Travelling Freelancer
Mr. Kim: New York Extract
My favourite home of all was a rooftop duplex on Columbus Avenue at 69th Street, a block from Central Park and a couple of blocks from Lincoln Center. It was four flights up, with a big open-plan living area, eight large windows, wooden floorboards, a working fireplace, a kitchen and a double bedroom. A spiral staircase led to a second bedroom built onto the roof, with a window at one end and French doors at the other, opening through a wisteria tree onto a garden of barrel planters and Astroturf.
I fell in love with it on first viewing and dismissed it as slightly above my price bracket, which at $1,400 a month it was. But every time I walked past that corner of Columbus Avenue it pinged in me, and as I was earning well as a freelancer I finally thought, screw it, called the agent and handed over the deposit. It was the kind of place around which you build a memorable life, and I knew that Beau, then nine, would love being so close to the park. He did. It ties in with a common theme among travellers: life’s short, so take the plunge, take the trip across country, get the dream pad, even if it seems irrational and out of reach.
At first I used the upstairs room as an edit suite and installed an Avid there, then a rare and expensive piece of kit. Before that I had cut on ¾-inch U-matic. Working from home and never leaving it, as anyone who lived through lockdown will sympathise, turned out to be bad for my psychological health, so I moved the Avid to a unit at Alan Weiss Productions in midtown and advertised the spare room in the Village Voice.
The first respondent was a singer-songwriter and backing vocalist with Clapton’s touring group. She was clean, professional and never made trouble, and her friends were genuine artists, older baby boomers who had survived the rock ‘n’ roll circus and were teetotallers and devoted followers of the recovery programmes. One of them, the lyricist of Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, liked to say of the survivors of their group: ‘Born to be mild.’ He also scorned new-age karmic theories about stepping on bugs and the like, which he found ludicrous. We were of different generations. Theirs was a completely ‘dry’ non-partying, puritanically reformed and important to them state of mind, and within a few months we parted ways. I placed a second ad in the Village Voice for my spare room in a gorgeous Upper West Side apartment: ‘Dependable, quiet and considerate but open to enjoying yourself on occasion.’
Beau came out twice a year from London, and for the two of us the local escapes were Fire Island, a beautiful place with no cars and free-roaming deer, the Catskills and Woodstock, and Burlington, Vermont, home of Ben & Jerry’s and Bernie Sanders, where my friend Martin Guigui had family. Martin was a bandleader and musician I’d hired on corporate films in New York, and later a film director, for whom I’d edit a feature, Swing (more of that later). In winter you can take a small passenger plane up to Burlington and see the most amazing snowy landscapes from a couple of thousand feet, which Beau and I did, and it’s a sight we’ll never forget.
I’ve probably driven the length and breadth of the USA a few times over, usually with Beau in tow, but the big trip is driving cross-country, the journey made famous by Kerouac in On the Road. This I finally did one summer, while a freelance film and TV editor in New York, not long after meeting the man who became my flatmate: Mr. Kim, from South Korea.
Most of the people who answered the second ad were actors who had come to New York to tread the boards and were looking for a nice place to call home, and most seemed to be trying too hard. Mr. Kim, beneath his trilby hat, was the most unassuming of them. He said very little. When I asked what he did, he told me he worked as an adviser to the president of South Korea and had come back to New York to experience the American culture he’d missed while studying too intensely at Columbia to pass the bar exam in a year. He hadn’t really spoken, read or written English when he enrolled. He had one other specification: he wanted someone with time to share the recreational enjoyment of America, ideally someone who would drive across the country with him to the West Coast, in a car he planned to buy, a Saab. I was freelancing and regularly took holiday breaks, so it was possible, though it sounded longer than I usually took off to travel with my son.
He didn’t seem to be acting, if anything the opposite, more like a man carrying a few secrets, but modest. As I showed him round and we stood in the rooftop garden looking out over Columbus Avenue, I had the strangest feeling that this was someone I definitely wanted to know. Not romantically, but, like the flat itself, something inside me said: this one, choose this one. That evening I called him and said I’d seen a lot of people but had a feeling we’d make good flatmates, and I wanted to say so before he found another place. He said he had looked at others but had the same instinct.
When Mr. Kim moved into the small double bedroom off the main floor, one of his first questions was about the phone, fax and answering machine, which he needed so his office in South Korea could reach him. I showed him how to record a message on the machine on the mahogany sideboard by the entrance, and played him the existing one: Beau and me goofing around, singing an improvised ‘You’ve got through to Charley and Beau, we’re not in right now’ song.
‘You like music, and to sing,’ Kim said.
‘I love music. I don’t really know how to sing. My voice sounds strange to me. But I’ve always played, mostly guitar and some piano.’
We began what he called a project for the better understanding and enjoyment of the city he’d missed. We started downtown in Little Italy, where there was a festival and we ate and drank cold beer till late, then moved uptown into his world: Korean restaurants. Our building sat above a Japanese restaurant I frequented, but Kim made clear that Korea had suffered a history of cultural appropriation, primarily by Japan and, in language, writing and the arts, also by China, so we sought out the real Korean deal alongside the best of the western spots. Korean food was new to me and well worth the experience, with dishes often arranged around a table grill or boiling water or oil so that diners cook right there. I liked most of what I tried, but some dishes, like kimchi, are a taste some of us will never acquire.
