Fifteen Years a Slave: Down & Out in New York, London & Sydney

It’s been five years now and I’m still riding the bucking bronco that is New York. Prior to that I sat atop the galloping elephant that is London and before that I straddled the wild pony that is Sydney.

Whilst New York tries to toss you off straight away, London & Sydney are more cunning in how they try to destroy you.

My move to each new city has been somewhat unplanned and circumstance-driven, and I’ve carried that casual approach into how I engage with each place, more or less with unforeseen and sometimes unpleasant results.

Subliminally, I was aware that each metropolis would try to crush and somehow grind me down until I either leave or start physically decaying into the city itself, usually but not always by death. At that point of decay I would truly be a citizen of the metropolis, albeit without the aura of life to truly enjoy my new found sense of belonging.

I’d never really thought about large post-modern cities as having the sense of self-awareness necessary to regulate the inflow and outflow of people, but now it makes perfect sense. Prior to Sydney I lived in Melbourne, Johannesburg and started my city struggles in the relative village of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe (population last time I looked: about 83 people)

Of all three, London is the most insidiously brilliant at subtly crushing your spirit, perhaps drawing on the many thousands of years of recorded history which Gotham and the Emerald City don’t have. Or perhaps it’s the weather — a constant lack of summer weather in summer must eventually take its toll.

New York achieves it’s destruction from the get go. Even before you’ve left the gritty terminal buildings at JFK someone is trying scam you into believing that the taxis are on strike but that he alone (it’s always a he) can get you to your broom closet in NoHo for a reasonable fee.

To arrive in Sydney is to get a great big seductive bear hug. The nice bits are nicer and much untouched by the poor. The urban non-gilted never had much of a foothold before their 1870s Workers’ terrace houses were reassigned to Social Media Directors, Model Agents and other #EssentialWorkers.

London mixes the dirt-poor and the uber-rich in a way which approximates a fish-out-of-water reality tv show. NYC does the same but favors an American Frontier approach to gentrification. Hence the ever expanding re-colonization of Brooklyn and Harlem by the cash-rich who rush into it as if Bushwick and BedStuy are the Oregon Trail in 1843, with Uber substituting for the Wagon Train and Seamless for the Chuckwagon.

If each city is your executioner, then they try to outdo each other with their respective commitments to Cruel & Unusual Punishment. London’s favourite method of death is cirrhosis of the liver and attendant maladies such as random street violence delivered by youthful amebriates celebrating the ancient English tradition of public drunkeness. With trial and error comes great expertise, and the Grey City lays many traps as it seeks to turn the casual drinker into a seasoned Lush. It’s the little touches that work — supermarkets there pioneered the prominent calculation and display of alcohol-to-price ratios which assist greatly in the lowest-cost path to boozed-up self destruction.

Sydney wants you horizontal too, but the hedonistic climate and lifestyle has always required a multi-faceted approach: This is the city who’s first currency was rum, so clearly a passion for excessive and public consumption of liquor is going to be part of the mix. The innate sensuality of that gangbang of a harbour makes for a death-inducing cocktail of sand (skin cancer), surf (drowning), semen (reckless sex) and salt (thirst). Throw in the self-destruction which is a fundamental part of the self-loathing which must necessarily consume the have-nots in a city where to have is everything.

By banning public consumption of liquor, right down to arresting Hipsters on their own Brooklyn stoeps for quaffing biodynamic organic warm-weather Rhone varietals, NYC signals clearly that alcohol is to be only a small part of the ultimate destruction it has in mind for you. As Zero-Tolerance and its running dog of Gentrification turns Manhattan into a thin caucasian medieval castle of an island where the poor are allowed to visit but not stay, it’s clear that this city has only been pretending to be friendlier over the past 20 years or so. It still wants to take in poor and huddled folks and crush them like it used to, but it’s had to play nice recently.

These fabled cities have long memories, and via their modern innards of metal intestines, tunnels and fiber optics they are concocting new ways to be the vindictive, self-serving and parasitic centers of depravity that they’ve always been, save for the past few decades of rebirth.

As they say on the Q train to Brooklyn when you’re dozing off and your guard is down: It’s Showtime folks!