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Reflections on New York City hazing, with teenagers in tow

My teenage siblings recently flew from Wisconsin to stay with me in Brooklyn. Over the course of that week, I found myself revisiting my first few months here through the lens of their relative shock and awe.

”Yes,” I told them. “There is a lot of garbage.”

”Yes,” I agreed. “People are very brusque compared to in Wisconsin.”

”But,” I insisted, over and over, “Nobody’s going to see you mess up — nobody is looking. You’re surrounded by people and yet you’re alone.”

Michael and Carly (seventeen and sixteen, respectively) regarded me doubtfully.

“People saw,” Carly insisted, referring to her unsuccessful attempts to swipe a metro card upside down. “And they kind of hated me for it.”

“If they didn’t care,” Michael added, raising his eyebrows, “then why did they all look so mad?”

“That’s just their faces,” I assured them.

It’s easy to write off perpetual embarrassment as being specific to adolescence, but I think there’s also something to be said for the fact that transplantation lends itself to a certain emotional regression. Out of our element, touched down in a completely new and busy place, we tend to feel the way we did in high school: alone, hyper-visible, and struck dumb by the sense that everyone is watching.

For me, the sight of my siblings navigating New York City incited uncomfortable flashbacks to my own initiation process. Their inability to stand upright on the subway brought me back to falling into old ladies’ laps on the R train. Tending to their blistered heels in the evenings reminded me of how little walking one does in Milwaukee, where the dearth of public transit necessitates carpools to and from every doorway. I’d been hazed into city life by getting hollered at for walking too slow, or for pulling my rolling suitcase over strangers’ feet. Blisters had bloomed, my boogers had turned black, and once I cried so hard in public that NYPD officers approached me in hoards, thinking I’d been attacked.

“I’m just homesick,” I told the cops, covering my eyes for privacy.

Eventually, I learned the New York City method of sobbing in public — face visible, expression haunted yet slightly proud — an art form that discourages all human contact. But it took a while, and until I became a model of what I now call “NYC MASK,” I felt exposed and mortified pretty much constantly.

“It’s a navigable city,” I promised Michael and Carly. I guess that, having reached the point where I can read a map and comport myself in a way that does not invite predators, I now feel a cult-like compulsion to convert the innocent, and help them weather the often uncomfortable transition to NYC MASK wearer. My own traumatic acclimation had yanked me out of my Midwestern self-consciousness pretty quickly. It taught me to be direct and watchful. Over the course of my time here, I’ve learned the difference between politeness and fear.

“See, we’re here,” I told my siblings, pointing to the map above our orange plastic seats. I traced the green line to Metropolitan Avenue. “And we’re going here, six stops.” I watched Michael and Carly stare at the intersecting lines — the open bubbles and the black bubbles, the elongated bubbles — and recalled those first few heart-pounding weeks in Brooklyn, when the subway maps swam before my own eyes. The trains and their coded stops may as well have been veins snaking across some anatomical map of the human body. And I sucked at science. I presumed that new places, like certain equations, were a phenomena that only geniuses could hack.

“Can’t you just do it for us, Bubba?” Carly asked.

“Okay,” I conceded, grateful that they are now taller than me and have the same pet name for me that they had when they were babies.

I didn’t ask them to navigate for the rest of the trip, and in general I treated them like children. Part of me was scared, because I’d wanted to help them avoid the shock of leaving home for the first time — maybe if they practiced enough while visiting me, freshman year wouldn’t even faze them. But instead I’d have to watch them struggle, reliving my own experiences through their actions and reactions — all the while wondering if their inability to hack it (or disinterest in hacking it, really) foreshadowed their settling in Milwaukee—though maybe I was overreacting. And what’s so wrong with Milwaukee, anyway, Kathleen? You NYC MASK-wearing snob.

A lot of closing thoughts, in other words. And not to compare myself to a mom, or anything — such a comparison would be offensive to moms, since I’m barely responsible for myself, much less for anybody else (this morning I ate Halloween candy for breakfast,and right now for clothes I am wearing a blanket) — but it must be something that parents deal with constantly: realizing how much you want to make the leap for other people, only to realize that instead you’re going to have to watch them either do it themselves, or choose not to all together.