by Jane Borden
No one in New York studied me. I could stand on a subway platform in full-body Day-Glo paint with a cat on my head reciting the elements on the periodic table—I’m the one who’s reciting, not the cat … no, hell, sure, the cat’s reciting the periodic table—and still the commuters would continue reading their Posts. And on the chance that someone did look up and disapprove, or judge, or call Ripley’s Believe It or Not, I wouldn’t care anyway because he or she would never see me again. I understand that I am not the first person to meditate on this quality of anonymity in New York, but that doesn’t diminish the electric thrill of experiencing it firsthand.
Janie—my late great-aunt; for the record, there are currently five Janes living—used to call picking your teeth, applying lipstick, or scratching your head “homework,” things you don’t do in front of other people. After a few months in New York, I had witnessed each of those happen on a subway, in addition to fingernail clipping and over-the-clothes heavy petting, which can only mean one thing: Wherever New Yorkers are, they feel at home. What tourists regard as exhibitionism, locals herald as the inalienable right to treat the city like a bedroom. Therefore, those who stare at others on the streets of New York are the urban equivalent of Peeping Toms.
Succeeding in the hive means knowing the difference between studyin’ and checking in. Now that I knew—and had learned to use the latter to avoid becoming intimate with every municipal erection—I’d really be able to enjoy my new success. Or so I thought. It’s true that, once I joined the hive, the street-level threats diminished. But the hijinks on the whole continued. I had not defeated the Cartoon Assassin. Duh: I’d only made it to level two, where the game was harder and the hazards more menacing.
For example, I found myself locked out of my apartment at four in the morning, when I swore I’d put the keys in my purse. I slipped on a spot of lotion and fell gangly down the spiral staircase of that apartment, though both of my roommates denied having moisturized that day. And isn’t it a little coincidental that the same week I moved into my second apartment, the carbon monoxide detector broke?
It went beyond the home. When the Internet bubble burst, Foodline folded; they still owe me thousands. Next, one of my former clients hired me to manage her restaurant; it closed shortly thereafter. So I picked up extra work cleaning a theater in Chelsea, until the day when, while sitting on a toilet in the pitch black because the lightbulb was shot, a full-sized mirror fell from the door and shattered on my head, leaving a shard a centimeter from the major vein in my right wrist.
A mirror shattered on my head! That’s the horror version of a Lewis Carroll tale. What the hell? Why was New York out to get me? I didn’t know how much more I could take. It felt as if I were the enemy, as if New York were fulfilling a personal vendetta. And I have to admit: The city had good reason to seek revenge.
This is when I confirm an ugly rumor, when I put away my pride and admit something disgusting: Southerners still harbor a childish contempt for the North. It’s insolent and arrogant, but nonetheless true. While growing up, we threw around the word “Yankee” with disdainful relish. And when we did, no one ever confused the discussion for one about baseball—even though baseball is also brash, gauche, and unaware of which direction the dessert spoon faces.
Oh dear, it’s so embarrassing! You’d think that, after more than a hundred and fifty years, we’d have buried the hatchet, but notions of Northern aggression persist. The fear is not of a literal invasion. No one wants to secede or form a militia, except maybe in Texas, but as all Southerners know, Texas doesn’t count. What’s happening now is a culture war. High-society Southerners think New Yawkers have no class, no taste, no appreciation for lacy duvet covers and pastel smocking. They fear an invasion of Yankee conventions and habits, so they protect their own the best they can: by closely monitoring imports and exports.
My two older sisters went to boarding school in Connecticut and, as a result, returned for summers and holidays with subtle changes in their accents. Barbarians at the gate! Some or all of every sentence they uttered would be parroted back with gross exaggeration. Their friends looked for it, waiting to pounce. The way they said “you guys” instead of “y’all” wasn’t just different; it was wrong.
I was as bad. Among my crowd at the University of North Carolina was only a handful of Northerners. Most of them assimilated instantly, due to incessant needling, but not Brett. And so we’d let him have it: for the club music in his car, the product in his hair, and the fact that, in the late 1990s, he had a cell phone. A cell phone: what a self-defeating reason to mock someone! “Ooh, look at you with your fancy piece of efficient technology. What are you, ahead of the curve? What are you gonna do, effortlessly stay connected with people? Brett and convenience sitting in a tree … k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”
As someone who fights the image of the simple Southerner, I probably shouldn’t have told you that. But honesty heals all wounds, right? As such, New York should own up to its own stereotyping, which in at least one case has been institutionalized. While wandering through the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West, I noticed that, of all the natural habitats re-created in the North American section, only one depicted a human among the flora and fauna. It was the southeastern coastal display, a picture of a swampy section of the Coosawhatchie River, beside which catbrier grows and wild turkeys wander, and along which floats a rude wooden boat carrying a man wearing, no joke, a straw hat and overalls. The literature beneath identifies thirty-seven species in the exhibit, including Magnolia grandiflora, Pinus palustris, and Terrapene carolina, but nowhere mentions Barefoot hillbillyus—as if we wouldn’t notice. I bet the Deliverance theme plays on the audio tour.
