New York Is Dying

Anybody catch the cover story in the Voice a few weeks back, about the German girl who scammed a handful of unfortunates by using a spare key & advertising for roommates & taking a bunch of deposits, only to exit stage left with the money and miss the spectacle of ten moving vans pulling up at once? Hi-larious, and almost poetic. She was sick of NYC and all the pathetic, desperate angling for nickels and dimes, and instead of just calling it a day and humbly moving on decided to pull a Dada stunt in the prevailing fuck-you ethos & make a tidy sum while at it.

And you know, I understand where she was coming from. I was born and raised in SF, but my dad was a native NYer & we visited every summer during the hoary days of the late 70s, and then in the late 80s I opted to decline admission to some more prestigious Ivy League schools in favor of NYU, just so I could live here. And it was worth it: there may have been more crime & graffiti & gen'l urban mayhem, but it was the capital of the fucking world & evidenced it without making a big to-do. So two & 1/2 years ago I jumped at the chance to relo here with the consulting firm I work for, and in my mind return to Civilization. Now I can't wait to get the high hell out, and after you read this you'll be looking forward to my exit, too...

See, NY is fundamentally upfucked, and shows no sign of righting herself. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to realize that a lot of this relates to the lingering effects of the monstrosity of 9/11... There's a lot of sadness just under the surface here, and I understand the impulse to soldier on and not dwell unduly, but the gen'l reliance on NY's famous character armor and tacit agreement to not talk about the consequences of that nighmare, and the decline of NY in general doesn't appear to be working real well either.

So, here, before I decamp for the mellower shore let me piss everybody off & start the conversation. What used to be an exhilarating and unavoidable general momentum that sharpened everyone's instincts seems to me to have degenerated into pathetic desperate angling for nickels and dimes, the old desire to fuck before being fucked, but like on steroids. Even friends, it seems to me, constantly look for leverage & take quiet inner satisfaction out of one free beer cadged out of anyone too stupid to keep track of rounds. And transplants are the worst: moving to NY gives them the license to find that inner asshole they always knew they had inside. At least natives don't know anything else, this hell's just the status miserable quo. And the City That Never Sleeps apparently sleeps now, and a lot. I used to dig how even at 4:30 am there'd be literal crowds out. No more. I took a livery car home to Br'klyn one morning recently and it was a fucking ghost town out. I remember laughing inwardly during the late 80s at the pretense of going to a West Side club, ordering a drink, and immediately deciding that the bar sucked and taking a cab to the East Side, and then repeating the process on arrival, having a coke-fueled hunt for the Perfect Scene which, amazingly, was findable with a little luck, timing, and the right connections. Now people are happy if they can get home, pull a (overpriced) bongload and sack out before Charlie Rose signs off. I know, everyone has to work hard to pay the rent, but there used to be a point to it, one worked hard but had ready access to wild anarchic subcultures, scenes and salons.

Exactly whose quality of life was improved by busting pot smokers & turnstile jumpers? I was dragged out of my car KGB style and digested through the maw of Central Booking for the crime of being an idiot and daring to take a toke with my girlfriend on the LES, and the kicker was the cops immediately started apologizing and giving me the old, "If it was up to us.., you seem cool, etc" which, you know: fuck you. Either arrest me or don't. Preferably the latter: it's weed. There's a zillion other pressing concerns. And all those cops fingering the tiny internal pockets of any boho looking cat's backpack at the subway are not looking for bombs. Be real.

And until very recently any punk kid could show up from Eau Claire or wherever & find a roommate situation in the admittedly sketchy LES or Alphabet City for a couple hundred. Now, forget it. They're gentrifying Red Hook! Red Hook! There's literally no margins left to get a foothold, at least not within an hour's subway ride. And no margins means no artists, writers, freakazoids. Just the aforementioned fuck-you-fuck-me species of uberyuppies and the poor wretches who slouch in from the boroughs to service them. Fucking sad. There used to be compensation for all the aggravations of NY life is I guess what I'm getting at, but no more. It's all tidied up for the tourists, and the cops own the streets (seriously: that shit during the Repub Conv would've inspired literal overturn-the-cop-car-and-set-it-aflame riots in SF- cordoning off blocks on scooters! The very fucking idea. That dude kicking and punching the undercover goon who was revving into the crowd was cool, tho.). I miss, mourn, and pine for the old NY (god what an eternal refrain), and until (god forbid) another Incident clears the City of the casual opportunists & does something about the obscene rental market you can color me gone.

And the fucking weather! Heh.