This is an excerpt from my ‘fictional memoir,’ Two Years in New York. To read more of it go to Sincere American Writing.
NYC MEMOIR: “TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK”
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Prologue
New York City lives in my body. It’s a place I felt more than anything else. Especially as an outsider, and especially especially as a Californian. I only lived in Manhattan for a little over two years, and yet it happened to be a moment which had never been seen before and may never be seen again—namely, the global pandemic known as Covid-19. Add on to this the murder of George Floyd and the mass protests which ensued, and the invidious political resentment roiling the nation on both sides of the spectrum—not to mention the chaotic turbulence of the Trump era—and you have one bumpy ride.
I was born and raised in Southern California—Ventura and Ojai, north of Los Angeles. I bounced around for many years and ended up living in the San Francisco Bay Area for a decade, from 2008 to 2019. As a semi-wannbe-semi-legitimate-very-angry rich-kid punker growing up in the late nineties and early two-thousands, I fastidiously read all the books I could find about the first-wave of punk which started in the 1970s. And this, of course, led me to Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.
Later, when I had transcended—if that’s the appropriate word here—punk rock and discovered writing, I read Jack Kerouac’s roman-a-clef On the Road, the 1957 classic which nailed a generation and changed young men in search of spiritual ecstasy ever since.
On the Road led me to New York.
In 2006—when I was twenty-three—I ended my one-year lease at my apartment in Pacific Beach in San Diego, and, following Kerouac’s lead, took an Amtrak train 3,000 miles east across America to the gritty emerald jewel that was Manhattan. I was over halfway through my “drinking career,” and needless to say it was a wild two weeks, complete with drunken tomfoolery; blackouts; never-ending explorations by subway and foot; crazed, frantic sex with strange women I barely recall anymore; and continually craning my neck upwards gazing at those impossibly high, shiny metal buildings, like steel dinosaurs which still ruled the land.
That trip set off a pattern: Once every year, I’d go to the city for two weeks. I’d have my inane, wild run of debauchery, and then come back to the warm, soft, kind arms of California, hungover, hungry, and hopelessly in love. New York to me then—as now—was a very romantic idea. Not so much a concrete city, per se, but an idea; a mental rabbit-hole which, if I took the ride, pulled me into all the literature I’d ever read, or nearly.
The more books I read over the years, the more I started to realize that New York was The Place for writers. (So many famous writers lived there.) It wasn’t just that Big Publishing was located in The Big Apple. It wasn’t even that you could potentially make crucial literary connections if you were lucky. Or even that intellectuals and writers had flocked and still did flock to Manhattan to get energized off it’s electric buzzing core (which never stopped).
It was, really, the simple fact that it was tough to live there. It gave the term “starving artist” more depth, shape, dimension and meaning. Everyone lived on top of each other; everyone was in everyone else’s way all the time. People had harsh, contracted tunnel-vision; it was A City of Solipsism. You thought that rancid smell coming from the culture was narcissism but really it was the intense fury of ambition, burning like a flaming river of bubbling lava. Everything that lava touched got consumed. Youeven consumed yourself. You forgot who you were. What you were. None of that mattered in New York City. What mattered was making it; success.
In September of 2010 I hit an emotional rock-bottom from alcoholism and got sober. It changed my life overnight. Immediately, all my drinking energy transmogrified into literary urgency. I suddenly had the need to finish the autobiographical novel I’d started in 2008 and had chipped away at for over two years. In a fever of hallucinatory vigor, I finished the draft in a matter of months, completing it in early 2011.
From that point on I called myself a writer. My mom was an author. My uncle was a writer. It was familial. As young as eight I’d written poetry. As a child Mom read the classics out loud to me. I scanned my mother’s prestigious library when I was little, picking up classics like The Last Tycoon, Sophie’s Choice, and Doctor Zhivago. I read the sentences with glee, pretending I knew what they meant. It didn’t matter. It was the words, the language that I craved. And the style, personal to each different author. Even then I knew I was destined to put words on the page. Alcohol stopped me dead in my tracks. But then I stopped. And everything changed.