You Think You’re So Big

Jersey City: Circa 2006

[ Here is something I wrote in, I think, 2006, for no specific reason that I can recall. I’ve cleaned it up a bit, and am adding it to the sporadic Letters From Here collection/series. ]

The kids on the PATH train, traveling east from Jersey City, are all trying hard. They want to be accepted by their big brother, which of course is New York City. Sometimes I look at them and I’m baffled: What, exactly, are you trying to do? But really, I understand. I have big brothers myself, so I know how it is.

I spent most of the 1990s in New York: First in Brooklyn, then the East Village, then the West Village. In all that time and I never thought I’d be the guy on the PATH train. I never even thought about the PATH train. For five years I lived within blocks of two PATH stations, and I barely even noticed them. Maybe, if I saw someone coming out of the station, I might think of, or not even consciously register that person as: Outsider.

Outsiders are an underrated aspect of New York City life. Without outsiders, insiders don’t mean anything. In fact, insiders are really only important to outsiders. You can’t be a big brother if you don’t have a little brother: someone who is impressed, someone who wants to be like you, and fit in with you. Someone who makes you feel Big.

From the point of view of a small town in Texas like the one that I’m from, New York was like a big brother that was ten or twelve years older. I mean that it was completely alien, but somehow more important — just bigger, basically. If you are a little brother, you know the profound frustration of little-brotherness: You get bigger, but meanwhile he’s getting bigger, too, and when you get as big he used to be, you just feel small all over again. You can never catch up. It’s even worse, I suspect, if you are close in age. He’s just slightly, just barely, just a little bit bigger than you — but bigger is bigger, period. That’s what it’s like, I think, for those kids on the PATH train. They are so close. And yet …

And yet, what would New York be without those kids? Those kids are New York. I never understood that until I lived in Jersey City, and started riding the PATH and looking at them all the time. In a way, they have the power. If a thing doesn’t click with them, it won’t click anywhere. If they don’t take it home, it stays with the insiders, and it straight-up withers and dies. Nobody else ever knows about it. Face it insiders: Your whole identity depends on these outsider kids. Without them, nobody ever cares about you. Ever.

Some of these kids get inside, and then inside has to go somewhere else, to keep them outside. Of course, some of them get inside and stay inside, but that’s pretty hard. Because, like I said, insiders need outsiders, or they are nothing.

So I look at these kids on their way to Manhattan, or on their way home. I look at their sneakers and the way they wear their jeans, and whether the cap matches the shoes, and all of that. I’m past the time in my life when I could say which look is “right” and which is “wrong.” At this point I no longer care what my big brother thinks, or what New York City thinks — or what you think. To me, some of what I see is innovative. Maybe the innovation is real, and maybe it’s the result of what some insider might call a mistake, because the outsider got it wrong. Doesn’t matter. A lot of beautiful things come from “mistakes,” from getting it “wrong.” Sometimes the best thing about being an outsider is that you don’t really understand the rules of insider-ness, and that’s as good a way to end up breaking a rule as any.

I spent a long time being a very little brother in New York City, which intimidated the hell out of me, terrorized me; it was the big brother that laughed in my face, played tricks on me, moved my shit when I wasn’t looking, pushed me around. Eventually I figured things out. You can’t catch up with your big brother, but you can grow up enough to see what matters and what doesn’t, and to have an identity that’s your own, not a reflection of his. In the end, I did everything you’re supposed to do in New York City. And then I left.

We moved very far South, then we moved north again, and ended up in JC. To be honest: I was horrified, at first, to find myself in Jersey City. I reverted to a childish version of myself, seeing my reflection in what I imagined to be the mocking eyes of big bro NYC. The outsider thing, I learned, is most acute when you’re right outside, when you’re just at the door, when you know what’s up, when you know how and why to get in — but somehow, you just can’t do it. You’re not in. Here is the door, and it’s closed. Try again, kid.

I hear some people say Jersey City is practically a neighborhood of New York, a sixth burough. It’s true that Jersey City is part of the landscape of the most hard-core New Yorkers I’ve ever known — not the ones who live their whole life three or four neighborhoods, but the ones who get around. I’m thinking now of a graffiti veteran I met in Brooklyn; he knew all the PATH train stops. He gets around. But despite this, JC is not a neighborhood of NYC. That’s not it. If that were it, the PATH would feel different. It would feel like the L train. It doesn’t.

These kids are different. They’re trying as hard as the kids on the L, maybe they’re trying harder. But to me, to my eyes, they’re a lot more real. If they’re a little “off,” well, part of being real is being a little off. They’re too young to have figured certain things out. They don’t quite know yet that their big brother isn’t all he seems to be, he has his flaws, he fucks up, he gets it wrong, he has weaknesses and fears that no little brother can ever truly comprehend. Being a big brother looks great, but … it’s got its downsides.

These kids aren’t thinking about that, they’re not thinking about the downsides of being an insider, they’re thinking about the downsides of being who they are: an outsider.

The train is almost to Christopher Street now, and what these kids are thinking about is getting inside.

I look at them one more time, as they go.

They’re from the suburbs and they’re from the ghetto, they’re white and black and Latino and Asian, they’re boys and they’re girls, they’re straight and they’re gay.

I look at them and I think: Kid, you look perfect tonight.

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