Happy New... York

The Great Leap Forward (excerpts)

When I first moved to New York, I shared a reasonably priced two-bedroom apartment half a block from the Hudson river. I had no job at the time and was living off the cruel joke I referred to as my savings. In the evenings, lacking anything better to do, I used to head east and stare into the windows of the handsome, single-family town houses, wondering what went on in those well-appointed rooms. (…)
I had never devoted much time to envy while living in Chicago, but there it had been possible to rent a good-size apartment and still have enough money left over for a movie or a decent cut of meat. To be broke in New York was to feel a constant, needling sense of failure, as you were regularly confronted by people who had not only more but much, much more. My daily budget was a quickly spent twelve dollars, and every extravagance called for a corresponding sacrifice. If I bought a hot dog on the street, I’d have to make up that money by eating eggs for dinner or walking fifty blocks to the library rather than taking the subway. The newspaper was always fished out of trash cans, section by section, and I was always on the lookout for a good chicken-back recipe. Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence. Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime. I didn’t want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks. The money was tempting. I just didn’t know how to get it.
(…)
Patrick offered me a job, and I took it. “Terrific,” he said. “Get yourself a back brace, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Because he was a card-carrying communist, Patrick hated being referred to as the boss. “This is a collective,” he’d say. “Sure, I might happen to own the truck, but that doesn’t make me any more valuable than the next guy. If I’m better than you, it’s only because I’m Irish.”
(…)
It would be a stretch to say that I enjoyed coaxing matresses up five flights of stairs, but it was nice to work as part of a team. The money was nothing compared with what other people earned answering phones or slipping suppositories into the rectums of senior citizens, but it was more than I had earned working for Valencia. The cash was bounceproof, and most everyone included a tip. After having spent a year and a half cooped up in a little office, it felt good to get out and move around. Rego Park, Bayside, Harlem, Coney Island, the job introduced me to the various neighborhoods of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. It gave me a chance to look into people’s lives, to meet my fellow New Yorkers and carry their things.
Because Patrick didn’t believe in having himself bonded, we rarely moved anything of great value, no museum-quality paintings or extraordinary pieces of furniture. Most of our customers were moving into places they couldn’t quite afford. Their new, higher rents meant that they’d have to cut back on their spending, to work longer hours, or try to wean themselves off their costly psychiatrists. They were anxious about their future and quick to complain should a part of their past get scratched or broken. “The transitory state fucks with their heads,” Richie explained during my first week of work. “Me, I just try to ignore their stressed-outedness and concentrate on the gratuity.”
(…)
After a job was finished, we’d stand on the street drinking beer or foul-tasting Gatorade. The tip would be discussed, as would the disadvantages of living in this particular neighborhood. It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. The’d put a good face on it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friends making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.
Our bottles drained, Patrick would carry us back to what everyone but Lyle agreed was the center of the universe.
(…)
The first of the month was always the busiest time, but there were more than enough minor jobs and unhappy marriages to pull us through. In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment. Leaving a spacious, reasonably priced one-bedroom in the middle of the month usually signified that someone had done something really bad. We’d empty a place of half its possessions and listen to the details as we drove the former tenant to a quickly rented storage space. The truck made a good deal of noise, and although the injured party was always eager to talk, he had to significantly raise his voice to be heard. I liked being told these stories, but it was odd hearing such personal information shouted rather than whispered.
(…)
When the citizens of New York went looking for a new apartment, they came to us. Some movers charged for their inside information, but, with the exception of Richie, we gave it away for free. Strangers would often flag down the loaded van and ask where we were coming from. “Do you know if it’s already been rented? Does it have a tub or a shower?” They asked the same thing of the emergency medical crews pulling up to the hospital morgue. “What floor did the victim live on? Did the apartment get much light?”
I’d been raised with the impression that it took a certain amount of know-how to get by in New York, but a surprising number of our customers proved me wrong. Here were people who packed two hundred pounds of dishes into a single box the size of a doghouse, or even worse, people who didn’t pack at all.
(…)
The best of times were snappy autumn afternoons when we’d finished moving a tow-bedroom customer from Manhattan to some faraway neighborhood in Brooklyn or Queens. The side doors would be open as we crowded in the front seat, Patrick listening to a taped translation of Chairman Mao boasting about “the great leap forward.” Traffic would be heavy on the bridge due to an accident, and because we were paid for travel time, we hoped that the pileup involved at least one piece of heavy machinery. When the tape became too monotonous, I’d ask Richie about his days at the reformatory and pleasantly drowse as he spoke of twelve year-old car thieves and boys who had killed their brothers over an ice-cream sandwich. Patrick would get involved, saying that violent crime was a natural consequence of the capitalist system, and then, eventually, the New York skyline would appear on the horizon and we’d all stop talking. If you happen to live there, it’s always refreshing to view Manhattan from afar. Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

