The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)
But I did feel the vertigo of death’s invitation, beckoning me towards the dark waters below. Only a newfound perspective and desire steadied my wavering soul. I came to realize, just in time, that suicide was far too easy – and obscenely cowardly – after someone I knew, not even half my age, had been through so much worse and still marched gloriously on.
New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.
Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of Purpose; everyone's got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn't mean it's and unfriendly place -- just busy and preoccupied. Personally, I love it. I'm a social creature but there are times and places you just don't want to do more than grunt at your fellow human being.
And suddenly it came to him. That Strawberry Fields garden he'd come from, and the Freedom Tower he'd been thinking of: taken together, didn't they contain the two words that said it all about this city, the two words that really mattered? It seemed to him that they did. Two words: the one an invitation, the other an ideal, an adventure, a necessity. "Imagine" said the garden. "Freedom" said the tower. Imagine freedom. That was the spirit, the message of this city he loved. You really didn't need anything more. Dream it and do it. But first you must dream it.
The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn't look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn't call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.
You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.
Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship. There was a raw, feral beauty about this landscape that was totally unselfconscious but no less real...There was no pomp or vainty here; this was an innocent, natural beauty, the best kind, like a woman first thing in the morning, lit up by the sun streaming through a window, who doesn't quite believe it when you tell her how beautiful she is.
I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.
I wanted solitude, but a treasure like that didn't exist in the city. I only found silence in Central Park, still littered with people of course, but the only place that held moments of calm. I breathed in that wonderful silence as my pace finally slowed, and nature delighted my senses.
When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses . . .
I revealed my affection towards my former employer and felt sick at myself for betraying him. My grandfather stood and poured me another tall glass. He offered me a sour tomato to take the edge off of the vodka. Pappy pulled his chair up next to mine then put his oversized arm around my shoulder and offered me his wisdom. "Feel no pity for this man James," he whispered. "A fool and his money are lucky to come together in the first place. More so, it's the responsibility of much smarter, more dubious men to party them," he finished.
Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love.
Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine’s favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure.
On occasion he would think back to the fiercest passion it had been his pleasure to experience and reflect on what might have been. He would look upon the woman who occupied the opposite half of his bed and feel his life had not quite lived up to the promise of another day. These moments would be mercifully brief, or so he hoped.
If Audrey sensed what he was contemplating, her silence did not let on. He turned from the window and found her looking at him with a flawless poker face. It may have been attentiveness and curiosity to hear what he would say next, or perhaps she was expecting from him what women throughout the ages, often against their better judgment, had expected of men.
...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.
Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy’s interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life’s meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave.
Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn’t know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror.
But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed.
Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper.
I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction...
Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.
She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.
It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle vines and no balconies and no guitars, it was meant for love. For living and for love, and the two were inseparable; one didn't come without the other.("Too Nice A Day To Die")
New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.
I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.
My decision to become a teacher suddenly seemed even more appropriate. Life had just become that much more unpredictably precarious and ill-suited to long-term planning, and it felt that much more necessary to spread love and knowledge to those who would one day have to manage this messy and painful world of ours"Also in Zack Love's "Stories and Scripts: an Anthology
There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, singled, and female in New York. It's a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It's about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously, and generally being treated like shit. But it's necessary.
So...Now that we got that over with, let's get back to love at first sight, Evan said. Not infatuation at first sight...Love. With a capital L, he clarified.Love? Heeb asked, playfully pretending not to know the concept.Yeah. The real thing. The conviction that if you had this one woman, all other women would become irrelevant. You'd never again be unhappy And you'd give up anything to have her and keep her.You've experienced that?Only once. And I haven't stopped thinking about it ever since.Tell me more.Sometimes I think that I still chase women just to forget about her. Because I know I can never have her. But I can't seem to forget about her, no matter what girl I'm chasing...No one can possibly compare....Who is she?Delilah, Evan said wistfully.Delilah?, asked Heeb, intriguedDelilah Nakova, Evan replied, with a hint of awe and reverence in his voice.
