Going Gotham
New York City is one of those places where you feel cool just being there.
Well, maybe you don’t. Perhaps you are fortunate enough to already be cool.
Regardless, I definitely felt cool for the entire four days, give or take, that I recently spent in Manhattan.
Not that I necessarily would’ve sounded cool to you if you’d passed by close enough to hear me audibly singing, as I crossed a certain famous street, the words “Darlin’ I love you but give me Park Avenue” in a cheesy Hungarian accent a la Eva Gabor in the Green Acres theme song.
Also, objectively speaking, I perhaps didn’t look all that cool in my cargo shorts and a variety of T-shirts. Although I would like to point out that I at no point sported a fanny pack, and that my Decemberists tee with the whimsical illustration by frontman Colin Meloy’s artist wife Carson Ellis prompted a brief discussion of indie rock bands with a woman at an upscale coffee shop who may or may not have been a local.
I also insist on noting that the lady who sold me a cookie at Grand Central Station complimented my Warby Parker glasses. Which I wore to the detriment of my eyes on those uniformly sunny days, because my specs that have a sunglass clip are notably less quirkily stylish than the Warby Parkers.
Here’s the thing about New York City. Sure, far more rats than people are packed into its 300 square miles. And yes, it’s a ridiculously expensive place in which to live, with tons of poverty and crime and misery. Per the closing line of a 1948 police-procedural movie that spawned a network TV series, “There are eight million stories in the naked city.” Many of those stories, to be sure, are not pretty.
But that’s not the New York City that’s been overtly or subtly glamorized in countless books, films and TV series.
In fact, as it happened — I hadn’t planned it this way — I read from start to finish one such book while I was in Manhattan. It’s a memoir by novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley called Grief is for People. It had attracted me based on strong reviews, compelling excerpts and the fact that a suicide is at its center. I myself have been touched by suicide in only a relatively minor way, but it’s a big societal issue, and I’m always interested in the ways that people move through, if not past, grief.
Crosley writes about two events that touched her life exactly one month apart in the summer of 2019 — the theft of jewelry during a break-in of her New York City apartment and the death by his own hand (and rope) of her one-time boss and longtime friend. Crosley is a wonderful writer, and there’s a lot of humor in the book, especially in the passages where she decides to play gumshoe and buy back some of the pilfered loot. But the aspect of the story that I should’ve anticipated — given that Crosley and the recently deceased met and worked together in the publicity department of a storied publishing house — is how much of a New York City book Grief is for People is. (If anything, it’s a bit too much of a New York City memoir, because near the end, once the pandemic has kicked in, there’s a hint of a what-do-you-know-of-covid-before-the-vaccine-if-you-didn’t-experience-it-here? vibe to things that I found slightly off-putting.)
All of the stuff in Crosley’s book about the literary world of New York City reads as very glamorous to a hick from the suburban sticks like me. To me, the city evokes famous authors like Phillip Roth and Norman Mailer, storied longtime New Yorker magazine editor William Shawn, and the reclusive widow Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, an accomplished book editor in her later life. In her quest to better understand and contextualize loss, Crosley, in Grief is for People, references an array of novelists, essayists and philosophers whose names I mostly know but whose work I decidedly do not. She doesn’t do so in a braggy way, but in a manner that suggests to me that such smarts kind of come with the territory of being a New Yorker, or at least a Manhattanite. No, I’m not saying that every resident of the city is well-read or highly cultured. There surely are hundreds of thousands of people in Manhattan alone who couldn’t tell you anything about the French New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard because they cinematically live within the Marvel Comic Universe. I’m talking here, rather, about New York City as a state of mind.
The New York City of my mind, specifically. And of yours, to some extent, I’m guessing. You, like me, may well reflect with a sense of appreciation on the city’s boroughs — sophisticated Manhattan, ultra-hip Brooklyn, the Queens of Forest Hills and the mid-1960s World’s Fair, the Bronx of the legendary New York Yankees and … Staten Island. Granted, there’s nothing much cool about Staten Island, which is Republican-leaning and landmark-light. But hey, my friend Steve is from there, and he may be the coolest guy I know.
