My First New York (8 page)

writer
arrived: 1982

M
y mother's purse was stolen about an hour before my parents left me in New York to start my freshman year of college. She noticed it missing from the back of her café chair just as we were finishing up our lunch at an outdoor table at a long-disappeared Italian place at 111th and Broadway. The handbag had probably been gone for a while, but like cartoon
characters who wander off of cliffs but only fall once they realize they have done so, I felt the solid ground disappear from under my feet and my life in New York begin.

Truthfully, I found the theft thrilling, even as it sharpened whatever anxiety my folks must have been feeling. The robbery conferred a modicum of street cred with zero injury, and I needed all the help I could get. I was a sophisticated sissy, having grown up near the center of Toronto, a cosmopolitan city of three million people. But displaying cultural literacy and knowing the difference between shit and Shinola are two distinctly separate realms. Being able to quote entire scenes of
The Philadelphia Story
from memory or paint a good facsimile of Van Gogh's
Sunflowers
(Large. On my dorm room wall) won't do you a bit of good in the real world. At seventeen, I knew nothing, and I looked it. A whelp of barely five and a half feet, I was markedly shorter and less developed than the boys I saw unloading boxes and suitcases. Compared to most of them, I was a tentatively pubescent cherub, encased in puppy fat with a face open to experience that seemed to beg:
Please hurt me
.

I looked at the purse-snatching as an early and
painless inoculation from violence, no small matter in the city back when the prospect was still real enough. New York in 1982 was only beginning to shake off the traces of its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” near bankruptcy. Infrastructure was still crumbling, the subways were still covered in graffiti. The term
yuppie
would not be commonplace for another few years (and it would be at least that amount of time before the city opened its first Banana Republic or Cajun restaurant to clothe and feed them). Coffee still meant a paper cupful from Chock Full o'Nuts. There was a remaining franchise at 116th Street and Broadway, probably unchanged since 1961, still boasting its undulating lunch counter in buttercream Formica, while one block down, a warning shot across the caffeinated bow of the neighborhood, was a doomed black-lacquer establishment with the almost parodically striving name Crepes and Cappuccino. The owners had wrapped the sickly tree out front in bright blue fairy lights, which only illuminated the empty interior in a dejected glow. It lasted less than a year. The colossus towering over this particular moment shuddering between decadence and recovery was not Bartholdi's Lady Liberty, but the first of Calvin Klein's bronzed
gods, high above Times Square. Leaning back, eyes closed, in his blinding white underpants against a sinuous form in similarly white Aegean plaster, his gargantuan, sleeping, groinful beauty was simultaneously Olympian and intimate, awesome and comforting. Here was the city in briefs: uncaring, cruelly beautiful, and out of reach.

Not all of New York's loveliness was stratospheric and unattainable, but at street level it was mixed in with the threat of harm, which was ever present, if in a somewhat exaggerated and highly prized form. We had been warned that the neighborhood around the university could turn dodgy in a matter of footsteps, but it was a matter of pride to have dipped one's toe into its scary waters. Morningside Park, for example: not since the age of medieval maps—wherein the world simply ends, beyond which all is monster-filled roil—has a region been so terrifyingly uncharted and freighted with peril as Morningside Park in the early 1980s. To venture in was to die, plain and simple. There were other terrifying rumors abounding, like the one about the boy in the hideous Gwathmey Siegel designed dormitory who narrowly avoided the bullet that came through his window and lodged itself in the
plaster above his head. The shot had come from—where else?—Morningside Park. Another boy, walking back to his room on upper Broadway one drizzling evening, had had his wallet demanded. He handed it over, and for his compliance had his teeth knocked out with the hard metal barrel of a gun. The boy-who-was-pistol-whipped-in-the-rain grabbed us with all the cheap poetry and tamped bathos of a Tom Waits song. It was doubly satisfying to me, since whenever he came up in conversation, I could say, “Tell me about it. I was robbed my first day here.”