156/ I'd be very good at being rich, but no one has offered to test my talents in that department. ... New York was like a wealthy, handsome, intensely artistic, complex, slightly manic man who, for some inexplicable reason, was enthralled with me. Not that I ever met a man like that. Who needed men anyway? I'll take Manhattan.
The most glorious hour in Manhattan was when twilight fell in sheets across the Great Lawn. Bands of blue turned darker by the moment as the last of the pale light filtered through the boughs of cherry trees and black locusts. In October, the meadows turned gold; the vines were twists of yellow and red.
In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.
I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love.
No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it . . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all?
To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.
Indeed, wounded loved can make for fierce vengeance. And, from what I know of Anissa, it does seem a bit out of character for her to behave so spitefully, so I'd like to think that she really is just deeply hurt, angry and looking for some way to injure me back...I hope she knows how well she's succeeded.
Speaking of body decorations, I luuhhhvv your belly piercing!” Heeb said, looking at the gold ring in the center of her slim, tan waist. Despite the artic cold, Angelina had opted for a skin tight, black tube top that ended just above her belly, on the assumption that a warm cab, a winter coat, and a short wait to get into the club was an adequate frosty weather strategy. Heeb was still reverently staring at her belly when Angelina finally caught her breath from laughing.“Do you really like it? You’re just saying that so that you can check out my belly!”“And what’s so bad about that? I mean, didn’t you get that belly piercing so that people would check out your belly?”“No. I just thought it would look cool…Do you have any piercings?”“Actually, I do,” Heeb replied.“Where?”“My appendix.”“Huh?”“I wanted to be the first guy with a pierced organ. And the appendix is a totally useless organ anyway, so I figured why the hell not?”“That’s pretty original,” she replied, amused.“Oh yeah. I’ve outdone every piercing fanatic out there. The only problem is when I have to go through metal detectors at the airport.”Angelina burst into laughs again, and then managed to say, “Don’t you have to take it out occasionally for a cleaning?”“Nah. I figure I’ll just get it removed when my appendix bursts. It’ll be a two for one operation, if you know what I mean.
Now give me some advice about how to take full advantage of this city. I’m always looking to improve my odds.”“Just what I’d expect from a horny actuary.”“I’m serious.”Carlos reflected for a moment on the problem at hand. He actually had never needed or tried to take full advantage of the city in order to meet women, but he thought about all of his friends who regularly did. His face lit up as he thought of some helpful advice: “Get into the arts.”“The arts?”“Yeah.”“But I’m not artistic.”“It doesn’t matter. Many women are into the arts. Theater. Painting. Dance. They love that stuff.”“You want me to get into dance? Earthquakes have better rhythm than me…And can you really picture me in those tights?”“Take an art history class. Learn photography. Get involved in a play or an independent film production. Get artsy, Sammy. I’m telling you, the senoritas dig that stuff.”“Really?”“Yeah. You need to sign up for a bunch of artistic activities. But you can’t let on that it’s all just a pretext to meet women. You have to take a real interest in the subject or they’ll quickly sniff out your game.”“I don’t know…It’s all so foreign to me…I don’t know the first thing about being artistic.”“Heeb, this is the time to expand your horizons. And you’re in the perfect city to do it. New York is all about reinventing yourself. Get out of your comfort zones. Become more of a Renaissance man. That’s much more interesting to women.
Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.
...And on my fourth morning in Naples, I woke up alone. There was a note on the table with the breakfast that Cinzia had quietly prepared for me. It read, "It could never be. But that's why it will always be - perfectly divine. Cinzia" City Solipsism: A Short Story
Our grief is not a cry for war."That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.
I waited in vain for someone like me to stand up and say that the only thing those of us who don't believe in god have to believe is in other people and that New York City is the best place there ever was for a godless person to practice her moral code. I think it has to do with the crowded sidewalks and subways. Walking to and from the hardware store requires the push and pull of selfishness and selflessness, taking turns between getting out of someone's way and them getting out of yours, waiting for a dog to move, helping a stroller up steps, protecting the eyes from runaway umbrellas. Walking in New York is a battle of the wills, a balance of aggression and kindness. I'm not saying it's always easy. The occasional "Watch where you're going, bitch" can, I admit, put a crimp in one's day. But I believe all that choreography has made me a better person. The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens, and I kept whispering under my breath "we the people, we the people" over and over again, reminding myself we're all in this together and they had as much right - exactly as much right - as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to.
