Growing up City — An Assumption

Ahhh… those were the days!

A few years back, I read a piece in New York Magazine where celebrities recounted their idyllic, eclectic childhoods in NYC. These vignettes mourned the slow disappearance of character in the current day’s more-gentrified, less-AIDS-infused landscape. The piece came out during a time when lamenting the loss of a grittier New York was the mode du jour — a New York filled with ethnic bakeries and charming bum fights.

It also came out a few years after I had gotten punched in the face by a couple of strangers. I wondered as I read the article, what exactly were these people missing?

I spent most of my childhood in a suburb about 15 miles outside of Baltimore. We had a house with a deck, a large yard, a pool, and a golden retriever. It was an antisocial enclave, a utopia for both kids and parents. Instead of being shuttled to a highly supervised park or a museum whose significance would evade and bore me, I spent hours every day creating hiding places under the deck and attempting to fit my rapidly growing body into the dog house. I rolled in the mud, rode the dog like a horse, and spent 99% of my time in my own imagination — never learning how to make friends, be social, or not have poison ivy.

Even with our 5 year age gap, my brother was my one and only partner in crime. We invented whole worlds and languages, played tricks on each other, and fell asleep in a fit of giggles in the same room, with me on his floor, despite having my own comfortable bed across the hall. Our parents occasionally took us to the city, exploring all it had to offer — Camden Yards, the Domino Sugars sign illuminating the Inner Harbor, the mellifluous sound of someone yelling “Omar comin’!” If my parents had to do it all over again, I hope they wouldn’t change a thing.

At the same time, childhood is universally scary for many reasons. Physically, you are on a suicide-mission, finding clever ways to turn otherwise safe activities into certain death traps. Emotionally, you experience strong feelings like betrayal and unfairness for the first time, during seemingly benign activities like a game of Go Fish. For a parent to introduce the physical threat and emotional dysfunction of 8 million SSRI-chugging self-absorbed man-babies seems like the clearest reason to immediately get child services involved. And yet, hundreds of thousands of parents make the decision to raise their kids in NYC every year. Is the perceived benefit really worth the risk?

And what exactly is the benefit? Some argue culture is both absent in suburbia and necessary to a child’s understanding of the world. As a regular museum-goer, I would almost never see anyone under the age of 20 at the exhibits. Children are generally unwelcome at the theater, which is probably for the best given Harry Potter’s propensity to brandish his penis onstage. In fact, while we’re at it, here are some things I’ve seen on stage, with my parents, thankfully over the age of 15:

• Al Pacino learning the perils of anti-Semitism in “A Merchant of Venice”;
• Alan Cumming learning the perils of anti-Semitism while grabbing at ladies (and gentlemen) in depressed underwear in “Cabaret”;
• A grown man grabbing at ladies and gentlemen and franken-monsters in sparkling underwear while undulating in a thong and red lipstick in “Rocky Horror Picture Show” (it should be noted we saw this no less than five times);
• A grown man recounting his botched sex-change operation in a wig, red lipstick, and a cutoff jean skirt in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (it should be noted we saw this no less than ten times);

I could go on.

Beyond the arts, some argue that big cities like New York have grade schools which from a young age, set children on a path to Harvard. While a strong diploma will certainly open doors, in the years since I left a couple of fancy universities, I’ve seen little correlation between impressive diplomas/transcripts and a lucrative career or even happiness. Furthermore, in the 4+ years I’ve lived in chill California, losing some of my street smarts (i.e., raging anxiety) is one thing I don’t entirely miss (see my related piece on losing my fashion sense — way more dangerous). It turns out, if you’re nice to people, most people are nice to you in return. Maybe it really is as simple as that.

As for my brother and I, even though as kids, we barely socialized outside our own little world, we both grew up to be successful in different ways — he with his accomplished career and beautiful family, and me with my worrisome ability to not be grossed out by mice. But maybe things would have been different had we grown up in the city.

Between the two of us, I’ve spent far more years in a city than he has. In college, my parents had moved back to NYC, this time Manhattan, giving me summers to enjoy the city’s bountiful and diverse offerings as well as an excuse to move there after graduation. At that point, my brother had moved to suburban Silicon Valley, while I began getting swept up in all that New York had to offer. I went to free shows, I went to expensive shows. I closed down bars on Tuesday night. I made out on subway platforms, I had my heart broken on subway platforms. I got punched in the face. I met people with connections in the arts, and soon began convincing myself that there was more to life than a desk job and a white picket fence. I supported my musician friends at dive-bar shows, and tried my own hand at collaborating on songs and spending late nights in recording studios. While I watched my peers from the Maryland suburb of my youth get married and settle into their comfortable houses down the street from our old elementary school, I was bent on being the culturally rich, free-spirited (i.e., ragingly anxious) artist the city beguiled me into thinking I was. It was thus no surprise that these successful celebrities in NYMag had commented on their childhood in NYC with such rose-colored glasses. But where were the countless stories of those that didn’t make it? Did they too laud the city for the cultural mecca and land of opportunity it purported to be, or were they mired in a pattern of self-absorbed self-doubt, unable to settle for the cushy lives of their suburban counterparts, yet also unable to succeed?