Mere days into the school year, my floor counselor, an elder statesman in his senior year, knocked on my door and gave me a stapled Xerox of the Joan Didion essay “Goodbye to All That.” The flattery of being singled out for such a gift is what made me read it immediately, with little comprehension. “All I could do during those [first] three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.” I was immune to the humor or irony in this passage. What I took away
from it was the hope—as unlikely as sprouting wings, it seemed to me back then—that I might one day be as old as twenty, or have logged eight years here, to acquire that youth-viewed-at-a-distance weariness, to be able to rattle off the names of the city's lesser-known bridges.

It was what I took away from most every encounter: an almost obliterating desire to “pass” as a New Yorker, to authentically resemble one of the denizens of the movie
Manhattan
. More than the Deco penthouse aeries of characters in old musicals, more than the moral elasticity and heartless grit of backstage Broadway in
All That Jazz
, perhaps on par with the gin-swilling savagery of
All About Eve
, it was the city as embodied in
Manhattan
I ached for. The high-strung friends with terrible problems, the casual infidelities, the rarefied bohemianism—ERA fund-raisers in the garden at MoMA, gallery-hopping followed by filling one's simple grocery list at Dean & DeLuca.

There was no one specific moment when the rigorous self-consciousness gave way to authenticity. It was more of a dim realization that the very act of playing the “Are we a New Yorker yet?” game means you
aren't one yet. But it eventually happens, dawning on you after the fact, tapping you on the shoulder after you've passed it. It comes from an accretion of shitty jobs, deeply felt friendships that last, deeply felt friendships that end, funerals, marriages, divorces, births, and betrayals, and you wake up one day to realize that you passed the eight-year mark decades prior; that you are older than all of the characters in
Manhattan
, with the possible exception of Bella Abzug; that you have been to a party in the garden at MoMA and watched the sun come up over Sutton Place and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and decided that, in the end, you'd rather stay home; that only a rich moron would buy his groceries at Dean & DeLuca; and that, as fun and Margo Channing as it might seem to be drunk and witty and cutting, it's probably better in the long run to be kind. These are all realizations endemic to aging anywhere, I am sure. It must happen in other cities, but I've really only ever been a grown-up here.

As for my mother's pocketbook, it was found later that evening, emptied of valuables and abandoned in a building lobby in Morningside Heights. Some good
Samaritan had gone through her phone book and found the number of a New York friend, who eventually tracked me down in my dorm room. It made the city seem like a shtetl, a fact that after the better part of three decades I realize is more true than not.

journalist
arrived: 1983

T
ina Brown and I couldn't have gotten off the boat any more unaware of New York life. The year before, we had gotten married in Ben Brantley's garden in East Hampton, and we had spent one night in the Algonquin. We saw Lena Horne, and had dinner with Lauren Bacall, which was very exciting. But then Tina had to return to
Tatler
in London, and I left a couple
days later. We had visited New York many times, of course, but we were not prepared to live here, and had no idea of the subterranean current of New York life.

Our first apartment was a disaster: a sublet on Third Avenue for which we paid rent by putting dollar bills in a hat. I'm supposed to be an investigative journalist, but I was too concerned about getting the apartment and so decided this was perfectly normal. We were instructed to speak to the doorman with assumed names. One day I opened a cupboard and out fell tons of pornography. I shouldn't have been looking in the cupboard—it wasn't my apartment. If I hadn't been about to teach a college class on ethics, I might have questioned the ethics of it all.

When we realized we would like to be treated like law-abiding citizens, Tina got us an apartment on Central Park South. Another disaster. This one had cockroaches, and since we were close to the ground floor, I hesitated to go anywhere near the window in my pajamas. And living on Central Park South is like being a part of a parade.

We moved again to a two-bedroom at 300 East Fifty-sixth, where one of the rooms had a bed that
disappeared into the wall, and if you weren't careful you'd disappear with the bed. We soon realized that New Yorkers don't muck up their kitchens by doing breakfast. Instead I would go to the Palace restaurant off Lex. We got in the habit of walking down Second Avenue and trying every restaurant on the left-hand side, which is very interesting because you go from the tolerable to the absolutely marvelous to the intolerable in the space of six blocks. A space was good or reasonable, or it was full of shouting maniacs. Mimi's I liked very much, and the places populated by Irishmen were jolly. We couldn't entertain many people at the apartment, so we'd usually take people out to Mortimer's.

