The Yelp Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Chase Compton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Laura Klynstra

  Cover photo: iStockphoto

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1360-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1361-1

  Printed in China

  Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Café Mogador

  Von

  The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf

  Uncle Ted’s Modern Chinese Cuisine

  Polish National Home

  Minetta Tavern

  Chapter Three

  French Roast

  Nathan’s Famous

  Sunset Tower Hotel

  Chapter Four

  Veselka

  New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

  Melvin’s Juice Box

  Eva’s

  124 Old Rabbit Club

  Tompkins Square Park

  Chapter Five

  7A - CLOSED

  Susanna Pizzeria

  Tue Thai Restaurant

  Sundaes and Cones

  Cafeteria

  Dean & DeLuca

  Chapter Six

  Murray’s Cheese Shop

  Happy Taco Burrito

  Sweet Revenge

  Bethesda Terrace

  Chapter Seven

  Brooklyn Bridge

  Chapter Eight

  Epilogue: Yaffa Café

  Prologue

  THE CITY OF NEW YORK has been drenched in romantic mythology since the dawn of time. It is a place that has come to be known for its stories of love and longing and heartaches and heartbreaks lurking on every side street of the Village and beyond. As a teenager dreaming about New York, I thought about the great love stories that seemed to be a common occurrence on this enchanted island.

  I believed in fiction and rationalized that all fiction must surely come from a place that actually exists. Woody Allen, Carrie Bradshaw, and other such feeble-hearted dreamers were the idols that I looked up to when I decided to come here. Their stories flashed out in black and white over sunsets and cinematic views of skylines from bridges I’d never set foot on. In the books I read and the films I watched, I plastered a vision of myself and my own heart on top of these stories that once belonged to someone else. I wanted to be a part of that vibrant, all-encompassing romance that seemed to drip from the pores of the natives on that island. I wanted Manhattan the way that the nerdiest girl in school looks at the captain of the cheerleading team: with unbridled longing. No matter that I’m a dude.

  Romance and make-believe are often intertwined when it comes to love in New York City. We all, at one point or another, hope for that moment that steals your heart as you take Prince or Princess Charming by the hand and gaze out at the sunset over the Hudson. We come here believing in fairytales and love potions (which in modern times have come to be called “gin”) and happily-ever-afters. For whatever reason, this place just made the fairytale seem so real. Those fireflies dancing in the bushes of Washington Square Park? I watched them with my eyes peeled, hoping for my own Jiminy Cricket to pop out. I watched and waited, praying that they were so much more than bugs blinking a bioluminescent booty call.

  When I was eighteen years old, I ran away to Manhattan to see what all the fuss was about. Fresh out of high school and with only two hundred dollars to my name, I fled my small hometown in California. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. I had two choices: staying in the happy and sun-drenched hamlet of my youth, probably later going into art school in Los Angeles and growing up to be a fine West Hollywood delinquent, or jumping into something unknown and dangerous that had the ability to kill me. At the point in my young life where I was still discovering who I was and what I wanted, I was rather surprised to find out that I was more inclined to the latter.

  New York opened her arms and took me in. This was probably the reason most kids like me sought her out: she just couldn’t say no to wayward vagrants looking to lose themselves completely. So I dove in, and I tried to get to the bottom of what all of the poets and lovers and dreamers were fussing about. They say that “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

  I didn’t realize that old saying didn’t necessarily refer to love. I guess they were just talking about locking down a shitty little apartment and maybe a decent job that didn’t make me want to kill myself. Love, it turns out, was a much more mysterious and elusive creature. Eventually, I was able to lock down an apartment in the depths of pre-gentrified Brooklyn and a few different jobs waiting tables, making coffee, and bartending all around the city. In my day-to-day, I still kept my eyes peeled for the one thing that was my real reason for coming to New York City:

  Him.

  I wasn’t sure what he looked like or what kind of man he would be. I didn’t know where I would find him: sitting at the old coffee shop where I spent most of my days off, writing poetry and chain smoking, trying to catch wayward glances of other mysterious-looking boys who might be the one. Would I have to go to a gay bar, armed with my fake ID and a smile, and pry open some complete stranger with vodka cranberries and my not-so-well-disguised California charm?

  As a young New Yorker, I ended up finding several different gentleman callers to entertain my days. With an open mind and an open heart, I gave myself completely to these boys who I desperately hoped would fill that space in my heart I was saving for Mr. Right. There was the waiter I dated after I left him a poem on the bill for the burger I ate at some restaurant in Chelsea. He bought me a very pretty candle when I made my first journey into New Jersey to see him, and we lit it before we made love the first time. I don’t remember why he and I never worked out, but it was inconsequential because shortly after him came the curly-haired opera singer who lived on Minetta Lane. Each time I went over to his apartment, I could only think of how badly I wanted to live on that street—it was surely the most beautiful street in all of Manhattan, and it was a block away from my favorite coffee shop! I still lived in the depths of Bushwick, where I, at one point, had to crawl over a dead cat that was covered in McDonalds cheeseburgers to get to my front door. Surely that kind of thing would never happen on Minetta Lane. Alas, eventually we broke up as well.