Go ahead and add that to the many ways in which New York seemed to be asking me, during my first years in its den, “Who’s laughing now, redneck?”
Fine, fine, fair enough. I surrendered to New York: “I’ll take my lashings and like it, just leave me alone!” What else could I have done, fought back? There is no fighting New York; no slingshot could fell that giant. It’s an activity as futile as screaming at the ocean. In an episode in the second season of TV’s The Osbournes, Ozzy tries to dig a fire pit on the beach outside his California home. But as he nears completion, the tide encroaches and spoils his effort. That is when, in what must be the most poetic moment in the history of reality television, Osbourne—a quaint combination of infantile and feral—challenges the ocean itself. “Fuck!” he screams and then plants his bare feet in the foam, faces the void, and commands it, “Go to Alaska!” He beats the surf with his fists, shouting, “No, no, no, no. You fucking asshole ocean! No!” I dare Ozzy Osbourne to walk through Times Square during rush hour in the rain.
Besides, New York would figure out sooner or later that I wasn’t the enemy. If I were sincerely bigoted toward the North, I wouldn’t have moved there; I wouldn’t have become an export myself. Of course I don’t hate Yankees! How can you hate someone you don’t even know? And anyway, the longer I stayed, the more I fell in love with the idiosyncrasies I’d previously mocked. The loudness. The lewdness! The hair dyed so black it’s purple. And the accents, God bless the accents. My friend Julie, from Foodline, ventilated in that Long Island brogue that oozes superiority; I could have listened for hours, which was good because that’s how long she held court. I began to scan subway cars for teenage girls, for the opportunity to catch a classic Rosie Perez. On such fortuitous occasions, it was important to sit near them, rather than stand, in case swooning ensued.
Oh these New Yawkers! They’re brash and gauche, and they don’t give a flip which direction the dessert spoon faces. I think I’m in love. I wanted to stay. Despite the bruises, I wasn’t ready to quit.
So I shrugged my shoulders and soldiered on. After removing the glass from my wrist, and promising the theater I wouldn’t sue, I picked up some temp work for a financial organization in one of the World Trade Center towers. Or maybe it was an insurance company. I honestly do
n’t remember because (a) I didn’t write in my journal and (b) a few weeks later it ceased to exist. Poof.
I was not stationed in its offices, however, but in those of the acquired business a few blocks away. My job was to transfer information from the defunct firm’s paper files to a digital Excel spreadsheet. Excluding myself and one other temp, a shy wiry fellow who introduced me to Blimpie, the floor was vacant. Most employees had been laid off; the rest were now in the tower. So, naturally, I set up shop in the former CEO’s expansive corner office, two full walls of which were glass, affording me a 180-degree view of Manhattan’s southern tip and the waters beyond.
Wow. So this was the dream—to sit dozens of stories above the melee, above flatbed-truck galleries and snow-obscured grates. This office was the princess that the Cartoon Assassin protected so fiercely. This is why rookies flood the streets year after year, outrunning poisonous beetles: to get this view, and a private bathroom. Everyone in New York is racing to the bathroom in the sky.
Even though I was literally paid to work there, I had no business sitting at that palatial desk. It was probably made of mahogany or marble. It was probably handcrafted by bald eagles. It had never before held atop its sturdy frame the second half of a Blimpie tuna fish and banana pepper sandwich, which filled the room with fragrance because its owner hoped to stretch one $2.99 special through dinner.
I had warped. Through my own volition, and honest means, I’d reached world 2. But then, somewhere on that board, I squatted into a green tunnel that spat me out at world 8. It’s fun to skip ahead, but warping is a dangerous tactic. Winning the game requires firepower and extra lives, and I’d arrived miniature and low on coins. Sure, my tuna fish and I were sitting on a cloud, but clouds can’t carry weight.
A few days later, we fell through. On a Tuesday morning, I overslept and woke, with the rest of the world, to a real assassin, a true exhibitionist, one whose work appeared live on my living-room television.
When the towers fell, so did every New Yorker simultaneously. Gravity found us the way consciousness does when you’re trying to dream. And we slapped the ground hard. We lay there for a while, a couple of days maybe, like a human blanket, some kind of last-resort barricade between the sky and the earth.
And then we stood slowly, brushed the sand from our clothes. The game had been paused. The screen was no longer rushing past, thrusting us relentlessly forward. So the players looked around, wandered in every direction, and began the long process of checking in, of sharing in the burden of proof of being all right.
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My senseless, self-centered notions of New York life went up in the dust of everything else, the pulverized steel and glass that, no longer erect, followed the whim of the wind, heading to TriBeCa, the East Village, and across the East River, where it blew through open Brooklyn windows, landed on sofas, and embedded itself in the bare legs of those who’d been miles away. It covered us in a toxic patina. We combed it through our hair and breathed it in our lungs, tracked it indoors and hung it in our coat closets, this gruesome reminder that matter had not been destroyed but merely changed shape.