Let’s face it, about the only demographics in America who don’t find New York City at least kind of cool are (a) the people who morally broad-brush it as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah and (b) Trumpers who detest the city that felonized their god and votes against him by such overwhelming margins that the state of New York is always Blue on the election-night map.
Here are just a few of the many scenes I see in my mind’s eye, and songs that echo in my ears, when I think of New York City:
- Taxi driver Travis Bickle drawing his pistol at the mirror and practice-challenging “Are you talkin’ to me?”
- Erstwhile fact-checker and current rock-bottom screw-up Jamie Conway trading his Rolex for a loaf of fresh-baked bread at the end (oops! spoiler alert) of Bright Lights, Big City. (A novel that influenced me to write a subsequent newspaper feature in author Jay McInerney’s second-person voice — to the utter detriment of my subject matter, as a friend of mine who’s an actual novelist informed me.)
- The totality of the first two Godfather films — everything from Sonny Corleone being gunned down at that tollbooth to the young Vito (Robert DeNiro again) establishing his homicidal Cosa Nostra cred in the immigrant neighborhoods of the 1920s.
- Midnight Cowboy hustler Ratso Rizzo angrily advising a motorist who has almost bumped him as he’s crossing the street, “I’m walkin’ here!”
- Jaded unofficial city spokesperson Fran Leibowitz writing or saying something very sardonic and funny, while also conveying in no uncertain terms that the world is divided into New York City and places that sadly are not.
- Everything that I loved about Woody Allen’s Manhattan — the Gershwin score! the black-and-white cinematography! the witty dialogue! — up until the #metoo movement happened and I realized there was something incredibly creepy about the sexual relationship between Allen’s 40-something protagonist and the underaged teenager played by a young Mariel Hemingway.
- Andy Warhol’s coterie of creatives and eccentrics experiencing the city in the 1960s and early ’70s in daring and dangerous ways, yet projecting to middle America that they couldn’t have been more bored with it all.
- The thrill and thrash of punk music at its height. CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. The Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, The New York Dolls. All while progenitor Lou Reed continued to evolve and dazzle.
- The Rolling Stones’ 1978 song “Shattered” with its pitch-perfect evocation of a city so beyond saving that a tabloid newspaper would capture its existential and actual bankruptcy in the headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” (My favorite lines from the song: “Go ahead, bite the Big Apple. Don’t mind the maggots!”)
What do all these things have in common? Yes, cool. Not always attractive cool, granted. But even there, cool in the way that the film noir genre is cool. A different and captivating kind of darkness.
Which was why last week, when I checked into my boutique hotel — a skinny building with tiny rooms and no view — I thought, “Damn, I have arrived!”
Which was why, when I started walking in one direction just to see where I’d end up and had soon crossed both the aforementioned Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue of Mad Men fame, and then smacked into Central Park, I fairly exulted in my great good fortune to be present in a land of such treasures.
Which was why I made a point of walking fast as I completed two early-hour laps around the Central Park reservoir on all three of my mornings in the city, with ultra-fit runners flying past me and even my fellow walkers seeming to be in a big hurry. When I got breakfast afterward, I smugly compared myself to all the tourists probably just then arising in their chain-hotel rooms.
Which was why, even though I’d have been panicked by the prospect of taking public transportation if my friend and old New York City hand Jeff hadn’t been leading me around at every turn, I luxuriated in my visual status as a possible city resident who was simply out running errands.
Which was why, as I attended a Broadway show one night and a concert at a jazz club the next thanks to Jeff’s thoughtfulness in procuring tickets, I fancied myself a native availing himself of the local arts, not just another tourist trying to applaud at the appropriate times and, once back on the street, endeavoring not to gawk at the skyscrapers and neon, or flash my wallet on a crowded boulevard in preparation for tapping my credit card at the subway gate.
Which was why, after I’d bid adieu to Anja and Jeff in the city and boarded a train to rejoin my friends Alison and Steve (yes, the cool Steve) on Long Island, I felt both exhilarated and relieved to have escaped with my ruse of residency and my utter coolness intact. At least in my own delusional mind.
