What's Up, New York?

What’s the deal, New York? You speak to us of fame and glory, of freedom and openness, of power and creativity. We move into your maze of streets winding and wending our way through the mess of job applications, grad school applications, social relations. Yes, we get lost for want of friends, in need of creating new families, new peer groups. Yes, these streets will make you feel brand new, but can pavement speak? But what does it whisper when it is your only pillow? Ah, but the allure of being at the center of things—everything. New York, the city with ninety-nine names, can provide the opportunity of a lifetime, but for most it will take more than a lifetime to succeed. While we can generalize and wax poetic, first-hand accounts convey much more. Here are some of ours.

How many times can a name be repeated before it ceases to have any meaning at all? Before it is reduced to something emptier than a concept, a hollow shell, something you wrap your mouth around but can never taste? New. York. The words come sliding out of my throat and expand to fill the tiled and hyper-bleached bathroom. All four of us lay strewn across the tiny room like so many used towels. One slinked down in the corner. One perched on the toilet. One on the sink, huddled against the cold draft that presses in through the open window. As for me I’m projecting wordshells from the bathtub, knees over the side.

For me it is a name that imploded under the pressure of so many presumptions: future career, future friends, melting pot, center. A future both glamorously minimalist and urban-chic. A city electric, magnetic, alive. The implosion probably occurred when the distance between my current life and my presumed future life was reduced to a little more than one terrifying year. May 2011, when I skate, alone, out into the big city. January 2010, when I spend my evening in the bathtub thinking of reasons why I don’t need this, don’t want this, shouldn’t have to want to need this.

My friends have varied perspectives on the matter, each one blowing smoke through her nose and watching it float out the window. The consensus, reached circuitously, is this: how can we embrace what we’ve been academically trained to at best critique and at worst despise?

But what about the vision of myfutureself—born sometime in the seventh grade and carefully maintained through annual pilgrimages to the post-card places—as a hardworking, edgy, fiercely savvy New York professional? Have the ivory towers of academia tarnished my nowformerfuture forever? Or is it just that my nowformerfutureself wasn’t very well thought out in the first place? For now, at least, the buzzing in my ears is devoid of answers but the bathroom is sparkling white-tile clean and providing four receptive walls for word-bouncing.

The first time I went to New York, I was only there for a day and a half, but I was overwhelmed with its pop-culture significance. I was staying with a friend in his brother’s apartment near Columbia. I visited the campus, but instead of appreciating its architecture and historical value, I kept trying to figure out if it was the setting for Peter Parker’s college in Spiderman 2. I was positive it looked familiar. Then I went to the subway and my mind was consumed with images of flamboyantly coordinated gangsters from The Warriors. That night, I went to a rooftop party in Manhattan. The party wasn’t even standardly “fun”, but I still thought it was the best night ever. I only knew about three people there, was really tired, and remember hating the music they played. Nonetheless, it was on a rooftop, giving me a view of the entire city, which, for most people, would have been breathtaking. For me, it was reminiscent of the introduction credits to SNL, which I watched religiously in my high school years. The next day I walked through Central Park and was surprised to find that it is much bigger in real life than in the Spiderman 2 video game.

Although I was in New York for such a short time, I still thought it was the best place on Earth. Recently, I went back for a four-day trip and the city had already lost its cinematic luster. Although it was an awesome trip, I got more of a sense of the expense of living in the city, the confusing subway system, and the impossibility of finding bathrooms. They never show that in the movies, but I guess it would be hard to have a half-hour scene in Spiderman where he was looking for a bathroom.

It was 2 AM. Eight friends, 200 strangers, and I were all waiting for the Manhattan-bound L train at the Bedford Avenue stop. Everyone was drunk and energetic except for me; I was just drunk. As I looked at my friends, all dancing and making violent fart noises with their mouths, I asked myself, “Where Am I?” With a smile, I quickly answered, “New York,” and the L pulled into the stop. We took the train to Chinatown because we heard there was a dance party, but when we arrived, we decided that it was a bad idea, so we got right back on and returned to our friend’s apartment in Greenpoint. Making a pit stop in Williamsburg to grab a dollar slice of pizza, we stood outside in the cold watching hipsters and young professionals parading the streets. We walked the rest of the way to the apartment, cutting through McCarron Park, admiring the graffiti on the walls of buildings. I was completely happy to just be wandering around, walking the streets with a few friends and a little social lubricant in my system. We agreed that we would go onto the roof again that night when we got back. The view of the illuminated Manhattan skyline from that roof was beautiful, drunk or sober. However, we were too cold and tired to do anything but lay out our sleeping bags and pass out. That was the best night of the trip, and we hadn’t done anything we couldn’t have done in any other city with a decent public transit system. Still, if it wasn’t for the cornucopia of smells exhaled from subway vents and restaurants, the thousands of colorful people to watch on the streets, the overwhelming feeling of insignificance bestowed by the towering buildings, and the joy on people’s faces as they heard “Empire State of Mind,” the experience would not have been the same. The aesthetic of New York is what makes it more of a feeling than a city, and a great one at that.

