My First New York

by New York Magazine

  MIKE MYERS

  comedian

  arrived: 1988

  I was from Toronto and had this fantasy that the only time I would ever come to New York would be if I had an audition for Saturday Night Live. That was a very exclusive condition. But in fact, that is what happened: I was called to meet Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live. It was one of those magical moments—not just because I saw how beautiful and vibrant the city was, but also because my superstitious belief that I should never come for another reason had paid off. I landed at LaGuardia, and the cabbie took the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, which I now know to be a strange choice. (Why not the Triborough?) I looked up at the city as we crossed the river, and it brought me to tears.

  By the time I got to SNL, it was very family oriented. The cast was all married, and many of them with kids. It was a lot of “Do you want to go jogging with me in the park?” and “I’ll meet you at the Imagine Circle!” But I quickly fell in love with Central Park, and the decorative elements of the Upper West Side brownstones, and, even though it’s Helvetica, the fonts in the subway system.

  Dana Carvey told me that everyone lived on the Upper West Side. One day I was walking down Amsterdam, and people saw me and waved. I had that horrible feeling of, I don’t remember these people. So I came up and said, “Hey!” They were shocked that I said hello to them. They said, “You’re the new dude on Saturday Night Live!” And I was like, Oh my God—I’m a famous person now!

  CHLOË SEVIGNY

  actress

  arrived: 1991

  I grew up in Connecticut and went to the city with my family for big holidays. But I started going on my own when I was a freshman in high school, skipping school and staying overnight on the weekends. We’d hang out in Washington Square Park with all the skater kids and punkers and pot dealers. The north part of the park was the skater side (because there’s a slope the kids would skate down to get speed), and the south side was more hip-hop. By the time I was a junior, I think my parents were a little nervous. Sometimes I’d lie and say I was at a friend’s house in Greenwich. They would not have been happy if they knew that I was at a rave all night long and then sleeping in the park. But not like a homeless person—like a teenager. I was with a group of cute kids.

  My sophomore year, I saw the Sugarcubes at Roseland. Björk was friends with all of the club kids, and at the end of the show they all came onstage. Now, this is before I knew what club kids were, and I was shocked by the sight of them all on the stage with her. They looked like complete freaks. I later became friends with some of them. A lot of them didn’t like me, though—usually because the gay boys that they liked, liked me. It didn’t help that I looked like a boy then, with my shaved head.

  I read Luc Sante’s Low Life and discovered the Lower East Side. Tompkins Square Park we never went to—it was gnarly. I remember going to Avenue A and being really scared. I was young and from Connecticut: it just felt like a situation I didn’t want to put myself in. But Washington Square Park was very safe. Some of the kids thought I was just a freaky girl who stared a lot. And it’s true, I was staring at everybody. I was just fascinated by these kids.

  AMY SEDARIS

  comedienne

  arrived: 1993

  The first thing I saw when I came to New York was a man leaning up against a wall, shitting. Perfect! My brother David had taken me to Chinatown to see a chicken dance, and it was immediately clear that New York was just much more stimulating than Chicago. I was never scared in Chicago. Here your fear was sitting right in front of you. But I loved it. David and I lived with our friend Paul Dinello in a gigantic loft on Chambers Street. It was a strange area, with no grocery stores or anything around. The loft was $1,500, fifteen hundred square feet, and really cold. I remember brewing tea and throwing the tea bags into our spare room, just to watch them freeze.

  I started waitressing at Marion’s, and then got a job at Gourmet Garage. After work David and I would go to Balducci’s and look at their prepared food and then go home and try to make what we saw. We shopped at Western Beef all the time. Waitressing was always fun. I like to wait on people, I like to work around food, I like to make cash, and I like to hear people complain.