I should clarify that during the my prolonged stint in NYC, I too spent 99% of my time mourning the loss of a bygone era. Young and underpaid, I saw affordable iconic venues disappearing (CBGB, Mars Bar, Mo’ Pitkins), and rents increasing with stuffy bankers filling vacancies and artists getting pushed out of the very city they created. I conveyed my ineloquent angst to my parents (with whom I had to live for 2 years, a self-imposed victim of the financial divide). And while they understood my frustration, they never wished to go back to the NYC of the 80s they immigrated to, the same NYC that left my father unconscious — bloodied and mugged — in a subway station that to this day, he has trouble revisiting.

A couple of years ago, my brother visited my parents who currently live in Manhattan, and took his then 4-year-old son on his first subway ride. I can’t imagine the confusion he must have experienced, inhaling the urine-soaked air while being reminded that “big boys use the potty”. As my brother described it, within minutes of getting on the train, a man who appeared to have escaped a hospital, complete with half-connected tubes and bloodied bandages, came barreling through the car, unable to fully support himself, unwilling to give an explanation. Upon his exit, their attention turned to a couple seated in front of them. A woman was inconsolable, hysterically crying as if she had lost her entire family, her will to live. My nephew looked on, unable to speak, uncertain he’d want an explanation.

Besides the still-troubling sights that any child (or adult) would be unprepared to encounter in the city, the opposite is also true. For every lunatic within entirely too-close proximity of yourself and your loved ones, there’s a too-conservative worrywort ready to rebuke your actions normally not intended to be displayed in front of thousands of strangers. (Don’t worry — I’m not about to launch into a lament over the unfortunate disapproval of public masturbation). Last month, my family and I took my toddler niece to Central Park, a trip which ended prematurely when her terrible-twos got to the best of her, leaving her in full on tantrum mode on the floor of a crowded pathway. Eager to get her moving, we kept encouraging her to get up and walk, but she was resolute, and threw herself even more dramatically to the floor with every passing second. Finally, we decided to pretend to leave, announcing “fine! we’re leaving! you can stay if you want” while slowly walking away, and yes, leaving a 2-year-old on the floor of the world’s busiest public park.

Now before you go apeshit, might I remind you that this trick usually works in suburbia. By the time the parent is halfway down the block, the kid wises up and comes running, albeit angrily and adamant in remaining enraged for the next hour or so, or at least until Wild Kratts comes on. But this is yet another concern of raising a child in the city — all of your parenting is on full display by hundreds, nay thousands, nay millions of the world’s most judgmental and more-successful-than-you people. Within seconds, someone frantically noticed my niece and walked over (others stood by, uncertain what to do, “is someone with… is there anyone… what the…”) at which point I waved them off, stating “no no, she’s ours, don’t worry!” with a weak laugh from about 15 feet away. The woman could barely hide her horrified reaction, and with good reason. It was New York City, it was Christmastime, it was 40 degrees. What the hell was I thinking?

Private lives becoming public is one of the common pitfalls of city life. But how do we expect to put on our best selves, especially while enduring the constant adversity that comes with raising a child? Maybe in this case, the rough-and-tumble NYC of the 1980s would in fact be more forgiving.

In the many years since I got punched in the face, I’ve retold that story a number of times, this time focusing on the (true) additional details. It often goes something like this:

“Wait, what? How did it happen??”

“Well, it was about 9:30, and I was walking home from dinner. All of a sudden these two guys ran up behind me and sucker-punched me. I got pushed to the floor, my purse flying in one direction, the pizza box I was holding in another. I started yelling like a sea lion in distress, and then boom — they just fled.”

“Wow… and then what happened?”

“I dunno. I got up, looked around, and made sure I was safe. And you know what my second move was? I swear to god… I went over and recovered the pizza box before a car ran over it.”

Such stories are accounts of remarkably frightening episodes that eventually fade away into almost comedic badges of honor. They often serve as fodder for bonding with others who have lived in New York and had similar experiences. My friend Anna, who looks somewhere between a J. Crew model and a Mormon sister-wife, loves to describe the time she was simply crossing the street in Manhattan and had a man stop in front of her, spit in her face, and yell “crazy white bitch!” In shock, she looked across the street and locked eyes with a homeless man who had witnessed the entire incident. He simply shook his head, looked down, and muttered, “…ca-razy!” I’ve asked her to tell this story at least 10 times now, never failing to leave us both in an unending fit of laughter before she even finishes.

It’s no revelation that tragedy + time = comedy. But these “tragedies” are one-off incidents that serve as semi-humorous anecdotes, harrowing but rare remnants of old New York wrapped up in a way to bond with other “war buddies” who also suffered the circus of the city. It’s easy to get nostalgic once you’ve left, or even if you’ve stayed but become successful enough that your current surroundings are cushy. So cushy, in fact, that they make you yearn for excitement, which you then conflate with danger.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe had I grown up in NYC in the 1980s, I wouldn’t actually inherit a lifetime supply of Xanax with a side order of commitment issues (which is waaaay off from my current suburban-upbringing self!) Maybe I would have become a successful musician. Maybe I would have dropped out. Maybe I would have been featured in New York Magazine.

Or maybe, just maybe, I would have punched somebody in the face.