The Cruise
Reviewed by Bruce Cantwell
When Elizabeth and I first stepped into a cab in the Big Apple and gave the driver the cross street of our destination, he asked where the streets intersected. Pardon my Chicago naïvete. Chicago runs on a grid and is organized by coordinates. Natives can negotiate Chicago's metropolitan area with ease based on these coordinates. Manhattan, a sliver of land about the size of our Lincoln Park MUST be superior if its cabbies can't find their way around.
 Timothy "Speed" Levitch would quickly set me straight. The grid system is a result of closed mindedness. It's based on our fear of complexity. Manhattan is too bustling and brawling to concern itself with such trivialities as navigation.
"When you are sitting in the middle of mid-town Manhattan, the city that grew up at an explosion, an experiement, a system of test tubes gurgling, boiling out of control...this is ludicrousness and this cannot last. The new Ann Taylor store on the right."
 When Gray Line double decker tour bus guide Levitch points out "That's the sun, another New York landmark," I wonder how much irony he perceives in the statement.
He's not a humorless man. His tour is one razor sharp quip after another. It's entertaining as hell. But no less entertaining is the larger than life persona Levitch creates for himself to deal with the awesome responsibility of living in the greatest city in the known universe.
Woody Allen's grandiose black and white montages of the New York skyline set to Rhapsody in Blue have nothing on Levitch's love/hate feelings for the living, breathing organism that he calls home. He recommends that tourists spin themselves dizzy between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and lie down in the plaza to watch the giants converge.
 What does Levitch want his tourists to take from their spin around the Big Apple? "I expect the total transformation of their life, the entire rewrite of their souls. I am fighting minute to minute, every moment that they're on the bus for every day they've lived thus far to seem as a abstract wreckage that might have happened but is probably a delusion and that this is the first real day of their lives."
Levitch yearns to be free from the burden of work, able Cruise the streets at will. He'd like to down a drink at the bar where Dylan Thomas proclaimed, "I've just had my sixteenth martini," before collapsing, lifeless to the floor.
He has disowned his parents but regrets that his grandparents don't see much of a future for him. $800 a month doesn't go that far in the center of the universe. His flamboyant wardrobe is tattering and if not for the hospitality of friends he would be homeless.
Whatever Levitch's prospects are, I enjoyed sharing his hour and fifteen minutes of fame. What do the cards hold in store for his future? It's up to you, New York, New York.
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