xtcian

6/19/02 Nobody has the tenacity

6/19/02

Nobody has the tenacity of my sister, something that was made clear to me again today by 10:45AM, as she set off to Bear Mountain to begin the 350-mile AIDS ride with her co-workers from the Union Square Caf. This is pretty amazing, considering she has a sub-par bike – most of the riders I saw were on $1200 cycles made from latticed polymers, weighing a third of an ounce – and that she never rode more than 70 miles in her training. But there I was, loading her bike and two others on the back of the car and schlepping them all up the Harlem Valley so they could pound out the four-day ride to Boston.

The other passengers were Beth and Simone Beth wants to be a yogi, Simone wants to be an actress, and both are servers at Union Square until either of those things happen. Beth still carried the knee scars from a wipeout she had last week. Those girls, who tonight are sleeping nervously in a tent on Bear Mountain, are, dare I say it, a good bit braver than I. What stuns me is Michelle's compassion; she's willing to slog 350 miles through the heat on an old mountain bike for an AIDS cure, and I'm reasonably sure she doesn't even know anybody with the disease.

Beth, Simone and Michelle pre-ride. Click on the picture for a short Quicktime movie showing a typical interaction between Sean and Michelle at dinner

After driving the gals upstate (and then backtracking back up again Michelle had forgotten her wallet), I dropped by New City to see Jamie Block at Prudential Securities. Nestled deep in an office park that could definitely have been worse (and would have been, if it were in North Carolina), his office had a clean, early-90s sheen with that curious landscaping that seems to be taking over America. While not as Orwellian as the stuff built in the '60s, there is almost something sadder about the intensely-manicured stretches of tiny lawn that greets the modern-day hotelgoer or investment counselor.

Jamie, of course, couldn't be happier. He actually likes playing with money, and is good at it, like his father was. It reminds me of the guilds, where the patriarch passed down his smithy job to the sons. Sure, the sons would try to be a bard for a few years, but pretty soon, the smithies would come calling. Two years ago, Jamie had a record deal at Capitol; now he's part of an investment group worth a quarter of a billion. And he's much happier. I kind of miss doing lines of coke off the stomach of a chick in the kitchen of a bar on Avenue B, but hey, why live in the past?