Southerner that I am, you might expect me to have some sort of knee-jerk, hackneyed aversion to New York. You might assume, for example, that the sheer size of the place (“They just cram all those people into teeny tiny lil’ apartments no bigger than a cattle trailer!”), or the speed at which people live (“You folks wouldn’t know how to set down and relax if my mule, Jethro, kicked your butt into that there Jennifer convertible sofabed!”), or its highly multicultural population (“Don’t nobody around here speak the Good Lord’s English?”) would be so instantly off-putting to my rural sensibilities, I’d never wanna go back.
On the other hand, homosexual that I am, you might expect me to be drawn to the city because it’s so damn fierce (note to heterosexuals: “fierce” was a popular term in gay lingo of the mid-1990s which roughly translates as “righteous”). I mean, it’s the center of the fashion industry (fierce), its nightclubs are legendary (double-fierce), and it’s the place where Madonna got her start (triple-fiiiiiiiiieeerce with a double-snap). What more could a girl want in a city?
The fact of the matter is that I’m like most people, Southern, Northern, gay, straight, whatever: for me, New York is a mixed bag.
On the one hand, there’s the weather. Yeah, I know it’s mild by some standards, but jeez, Louise, what insane colony of religious zealots spent the first winter there and felt the sphincter-clenching, gale-force winds blowing across the Hudson and said to themselves, “Would this be a great place to settle down or what?” Who? …Oh, of course. The same people who can’t decide whether they live in Holland or the Netherlands but call themselves Dutch. The same people who, until the EU came along and knocked some sense into ’em, thought it was a good idea to have two national currencies. The same people who eat mayonnaise on their french fries. Hmph. Figures….
Then there’s the living situation. I mean, if I’m going to pay three times the rent I’d pay in other cities for an apartment one-fourth the size, I’d at least like to see a tree out the window–two if possible. And yes, a radiator provides an ample and efficient source of heat, but can someone weld a freakin’ thermostat to the damn thing, please?
On the other hand…
You get to walk in New York–which is, you know, a good thing. In fact, New York is probably the most perambulophilic (I just made that up!) city in the country, maybe the world. For the rest of Americans, walking is something we do only sporadically–maybe in the middle of the night, we get to walk to the bathroom, or when we want to distribute a memo to our coworkers about the need to practice aiming at the toilet instead of the tissue rack we walk to the copy machine, but otherwise, we hop in our cars, drive the 20 feet to the 7-11, and circle the parking lot for 20 minutes trying to find a spot five feet closer to the door. But in New York, you wanna get somewhere? Walk outside, two blocks down to the train station, get on, get off, then hike six blocks over, one block up, to visit your friend who lives in a 5th floor walk-up. Life in New York is conducive to great calves and even better asses.
New York is so hip to walking, they’ve made it okay to eat en route. Most of America is kinda funny about eating away from the table. We’ll consume lunch in the car if we’ve just hit the Burger King drive-through, and we’ll even eat on our feet at carnivals and such, but other than that, there seems to be an aversion to eating on the go. In Europe it’s even worse; there, if you’re not actually seated at a goddamn table in the beer garden and you so much as pop an M&M in your mouth, they’ll extradite your ass and put you on the next plane headed west.
In New York, however–the world’s premiere multi-tasking milieu–eating and walking are an everyday thing; I can only assume that it’s somehow been built into the genetic code. You see people walking down the street not just with candy bars or breath mints, but with caesar salads, bagels, and of course, pizza. Watching a 95-pound model wolf down two Sicilian slices while carrying on a cell-phone conversation with her agent (no headset) and digging her apartment keys out of her Coach rugby bag–now that’s talent.
New York is also good for another thing: waiting. Despite its frantic pace, New Yorkers get to spend a lot of time doing nothing. You wait in line. You wait for your friends. Unless you’re wealthy or you’re in a big hurry, you wait for the subway. Then once you’re on the train, you wait to get where you’re going.
You don’t get that elsewhere–at least I don’t. Except at the movie theatre, I don’t spend much time waiting in line. If I need to see my friends, I go and pick ’em up. and when I need to get somewhere, I dash off to my car and drive there. And no matter how pleasant are the dulcet strains of Linda Wertheimer‘s voice, driving a car is never quite the same as just waiting.
Subway platforms, cafes, the F train: they’re sudden oases of calm, a surfeit of time to reflect, to read, to people-watch, to calm down. They’re like pressure valves to keep you even-keeled.
And that is how I feel about New York today.
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