4.

The hostel in Chelsea was booked out for weeks. The receptionist suggested a place in Brooklyn doing cheap short-stay. I caught the subway there and checked in. Something inside me was running the show now. A concoction of fear, sadness, excitement and anger, all mixed in the perfect ratios to fuel me with nervous energy. I felt as though I was doing something I shouldn’t be, and if I slowed down, then I’d be caught by some invisible enforcer and the game would be up.

I called my bank and asked if the total amount for the house sale had been transferred yet. It hadn’t. I was comfortable for money from the house deposit, at least for a little while, though the cost of the empty seat I was paying for to fly across the Pacific at that very moment didn’t help.

I grabbed a newspaper and searched for the classifieds with such ferocity I ripped some pages. A payphone on the corner of the block swallowed my coins with a metallic gulp. Wiping the handset with my jacket cuff, I scanned the page I’d torn out. Three circles, drawn so quickly the paper had punctured, encompassed three used- car listings. Two had accompanying photos, one was just words, but they all fitted a particular theme: they were in my budget, and ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than what I had planned.

The first’s contact was simply: ‘KING’. I punched in the number and waited. ‘What?’ barked back through the phone. I asked to see the car as soon as possible and within half an hour I was on my way to the Bronx. Walking downstairs from the station, I rounded a corner and there it was – a champagne Ford Mustang convertible. I extended a hand more upwards than outwards to its huge Black owner as he stepped out. He seemed taken aback by the formality, but shook it.

‘Mark.’

‘King,’ he snarled, showing teeth of diamonds and gold.

‘What’s your real name?’ I asked, following him to the car. ‘It’s, just, I don’t think the DMV would accept “King” on the forms.’

He stopped and turned back with low brows. My smile disappeared.

‘Call me King.’

I drove around the block, deciding halfway through my first lap that peak hour in the Bronx was not the best place to pilot a left-hand-drive car for the first time. The Mustang pulled to the right when coasting and to the left when braking, but it was mean. The engine and the sound it produced were burly – any pressure applied to the throttle translating back into my gut tenfold as the car surged forward. The car was made to live on a highway carving through some desert, but the body was badly rusted and the brakes made an awful noise when used too much. I knew nothing about cars, but even I was seeing red flags.

‘How much do you want?’ I asked King.

‘Five-K-five, my man.’

‘That’s a little steep. How low could you go?’

‘Hmm. Five-K-five.’

I took the subway back to Brooklyn and used a bar’s phone to check the other listings. One had been sold; the other could be viewed the following afternoon. I called Claire and told her I’d pushed my flight back to spend more time in New York. She said she was glad I was enjoying the city so much.

The next day I caught the subway to lower Manhattan and boarded the Staten Island Ferry. I walked quiet blocks of white picket fences and manicured lawns, beautiful houses and perfectly waxed cars in driveways, pretty birds chirping in pretty trees. This was an America I’d always imagined, but never thought could exist so close to Manhattan’s chaos. Approaching the address I was given, I saw the car out front. ‘Oh, god,’ I said to myself, almost turning back right then.

Its owner stepped out through the front door with a swinging wave. A young Hispanic guy. His name was Carlos, but he told me I could call him Carl. He showed me around the car, which he seemed to take more pride in than its appearance suggested.

‘It’s a 1989 Mazda Miata,’ he told me. The diminutive convertible wore its eight-year age worse than I thought possible. A skewed, chipped bumper wrapped around pop-up headlights at the front, with a cracked panel and black soot around the exhaust pipe garnishing the rear. Its red paint had faded from a glossy finish to more of a chalky one. The wheels had been spray-painted black – I assumed to cover damage – and the antenna was stuck at full-mast, bent almost ninety degrees. Rust festered beneath the doors and patches of paint were missing.

‘Let’s go for a spin,’ Carlos said, throwing me the keys. I pulled on the driver’s door handle and nothing gave. ‘Oh, yeah, that only opens from inside,’ he added, reaching over the passenger seat, unlocking and pushing it open for me.

‘Cool,’ I said, lowering myself into the seat and pausing.

‘What’s up?’ Carl asked.

‘This is manual.’

‘Sure is. Five-speed manual transmission, and smooth as a waxed pussy.’

‘I don’t know how to drive manual. Your ad didn’t mention it.’

‘Come on, man, it’s a sports car. Of course it’s gonna be stick. Just give it a try.’

I started the engine and found my feet, and Carl’s, swimming in an ocean of red, blue and green light.

‘What is that …?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yeah! I put these lights down there and wired them into the speakers. They pump to the bass of whatever song you’re listening to. It’s awesome.’

He fiddled with a controller fitted to the side of the transmission tunnel, pushing buttons that cycled through various modes of the light show.

‘Cool, huh?’

‘Can they be turned off?’

‘Yeah sure, I mean, if you wanted to. They’ll just turn back on next time you start her though.’

‘For fuck’s sake …’

After a two-minute explanation of how to drive a manual car, I bucked my way out of Carlos’s driveway and we were off. The engine was smooth but loud, due to a rusted-out section of exhaust. The Miata didn’t have the same grunt as the Mustang, but it would rotate with enthusiasm wherever the wheel was turned. We settled on $1300 and filled out the bill of sale.

‘Whoa, what state is this from?’ he asked, studying my licence.

‘Victoria, in Australia.’

‘No shit … you live here now or what?’

‘No, just travelling.’

‘Why not rent a car then?’

‘Don’t know how long I’ll need it.’

