A U.K. friend from an old life is in town for 24 hours, and I meet her, and her friends, at a rooftop hotel bar somewhere in what apparently is a new hotel district north of Madison Square. There is the Empire State Building prominently visible, but also a construction crane for yet another hotel that will hide most of it in a month or two. A couple of her friends are a married gay couple who own an art gallery near where she used to live when she lived here, and I hear all about their several year old courtship across Paris, LA, Turkey, Scotland and London replete with drama and betrayal. We have a Trini among us, so we talk about Caribbean countries for a bit, and also how homophobic they all are, and how the US never cared, and how beautiful Grenadians are, with their green eyes, and what it’s like to be in the carnival, walking miles in high heels. Their friend is an Aussie with a boring day job, in finance of course, who wants to write children’s books. The DJ knows what she is doing – she is pretty good, but it’s hard to have a conversation. There is another, bigger, party – someone’s birthday, and they all flew in from London for it – which I find strange, but that’s how they roll in UK, my friend says. I mean, they have all these European cities to choose from, and they fly all the way here? Is the pizza here really better than in Naples? A strange conversation with one of the people from that other party, and she wants to dance with me – and afterwards my friend says – you know she was trying to pick you up, right? I didn’t, and I didn’t care to, but it’s good for your ego, she says. I guess it must be, and i suppose it is. She was pretty cute, too. I show my friend and her one other friend who remains the way to a cheap Korean place I know in K-town, Woorjip, which is very crowded this time of the night – it’s only midnight – but I have to go home – in all likelihood the wakeup is in five hours, and it takes an hour to get home. I have nothing to do on the train but recount the night because it will all be forgotten tomorrow. The train is full of people talking to each other – it feels like a party – which is never the case when I usually take the train at the usual time. The number of people who talk dwindles, and by the time my station is close, the train is quiet again.