some point I calculated the right thing to say to get me in.

I don’t remember what it was now. But let’s say it had something to do with Myanmar, which is where one of the trio—a librarian-glam woman we’ll call Kh.—was from, and where she’d spent time with her now-boyfriend, A., the balding white guy from Cleveland who was sitting next to her. I could do this because I’ve been to Myanmar a couple of times, and to odd ends of the country (eastern Shan State), and at unusual eras in its recent development, and while I’m certainly no expert, I have some experience. And so we got into it, talking about mohinga and mango shoots and the differences between Burmese and Shan and Kachin cuisines, and somehow that all turned into talk of relationships, and I told them tidbits from my history with Jean—how I fell for the way she attacked a dish of ganjang-gejang in Koreatown—and we ordered more shochu, and then I found out the third member of their gang, a woman we’ll call Ka., was not only from Japan, not only from Nagano, but from Azumino, a small town two and a half hours northwest of Tokyo that may be my no. 1 favorite place in Japan (not to mention the home of some very dear friends). The three of them were all in Hagi because Kh. and A. were up visiting from Washington, D.C., where their work in human rights was, um, not entirely in sync with the current mood of the capital. Tourists! I love tourists!

No, I loved these tourists (and Ka., who lives in Brooklyn and studies disinformation). They were cool, with good strange stories to tell and aggressive questions to ask—they lived, much as I like to think I can live. And even if my approaches to them were calculated, practiced, they held their own, they were experts at talking to me: We were all equals in this formerly underground bar, local-visiting tourists encountering a local playing at tourist.

This—this was why I didn’t stay home. Because I needed to make myself uncomfortable in my own city, to see how I’d react, to see what I’d discover, to see who I’d meet and what would happen if I got the hell over myself and engaged with a place it’s far too easy to avoid. I do that a lot—I retreat. I think we all do that a lot more now than we used to, because there’s so much to enthrall us on our screens and because our beds are so cozy and because it’s safer and we need that safety, crave that safety, in ways we didn’t a decade ago. I crave it, too, and it’s because I crave it that I need to remind myself that I don’t also need it—that I can, that we can, still live full lives out in the world, which however unfriendly remains a place of potential connection. Did I make new friends that night? Maybe! At the very least, I think, I hope, I found three new guests for my pig roast next September. 🪨🪨🪨

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