  Looking back, I can recall each of the boys I had loved in my search for romance in the big city. I remembered the cab-driver-turned-photographer from Chicago; the club kid from Denver who, because he was born in Roswell, thought he was an alien; the yogi that I lived with for two years; and the boy from Los Angeles with the underwear-model-good-looks whom I took under my wing when times were tough for him. They all had their place in my heart at one point or another, but for whatever cosmic reason, none of them felt like the right fit. So I continued to grow older and wiser, learning from each new person I chose to let into my heart. I considered it
all to be practice for the real love that was out there waiting.

  It was here in Manhattan where I grew up into the man I am today. It was the search for true love amidst armies of aimless masses that turned me into the person that I was destined to be. With my eyes open and my arms wide, I carried on just as anyone else would have. I worked my jobs, paid my bills, and paved a life for myself in the city of dreamers. Life went on just as I had expected it to until there came a point where it couldn’t any longer. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to embark on a journey that would be the catalyst for all of this mess—which would raise the stakes and scare the ever-loving shit out of me.

  Introduction

  Paris, 2013

  AS I READIED MYSELF to leave, I knew I was dangling terrifyingly close to full-blown panic. It had been so easy last time I had fled to Paris on a whim—but those were different times, and I was a very different person. Maybe I was a child back then, and that was why I took to escaping with a child-like wonder and lust for the unknown. It was as if fleeing NYC had always been in the back of my mind.

  Back then, all I wanted was to be a stranger again. I had grown weary of the same streets that I had known since I was a teenager. As complex and constantly changing as New York was, it was still all like second nature to me. I could close my eyes and navigate the winding streets of the Village as if I had an internal compass. As much as I hated to admit it, it was becoming evident that no matter how much you love something, it can spoil you in the end. Like a relationship gone cold, I had grown to recoil at New York’s touch, her smell, her overall predictability.

  Years ago, I thought that Paris would fill the gap in my heart that was a direct result of my complacency with Manhattan. Because I was not ready to let my love for Manhattan die, I attempted to breathe life into the city to whom I had pledged allegiance. Although it seemed counterintuitive, an affair was in order. I needed the touch of something new to rekindle the fire I once held so ardently, and it felt almost like a betrayal. So I rushed into another’s arms to make sure that the one I had devoted myself to was in fact the one I was intended to be with.

  My father had told me to go and find myself as if I hadn’t a clue who I was in my relationship with the Big Apple. He was right, after all. So I went, and I soaked in the love and the romance of France. I let it envelop me, and it filled me like a tick to the point of bursting. It wasn’t until I was lying flat on my back on the Champ de Mars that it all began to make sense. I was in love more so than I had ever been before. With New York. With the one I always knew I should be with.

  She was a bitch. She got on my nerves, and there was absolutely zero subtlety in the daily struggle that was slowly hardening my once whimsical nature into a calloused drone. It was something I had heard from my peers who had lived in Manhattan for any amount of extended time—she changed you. The feeble were crushed by her, and the ambitious were fortified by the scar tissue that came with her wounds. Somehow, I was convinced that I was one of the ones that was made stronger by the adversity of the city. She made me a crazy person at times, but I always knew that she was the one. That was the first time I realized that love at first sight was not just the fodder of romantic comedy. When you meet the one, you just know.

  Eventually it happened again—love at first sight. Five years passed, and I’d settled into my relationship with the City like an old married couple. It was comfortable, the way a marriage grows to be. There was often no need for words to fill the silences of our time together, and that had possibly stunted my budding literary ambitions. I had stopped writing love letters to New York only a few months after returning. I no longer had to woo her—I knew she was mine already. Clearly this was to become a problem, because without adversity, I knew I would never be capable of any necessary growth or change. That was why I was so swept off my feet the moment I met Him.

  Out of nowhere came this person. He was the type of person I had always wanted to be with but never had the balls to actually pursue. He was not like all the ones before—he was different. I knew this upon our first meeting, and it made love at first sight feel like a real thing again. In a ragged tee shirt and saggy sweatpants, he had come to meet me one night for a drink. Perhaps this was why I knew that I loved Him—even at his worst I thought he was the most arrestingly stunning boy I had ever seen. The sweatpants be damned—I couldn’t avert my gaze from that mouth. That smile! Those lips that I wanted to take into my own and swallow whole. He was beautiful.

  Not only was he the most magnificent boy I had ever seen, but he was also utterly insane. I didn’t know this right away, but within the next few days it began to show itself in subtle ways. He had a way of living life that left me so many times aghast—and quite honestly dumbfounded. Before I actually got to know Him, I found myself picking my jaw up off of the floor because of the things he would say. He spoke in a language that I was immediately fluent in. More than that, often he didn’t need words to convey what a knowing glance could—his eyes widened like a cartoon with one raised eyebrow, which denoted “are you seeing this shit?” He was hilarious. He was crazy. He was full of life and light.

