The other day on Washington Street I thought I saw Paul McCartney. But was it really him? He was eating lunch on a dazzling spring afternoon outside at La Isla, the Cuban restaurant near City Hall. I froze and did a double take, but the guy eating with “Maybe Paul” fixed a quick hard look on me. His bodyguard?
So I continued to the corner of First Street, where I stopped to collect my thoughts.
Nah, it couldn’t be him. What would Paul McCartney be doing in Hoboken? Then I thought about what a cool, hip, aesthetically beautiful town Hoboken is, and what, with the whole Frank Sinatra music history thing — at the beginning of my walk down Washington Street, in fact, I passed by a frame shop with two Frankie photos on proud display, glimmering in the crisp spring sunshine (one the famous “The Voice” shot of young Frank at the microphone, the other a Rat Pack ensemble from the ’60s) — perhaps McCartney, on a New York jaunt, felt a need to de-Gotham and chill on the Jersey side for a while: in Frank’s old hood.
Should I say hello hello? Here might be my only legitimate chance — ever, in my lifetime — to meet a Beatle. Such are the strange, existential moments that define us in our wacky age of celebrity. But I wanted to be strong, or at least more evolved than a sniveling, star-worshipping cretin. I wanted to brush off the surreal, near-miss McCartney sighting, to hop the PATH train to Manhattan and continue on my “higher purpose” cultural mission to see Close Up at Film Forum, the groundbreaking 1990 documentary hailed as the greatest example of Iranian New Wave cinema.
I even thought, maybe if I ignore the possible McCartney, it’ll strengthen my ego somehow. It could be a major creative turning point in my life. The day I become myself!
Big deal, McCartney: is he on his way to enrich himself by seeing a classic avante garde Iranian film?
After breaking loose from my fame shackles on this historic (to me) day, who knows, maybe a horde of beautiful young women will suddenly give chase to me down the street, like they did to the Beatles in the sixties.
Look, there he is, there’s that guy who’s too grounded, too secure in himself to genuflect to Paul McCartney: Ahhhhhhhh!
Still, I wrestled with my existential choices. Glancing across the street, I beheld the strangely comforting line of Cake Boss fans waiting to get into Carlos Bakery — and felt slightly less guilty for my own fame-worshipping sins. Were they as conflicted as me?
I crossed the street, as if being pulled gravitationally by the Cake Boss line (Newton’s Third Law of Cannoli) but decided to linger a while longer at First and Wash, by the bank across the street from La Isla — where a black street musician sat strumming a blues tune — so I could cast a few more furtive glances at the could-it-be McCartney guy. I wanted to flip the guitar player a quarter and request “Let it Be,” as an ironic, cinematic gesture to my psyche. But I honestly couldn’t afford it, being a broke adjunct professor in a country that pays its teachers the same as McDonald’s workers.
Close Up was revelatory. It’s based on the true story of a man so obsessively devoted to film and art — for the way it shows the “sadness of the world” — that he impersonates a famous Iranian film director and, a la Six Degrees of Separation, cons a wealthy family into living with them so he can make a film about their lives.
The better part of me would like to attribute my hovering around a guy who looked like Paul McCartney in Hoboken to my own love of art, in this case music. A celebration of those rare bursts of transcendence, joy, and tenderness that have flooded my soul over the years due to songs like “Hey Jude,” “Yesterday,” and “Roll over Beethoven.” And still do today. – John Bredin