  RUFUS WAINWRIGHT

  musician

  arrived: 1994

  My New York life didn’t really begin until 1999, but I first moved here in 1994, after I’d fallen in love with a heroin addict in Montreal. I was still smarting from that failed relationship and had to get out of the vicinity of my dark love. So I came to New York and worked three jobs: at Film Forum; at the Lion’s Head, on Sheridan Square; and as the houseboy for a Broadway producing family who lived on Park Avenue. I would also perform here and there, mostly at an old jazz club called Deanna’s in the East Village, but I couldn’t make enough money or any friends. Nobody was interested in my point of view. I tried to perform at the Lower East Side club Sin-é, but they refused my tape three times. I’d go to the old Crowbar to see Misstress Formika, during the East Village Renaissance that I had absolutely nothing to do with.

  So I moved back to Montreal and started doing a lot of shows there. I was signed to DreamWorks Records and made my first album while living in L.A. When I came back to New York in ’97, DreamWorks got me a gig at Fez, which was a bit of a nightmare. I opened for a folksinger named Jonatha Brooke, who is very nice but whose fans are assholes. I think they would purposely speak louder when I was onstage. One time, a bunch of people came in on Rollerblades and sat in front of me really drunk while I was trying to sing about dying opera divas.

  I ended up hanging out a lot with this girl Lisa, a really party-hearty hard-core Sex and the City person. Lisa was in advertising, and her crowd wasn’t necessarily an artistic mélange. We’d go to the Wax Bar in SoHo, and I was their gay-artist mascot. But one night I saw Kiki & Herb do their Christmas show at P.S. 122. It was earth-shattering; it gave me a focal point of where I wanted to go.

  I went back to L.A. to write my second album, Poses. L.A. was also where I learned how to drink and do drugs, how to scope out the dealer and get into the party, and how to drive drunk (which I don’t do anymore). So when I finally returned to New York, in the summer of 1999, I was like a heat-seeking missile to find out what was happening, where was the fun, where were the goods, and who I wanted to go home with. I had very long hair and wore Greek caftans and posed as a romantic, almost Pre-Raphaelite androgynous person. I moved into a closet-size $1,800 apartment in the Chelsea Hotel because my friend Lorca Cohen told me her father Leonard used to live there, and that I should too. I met this guy Walt Paper, who brought me into the remnants of that club-kid world, which had just collapsed. We met the drag performer Lily of the Valley and a fashion designer named Zaldy, and the four of us became a quartet who were at every party and in every hot tub and on every beach.

  We went to the Boiler Room and Beige and the Cock, where Miss Guy would DJ this eclectic mix of rock and roll, Nirvana, and Dolly Parton. I drank a lot, starting around noon and going on till four in the morning. I was so blissfully ignorant of any kind of danger or defeat. I was so confident that I was brilliant and indestructible and could drink and sleep with people as much as I wanted. I no longer have that magic blankness. But when I think back on it, I’m proud of having cracked the code of living life to the fullest, and that it didn’t take me down—though it very nearly did in the end.

  MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

  actress

  arrived: 1995

  I grew up in L.A. and moved back here to go to college at Columbia, where I lived in the dorm for the first two years. I had a boyfriend who lived on Ludlow Street, and I couldn’t believe a place as alive and wild as that existed. I wanted to drop out of school and hang out there. I remember there was this guy who would take PCP. And when he did, everyone on the block would stop what they were doing and lock the doors and hide from him as he smashed car windows. My boyfriend had a teeny-tiny apartment that he shared with another guy. They had built bu
nk beds. And I would sleep over. The roommate would still be there, but we figured it out, like you do when you’re that age. We would use the Pink Pony like it was our kitchen and living room. I felt it was such a great way to live. I don’t know how I’d manage that now.

  MICHAEL LUCAS

  porn star

  arrived: 1997

  I met a Wall Street guy when I was living in Munich who invited me to move to New York. He was a very difficult person, but he was the only person I knew in the city. We lived on Thirty-ninth Street between Eighth and Ninth, which was depressing. Every day there were these terrible tourists, and every evening it would be even worse, with tranny hustlers and hookers. I remember one sad-looking transsexual who had just been punched in the eye. It was all too much.