  This was immediately apparent to me the first time he took my hand while we walked through Washington Square Park. As his fingers intertwined with mine, they didn’t clench but rather wrapped around mine playfully. His grasp was engaging, and it begged me to follow and dance with it. He was utterly boyish, and it was suddenly something that I realized I was insanely turned on by. It was if I was looking in a distorted funhouse mirror of myself before Paris. He was wide eyed with the intensity of springtime in New York City as he discovered it for the first time. It can be an overwhelming thing. Perhaps a little too overwhelming. Much like myself several years prior, he too was fresh off the plane from California.

  Willingly, I threw myself into a whirlwind. I spent every waking moment drowning in the amazing feeling that he had resurrected in what I assumed was a plateauing ennui. Every street in SoHo was suddenly new as I looked through his eyes. It made me feel alive and relevant again. Overcome with such intense feeling for these new sights, it was easy to fall in love. I saw what he saw, and I believe that I really saw Him. Frankly, I was obsessed with what I saw. It was a beautiful person with an exposed soul, and an intense joie de vivre that often left me exhausted and spent. I wanted to do everything with Him. Every meal was the most delicious I had ever eaten, every walk through the park was a cinematic screenshot of a film whose happy ending I could see myself in. I knew what I was getting myself into.

  Much like I had loved the City, he loved me. I was his New York City. Surrounded by constant rapture and earthly delight was only a means to an end that would ultimately require Paris. If he loved me as much as I had loved my city, then it was only a matter of time before the brilliant luster of it all became a familiar and soft glow, no more than a firefly’s light. That’s the problem with loving something so openly and truly, I was sad to realize.

  He grew tired of things going his way, and it devastated Him. I was helpless because I could never say no to Him. I was a junkie for seeing Him happy because through his eyes was now how I looked at the world. I had never thought it possible before, but I discovered the meaning of too much of a good thing. I sat and watched Him recoil and withdraw, and I felt like I was wilting. The very wellspring of my newfound content had suddenly gone dry. Happiness was the dam I built, and happiness was the poison that got me in the end. If I do say so myself—what a way to go.

  I resented and delighted in the fact that it had all come full circle. I was returning to Paris again in a week, this time not to fall in love but to find out how to make love go away and somehow manage to keep my heart intact.

  As fate would have it, he told me he was in love with me a few days before I was about to return to Paris—this time for nothing more than a vacation to celebrate my birthday. Said he loved me, although it echoed hollowly against the recent memory of Him telling me he could never love me the way I loved Hi
m. The way he had told me he still constantly craved the company of others and that he didn’t believe that he was even capable of “truly” being with another person reverberated through me. Yet like many people do post-breakup, he kept me close. On standby. Just in case, it seemed, he didn’t find another in my absence. The red flags should have been everywhere, but I chose to ignore them. They say that love is blind, and I believed this to be true. But I began to lose focus and ultimately lose sight of myself in the process.

  The real kicker is almost too embarrassing to mention. It is one of those things that we only dare to think of discussing in our normal lives. It was the way we had met, the way we came together in this sick little microcosm of New York love affairs. It happened in a sphere not of this world. It happened … via Internet. Yes—it’s true. Forgive me as I break whatever poetic notions you had about our history. He found me on the Internet. Cut and dry.

  They call it OkCupid, as if Cupid’s victims are ever really okay with matters of the heart. Not GoodCupid or FairCupid or JustCupid. Just okay. Like Cupid has nothing better to do than just be tolerant of the tomfoolery that has occurred in his name. It seemed so innocent at the time, and I had merely sent Him a message saying that I loved the fact that he couldn’t live without kale or drop-crotch pants. He was adorable—at least in pictures—and he sounded like he could be my kind of guy. So I did what I was supposed to do, and I told Him that I wanted to meet Him. That was the entire reason for me lurking through cyberspace on a goddamn dating website in the first place—to find someone. And for a moment, it seemed as if I had actually found someone.

  Weeks later, after the whole affair was well on its course, I found time to steal away by myself to sit at the Champ de Mars. It was my thirty-first birthday. In the shadow of la Tour Eiffel I must have looked utterly typical, swathed in all-black garb and hiding my gaze behind dark sunglasses. Part of me expected to be angry, but I was not. It would seem impossible to be angry when basking in the Parisian ebb and flow of life, which was noticeably slow considering it was the slow season locally. It was familiar, and although it was the same Paris I had fled to years prior as a wanderlusting twenty-something, it seemed changed. Paris had emptied out, and all of the people had gone to the country or Provence for their vacations. The streets were oddly bare and at times frightfully silent. Just perfect, I thought to myself. Perfect timing.