Summer sticks to her skirt sumptuously, in the shiny gray fabric hanging loosely from her curves. Her chestnut eyes, apparently hidden from strangers; her simple but graceful face, unpainted by Madison Avenue; and her straight black hair, parted down the middle without ego, all suggest a minimalist - almost pastoral - beauty that is oddly discordant with her fashionable attire, comfortable indifference to the crowds, and quasi-attentive perusal of the Time magazine unfolded over her hand.
You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the first island they took over.
I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it's so bright and so dark at the same time, just knowing there are three thousand people out there longing to be swept away by the passion that's about to flood out from scarlet curtains, to this I consecrate my body and my soul, I can give no more than all of myself, I feel my heart is a throbbing engine and my voice is the valve, like a wailing train, it has to sing or blow up, there's too much fuel, too much fire, and what am I to do with this voice if I can't let it out, it's not just singing. I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me. I am in love. But not with a person. I am passionately in love with my life.
The city was different back then--poor and crumbling--kept alive only by the gritty determination and steely cynicism of its occupants. But underneath the dirt was the apple-cheeked optimism of possibility, and while she worked, the whole city seemed to throb along with her.
People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me wither way!
Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.
While the layman sees an opportunity and decides to take it, the professional criminal through the use of deceit and treachery, is able to create opportunities. This individual not only actively searches for a crime to commit, the professional criminal assembles teams of similar people and generates situations in which crime can be safely perpetrated in a controlled environment for maximum profit.
At first, sending the confession by real mail had felt like a genius device. I would not have to sit by my phone and watch for the signs that indicated it had been sent and seen. Slim but solid paper would, I hoped, convey me better. Now I had to consider the very real frailties of the system. Ludicrous, in fact, to entrust something of such magnitude to a mailman. A perfect stranger. I looked up stories of nefarious New York mailmen. There was one who has willfully upturned the lives of ordinary people like myself by hoarding 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The city was crawling with thieves and malcontents.
MY DEAREST MY EVER CRUSH I couldn’t have wished anything moreThan that the spaces between my fingers Were filled with yoursAs I strolled and sample the best of NYC todayI wish that every wish become real, and all dreams trueBecause in my dreams I am always with youOur friends both envy us and rejoice for usWe are ever madly in love and think less of who caresI can’t wait to see you againTrue Love
The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone’s outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness.
Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in.The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground.Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again.Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get.This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here.("New York Blues")
Manhattan was a no-man's land, empty, an unofficial demilitarized zone between Partials and the human survivors. No one was supposed to be here, not because it was forbidden but because it was dangerous. If something happened to you out here, either side could get you, and neither side could protect you.
But what Dakota most enjoyed about the beginning of winter was the crispness of the air (that practically demanded the wearing of knits) and the way that tough New Yorkers - on the street, in elevators, in subways - were suddenly willing to risk a smile. To make a connection with a stranger. To finally see one another after strenuously avoiding eye contact all year.
But the fantasy kingdom and trappings of success soon lost their luster, as I discovered that the most prestigious and remunerative of my resume's way stations was also the most tedious and unfulfilling I had ever experienced. This paradox only made me more morose about modernity. Why was I going to watch my hairline recede in front of two-thousand-line spreadsheets staring at me from cold, glowing monitors? Why was everyone in my office apparently so happy to be spending so many hours there, when the things they really cared about - people, pets, pastimes - were all relegated to a few photographs on their desks? That seemed to be the formula: spend the best years of your life in an office with photos of what you really care about.
I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings.
For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich—the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising—and one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana’s: “Money is the petrol of life.
As she looked in the full-length mirror in her dressing room, she added a few ropes of pearls, pinned a white silk camellia, and draped the Chantilly lace shawl. In that moment, Dana thought of fashion's most enduring icon who created this elegant and alluring style, and the happy personal life that eluded her. Mademoiselle Chanel died in 1971 at the age of eighty-eight while working on her spring collection, but her passion for work did not fill the void of marriage and children. Her success was costly, but clearly the choice of an uncompromising woman determined to achieve greatness on her own. She once said, "I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.
