NEW YORK — Visiting from Ohio with hope in his heart and a fanny pack on his person, tourist Doug Pemberton, 52, achieved the full Times Square experience Saturday afternoon, paying $19 for a single bottle of water in order to stand completely still in a dense crowd while being screamed at from four directions by people dressed as cartoon characters.
Pemberton, who had been told by a coworker that Times Square was "a must-see," arrived expecting magic and instead found himself wedged between a man aggressively distributing flyers for a comedy show no one will ever attend, a person in a stained Elmo costume demanding $40 for a photograph, and a 14-screen wall of advertisements so bright that his pupils have reportedly not yet returned to their original size.
"I don't know what I expected," said Pemberton, blinking against the glow of a four-story digital billboard advertising the very phone he was holding. "Everyone said I had to come here. So I came. And now I'm standing in one spot, unable to move in any direction, paying $19 for water, while a man in a Spider-Man costume argues with a child. This is the heart of New York City. This is the Crossroads of the World. I think I'm going to cry, but I can't tell, because of the screens."
Times Square, a small wedge of Midtown that residents of New York avoid with the instinctive precision of animals fleeing a forest fire, draws an estimated 50 million visitors a year, not one of whom leaves happy. The area functions as a kind of municipal trap, drawing in the hopeful and the out-of-town and depositing them, hours later, on the sidewalk, sweating, $200 poorer, holding a single churro, and wondering where their afternoon went.
"There is nothing here. That's the secret," said fictional urban anthropologist Dr. Felix Nakamura. "People come to Times Square expecting it to be the center of something, and they're not entirely wrong — it's the center of advertising for things that are happening somewhere else. You travel a great distance to stand in a place whose entire purpose is to make you aware of other places. It's a billboard you can walk inside. The only thing to actually do in Times Square is leave Times Square, and the architecture is specifically designed to prevent this."
The local economy runs almost entirely on the sale of bottled water at prices that would be illegal in most countries, photographs with unlicensed costumed characters of escalating menace, and the chance to eat at the same chain restaurants the tourists have in their own hometowns, except more expensive and somehow angrier. A single slice of mediocre pizza in the area now reportedly costs more than a sit-down meal in 40 states.
"You can get an Olive Garden in Ohio," noted Dr. Nakamura. "And yet people fly to New York, one of the great restaurant cities on Earth, and they stand in a 90-minute line for the Times Square Olive Garden, which is identical to their Olive Garden except that it is haunted and costs triple. We've studied this for years. We still don't understand it. The human brain, confronted with too many screens, simply seeks the familiar, even if the familiar is breadsticks at a 400% markup."
The costumed characters deserve their own field of study. At any given moment, dozens of off-brand mascots roam the plaza — an Elmo whose eyes point in different directions, a Statue of Liberty who is also, somehow, vaping, three competing Spider-Men engaged in what appears to be a turf dispute. They approach tourists with the warmth of an old friend and the business model of a toll booth, posing for a photo before revealing that the photo costs money, that the money is now, and that the costume contains a man who is no longer smiling. "The number one mistake tourists make is making eye contact," said Dr. Nakamura. "Eye contact is a verbal contract in Times Square. Once a Minion has seen you see it, you owe it twenty dollars. This is settled law."
Locals, who experience genuine physical pain when forced to pass through the area, have developed elaborate routes to avoid it. "I would walk 20 blocks out of my way," said lifelong New Yorker Yvette Ramos, 47. "I would walk into the river before I'd walk through Times Square on purpose. If you see a New Yorker in Times Square, something has gone deeply wrong in their life. We are there against our will. We are passing through, fast, with our heads down, like we're crossing a minefield made of strangers taking selfies."
Pemberton, for his part, plans to remember the experience fondly the moment it is over and he is safely back in Ohio. "I'll tell everyone it was amazing," he confirmed, slowly being pushed by the crowd toward an M&M's store the size of a department store. "I'll say I saw the lights. I'll say I felt the energy. I will not mention the $19 water, or the Elmo, or the fact that I have not moved my feet in 25 minutes. That part stays with me. That part is mine."
At press time, Pemberton had been gently absorbed into a line for a TV studio audience that would not begin filming for six hours, and reported, against all logic, that he was having the time of his life.