Carlos’s mother arrived home during the sale. In a matter of minutes she’d decided my story sounded suspicious and was on the phone to her husband. In a matter of a few more minutes, she’d decided I looked like I needed to eat. She warmed up a chicken cutlet and put it down before me at the table. It was the first meal I’d had in America that wasn’t eaten at a bar or a deli or a fast-food outlet. It was nice to sit in a home where people lived, to eat with the company of framed photographs of families, not baseball stars or musicians.

Carlos’s father decided my story checked out. Carlos cleared his belongings from the Miata, one of which was a crowbar. ‘Never know when you might need one. There’s a lot of looneys out there,’ he said when he saw me staring. He drove his family’s car back to Brooklyn while I followed in the Miata and stalled or bucked away from each stop along the way. Carlos uninstalled the hardware holding the plates on – which consisted of one bolt and three zip ties – shook my hand and was on his way. I leant over the passenger seat and locked the driver’s side door. Taking a step back onto the footpath, I placed my hands on my hips and took in the magnificence of my purchase. ‘What a pile of shit,’ I muttered.

Registering the car was painful. After three days of back-and-forth subway rides, photocopiers, waiting rooms and being turned away for inadequate documentation, a clerk finally disappeared into a backroom of the Manhattan DMV and returned with two fresh New York state plates. I ran my fingers over them as he spoke.

‘Secure these to the front and rear of the vehicle in a visible location. You have ten days to have the vehicle inspected. Next!’

‘So it’s done?’

‘Is what done? The vehicle is registered, sir. Next!’

‘Like … it can be driven? I can get in it and drive wherever I want?’

‘Yes, that is typically what a registered vehicle is used for. Next!’

An old woman sitting next to me on the subway back to Brooklyn looked at the plates in my lap.

‘I just registered my car. I’m gonna drive it,’ I said.

‘Good for you.’

I justified staying the following days in Brooklyn on the basis I’d already paid for a week’s accommodation, but there was something else hindering me. I loathed admitting it, but my father’s eloquence rang true, even two decades later. New York City was brutal in so many ways, but I felt safe. I couldn’t tell if the city was made hard by the people, or the people made hard by the city. Nevertheless, it belonged to them, and they to it – like a parasite and its host, the order of which eluded me. Its geography, with the Atlantic just over its shoulder, gave me a sense of being at the edge of the earth. People tend to feel their safest or most vulnerable when cornered.

My room key disappeared into the letterbox at the unmanned reception. I stepped through the front door and into the morning sun. The air was cool and still, the sun unobscured yet forgiving. My favourite type of weather. The boot lid fought back as my bag was squeezed against the floor. I hadn’t thought to check if my luggage was larger than the available space. It was. I transferred clothes into my backpack and threw it onto the passenger seat and placed my weight onto the boot lid for a second attempt. The latch clicked shut and I moved back in small steps with raised hands, expecting the rear of the car to pop like a shaken champagne bottle at any moment, then walked into a deli around the corner to fuel myself.

‘Morning, do you do coffee?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Great, I’ll have a flat white then.’

The shopkeeper scrunched his brow and opened the display between us. He removed a white bagel, laid it on the chopping board, and began sawing it in half.

‘No, no, a coffee.’

‘You want a coffee or a bagel?’ he said, slamming his fists down on the board.

‘Sorry, a coffee. A flat white coffee.’

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘Okay, what type of coffee do you do?’

‘Caw-fee,’ he spat, pointing to a dispenser in the corner with a large, red tap handle protruding through a photo of a white-toothed woman smiling over a mug of brew she obviously hadn’t bought there. I looked at the machine and back to him. He continued pointing at it with his left hand, his right against the board, white knuckles wrapped around the knife handle. The machine gurgled as I pulled the tap, a molten black mess spewing into my cup a moment later. It was immediately too hot to hold, and I sleeved the first cup into another.

‘Hey, you can’t take two cups,’ he said, still watching me.

‘Fuck yourself. I’ll pay for two,’ I retorted, to both of our surprise. He shrugged and went back to preparing sandwich ingredients. I walked to the counter and threw two ones down as the clerk opened the register.

‘For that, you can throw in the hacked-up bagel as well,’ I said to him, not breaking my stare. He looked at me for a second, then bagged the bagel and handed it over.

‘You have a good day, sir,’ he said.

‘And you too.’

As I sat in the car, sipping coffee and chewing a bagel, I laughed to myself. In my final moments in New York, the city had given something back. A forgettable breakfast to most, but a trophy to me. I had seen something I wanted, and I had taken it.

Taking a breath, I tested my newfound self-assuredness right away. I removed the letters from my pocket and turned pages until I reached the second. Nausea swelled as I consumed the words, but not stemming from fear like it had in Melbourne. This was different: it was an overwhelming sense of anticipation.

I started the engine, turned off the footwell disco lights, and clunked my way from the kerb out into the street, following signs into Manhattan. I dropped the soft top at a set of lights and put on my sunglasses. Two women covered their mouths, laughing and pointing as they crossed the road. After a few more turns, I was in a tunnel under the Hudson River, emerging from its other side into sunshine. A long, sweeping left-hander guided me higher and higher before opening out at the top of a large crest. Roads and buildings and greenery stretched in all directions under the blue sky.

I removed a cigarette from the pack resting in the cup holder, and the beat-up flip lighter from my shirt pocket. Turbulent wind pummelled me. I leant forward under the windshield to escape it. The flint spat sparks, and the fresh, white wick I’d replaced while hunched over a bar the night before was engulfed in flame. I sat back and drew a deep breath through the cigarette. A large, imposing sign ahead arrowed towards each lane: ‘Pennsylvania’ marked the furthest right.

It glided over me like some great gatekeeper deciding if I was worthy to pass. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said aloud. I moved to the right lanes, getting the Miata into fifth gear as I worked it up to seventy. With another deep breath, I headed for the horizon.