How arrogant I had been to think the city was out to get me. I was so accustomed to living in a petri dish back home, that I self-indulgently invented an all-seeing scientist in New York. But the reason I was having a hard time here is because, guess what?, life is hard in New York. That I could be daft to something so obvious illustrates how easily I’d gotten by before. I’d never realized that the Southern villagers who watched were also protecting.
Although my cell-phone radar was jammed, my friends and family reached me that Tuesday. In my computer were dozens of e-mails. Everyone wanted to know everything about everyone. Word was delivered to my Luddite parents, and then, through a sprawling train of reply-all e-mails, my college friends began to account for all of our pals in the city, some of whom are still being sought.
When New York restored cell service, Aunt Jane’s call was the first to come through:
“Please come home. Something else could happen. It’s dangerous. Come back and stay with me, where I can keep you safe.”
It doesn’t make much sense, but after discovering a nonfictional threat, I no longer felt threatened. He’s not an all-powerful wizard. He’s a criminal. And even though Aunt Jane could never have imagined to warn me about this, she’d still delivered the advice I needed: Don’t look at him.
It’s true that one cannot fight New York, but the reason is that New York won’t fight back, and therefore we remain invincible. We ain’t studyin’ you. It’s inefficient. That had been a hellish wave—it knocked us over, stole our breath, dragged us through the sand and blinded us with salt—which can mean only one thing: Another will surely be hot on its heels. The best we can do is stand up, shake the water from our ears, and face forward. North Carolina may be the village that reared me, but New York is the one where I was raised.
seemingly pointless lessons of grade school, however menial or inscrutable, are actually preparations for travails later in life. Relay drills in soccer taught me to work with others. Geometry gave me the tools to shape an indefinable world into usable terms. And, thanks to Mrs. Palmer, my dry-mouthed, ninth-grade English teacher, I am acutely aware of when white balls of spittle collect in the corners of my lips.
I abandoned this philosophy in college, when faced with a trial so pointless and trivial, it couldn’t possibly have had an adult counterpart. It was Rush, the week I visited a dozen sorority houses, selling myself at each. But I was wrong. It does have a real-world doppelgänger: the rooms/shared board for New York on Craigslist.org. Both are facilities designed to help people find places to live. Both aim to pair you with like-minded individuals. In fact, the only difference between the two is that this time around, no one filmed the procedur
e for a commemorative video.
Most Craigslist ads seek gainfully employed tenants, so I conveniently and consistently failed to mention I was planning to quit my full-time job the following month. I knew I’d still be good for rent, so what did it matter? And the fact that I had a cat currently living at a boyfriend’s apartment? It never came up.
I feel no shame; this sort of equivocation is part of the game, a game whose rules I learned in Rush. For example, at the Kappa house, which was known for having the highest GPA, I said, “I’m thinking about going premed.” That wasn’t a total lie. I was thinking about it … thinking that I wouldn’t do it. And at A-D-Pi, whose ladies wore their hearts on their sleeves, I said, “Don’t apologize, Courtney—if I’d just been singing in the candlelight with all of my ‘sisters,’ I’d be crying too.” This wasn’t a lie because I might very well blubber like a mascaraed fool in that situation—but since I knew I’d never be in that situation, the outcome was impossible to prove.
A week before I left for college, Tucker—one of my aforementioned elder and real sisters—knocked on my bedroom door. She headed straight for the closet. Tucker had also been through Rush at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an expert, she’d promised to help me choose outfits appropriate for each house’s style. It was like packing for a week of costume balls. “Chi-Os go out a lot, so wear something cute and trendy,” she said, pulling from my closet a fitted top and a pair of black pants. “But the Pi Phis are more laid back; they smoke a lot of pot.” Her interpretation of that was a flowery skirt and oversized white blouse. So, clearly my sister did not smoke pot. Then, she sashayed out of the room saying, “Just remember, the most important thing is to be yourself!”
This year I wore Marc Jacobs to meet the publicist in Brooklyn Heights and rode my skateboard—a skill learned in New York, mind you, not North Carolina—to the artist’s pad in Bushwick, all the while playing up a different part of my varied past depending on who was listening. The girls in Boerum Hill wanted someone with a sense of humor, so they heard about my gig freelancing for Saturday Night Live. Since the guy in Chinatown worked at a hedge fund, I told him about my stint at a leveraged-buyout firm. One time, I misjudged. An ad agency associate ended up being more Goth than Madison Avenue and I spent the hour-long meeting obscuring my designer purse behind my pleated-pant legs. I am not proud of this behavior. But after living through four years of Rush—first you peddle yourself, then the house—I was working off instinct. The eighteen-year-old me was in the driver’s seat. And she said, “I think I remember this from a kegger.”