As she looked in the full-length mirror in her dressing room, she added a few ropes of pearls, pinned a white silk camellia, and draped the Chantilly lace shawl. In that moment, Dana thought of fashion's most enduring icon who created this elegant and alluring style, and the happy personal life that eluded her. Mademoiselle Chanel died in 1971 at the age of eighty-eight while working on her spring collection, but her passion for work did not fill the void of marriage and children. Her success was costly, but clearly the choice of an uncompromising woman determined to achieve greatness on her own. Chanel once said, "I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird." Quote from "A very Good Life.
Not even a cat was out. The rain surged down with a steady drone. It meant to harm New York and everyone there. The gutters could not contain it. Long ago they had despaired of the job and surrendered. But the rain paid no attention to them… New York people never lived in houses or even in burrows. They inhabited cells in stone cliffs. They timed the cooking of their eggs by the nearest traffic light. If the light went wrong, so did the eggs…
The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then—revealing—just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason.
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.
As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.
I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping along behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.Of course, the Mist helped. People probably couldn't see Mrs. O'Leary, or maybe they thought she was a large,loud,very friendly truck.
New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.
With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city's many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air!
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments,--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.
Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.
Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view.
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
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. They’d put a good face one 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 friend 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.
He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.
People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.
Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get outof here."She snorted. "Like hell.""I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.
New York always feels more like my hometown than the places where I actually grew up (which weren't far from New York), perhaps because I did my artistic "growing up" while working in this crazy, wonderful city back in my twenties. Although I love the quieter, slower, nature-rich life I live now in the sheep-dotted hills of Devon, there are ways in which I still feel more truly myself here in New York, more than anywhere else. Even after all this time in the desert and on Dartmoor. Strange, isn't it?
Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?
And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.
Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to the image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.
I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.
Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.
The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.
New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels. A person given to idleness, as Parvis has come to think of himself, must move about for the sake of moving, if only to fit into the general scheme of things - an electron obeying the current. Tantamount to movement, he has come to realize, is self-reliance, a fact reflected in the language: "Take care," a friend may say to another as the two part. In his old life the same two friends would have said to one another, khodahfez - "may God protect you.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.
If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.
The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new management breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people. They believe the numbers say it all, and when the numbers don't say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.
Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia.
And yet, there will always be something essentially elsewhere about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn't ever fully offer itself. It's intoxicating. Keeps you on your toes. Keeps you drinking coffee and keeps you walking.
Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city.
Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....
Disrespect one of our associates and face the penalty | This was our creed. There should have been corpses floating that cold September eve. This was the perfect place to do it, too, in the middle of the ocean where gunfire goes unheard and chopped up limbs and torsos would be lucky to survive the predators and float onto a beach weeks or even months later.
This was a quarrel they did not need | It was one they knew they could never win. Beat us with a bat and we come back with Jiggers | Stick us with a knife and we bring the heaters | Plug one of us, and you'd better murder us all. We were the authentic spectacle, and the fact they left with their lives intact, no bones broken, or a limb missing, was miracle enough.
If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant.
For those of you that truly believe there's no such thing as the mafiya, I would be more than happy to sell you your own fast lane on the Belt Parkway, you know, so you can avoid the rush hour commute. The mafiya is real as a heart attack and, contrary to popular consensus, has been steadily growing in power since its inception in the 1920s. Italian organized crime just doesn't operate out in the open anymore, former mayor Rudy made sure of that.
Fear is the primary tool of the mafiya. It's how they contain their vast criminal enterprise. For the mafiya, fear is the grease in the wheel. Fear is much stronger than love | Fear lasts much longer. Love fades and is replaced by hatred and contempt. Fear lingers and brings forth other emotions such as doubt. Fear encourages procrastination and cowardice. Besides, you always hurt the ones you love. Most are too afraid to hurt the ones they fear.
Another deputy threw down a clear plastic trash bag with my orange jumpsuit. I reached for the bag and was knocked down to the floor with an overhead right, another shove, and I was inside the 4X6 room. The heavy white door was already closing behind me. The walls here were made of hard white rubber. There was a small shower head towards the back of the tiny cell and a grated hole in the middle of the floor | I assumed that the hold would be my toilet. The cell reeked of anguish.
Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church.
The Jewish center on Kings Highway scheduled an interview at the local labor hall downtown for my father to meet one of their counselors in order to asses his skills and capabilities. When my father sat down with the fellow and asked all sorts of questions, his reply was a blank stare. Boris didn't understand a word. He did speak a little English | He knew two words, pipe and chair. So Boris did the smart thing. He kept saying pipe over and over. Whatever question, he simply replied... pipe. The counselor soon got the gist | Boris must be a plumber. He was handed a small slip of paper and was instructed to report to the address penciled on it at 6 am sharp the following day.
Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.
I wanted the rattle of New York around me, I wanted stink and strangers and the sour dank air of the IRT clutching me to its bosom. I wanted hustle and bustle. I wanted to know that millions of lives were playing out at my doorstep, and not one of them gave a damn about my little problems.
I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.
I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.
As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.
... I somehow got the idea that oak floors were located exclusively in New York City. This came chiefly from watching Woody Allen movies. I wanted to live someplace that looked like Mia Farrow's apartment in 'Hannah and Her Sisters' (little did I know that it was Mia Farrow's apartment). To me, this kind of space did not connote wealth. These were places where paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed, places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations, and living, according to my logic, in an authentic way.
Summoning my inner Kojak, I tried to convince myself that she would have sat next to me even had there been somewhere else on the bus to sit. Unfortunately, I didn't do a very good job of self-persuasion. Good thing I wasn't in court suing myself, because I would have lost. From: "My Best Valentine's Day.Ever: A Short Story
So I'm delighted to open up a bit about these particular details, in honor of Valentine's Day (when every balding, chubby, and short actuary wants people - especially the babes out there - to know about his studly past"From: "My Best Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story
This was getting uglier by the minute, I thought. There really was no easy escape, since we were sitting far from the exit and the waiters knew me from prior dinner dates with Ashley and I hadn't paid the tab yet. From: "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story
Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong.
Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.
If I could do all of that on February 14th, it would be a personal best for me. Something to share with my crew for the glory and the laughs, or to cheer up the next buddy of mine to get dumped or cheated on. From "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: A Short Story
There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks--is ready even now to give up hope?
Slowly the sky turned from the color of cornflower to that of hyacinth, and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island appeared like a ring of diamonds against the twilight. New York-that city made of canyons between tall buildings, and ornate houses filled with glittering things that might trap a girl forever-was nothing more than a few dots on an infinite landscape. The atmosphere was crystalline and afforded her a perfect view. Only from this place was she able to see how limited the city was, after everything, and how wide open the world could all of a sudden become.
The rest is just slow diminution and loss. A waning of the full and effulgent moon of my youth. Not that the bright light of my youth was anything to be proud of. I was a terrible person. I did unkind and sometimes illegal things. I treated women abominably. The remembrance of it causes me to flush with shame and to feel a tightening in my groin.It was a radiance without warmth, and I thought of nothing but myself in the brightness of the light. Now I try never to think of myself. I try not to think at all, not to dwell, but, sometimes, late at night, it all comes back to me, and I lose myself in the life that might have been, the wife of twenty years, her comforts and distractions. The fractious children, raucous at the holidays, with their tattoos you asked them not to get and their lacrosse sticks they play with in the house, stringing and restringing them, the trips to Paris to stay at the Lutetia. Photograph albums of a life that never quite came to be. It doesn’t last long when it comes, but it is vivid, and I am there, not here, not here where I belong. When you lose everything, you don’t die. You just continue in ordinary pants with nothing in your pockets.
Twists, turns and double crosses in literary theft quickly expand to threaten the globe in: THE SLUSH PILE BRIGADE. At its core, the book is a solid thriller. It has clearly defined stakes and goals for the main characters. Marquis has laid the groundwork as a thriller writer and hopefully his following novels build up a James Patterson-esque empire. A promising debut from an up-and-coming thriller writer."----IndieReader - 4.5/5 Stars (****1/2)
The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.