A large portion of my mother’s family lives about 45 minutes outside of New York City on Long Island, and my mother loves to drive, so it should be no surprise that I’ve been going to New York several times a year for longer than I can remember. Tri-annual 8 hour drives tend to blend into each other after a couple decades, and it gets pretty difficult to distinguish which historical landmarks we visited or the Broadway shows to which I was dragged on our various excursions, but one trip is indelibly etched in my memory, mostly due to constant retelling by my family members.

I was six years old during the winter of 1996 when we went to the city to meet my aunt and uncle. We had just gone to see an afternoon matinee of The Nutcracker at the Lincoln Center, and like a dutiful six year old, I squandered their $100 ticket purchase by napping through most of the performance. Afterwards, my extremely agitated parents took my sister and I to the Fifth Avenue F.A.O. Schwarz, the coolest toy store in the United States. I had already tried their patience with my narcolepsy, and my insistence that they buy me every toy I laid eyes on only irritated them even further. After a few minutes they decided that to punish me, they would buy my sister a toy and I would go home empty handed. Rebellious lad that I was, I decided I wouldn’t bear this oppressive treatment and ran off into the store. They were unable to find me after an hour and ten minutes of searching, but I soon grew tired of rebellion and approached a trustworthy looking employee, crying and yelling for my mother with a urine stain on my drawers. He announced my location over the PA and my parents came to collect their sobbing, soaked lil’ mutineer. New York City can be a rough place; when the going gets tough, the tough piss their pants and cry for their moms.

Every time I go to New York City, before I even get out of Chinatown where my bus drops me off, I end up feeling like a little fish in a big pond, anxious about finding and staking my place in the crowd. Once in the heart of Manhattan I go to some socialite event and cue the schmoozing; cue the dumb jokes I’ve become a pro at cracking; cue trying to give a resumé, a business card, or at least a good impression. It’s nerve wracking and hardly fun, as I’m constantly comparing myself to every interesting person I meet and filling my head with overly dramatic, self-deprecating thoughts. I’ve got to go to all the really important and smart places, meet all the really important and smart people: go to the MoMA and talk about the timelessness of de Kooning’s Woman I or the new Tim Burton exhibit. Visit a small, “legitimate” bookstore that hasn’t completely “sold out” and actually takes interest in getting people connected with literature they’ll love. Order some expensive, new dish from some country I can’t even find on the map to show my worldliness and willingness to try new things.

And then I find myself back in Chinatown for my return bus. The lady who marks my ticket with a permanent marker hardly speaks English. She makes no effort to make me feel comfortable in the office we occupy by ourselves for over an hour. She couldn’t care less about schmoozing, trying to impress others or climbing up the highly detailed but still utterly incomprehensible social ladder we all imagine. And, while this is all mere coincidence—while I know that this woman’s seeming reluctance to assimilate into American culture has nothing to do with a philosophical stand against the urban rat race, there’s something soothing and poignant about the silence we share. She quickly becomes the physical manifestation of my unfinished thought: life rolls on regardless. I need to shut up and relax.

My ex-New-Yorker brother gave me one piece of advice before I ventured up for some New Years fun, “Whatever you do, don’t get drunk and lost in the Brooklyn subways!” Cut to 4 a.m. New Year’s day as Daniel and I stood (a bit wobbly) in the middle of a house party in Brooklyn. Our hosts for the night had headed north into Manhattan, calling the party quits and leaving us behind.

Problems to solve: not knowing were we were, having little to no knowledge of how to get around NYC and having no idea how to get back to our friend’s dorm in North West Manhattan. Our silver lining: a cute girl dressed as a fairy who completely covered Daniel in blue glitter. By the time we finally decided to go home, the temperature had dropped to five degrees with gusting winds. Since we didn’t have enough money for cab fare, we decided to take the subway. Once on the train, I realized that Daniel’s glitter cloud was much larger than we had realized. Every time he touched his head, a large glitter puff filled the subway car. We managed to make it back even though Daniel’s glitter trail almost got us beaten up, and we slept through a transfer to end up on Long Island.
Glitter is impossible to clean off things, especially people. The glitter cloud stayed with Daniel over the next three days; it got so bad that he was denied entry into a MoMA exhibit.