Within a very short time, the New York vortex kicked in. When you're on the outer edges you can swim quite happily in cool waters, but as you get closer and get to know more people, you get sucked into a level of activity that is calculated to drive you crazy. It was very exciting—and very 1980s. People arrived in stretch limos. At the same time, I was astounded by the drug transactions I'd see on street corners, even in white-collar Midtown, outside the New York Pub
lic Library. It was grim as hell, and all this alongside the intellectual excitement of media life and America being on top of the world. It was like going to dinner with some wonderful person and looking underneath the table and finding mice droppings.

baseball player
arrived: 1983

N
ew York was the last place I wanted to be, down there with Cleveland, Oakland, and Detroit. I was a guy from San Francisco, and I had already made something of myself, winning the World Series with the Cardinals, so it's not like I was some kid getting off at the bus station in Midtown all full of wonder. And nobody wants to be traded midseason.

But I joined the Mets in June 1983. At first I was put up in a hotel at LaGuardia, which was a terrible existence. I eventually moved to Greenwich until I got divorced. Then Rusty Staub, a New York fixture, told me, “Look, man, if you're going to be single, don't live in Connecticut. It's all in the city.”

So I rented a place for a year until Fred Wilpon, the Mets owner who was also a real-estate guy, offered to sell me a condo at Forty-ninth and Second. It had been decorated by some interior decorator in Chicago, and they put all my clothes and luggage in a pile ten feet high—no lie—in the middle of the living room. Ed Lynch, a starting pitcher, was crashing with me while his condo was being finished. I went out one day, and when I came back he had unpacked all my stuff. I got his dinners for a month after that.

We'd go downtown. SoHo was this pocket of the city where you could just get out of a cab, wander around, and have a great night no matter what. And I really got into the restaurants. You know, you could do a ball game and then still have dinner after. At eleven! That doesn't happen in the Midwest. Fanelli's, Palladium, Chin Chin, Smith & Wollensky, Lutèce…And you'd be a fool to live here and not take advan
tage of the cultural stuff. So I would go to Broadway plays and even some operas. I met Plácido Domingo backstage once. The guy is a huge baseball fan, and he said “Sorry, I have a cold, I sang like a .230 hitter. Next time, I promise I'll be a .300 singer for you.”

Back then, of course, the Mets were terrible, so I would be incognito. As we got better, I would go out, and it would be all or nothing. Nobody would recognize me, or they all would. And, man, for about six weeks after we won the '86 World Series, I couldn't pay for dinner anywhere in the city. People would, I kid you not, send over bottles and bottles of free Cristal. Ridiculous. It's one thing to become a New Yorker; it's so much weirder to become a New Yorker that all the other New Yorkers know.

radio host
arrived: 1984

I
first moved here when the woman I was with decided to go to NYU law school. We lived in married-student housing, though we weren't married, and they were really just dorms. We were assigned a freshman dorm, and I was twenty-five and had never felt older in my life. We split up after a few months.

We had moved from Washington, and I was trying
to learn to write radio stories. I wasn't a terribly fast study, so I did other things, like working as a temp secretary. I made about fifteen thousand dollars a year. I remember walking by the Dallas Barbecue on the northeast side of Washington Square Park. I would look at people eating in the restaurant and think to myself, Someday I'll be able to afford to eat in a place like that.

After the NYU dorms, I lived in a series of cheap apartments, the worst of which was at Rivington and Allen. That was a truly dangerous neighborhood. I would get out of the subway on Houston Street at night, and there'd be drug dealers and prostitutes and crack vials on the streets, and I always had to make the decision, Should I run? And I thought, well, that's just going to look so uncool. But often I would run.

I rented an illegal sublet that cost me $145 a month; if anyone questioned what I was doing there, I was under strict instructions to say I was visiting somebody. The apartment had a smell to it that came up through the floorboards. My roommate had come to New York to do art but then had gotten into a dispute with the landlord, and literally, the dispute with the landlord took up every ounce of brainpower that
she had. She was suing him for stuff that got damaged when the roof had caved in, and she was forever going on and on about the proceedings and how unfair he was and how he did one lousy thing to her or another. She became unable to do anything but think about this apartment. She was like a character out of a Tom Wolfe novel—her life had made her crazy—and that just seemed to sum up so exactly something about this city.