My main concern while in New York wasn't becoming a hot shot. I was more concerned with staying alive, and that took all the pleasure out of the experience. I didn't know where to find a grocery store so I subsisted on hot dogs, peanuts and whatever else I could buy from a street vendor. I didn't know how to hail a cab (apparently there's an art to it). I stood on the edge of the sidewalk and waved my arms around but no one stopped, so I limited my entire universe to however far I could walk and I never walked too far because I was afraid I'd get lost and never find my way back home again. Perhaps that's why there are so many homeless people in New York; maybe they're not really lost, maybe some of them have homes but they just don't know how to get there.
VISIONS OF GRANDEURI'm walking through a sheet of glass instead of the door,Flying over a giant candlestick lighting up Central Park,Repeating two courses at Hard Knock's College,And swimming through the Red Sea with silky jelly fish.I'm hopping over an empty row house in Philadelphia,Getting a seventy dollar manicure on a gondola in Venice,Wearing a white pearl necklace stolen from Goodwill,And running my first New York City marathon.I'm discussing the meaning of life with my late cat Charlie.Dating John Doe- the thirty-third chef at the White House,Running non-stop on a broken leg through a bomb-blasted city,And keeping a multi-lingual monkey named Alfredo as my pet.I'm spying on two hundred and twenty-two homegrown terrorists from Iowa,Worshiped by a red-headed gorilla named Salamander,Sleeping with a giant teddy bear dressed in black leather,And wearing hot pink lipstick over a shade of midnight blue.
There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will just glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.
The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
Look at it,' he said, gesturing. 'This window looks down upon hundreds more panes of glass, and behind those panes live thousands upon thousands of lost souls. When I feel cast down and helpless, scores of other men do as well, and when I am bitterly angry at feeling cast down and helpless, countless other people languish in concert with me. When I'm happy, it's the same. It's a bit like...I used to play chamber music. It's like a vast orchestra. And so I shan't ever be alone.
Did you go to the the theatre last time you were here?'No, it's too expensive.''What did you do?''What tourists always do in New York City. Empire State, Statue of and all the galleries. There's a million galleries.''Where'd you stay?''The first two nights, I slept in an abandoned car. A Pontiac Grand Am.' Weren't you scared?''Not really. It had a doorman.
Life is amazingly simplified,” she wrote in her journal, “now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow. In spite of reams of papers to be written, life has snitched a cocaine sniff of sun-worship and salt air, and all looks promising.” She already adored New York.
I trust you above all others", he told her. "Above myself". She shook her head, but then leaned into him, as though taking shelter. He drew her close, the crown of her head beneath his cheek. Beyond the hansom's window, New York was an endless rhythm of walls and windows and doors, darkened alleys, flashes of sunlight. he thought, if he could pick a moment to be taken into the flask, a moment to live in endlessly, perhaps he would choose this one: the passing city, and the woman at his side.
Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wishful hunch now seems confirmed by the way she's reading her Time magazine article next to me.
You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what makes it a safe haven for individuals everywhere (Maeve Brennan)
Dana daydreamed of one day being able to set her agenda at B.Altman with the same courage and tenacity as the woman who was now driving the VW while speaking animatedly about her travel plans for the near future. She would be journeying to India in search of exotic merchandise for the store’s Indian extravaganza, a lavish event planned by Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello to compete with Bloomingdale’s Retailing as Theater movement. The movement was the brainchild of Bloomingdale’s Marvin Traub, who staged elaborate presentations such as China: Heralding the Dawn of a New Era. Typical extravaganzas featured fashion, clothing, food, and art from various regions of the world.“I’ll bring back enough items to make Bloomingdale’s blush!” Nina said confidently. “And I’m not just talking sweaters, hats, and walking sticks. I’ll stop first in the Himalayas and prowl the Landour Bazaar.”Lynn Steward ~ A Very Good Life
Andrew laughed at the use of the word “theater.” “B.Atlman will have plenty of theater on Monday,” he said, “when Estée Lauder arrives to secure a prime location in the new cosmetic department. I was told on Friday that she intends to bring along her husband, Joseph, as well as her sons, Leonard and Ronald, to make sure she gets exactly what she wants.” Nina laughed loudly. “Oh, she’ll get what she wants all right. She’s a determined woman.” She glanced sideways at Dana. “And we know what a determined woman can accomplish, don’t we?” “Yes, we do,” Dana replied. In Nina’s presence, the restrictions imposed by Bea and Helen seemed almost trivial. Dana had experienced a single setback, but Nina was a reminder of what real determination and enthusiasm could accomplish. “Her reputation precedes her,” Andrew said. “Ira already told me to give Ms. Lauder whatever she wants.” “Sounds like a done deal,” Dana said. “That’s why there’s going to be a little drama on Monday,” Andrew said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “The space she wants has already been promised to Charles of the Ritz.
