Similarly, there are recovery programs in New York for everything. City dwellers tend to be in a rush, so programs such as AA tend to be six steps instead of twelve. (I’ve had Jewish friends tell me that because of busy schedules on Passover, the Four Questions have occasionally been shortened to just two or three.) Not surprisingly, New York is the birthplace of “speed shrinking,” where panels of therapists, usually armed with their books and business cards, give quick fixes of advice while their harried patients move through a line. New York
ers don’t do anything slow, and they don’t single-task. In addition to everyone being a multihyphenate, such as a bus driver–filmmaker–drug dealer, almost everyone is bi – bicoastal, biracial, bipolar, bilingual, biannual (going home twice a year for Thanksgiving and Christmas or Hanukkah), and of course the one you thought of first. Living in a crowded city, people are conscious of limited space and thus thankful we’re all biodegradable. The only thing we’re not is bipartisan.
The premise of Ghostbusters II (1989) was that the collective negativity of New York City’s anger was powering a river of slime under the streets, making it possible for an evil sorcerer to take over the city via the body of a baby. It’s true that jam-packed Madhattan in particular surely contains a high level of communal fury when you factor in subway rage, bike-lane rage, slow-walker rage, taxi-in-the-rain rage, Razor-scooter rage, stroller rage, parking rage, office rage, random rage, parade-in-my-way rage, subway-grate rage (which afflicts persons in high heels), and lack-of-public-restroom rage.
Speaking of the last: The newspapers regularly run articles on which public restrooms transsexuals use – ladies or gents. I see plenty of transsexuals in New York. They’re easy to spot since they don’t switch from heels to sneakers for the walk to the subway. However, show me these supposed public restrooms! Restaurants want you to buy something before using the bathroom. Stores claim not to have them. Hotels want proof that you’re a guest. Even if you’ve never read a book, the bathrooms are a good reason to hope that Barnes & Noble doesn’t go out of business. New York women live on average seven years longer than New York men. However, they will spend at least six and a half of those years searching for public bathrooms. The Big Apple means Bladder Control. You know something is up when signs everywhere proclaim RESTROOMS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY and a New York restaurant guide has an entire section called “Bathrooms to Visit.”
If you’re caught in the Times Square area in need of a restroom I can heartily recommend the Marriott Marquis where you go up several escalators and there’s no hassle from security. In Lower Manhattan, head to the National Museum of the American Indian on the south side of Bowling Green, adjacent to the northeast corner of Battery Park. Ad
mission is free, and the downstairs restrooms are terrific. While there, check out the highly detailed Reginald Marsh murals in the rotunda that depict daily life in the city’s shipping days. On the Lower East Side, for a scary adventure in bladder relief, enter the crazy quilt of shops known as Essex Street Marketplace. You can get a key from a vendor for a journey up a dimly lit staircase and past some creaking heavy metal doors that look like they once imprisoned the most violent patients in a nineteenth-century mental hospital. Otherwise, if you don’t want to spend $12 in a restaurant just to use the restroom, the only other option is to stop in at a doctor’s office and ask to leave a urine sample.
New Yorkers aren’t ashamed to take medication for their mental health. Instead of swapping holiday recipes, we exchange prescription information. And our favorite party game is: If you were stranded on a desert island with only one medication, which would it be? While gyms are open until eleven p.m., restaurants until midnight, clubs until two or three a.m., most drugstores are twenty-four hour. Basically, Manhattan is a series of apartment and office buildings squeezed between drugstores, coffee shops, and ATMs. I once attempted to get cough syrup in Erie, Pennsylvania, after 9 p.m. Impossible. In Houston I asked for directions to the pharmacy and had to take a twenty-minute taxi ride. In Manhattan, sometimes a Walgreens is opposite a CVS with a Duane Reade around the corner. In the 1980s, Coca-Cola created a mission statement in which they wanted a person never to be more than several feet from a can of Coke. The city of New York feels exactly the same about residents and their medication.
New Yorkers wear their neuroses like a badge of honor. Woody Allen has made an entire career out of his. Even our pets take anxiety and depression medication. A Central Park Zoo polar bear named Gus made headlines around the world in the 1990s when he was swimming figure eights obsessively in his pool for up to twelve hours a day, day after day, month after month. Locals suspected that it was an identity crisis because he didn’t know for sure whether he was an East Sider or a West Sider. An animal behavioral therapist was brought in to the tune of $25,000. Gus was pronounced “bored and mildly crazy in the way that a lot of people are in New York City,” and an enrichment program
was put into effect. Locals felt somehow vindicated that even a bear who seemingly had everything, including an inground swimming pool and daily admiration, was finding it difficult to cope.
It helps somewhat to know that we are suffering collectively. I can guarantee that after every sixteen or so hours of city life you’ll have to lie down for at least seven or eight. While most local news magazines run feel-good human interest stories every week, The New York Times Magazine has a five-pager about some near-death person with mysterious symptoms that no doctor can diagnose. The editors tease out this medical thriller until we get as close to a resolution as possible because New Yorkers know that there are never any easy fixes. When Manny Bloomberg started the 311 phone line for nonemergency complaints about blocked sidewalks, barking dogs, foul odors, and open fire hydrants, residents immediately began phoning about bad breakups, not getting callback auditions, salary gripes, and flu symptoms.
