From ages 19 to 22 I was focused on acquiring money from Smith College in order to visit cities. I was successful in this endeavor and visited the following on Smith’s dime: Mexico City, Atlanta, Montreal, Vienna, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo, Jakarta, and Istanbul. In each city, I felt my posture correct itself. In each city, I mapped out routes from design centers to leftist bookstores to trending bakeries to contemporary art museums on Google Maps and then set out for the day. Especially in my last year of college, when I was isolated and depressed, it felt better than anyone could even imagine to walk in the Christmas Market in Vienna. It was revelatory to sit next to the canal in a scarf or to go with German girls to a club. The only way I could think of describing it at the time was that the city felt like my real life.
New York City is dense with preconceptions, deeply packed muddy layers. It’s difficult to move through the city without being aware that you are in New York City, to step each step with a squelch. A squelch that sounds like Friends and Girls and Sex and the City, in addition to Following Your Dreams in the Greatest City in the World. I walk to the pier on my lunch break and see the Statue of Liberty. How can I ever see it as just a statue, instead of a myth or a keychain? #I CANT GET OVER THIS VIEW 🤩
I push and push, then coast, then push and push through the city. On rollerblades, right foot left foot, tripped by a crack in the sidewalk. It often feels unclear what I’m supposed to be doing, on the larger scale, but on the day to day I seek to be engaged in the most optimal activity for each hour every hour. When I talk to people, strangers and friends and coworkers and kids and acquaintances and acquaintances’ dogs, I allow myself to forget about both the larger and smaller scales of What am I doing.
I litter money around the city; indulgence is easy and encouraged. Some recent purchases include: diner hash browns, fly-sticking paper, fly-trapping lights, an espresso tonic with real whipped cream, a handmade backpack from a bike store, shampoo and conditioner from a friendly man in a store with many bottles, admission to my friend’s boyfriend’s figure drawing class, expensive asparagus.
I seek out the $3, the $4, the $5, the $6, and it usually ends up being $12 no matter what I do. I trade vast swaths of my time for the pride and pleasure and privilege to pay $12. I spend the day in the cafe copying and pasting information from one platform to another or writing code which feels like solving puzzles and then chatting or waiting around or reading interesting articles.
I also tutor math, paid and unpaid, to girls in many areas of Brooklyn and Queens: Park Slope, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bushwick, Ridgewood, Clinton Hill. Some of them are wealthy and some are not. Some girls are given lessons in singing to prepare for Broadway camp and croissants every day after school. Some girls live in my neighborhood. I feel a real affection for all of the girls, for how they push through the city, for how they are sometimes lazy but often make me laugh. One begs me to test her on her 7 times tables even though right now she only knows 7 times 1 and 7 times 2. I want them all to have a pet rabbit and a trip to Paris, if they desire these things. As New York City gets warmer and wetter, and the system strains, I want them all to stay cool and sheltered.
Many people’s connection to survival is tenuous. I find it incredibly hard to believe that we all accept that rent must be paid. Entire neighborhoods disappear and the disappearance keeps rolling eastward. The critiques I can deal towards myself come easily and plentiful; I know my place in this whole situation. I tried to find the cheapest rent and now I try to help my neighbors. I watch out, I take care, I whatsapp, I eat food someone else has cooked, I come late from work. Everyone’s pushing forward, bracing against the same strong wind.
The city collects and restricts and corrals; people end up pooling together in neighborhoods, bus routes, delis. I realized recently that every place in the city has regulars. People are always greeting each other like, How are you doing, buddy. I like the regulars at the cafe and I notice when they shave. The travel vlogger comes into the cafe with his enormous dog. I turn to my coworker: I thought that dog moved to Ohio.
I get pooled, I’m pooling. I look like others, I know that – the clothes I wear spell out a message. I am legible. Clothes rhyme all across the city, Freitag bags, slim fit pumas. I'll never win this game. I wear clothes like a dalmatian would. It makes me not even want to try sometimes, but recently I’ve been seized by the urge for a strong silhouette. I wish to obtain and maintain a shape with a striking perimeter, one whose edges push firmly outwards.
I would love to be a boy in the city, especially one with a cross body bag who crosses the city on bike. I would go so fast on my bike as a boy. I wouldn’t cling to the handle bars but instead lace my fingers behind my head and lean back and maybe weave in between cars but never get injured except for some sexy scrapes. When I go on a date with a girl I would imagine that she would feel a thrill at getting to date me, me with a cool haircut and an occupation like woodworker/butcher/designer/DJ. I would have large, deft hands. I would probably wear a striped button down, or a worn T shirt.
There are many stores in New York City with beautiful books and beautiful magazines. These books and magazines have photos, interviews, and essays. Names bounce across these stores, across the city – Paul Thek, Cookie Mueller, Kathy Acker, Marfa, Texas. I often get nauseous in these places, a kind of nausea specific to looking too long at a photo book. I rush out and take the subway home.
It’s completely possible, and in fact regularly practiced by individuals such as myself, to move through this city of many many many and think only of yourself. I am on the subway turning over my latest failure, in addition to logistical concerns such as What am I going to have for dinner tonight. I never let it floor me – the enormity, the amount of fabric needed to clothe the city, the quantity of apartments and dollars of rent paid, how I’m one in a city of many many many. Sometimes I consider it but I never let it floor me.
In the city, you are trained to incorporate strange or jarring or even beautiful sights, sounds, and experience into the normal. Anything else would prove overloading. The out of ordinary must be turned ordinary. You have to get to work on time. You must look at your phone, the game Cantaloupe, and focus on combining blueberries into dragonfruit, dragonfruits into kiwis, kiwis into melons, melons into grapefruits, grapefruits into cantaloupes, and so forth.
I don’t want to incorporate the un-normal, the un-ordinary, the changed, the changing, the inconvenient, the too-close, the too-loud. I take out my noise-canceling AirPods compulsively. I like to look to see where a building or a tree meets the blue blue or blue gray sky. In Red Hook, this meeting is angular, posed, sparse, potent.
In London last summer with my dad and sister we sat down to eat in a dark restaurant. There was a man sitting next to us, enjoying a steak with mashed potatoes, and he asked us if we had traveled from Boston that morning. Yes, we replied with surprise. How did you know? Because, he said, pausing for effect with satisfaction, I was your pilot. A city can collect and corral you, but often you collide, surprised, excited: Oh small-scale wonder!
In a tiny opening within the texture of the present, you can take a break from all that pushing. I met a dear friend at a party where I spoon-fed him mashed potatoes. On weekend nights, he and I flail in dark spaces, and strangers tell us Now that’s real dancing, wow you guys know how to Dance. I get soaked through, wet to the outside of my cutoff denim shorts, and I glow with the amazing happiness of finding my one true dance partner and the pride of being good at something. He sniffs poppers and I slide my shades down, shaking my hair vigorously to feel a delicious scalp sensation.
I push and push and push through the city until I find either a breaking or a stopping point. I reach out and continually find that there are people there, people to run with and stop with. I am enormously grateful and satisfied. I end each day tired and wanting to go home and eat chicken fingers. But the bus is coming in eleven minutes, and then I’ll have two more transfers!!!