Towards the end the Q train commute had become this sorta weird visitation of hell on earth and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. OK, I’m being facetious. Sorta. See the thing was I had taken to reading the New York Daily News every day on the subway. The more rituals the better in those days, that’s one way to look at it anyway. The Daily News was simultaneously my direct conduit, my cartographer and my prayer to the city. One day it all suddenly dawned on me. If I didn’t start to understand how the underlying perpetual motion of the city worked or if I didn’t develop a deeper sense of community that comes with living with 8 million strangers I was going to leave. I said it loudly and with the utmost resolution, like a sassy country song about leaving a lover unless they change their cheating ways. Show me what you got, NYC. So that’s how I started reading the Daily News every day.
Before long I knew so much about the teacher’s union struggles and which police precincts were corrupt I felt like I could run for city council. Or at least host a community talk show on public access that would air once a week. Suddenly, I had ideas about the budget. I knew how to increase productivity in the Department of Sanitation. I would advocate for public education and against firehouse closings.
I was a complete insufferable bore at dinner parties. I would talk at length about the week in murders and suicides. The week in suspensions and lockouts. The week in which nothing much really happened at all upstate because the holiday threw everyone off and though no one said it we were all so ideologically tired. The slow century had too many of us sleepwalking indifferent through grocery stores and cubicles. I could imagine those beat writers for the Daily News, writing the unspeakable and trying to avoid moralizing tones and syntax. Trying to keep a semblance of integrity in journalism, in their own callus lives. In the end my experiment didn’t work. I left city in the fall, withdrawing $2000 dollars and two months of time to get a new perspective in Costa Rica. Well, that was the original plan. I never left once I got there.
On the last day I lived in New York I walked past 14th St. and 5th Ave. and saw an enormous vacant lot where the main New School for Social Research building once was. It reminded me of all the structures I had worked so hard to make stand in my own life and how when I swept over the vast vistas of my past I realized almost all of them had come crumbling down brick-by-brick. I couldn’t bear watching them being demolished at the time but imagining them that day all I saw were apologetic ghosts dancing in the ruins, too charming and detached to be helpful. I threw my newspaper into the rubble and headed to the airport in ecstasy.
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