Korean karaoke was also very different from ours. In the West you sing in bars. Here we were escorted to a private room with a screen and a menu folder of song codes, mostly K-pop, with beers, sodas and snacks included, and the staff recorded the whole session onto a cassette, which they gave us as a keepsake. As a younger man Kim had pursued a career in K-pop. His father, a traditional patriarch, later forbade it as beneath a young man from a good family and sent him to law school, but Kim had made a splash, so much so that a number of his tracks were on the menu, and he sang them live in front of me. There were also several somewhat strained attempts at ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ and the inevitable shot at ‘My Way’. We took the tape home and listened to our antics. Contrary to my embarrassed protestations, Mr. Kim said I had the makings of a very good voice, particularly on ‘Lonesome Tonight’.
He also drank foul-tasting herbs every day to balance his system. In Korean medicine, he explained, there are four basic types of people, which he described as plus-plus, plus-minus, minus-plus and minus-minus, with yin corresponding to minus and yang to hot or warm energy. Hot substances, like whiskey and, oddly, potato, disturb the balance, depending on your type. The herbs were necessary because, after his fiancée left him, saying he cared more about his ambitions in coming to New York to get his law degree than about their relationship, he had spent a year holed up in an apartment mourning with a bottle of whiskey. It had left a mark on his system, mainly exhaustion. He blamed himself for not investing enough in the relationship, which he said was one of our deepest purposes in life: the bond between a man and a woman.
He demonstrated a test in our kitchen. You extend one arm horizontally while a friend presses down on it, to gauge your natural resistance. Then you hold in the other hand a substance you suspect is bad for you, such as a cigarette, a beer or a piece of cloth, and your friend presses again. The weaker your arm, the more harmful the substance is to your system. Amazing, I said, as we tried it on his foul-smelling mixture.
He was also open to esoteric arts, such as channelled ‘spirit’ drawings, and one day asked me to try one. Looking at my random doodles, among them a heartbeat sensor hooked up to a music system, the rhythm of life, he said I had an odd mix of technical and artistic. To feed his more practical intelligence, he read voluminous technical manuals for the cars, equipment and white goods he was buying to ship home to Korea. He said that from the manuals he could tell the quality and care the makers had put into the products. It seemed very Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to me. I never discerned a malicious bone in him. This was before the boom in South Korean technology, not to mention music and soap operas, which has since replaced Latin and Turkish TV dramas as some of the most popular content consumed globally.
He told me, too, how readily his government embraced far-out ideas and guest speakers, among them one who claimed that the explorer Scott had discovered a populated land beneath Antarctica, which still existed and had been kept from the public. At times it became too much and I had to excuse myself and climb the spiral stairs to process what he had said. I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories, but esoteric beliefs don’t bother me when they come from someone who seems to be coming from a good place.
We were an odd couple, windows into opposite cultures. I told him about my chequered upbringing among hippies and rock stars, and about working as a freelance editor in the city, while he opened up an eastern world I’d never imagined: its food, medicine, martial arts, and an East Asian idea that we are part of a larger system, valuing the good of the many over the individual and using adversity as an opportunity to strengthen key virtues.
Knowing how much I loved music, Kim sensed that although I had an interesting voice, I hadn’t developed the muscles needed to express the emotion I was trying to put into the songs. He showed me the proper posture and breathing technique. In Korea, he explained, if you wanted to learn to sing you were sent down to the waterfalls every day for two or three months to ‘sing your heart out’, where the sound of the water meant you couldn’t hear your mistakes while a strong voice developed. It was a bit like the Native American way of choosing the person you wanted to be and then walking towards that person.
‘But there are no waterfalls here,’ I said. ‘We’re on the Upper West Side.’
‘No problem. Go to a music store and buy a decent pair of ear-covering headphones. You get the same effect.’
‘But surely a flatmate yelling at the top of his lungs for three months isn’t what you want from your American experience.’
‘The noise is not a problem for me.’ He explained that in Korea, even in China, when it rains people run out into the street in celebration, whereas in the West they run indoors or buy an umbrella. Whether it was karma I don’t know, but it was unusually accommodating. And so began the musical prelude to our cross-country adventure.
All was well with our little bromance until one day Kim told me he’d received a call from someone in the Korean government. At first he’d been curious and amused, and had let the earlier calls go to the answering machine. This time he wasn’t happy. The caller, he said, was a sort of Columbo of investigators, a go-to man people called when someone in power wanted to dig up dirt on a colleague and bury his career.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He wanted me to get him into Columbia University. I told him I don’t have that kind of influence, that he’d have to apply like everyone else. I said I’d give him a reference, but that was all I could do.’
Kim wondered aloud at the real reason for the call. Perhaps, as the only government lawyer with an American law degree, he had been seen as a threat for high office. ‘Not that I have any particular plans to pursue anything like high office.’
The route west from New York is mainly Interstate 80, which you pick up by crossing the George Washington Bridge. Heading out, we kept an eye open for small-town America: little-league baseball, amusement parks, aerodromes. America is a great place to fly, with excellent training that is cheaper than in the UK, where I got my private pilot’s licence. We stopped at a theme park, where Beau and I enjoyed the rides while Mr. Kim sat to one side in his trilby, concerned with keeping to the itinerary of booked hotels.
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