  I had arrived at JFK with a backpack and a little suitcase and $150. I immediately started escorting for $300 an hour and working at the Gaiety Theater. Porn was not my dream; I wanted to be the next Tom Cruise. But I was realistic and practical, and saw my competition in Hollywood, and decided that the opportunity for me was in porn. But it was also depressing, mostly because I was working with straight, rude, gay-for-pay performers. It was a lot of pressure: five shows a day, two performances a show (one clothed, one naked). At first, people didn’t want me as their escort because I was not buff enough, or because I had long hair and a thick Russian accent. I said MUD-un-nuh instead of Mah-DAWN-ah.

  After three months, I rented the living room of a DJ from the Gaiety and saved $17,000 to pay six months up front on my own one-bedroom on Barrow Street. The neighborhood felt like a nice suburb of London, and that is when I started to fall in love with New York—even though I just had a mattress on the floor and a rotary phone to call my family. I wore poor-person clothes like Abercrombie & Fitch, which was very sad, very beige. (You can imagine this. I was from Germany; I did not know one thing about style. Eventually, when I started to get some money, I bought Valentino, because I did not know any better.) I got bad haircuts and shopped in bad supermarkets. I learned to cook from marked-down cookbooks I bought at Barnes & Noble, but I preferred Burger King. I remember looking in the mirror once in 1997 and not seeing even one ab.

  I was poor, but through escorting I was paid to go out and see rich New York. I was taken to the Metropolitan Opera and The Lion King and wonderful Eugene O’Neill plays, to tacky-but-expensive restaurants like Daniel, and to Upper East Side apartments with marble bathrooms the size of my apartment. I went to Beige, the Tuesday-night party at Bowery Bar, and I realized that you could be stylish.

  My biggest obstacle was when clients would pay with bounced checks or fake addresses. I would call and demand to be paid, and they would treat me like I was nothing. It was tough. But I kept the bounced checks. Ten years later, I Googled the name on one of them and discovered he is this important man who sits on many important boards. I called him and demanded he pay me three times what he owed me, in cash, or I would make him more famous than I was. He paid me. One should not take advantage of a foreigner. We are tougher than people born here, and we achieve more because we are fighting for it.

  ALBERT HAMMOND JR.

  musician

  arrived: 1998

  Getting a job at Kim’s Video was harder than joining a band. It was ridiculous: you had to know someone. But I had just moved from L.A., trying to get away from my friends, who were slow and didn’t want to do anything but get fucked up. I finally met this guy named Aurelio from the band Calla, and one day he called and said, “Hey, there’s a position for you, do you want it?” I was like, “I’ve dropped off tons of résumés, now I can just get the job?”

  It was only a month after living here that I met Julian Casablancas. His father had a modeling agency called Elite, and I walked in one day after recognizing his name on the door. We quickly moved into an apartment on Eighteenth Street. The apartment was shaped like a dumbbell and had a washer and dryer instead of an oven. We each had a bathroom, which was the reason why we got it (he’s a mess, I’m neat). When I met Julian, I told him I played guitar. He said, “That’s funny, we’re looking for a guitar player.” When I tried out, I had a fever and didn’t play well and thought for sure I didn’t get the job. What I didn’t know is that he had already decided I would be in the Strokes.

  We were really ambitious. It’s all Julian and I spoke about every night. We set a goal: we’d be playing shows a year from now. When you first start, it takes you all night just to play through one song and play it right. And we only had rehearsal space in the Music Building in the Garment District on Monday and Wednesday at weird hours, although we’d sneak in at other times, too.

  Most nights Julian and I would be at home, and Nikolai, another band member, would come down from uptown, where he worked at a video store. We’d get stoned and watch whatever movie he brought. One time, our fridge was packed so full of Budweiser we took a photo of it. Late at night we’d go to the deli down the street where this guy named Peruvian Love Child would make our salami sandwiches.

  We tried everything possible to be friends with bands and play bigger shows with them. We weren’t picky. But they were all such dicks—too competitive to get together and make anything. The Mooney Suzuki were megastars to us. We saw them one night at the Cooler in the Meatpacking District. They fucking blew us away. We were just standing there watching how cool they looked onstage. It was beyond amazing.

