Fall Back Disposition

New York City has several recurring themes, most built around notions of high highs and low lows. The city has never been lovelier than it is right now. A perfect summer fading into a truly luscious autumn. More trees and green space than have been seen in centuries, harking back to early industrial times when the city was mostly farmland. A recent panicky shark sighting off Long Island turned out to be a huge pod of dolphins, and whales are so numerous in the harbors that a marine biologist has hailed this "the new Cape Cod." But then my friend Adam Jay, minding his business on his way to our friend Terry's party on Friday night spotted some man making business on the sidewalk.

"I wanted to post about it on Facebook," he told me later, "But had to look up the spelling of defecate to make sure I got it right."

That's New York City for you. The more things change in this city that never stops changing, the more it can't completely shake the vestiges of the past. There is something about this place. You are forced by circumstances to always be moving forward and yet the city makes it so difficult to let go of everything that has come before. Naturally I mean this both in the sense that memories made here can be hard to shake and that you could literally be stuck with the same couch for decades solely because it is impossible (read: too expensive) to get rid of.

Lounging on a chaise lounge in 2001 that, for some reason, I still have. 

I have been writing about New York City since before I arrived and my love of the city hasn't changed (even if I don't write about it as much as I used to). This place is magical. Period. But it is a cruel dark magic, like Ariel trading her voice for legs. You give up so much just to have the most basic necessities. No wonder people who live everywhere else think we are insane. But loving New York City is a form of Stockholm Syndrome. You're a prisoner but where else can you get a bagel like this?

Adam lives in Los Angeles now and while it has many fine qualities (eternal sunshine, air you can see and taste), it's no Manhattan. LA too often can feel like those commercials for depression medication where a sad lady is standing alone in the middle of a party filled with happy, laughing people. "I can't feel my life." Carrie Fisher wrote in Postcards From The Edge and that is LA. You can definitely feel your life in New York City but mostly because it has cut you and you're bleeding.

I realized at Terry's party that it has literally been forever (March) since I wrote about the city. It isn't that I haven't gone out, it is just that my desire to write has. Jimmy made some remark about his long absence from my blog, but it is the blog itself that is long absent. "I think it might be over," I declared, saying out loud what I had been thinking for a long, long time. But here I am again.

Cub and Chris got married this weekend and it reminded me that it has been a long time since I saw them. A quick dash through my blog and I relived quite probably every single interaction we have ever had. A brief, sporadic friendship was writ large, no moment lost to the ravages of time. In that moment, I realized that even as my writing has annoyed and exasperated those closest to me for years, the truth is also that it has documented all of those small moments, good and bad, that make us New Yorkers.

Meeting Cub and Chris at Ben Harvey's birthday brunch in 2009, as New Yorkers do.

We can lose institutions, from Joan Rivers to Roseland, that we thought would stand forever.  Memories can dim and pictures can fade but words are eternal. And if the man relieving himself against the wall of a Broadway theater on my way home after the party is any indication, so is public urination.

Only in New York, kids. Only in New York.

Card Again

The doorman waved me into Vlada with a smooth gesture, “Go right in. I know your face.” He was as unknown to me as Jupiter. I know your old face he meant as he didn't bother to ask for my ID. I remember being offended when I would get carded at the door even though a baby could have been born since then who is old enough now to not be carded himself. Things just aren't as they used to be.

This was at Vlada but it was the second time in the evening that I wasn't carded. The first time was at Therapy where I went to meet Brent, who is visiting from San Francisco. Brent has been a long time listener of the show and I first met him when he was a nineteen year old college student seeing New York City. But that was eight years ago and Brent is all grown up now with a real job and boyfriend and everything.

Brent suggested Therapy (the only bar in the city he could remember) and the last time I was there, it was something of a ghost town since Hell’s Kitchen fell under the spell of Industry across the way. But tonight the bar was packed, to the rafters, with many young people and a few bewildered old people like myself who wondered what happened to their quiet old haunt. It turned out not to be a place to have a catch-up conversation but it was a place to run into Philip.