I miss New York City. The chaos. The somber, frenetic loneliness. The snow. The frantic energy and lurid masses, squirming up and down and across the streets like demented cosmic bullets being fired from hellish, wild guns.
I don’t, to be clear, miss Harlem. 130th Street. I do, however, miss Lenox Hill, Upper East Side, 70th between First and York. The 24-hour deli downstairs in my building. The medical research center across the street. All the coffee shops and restaurants down the road on 1st Ave. The closeness of the East River, surging black and emerald green down on East Side Ave, a couple blocks away. Carl Schurz Park up in the 80s on East Side Ave, the walks and strolls and jogs along the boardwalk, seeing the river and Roosevelt Island and Brooklyn across the water and the tram and the little mini-dog-parks and all the tourists and locals and sitting on the dirty green benches.
I miss the feeling of being totally anonymous, wandering round Times Square, like some empty husk of a human shell, yet loving every moment of it, feeling simultaneously more alive than ever and yet more empty than the abyss of nothingness we call Death.
I miss runs around Central Park, especially in spring and summer. The Sailboat Pond along 5th Ave and the mid-seventies, that old French man in all white who played superb jazz sax around the lake and always made me think of Paris, which made me think of my last trip there in 2007 (age 24) with my ex, and seeing Jim Morrison’s gravestone in Pere Lechaise. (Oscar Wilde is buried there, too.)
Of course the thought of NYC reminds me of taking subway trains everywhere: The red 2 and 3 trains from Lenox and 125th when I lived in Harlem (and the 4/5/6 on the east side, Lexington and 125th), and the Q train, 6 train at Lex and 68th (right by Shakespeare & Co Bookstore [and Hunter College], which I visited often), and the N/Q/R on 72nd and 2nd Ave.
And then of course Covid: March 2020 and after. Emptiness. Times Square when it was absolutely empty and apocalyptic (I filmed this and wrote about it in my “fictional memoir” on Sincere American Writing) as if I’d just walked into the Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road.
But back to 2019: Broadway plays (Dear Evan Hansen, Slave Play); trains across the East River to Brooklyn; AA live meetings; long, long walks around town; writing constantly; my initial stays in multiple Air BnBs, in lower East Harlem and Washington Heights. Meandering in Greenwich Village, writing at Café Reggio on McDougal Street. Washington Square Park. NYU. The “mall” in the park. When Harry Met Sally.
A bleep in time, the 2.3 years I lived in Manhattan, from age 36-39. A tiny fraction of time, especially in The Big Apple. And yet: I did a lot. Saw a lot. Survived Covid. (In Harlem, no less.) Dated women. Saw live jazz at Small’s. Saw comedy at The Comedy Cellar. Read. Wrote. Caroused dozens of epic independent bookstores like Strand and McNally-Jackson Books in SoHo. Attended literary readings. Gazed up at those Godzilla-like steel skyscrapers, feeling both touristy and foolish and yet smiling.
What did my time there mean? Anything? Nothing? Something? All three at once?
I do not know. I do not care. I was there. That’s really all that matters.
one hates to say "that first sentence is outstanding" as if the rest of this passionate nostalgic considered paean fell off somehow like a fallen leaf in a wayward NYC pond...Boston was always the "city" that held my dreams?heart but this description is so great because in its brevity while holding density dear it allows others to remember, to see how it can be done to cherish good memory.....NYC is what i once as a callow (younger!) carpenter in Northern VT. titled a weekly humour column with parentheses "Not Your Catastrophe" as i felt blessed to be removed from its thrumming mass of humanity, cocky in the rural peace of mind which had formed scar tissue around the brief lifetime of association there...i'd go on in that vein but most important this: throwing in Pere LaChaise into mix you open up for others again the door and i had wandered at night too with knapsack a 24 year old drifter that same vast redolent with history/names cemetery with intention of finding his gravesite
and never found it but in some decrepit building a bulb hanging from kitchen ceiling of modest apartment conversed briefly with occupants in vague sign language, and beyond us the city, another one, lay sleeping in its own character......thanks.
I spent a lot of time in New York too. Never lived there, but I have a lot of great memories. Beautiful place, full of energy like nowhere else in the world. ❤️