There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind.
Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey--a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing--streets and hot dogs and brusqueness--and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated.
I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it--a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you?
New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars...The upside was that the city was inexpensive…
In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone.
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.
[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!
Having grown up here, I always wonder what it would be like to see this city as a tourist. Is it ever a disappointment? I have to believe that New York always lives up to its reputation. The buildings really are that tall. The lights really are that bright. There's truly a story on every corner. But it still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions. To not feel the bright lights even as they fill the air. To see the tall buildings and only feel a deep longing for the stars.
But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn't feel any passion to write about the place. I didn't give a damn about local politics; I wasn't moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world was a centre and that centre was here. ‘The world's a sphere, everyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘The centre of a sphere doesn't lie on its surface. Look up the word 'superficial', when you have a chance.
New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.("New York Blues")
Waiting for a hot pocket to cook we’d fuck and be satisfied, barefoot on new york city apartment linoleum. A satisfying hot pocket and a big ass smile and a tight ass grip and a wall beside a random pipe beside the stove where we left palm and dick prints. We fucked like this. Three condoms in an hour and a half and where are you now? Holding the hand of some local dude you wish was a little more international, wishing you had known I was enough and asked me to stay. You are standing in the kitchen waiting for popcorn to pop while he washes dishes, not knowing I’m wishing back for you.
The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out - everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.("New York Blues")
It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
Never mind gas masks and fallout shelters in the event of biological warfare. Many New Yorkers move from place to place equipped with the essentials of vermin assault weaponry: mouse traps, roach spray, and sticky tapes. In some neighborhoods, it’s a must.
It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.
What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.
You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)
Though I have not lived in New York City for more than two decades, these storytellers – from the United States, Britain and Canada – have touched my heart with their openness, inspired me with their joie de vivre and deepened my appreciation for my hometown as a worldwide phenomenon. Welcome to our New York.
By necessity, we are direct and swift in speech and movement. This is the true dynamic that underlies our apocryphal rudeness. Also true: we do not make eye contact. Neither do we encourage it. Consider the number of humans a New Yorker will pass on a given day – on the subway, in a train or bus terminal, in an office or simply walking down the street. To facilitate speed and minimize drama, it’s productive to keep one’s eyes focused ahead.
For all the energy directed toward the stratagem of big city living, New Yorkers are never too distracted to respond to, and more often, proactively assist visitors. Tourists tracing the routes of subway maps with their fingers, squinting at street signs or staring at a slip of paper with confusion are typical recipients of our generosity. We know our city can be as challenging as it is fascinating, and we want visitors to have a good experience.
I know when people think of New York, they think of theater, restaurants, cultural landmarks and shopping,” I told him. “But beyond the iconic skyline and the news from Wall Street, New York is a collection of villages. In our neighborhoods, we attend school, play Kick the Can, handball and ride our bikes. I grew up knowing the names and faces of the baker, the shoe repair family, the Knish man and the Good Humor man who sold me and the other kids in my neighborhood half a popsicle for a nickel. My father took me to the playground where he pushed me on the swing, helped balance me on the seesaw and watched as I hung upside down by my feet on the monkey bars. Yes,” I told the interviewer, “people actually grow up in New York.
All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festooned about the doorways of drugstores and restaurants--and the famous electric signs of Broadway had come to life with glittering fish, dancing figures, and leaping fountains, all flashing like fire. Everything was beautiful. Up in the deepening sky above the city the first stars appeared white and rare as diamonds.
It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.
When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.