(note:  I felt like writing something a little different on a recent trip to New York with my beautiful wife).

I’m cool.  I’m definitely cool.   Maybe not on a day to day basis like I’d love…but this morning I’m cool.  I don’t even know if the word ‘cool’ is cool anymore but if it is, I’m it.  Max is cool too.  Truthfully, Max is way cooler than I am.   Maxi is, dare I say, ‘uber-cool’.  It could be because Max’s torso has a long, black sheen,  a colour infinitely cooler than the pasty, sunless white of my Vancouver body.  Max also has green eyes, which, when you combine it with his majestic blackness, make him the epitome of cool.

We are also in Max’s apartment in Soho this morning, right at the corner of Spring and Wooster.  Again, this makes Max cooler than me no matter how badly I want the roles reversed. 

The sounds of what I guess is a typical New York morning bounce off the walls of the trendy little shops that we are living above.   It would be noisy were I seated on my own couch in Vancouver’s Main St. district but it whispers to me in the Big Apple.  The City that never sleeps.  Max town.

Max doesn’t notice.  Max doesn’t notice anything.  Max glides across the floor effortlessly, somehow even ignoring the Bikram’s yoga class working up a heated sweat across the street. He’s impervious to it, the bastard, and I hate him for it. 

Not me.  Uncontrollably,  I leer out the window like some overweight city worker in a white van doing the summer drive by of the local beach.  And, as it is with most perverted glances, I see nothing really.  The tops of a few heads and an elbow or two.  Not even a moment of pleasure, damn it, though I do manage to satisfy my head and elbow fetish for the next year or two.  An artist obviously pulling an all nighter on a painting one door down,  spots me.  He glares back at me, knowing my voyeuristic intentions and robbing me of my cool for an instant.  I ignore the fact I just got busted and roughly slide back into the red leather art deco couches of our host.

Max takes no notice of any of this.  He’s too busy being cool.  He just plants himself on the couch, inches from my coffee and purrs. 

My favourite bumper sticker read ‘I love my cats, they grudgingly accept me’.  Max is no different, though he knows that I’m a cat person and I know how to touch Max in just the right spots.  This morning he is grudgingly accepting me.  He is even allowing me an occasional sip of coffee in between strokes, though at one point I am clearly  distracted by a full elbow-tricep-shoulder shot in full Lululemon technocolour and Max nips my forearm angrily.  You know what it’s like.  There is nothing more uncool than blowing somebody else’s cool.  Max is no different.  Max will grudgingly accept me for two more days and then he knows I’ll be gone, the white boy heading back to Canada while the Prince of Darkness remains unfettered. 

He leaves me now, friskily bounding off the couch and strolling perilessly  across the window ledge unrependent.  The Yoga practitioners, having sufficiently stretched and pulled their agile bodies in every direction, see him and point.  He is as most cool figures know themselves to be.  A spectacle.  A spectacle that attracts attention effortlessly.  I can try as hard as I want and I know I’ll never be as cool as Max.  But, like most dorks, just being in the presence of His Majesty The Dark Knight is more than I can ask for. 

Kinda’ like watching Yoga but knowing that the only thing I can stretch is my imagination.

Moral of the story--If you've never been to New York, you simply have to go.  Please go to www.truerealestatestories.com for more from our collection.