My return flight to Vancouver was the 10:30 Cathay Pacific redeye out of JFK. I packed my bags and did one final walkthrough of the apartment making sure that I wasn’t leaving anything essential behind. Then I called a car service. That quintessential New York hailing-a-cab moment? It doesn’t really happen outside of Manhattan. What the other four boroughs do is this: we use car services.

Every car service in New York ends a phone call the same exact way: they say the words, “Five minutes,” as dispassionately as possible, as if they have said those words a hundred times today, which they no doubt have. Then they hang up.

“Five minutes,” of course, does not literally mean that they will be there in five minutes. Sometimes they arrive in two minutes. Other times: twenty minutes. And still other times, they do not arrive at all, for reasons which are never fully explained.

I locked the door to my apartment, willing myself to not feel the gravity of the place. You’ve had your fun here for a couple nights, I told myself. Now move on. You’ve got work to do elsewhere. You’ve got people who are counting on you. You’ve got cats to take care of. You’ve got a girl who is trying to love you. I turned the key, and heard the bolt slide into place. Then I hauled my luggage downstairs and waited in the lobby for the car service to arrive.

The lobby, as always, was decorated with a large, artificial Christmas tree and a plug-in menorah. The maintenance men–or the “porters,” as the building calls them–do all the decorating. The tree looked the way it always looked: like it had been decorated in less than five minutes by maintenance men. A television played loudly in one of the nearby apartments. Cigarette smoke from the chain-smoker in apartment 2B hung in the air like stale fog.

A horn honked in the street. I peered through the glass. A black, rusted out sedan, its tail lights glowing red, idled out front. My chariot had arrived.

The trunk popped open of its own volition, which was the driver’s way of indicating to me that I’d be loading and unloading my own bags on this trip. I didn’t mind. I liked that car services are a no-frills experience.

Inside, the car was warm and smelled of old food and B.O. Salsa music blasted from the speakers. The driver–a weathered man with a Bluetooth headset embedded in his ear–lowered the volume just enough to ask me where I was headed. “JFK,” I told him. Then he turned the salsa music back up to an almost ear-splitting volume and proceeded to simultaneously attempt to have a phone conversation with someone he kept referring to, very loudly, as “mi novia,” which, I believe, means “girlfriend” in Spanish. (I’d learned a few Spanish phrases from working in kitchens in Chicago in the early ’90s, the bulk of which consisted of gay putdowns.)

So what does this caliber of hospitality cost? It can be yours for the low, low price of $32 or $38, depending on the driver’s mood that day.

The driver hit the gas hard enough enough to make the tires give out a dramatic squawk. And once again I was leaving New York behind.

I looked out the window and watched the city go by.

Ah, New York.

F***ing New York.

And now, onto stage 6-7. Today’s stage is a multiscreen endeavor consisting of all manner of scaffolding and conveyer belts. On the left side is a stack of vertical passageways, ladders connecting them all together, with exit doors on each landing. On the right side is a digression of conveyer belts. In order to get the key to the exit door–which, by the way, is the third door up on those aforementioned landings–you must travel the stage in a clockwise fashion. You must claim the key at the very apex of the stage, then manipulate the conveyer belts in a specific fashion via the switches until they finally spit out the key at the very bottom of the level.

Really, all of it boils down to this: you must perform the same somewhat tricky task three times in a row. That task involves tossing the key onto a conveyer belt, watching it travel the length of the conveyer belt, then, once it falls to a conveyer belt below, hitting the switch and changing the direction that all conveyer belts are traveling in.

You must keep the key in play, so to speak. Then, once it’s in play and moving along the conveyer belts, you need to babysit the key, making sure that it is never out of your hands for more than a few seconds at a time. Remember the 1988 movie Midnight Run starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin? It told the story of a bounty hunter (De Niro) who is trying to protect a sad sack accountant (Grodin). You and the key are basically starring in the videogame version of Midnight Run.

As soon you start the key down the digression of conveyer belts, immediately man the nearest switch. Once the key drops from the end of the first conveyer belt, pull the switch. I  realize that the sight of a key traveling along a conveyer belt is utterly fascinating to look at and everything, but stop looking at the key and immediately descend the nearby ladder, so that when the key arrives on the lower level, you are there to give it a kiss. Remember, the key is an extremely fickle entity. If you’re not there to greet it/kiss it in time each and every time it arrives at its destination, it will flash a few times then vanish, returning to its starting point at the apex of the level. No one wants that to happen.

Repeat this process until you and they key are both at the very bottom of the level, where the stage began. Use the bottom tier conveyer belt to the reach the stairs/ladders on the left side of the screen. Once you and the key have arrived, jump into the air, then toss the key at the highest point of your jump. It should land on the landing above. Quickly climb the ladder, reclaim the key, and jump again. On the third landing, carry the key over to the door. Boom, stage 6-7 is done.