THE GLITTER UNDERGROUND

Thoughts from New York

The thing is you do not move to New York simply to meet new people, or try new things, or stumble upon a handsome psychopath that will torture you and marry you.

Martini glass, source Pinterest

In the corridors of the distant past, there begins an unfortunate sequence of events that lead to my arrival in New York. It is only a shortage of fortune that can establish the conditions for such punishment.

The thing is you do not move to New York simply to meet new people, or try new things, or stumble upon a handsome psychopath that will torture you and marry you. (Such nonsense is classified under a special category of “Personal Delusions” that we keep in the vaults of our self-accounting, along with an archive of 90’s erotic thrillers and posters of young Mickey Rourke.)

In reality, the pivotal points of our lives are far less glamorous.

“What brings you to New York?”, the customs officer asks me.

It is the answer everyone is dying to know. You hear it all the time, the local ice-breaker among hotel maids, and CEOs, and lawyers, and painters, all of them dying to pick the insides of your brain. It is the theme of all the dinner parties in East Village, where people nod habitually at every word, and a certain Ivy League condescendence artificially collides with a “Valley Girl” vernacular:

“Oh, it’s the cultchuuure…”

Yet you know very little of the culture before, and no one ever wonders why a woman in her right mind would leave her entire life behind, for the sake of standing at a hot dog cart, or to have a naked activist pass her in front of the Met, or to witness — perhaps for the first time in her life — a red hawk snatch a white dove off the ground and carry it to its lair, in a skyscraper off Central Park South.

This is the town that invented the commercial, and here everyone is always selling you a story — be it a life story, an art story, a success story, or a broken chair story — and the entire world has bought this story, time and again, insatiably. This is the land that put the Lord on the dollar bill. Here it is possible to work twelve-hour restaurant shifts, and then work another four on a fish truck in Williamsburg. The vagabonds occupy this sinister city, one hundred thousand of them, threefold as many weddings in a year. Here is where it is conceivable to see Santa Claus strip to the skin and make snow angels in a mud puddle, on a train platform, at one in the morning. This is the city that nearly transformed Louis Vuitton into a Puerto-Rican hallmark, where the average rent is more than triple the average mortgage payment in the country. Two million rats reside here, one for every four people, and not the nice ones, but fat monsters with the audacity to eat a 30 cm pizza in front of a crowd. This is the last stop for all the shufflers and fame-seekers, for those who ran from their past and their relatives. Here is where they are looking for a new beginning, looking to find it in the only places they know how to look: in the restaurants and the member clubs.

People don’t want real answers in New York. They don't have the luxury. I once met a doctor at a party who said he became a heart surgeon so that he could drive a sports car, and date supermodels, and marry a Vanderbilt. Everyone laughed with discomfort, but I knew he was not joking, and I knew I had met the last honest man on the island.

There is, unfortunately, little cultural substance in New York, and its isolated exceptions only confirm the rule. Of course, there are those determined to stand by these illusions, but they usually reside in Greenwich and drink tequila with cognac from the same glass. People who have a good amount of money, or a great deal of time — perhaps both — and in any case, blatantly naive to the prevalent reality, namely how a capitalist-driven “diversity” has less to do with culture, and more to do with hipsters who want to make a million bucks.

They talk about Wall Street in the movies, and Fifth Avenue, and swanky blues bars, up in Greenwich. They talk about the languid, jazz-soaked air of a 34th Street penthouse, and golden drapes pulsing in a windstorm. They talk about hailing taxis last-minute to make it just on time to stop your soulmate from boarding a to Tijuana. They don’t talk about the midnight train rides, and the girl who used to be a star, and the boy who wants to beat the market, and the deli-owner who hasn’t seen his family in seven years.

Because here, in the steamy red light of a Manhattan restaurant, the past’s constraining grip releases, and the future beckons you, in all its shimmering brightness. And the future always looks good in New York because everyone forgets where they came from. Here, you have another shot, a new beginning, free from trappings of association. Except here, in the land of the lox bagels, black trash bags, and the ancient laundromats, things had better work. Because this is where you run out of cinematic endings.

“Miss, what brings you to New York?”

I’ve forgotten about the plump man with the red cheeks. If he wasn’t a customs officer, he could have been an 18th century executioner.

There is a reason one wakes up one morning and decides to move to New York out of all places. And it is probably not culture or diveristy, nor love, nor any other talismanic bandwagon platitude, otherwise Bergamo, London, or even Berlin would have all been sensibly better alternatives. But something is missing, something is craved, something has been taken. You no longer correspond to the immediate world. You must reinvent yourself at any cost. It is the only way to go on. Of course, I don’t tell him this.

Fast forward two years.

To a winter night that feels like spring. So you can go out on the fire escape and contemplate your life. The apartments opposite of mine are miniatural, like a scale model. And inside the cubicle rooms are the vaporous bodies of messy women and shirtless men. They all have the appearance of surrender. And somewhere in the background –dominating the skyline from a skyscraper– a blue light spans the sky. Steadily gliding, swirling over the black water, floating, rising above the horizon, circling the night, as if it is looking for something. Some logic for this place, some binder that holds it all together. And I know what it is.

I search beyond the immediate world of nostalgia. Something lost in the moment. Something found in the park, in the small cubicle rooms, and the jungles of the broken hearts.

An eternal pulse of hope, beating violently against all odds, awakening the spirit from its slumber, and exalting it with courage to fight its inescapable grief. I see the blue light every now and then, on the rare warm winter evenings after seven, and I am certain that as long as I continue to see it, we will someday leave this terrible town that deceived us and betrayed us, and — occasionally — nurtured us into better men and women. And I think to myself, for the first time really:

Is it possible to hate this dirty world and still love it with a curious indebted affection?