Whereas people in general have been known to take a certain amount of pleasure when others fail, New Yorkers can be so complex that they’re able to have feelings of Schadenfreude about themselves. Of course, with all the prescriptions and therapy, you could easily think this is a city of pessimists. But that’s not so, which is why there’s a race to cure something in Central Park every five minutes from May until December.
New York City has been vying for the Summer Olympics the past few years. Trust me, people who don’t want their own president or any visiting royalty in town definitely don’t want the Olympics. For one thing, we’re already registered in the year-round New York Olympics. See how you do in the following events:
1. Register a car at the DMV.
2. Get from the Bronx to Wall Street at rush hour.
3. Buy two orchestra seats for whichever musical just won the Tony Award.
4. Find a public restroom in Midtown.
5. Flush a low-flow toilet in fewer than five tries.
6. Commute ninety minutes to and from work.
7. Live with the smell of Korean cooking coming through the airshaft night and day.
8. Eat street meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Dating is the number one cause of mental illness in New York. If the psychological thriller Fatal Attraction has a theme it would be that single life in this city will transform you into an obsessive, kidnapping, knife-wielding, emotional-blackmailing stalker and boiler of bunny rabbits. “City of Orgies” is how Walt Whitman described Manhattan in the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass. With the advent of the Internet, it might more accurately be described as a place where people are lonely together. A million blinking screens and a million broken hearts.
The Sex and the City stars had hot and cold running boyfriends. However, gals outnumber guys by 5 percent in the general population, while among twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds it’s 10 percent. And why does it feel like there are more gay men than lesbians, further diminishing the female dating pool? To make things worse, due to gender profiling women hardly even get stopped and frisked by male police officers. Single men are always “s
ingle” men in New York. Meantime, women in their twenties and thirties are considered “available,” but women in their forties and fifties are “alone.”
People like to argue that New York women are being too picky and perhaps that’s true. When making an online profile it’s best to include your neighborhood because people aren’t willing to travel that far for the unknown. Although if women really wanted to increase their odds when it comes to husband-hunting, they’d move to Alaska, the state with the highest male-female ratio, or else Afghanistan, where one man can have up to four wives.
There are plenty of activities for singles to connect, including mixers, speed dating, and all types of clubs, classes, and sports, but a lot of people moved here specifically to avoid group activities. For instance, a group of New York teachers, librarians, and booksellers wanted to copy Chicago and other cities by having us all read one book at the same time. The effort quickly collapsed into vicious squabbling. It probably would’ve been easier to get the entire city to embark upon a
juice cleanse together seeing as there are more Jamba Juices than bookstores. Similarly, you won’t find many league bowlers in New York, though that may be a consequence of it being a sport with no offense.
Most people who don’t meet online find each other in nightclubs, parks, gyms, grocery stores, or during the ginormous December pub crawl known as SantaCon. The subway is also known for being a matchmaker, and in addition to facilitating those who get up the courage to exchange information or make dates, it has spawned a number of websites seeking “missed connections” (e.g., You wore black spandex pants and aviator shades with a blue tint and got on the 6 train at Park and 28th…) à la Charlie Brown and the elusive Little Red-Headed Girl. The only hard and fast rule about dating in New York is never to form relationships with people living in fifth-floor walk-ups since they might ask you to help them move.
When it comes to New York weddings, ushers are careful to ask, “Bride or groom?” rather than, “What side are you on?” since the latter can elicit anything from a West Side–East Side rant to a diatribe on politics, euthanasia, or gay ministers. If it’s a same-sex wedding then folks can sit wherever they like as it’s a “judgment-free” zone.
Chapter 24
Time’s Winged Taxicab
New York is a place of extremes, where differences are celebrated or at the very least tolerated. You’re guaranteed to be welcomed but not necessarily loved. People of every age, class, ethnicity, profession, sexual persuasion, political leaning, philosophical view, religious belief, fashion choice, and personality disorder are on display. They crowd the streets, sidewalks, public spaces, office buildings, parking garages, subways, buses, train stations, elevators, museums, theaters, shops, bars, and restaurants. On constant parade is the whole spectrum of human nature, and it turns out there’s a whole lot of human nature to go around. There’s no detour past it or private plane over it and no gate on this community. In contrast to Survivor, on our islands we don’t take a weekly vote regarding who gets to stay and who has to go. A number of extraterrestrials have even walked among us unmolested and unprobed, according to Preston Dennett’s “true history,” UFOs Over New York.
Contradictions are therefore not resolved but rather contained within the sprawling tapestry of daily life. If there’s not always a communal sense of Whitmanesque belonging, then there’s the certainty that we’re all in it together. This was exemplified by how the ravages of 9/11 made no distinction between executives and interns or accountants and janitors. Victims were mostly residents of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, but they had origins from around the country and the globe. Emergency workers who lost their lives were not just from Manhattan but from all five boroughs, in addition to Long
Island and Upstate New York. We were revealed to be more connected than we’d thought.