  At first, we didn’t go out anywhere cool—just Rudy’s, which was near the studio and had free hot dogs and $5 pitchers. But slowly we’d go to bars like Don Hill’s and Bar 13 to promote, handing out flyers with stuff from weird 1970s soft-porn movies like Emmanuelle. They started to recognize us—“Oh, there’s the guys from the Strokes hanging out”—and as a group the five of us were a pretty striking image. We were really cocky. Not in a bad way, we just believed in ourselves and so we were always balls to the wall.

  ANDY SAMBERG

  comedian

  arrived: 1998

  I moved to New York with three friends from summer camp. Two of us were going to NYU, and the other two were in that self-loathing, debaucherous postcollege year of self-destruction. We crammed into what probably should have been a two-bedroom apartment on Bleecker and Macdougal and sectioned things off into a four-bedroom by putting up a lot of curtains.

  That was an absolute disaster. We were all really broke, and those dudes were out of control. There was no one in the house that did any cleaning, so by halfway through the year there were rats and mice everywhere. I grew up in the Bay Area, so I’m fairly “at one” with nature, but this was different. California nature is lovely. New York nature is disgusting. At first, I was really grossed out by it, but by summertime, I remember lying on my couch watching TV with a water gun, and every time a mouse would run out from behind the TV, I would just spray it. There was no “Let’s try and catch them” it was just like, “Take a hike, buddy.”

  The mice kind of became a part of the house. We weren’t feeding them or anything, but we definitely got less skittish around them. It’s interesting how much you can adapt to when you don’t have the means to fix it. We did get the sticky traps once. But when one got stuck, we were all too scared to get it and throw it out or kill it. Literally, we were four college-age dudes curled up on the couch listening to it scream for three days. We took turns going back and peeking at it and yelling, “Oh God, it’s there! It’s dying! It’s dying! What do we do?” But you can’t get it off; if you pull it, you rip the limbs off. The humane thing to do would have been to smash it with a hammer, but no one had the stomach to do that, so it was pretty awful.

  DAVID CHANG

  chef

  arrived: 1999

  I was teaching English in Japan, right out of college. I had no idea what I wanted to do after that, so I just came to New York because that’s where most of my friends were. I stayed with my sister, who was getting her whatever-the-fuck degree at Columbia and lived on Seventy-eighth and First Avenue.

  New York was a
kick in the ass I was not prepared for. Of all my friends I knew who moved to New York, only a few still live here; it’s a hard mentality, it can consume you, and it can be depressing. A lot of the people I hung around with were stuck in an office, and they hated it, myself included. I worked in a variety of desk jobs as a glorified lackey. It was just drunkenness every night; I’d go anywhere there was an open bar. I remember sitting down and calculating how much money I was spending on alcohol—it was ridiculous.

  Eventually I was like, Fuck it, I’m just going to start cooking. I had thought of cooking before, but it was never a reality. Or I didn’t think it was a reality. In my parents’ eyes, cooking wasn’t really a career option; my dad had worked as a dishwasher in New York and had hated it. But food was the only thing I really wanted to do. So I enrolled in cooking school. Everyone thought I was a lunatic.

  It was a crazy time to be in school, because there were a lot of people who had cashed out of the dot-com boom and were already millionaires. I got my first restaurant job doing hot apps at Mercer Kitchen after school, and I’d take restaurant reservations at Craft on my days off to make cash. I thought that the staff Tom Colicchio had assembled was one of the best in New York history, so answering phones was not beneath me. I did that for a month and a half, until they let me work in the kitchen for free. I wound up cutting vegetables and cleaning mushrooms.

  Around that time, Wylie Dufresne had opened 71 Clinton, and it was like an atomic bomb had been detonated on New York City. That was the restaurant that revolutionized food in New York, and people still don’t even realize it. And it transformed the Lower East Side! I remember being totally surprised and caught off guard that he had opened a restaurant there, and in love with the whole idea: a classically trained chef who had worked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten in Europe was opening up a restaurant on Clinton Street. It was so contrarian!