More About New York

The other day I was walking down the street, thinking to myself “what am I doing here in New York?” A long time ago, when I was 18, I came here to visit NYU with my father. Walking around Greenwich Village, I thought: Yes. This is it. I belong here. It was something incredibly dumb like the store Trash on Vaudeville—a glam-rock boutique on St. Mark’s Place that sells stuff like sparkly green Doc Martens—that made me fall in love with the city. That was IT. I was moving here and staying here forever. As they say, hideously, bafflingly, in the Bible, my heart was circumcised on the subject.

Like just about every New Yorker (and I guess I have earned the right, now that I no longer care much about it, to call myself a New Yorker), I have a love/hate relationship with the city.

I Hate:

• Traffic, all the time, everywhere.
• Loud idiots yelling outside my window.
• Car alarms.
• Standing in a subway car that is so crowded that I can’t turn the pages of a book, and being asked to step further into the car.
• Rats. Man I hate rats.
• Park Slope Moms and their murderous baby-carriages and their relentless, age-inappropriate chatter to their little Tristans and Charlottes about upcoming “play-dates” (whatever in God’s name those may be).
• No trees, no sky, no grass without rats on it.
• Clusters of horrible teenagers saying horrible things right next to me on the subway.
• Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• The idea of raising kids here.
• Burglary, mugging, murder.
• Corny New York Kitsch, like those awful Robert DeNiro American Express ads.

I Love:

• Constant access to art: theatre, music and paintings. Not so big on dance or opera, though.
• Delicious, amazing Japanese fusion cuisine. Restaurants of every conceivable variety and caliber.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• Opportunity. Everywhere.
• The pulsing, tremulous energy of the city.
• The skyline of Manhattan from the BQE at night.
• The fact that everybody I could ever possibly know will at least come here to visit sometime.
• That New York is just always completely fucking COOL.
• Crazy cultural, ethnic and religious juxtapositions of the sort that happen every semester in every community college class I teach here.
• Subways, when they’re not too full.
• Dog Runs (spaces in public parks for dogs to run around. I don’t have a dog, but sometimes I sneak into them anyway, just to watch the dogs.)
• The random bits of historical flotsam scattered around everywhere.
• Timely access to obscure and great films.

So it seems that there are exactly the same number of things I love (thirteen), as there are things I hate about New York. I don’t know--my folks live in Suburban Maryland, and I don’t think they’re any less neurotic or frustrated than I am, in spite of the ostensible preponderance of stressors here. And as Chekhov, Ibsen and Bergman have amply demonstrated, it is entirely possible to drive yourself to suicide in a pastoral setting, beneath a cloudless, azure sky.

But this place is addictive, and arguably all addictions are unhealthy, in that they enslave you. If I were to move out of New York at this point, I would probably have to live with the eternal sense that something cool was happening and I was totally missing it. At least here, if something cool is happening, I have the option of being there. Even if I rarely am there, at least I could have been if I had wanted to. In fact, I am almost never there—but by virtue of the fact that I live here, it’s still mine, anyway. It’s all very pathological, really.