Talking heads insist that incidents such as the Trayvon Martin trial are going to lead to a “conversation on race.” New York has been having that tête-à-tête daily since 1626 when slaves first arrived in the colony. Stand in a crowded subway car, that great equalizer, and look around. You will see every ethnicity, along with professionals dressed to the nines, groups of yawping students, riders rocking baby carriages, hipsters, Hasids, civil servants, and blue-collar workers along with folk showing off their tattoos, body piercings, and hair sculptures. If that subway car gets stuck overnight in a snowstorm as happened in 2011, you are suddenly one big freezing-cold family, sharing supplies and figuring out a lavatory plan together. No shouting or panicking, no robberies or cannibalism occurred, just understanding and cooperation. Sure, there are laws, courts, cops, and firefighters. But 8 million locals are moving about alongside another 2 million nonresidents who commute each weekday, plus the tourists and day-trippers. The system must sustain itself based upon a million unspoken mutual agreements. Hundreds of unsung tender mercies occur every day, including daring animal rescues, assisting confused visitors, and offering spare rooms to homeless people. Many altruistic efforts succeed, leading to saved lives and fresh starts. In my friend Suzy’s case, the homeless man offered an alcove in which to sleep and stay warm stole her bike.
New York has as many optimists as pessimists. The optimists keep us all moving forward, smiling as we attempt to navigate around construction sites and movie shoots, all working together toward a better and brighter future. And the pessimists, with their withering sarcasm and “why bother” attitude, all share a little secret – once you give up hope you start to feel better.
Compared to the doomsday machine the city resembled when I arrived in the 1980s, it’s now in a respectable phase that boasts safer streets, better schools, cleaner air, and more parks as well as playgrounds, bike lanes, ferries, tour buses, subway stops, skyscrapers, sports stadiums, smokeless bars, coffee bars, cigar bars, sports bars, gyms, galleries, clean cabs, chic hotels, chain stores, box stores,
flagship department stores, sidewalk cafés, refurbished piers, indoor malls, Silicon Alley, street fairs, farmers’ markets, high-rise condos, the High Line, billiard parlors, public spaces, day spas, museums, concerts, theaters, Shake Shacks, cupcake shops, food trucks, gluten-free pizza, wine tastings, night clubs, penthouse soirées, spin classes, hot yoga, power yoga, kids’ yoga, yogurt bars, smoothie shops, beekeepers, microbrewers, pickle-makers, cronut bakers, baristas, fashionistas, hipsters, e-smokers, metrosexuals, brunch lovers, superstars, poseurs, wannabes, locavores, party planners, Russian tycoons, clipboard people, Vespas, Razor scooters, Bugaboo strollers, Segways, personal trainers, life coaches, spiritual advisors, animal whisperers, bloggers, and preservationists. And of course pharmacies. When Duane Reade is out of something the salespeople ask, “Did you try our store across the street?” Meantime, the pursuit of adult entertainment and designer drugs is arranged mostly online and out of sight.
Above all, blessed are the double-decker tour buses, for they are truly a private enterprise serving the public good. In the 1980s tourists were free range and on the loose, standing at the top of every subway stairwell looking bewildered, stuck in every revolving door, clogging up subway turnstiles, monopolizing token booths, trying to give bus drivers dollar bills, asking visibly disturbed homeless people for directions, and getting lost, mugged, and swindled. My friend Neil refers to such hominid logjams as CPUs – Central Pennsylvania Units. Counter-tourism measures became a local government priority. Nowadays these holidaymakers are safely packed onto coaches, waving, smiling, and snapping photos, and being watched over by enthusiastic young people who are paid to care for them. I am always happy to be stuck behind or give way to a tour bus. I’m even happier to show my houseguests where to board the bus and without fail suggest the three-day pass, which includes Manhattan at night, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
Remember the Bowery Bums? For better or worse, the Bowery has become one of the city’s chicest streets with boutique hotels, tony apartment buildings like Avalon Bowery Place, and upmarket clothing shops. High-end men’
s clothing designer John Varvatos took over the location of the famed CBGB club. Journalists are always chronicling
the passing of the last veteran to have served in World War I or World War II, but what about the last shopper to have exited the revolving doors of famed department stores such as Gimbels or Wanamaker’s?
And whoddathunkit but some of New York’s old graffiti, which authorities worked so hard to thwart and remove, now resides in museums or on the streets in preservation programs. You can pay to go on walking tours that feature graffiti and street art in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
New York is no longer home to the world’s largest population, tallest building, longest bridge, most crowded subway, or busiest seaport. But for much of the last century New York City has been the financial, cultural, media, retailing, and fashion capital of not just the country but the world. It’s a progressive town. Whereas other places are just now getting around to Casual Friday and Take Your Daughter to Work Day, New York has already moved on to Cross-Dress Friday and Take a Lesbian to Lunch Day. Meantime, New York doctors don’t want to tell expecting parents the sex of their baby so much as let it decide for itself when it’s a teenager.
Life in New York Page 18