City of Angels (excerpts)

My childhood friend Alisha lives in North Carolina but used to visit me in New York at least twice a year. She was always an easy, undemanding houseguest, and it was a pleasure having her as she was happy following me around on errands or just lying on my sofa reading a magazine. “Just pretend I’m not here,” she’d say –and sometimes I did. Quite and willing to do whatever anyone else wanted, she was often favorably compared to a shadow.
A week before one of her regular December visits, Alisha called to say that she’d be bringing along a guest, someone named Bonnie. The woman worked at a sandwich shop and had never traveled more than fifty miles from her home in Greensboro. Alisha hadn’t known her for long but said that she seemed like a very sweet person. (…)
The two women arrived in New York on a Friday afternoon, and upon greeting them, I noticed an uncommon expression on Alisha’s face. It was the look of someone who’s discovered too late that she’s either set her house on fire or committed herself to traveling with the wrong person. “Run for your life,” she whispered.
Bonnie was a dour, spindly woman whose thick girlish braids fell like leashes over the innocent puppies pictured on her sweatshirt. She had a pronounced Greensboro accent and had landed at Kennedy convinced that, given half a chance, the people of New York would steal the fillings right out of her mouth — and she was not about to let that happen.
(…)
“I expect to be treated like everybody else is what I expect. I expect to be treated like an American.”
That was the root of the problem right there. Visiting Americans will find more warmth in Tehran than they will in New York, a city founded on the principle of Us versus Them. I don’t speak Latin but have always assumed that the city motto translates to either Go Home or We Don’t Like You, Either. Like me, most of the people I knew had moved to New York with the express purpose of escaping Americans such as Bonnie. Fear had worked in our favor until a new mayor began promoting the city as a family theme park. His campaign had worked, and now the Bonnies were arriving in droves, demanding the same hospitality they’d received last month in Orlando.
(...)
“Now those were some nice New Yorkers”, she said, waving good-bye to the crowd in the tearoom. I tried to explain that they weren’t real New Yorkers, but at that point she’d stopped listening to anything I had to say. She dragged Alisha off for a carriage ride through Central Park, and then it was time for a visit to what she called “Fay-o Schwartz.” The toy store was followed by brutal pilgrimages to Radio City Music Hall, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Christmas tree at Rockerfeller Plaza. The crowds were such that you could pick your feet off the ground and be carried for blocks in either direction. I was mortified, but Bonnie was in a state of almost narcotic bliss, overjoyed to have discovered a New York without the New Yorkers. Here were out-of-town visitors from Omaha and Chattanooga, outraged over the price of their hot roasted chestnuts. They apologized when stepping on someone’s foot and never thought to complain when some nitwit with a video camera stupidly blocked their path. The crowd was relentlessly, pathologically friendly, and their enthusiasm was deafening. Looking around her, Bonnie saw a glittering paradise filled with decent, like-minded people, sent by God to give the world a howdy. Encircled by her army of angels, she drifted across the avenue to photograph a juggler, while I hobbled off toward home, a clear outsider in a city I’d foolishly thought to call my own.

David Sedaris, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, Abacus, 2000.