25 Years a New Yorker. Still.
On June 1, 1995, on Second Avenue and 40th Street, I bought a mop.
The supermarket was anything but. The fluorescent lights pulsed above the paltry selection of anemic tomatoes; peaches little bigger than their pits, apples dented. The checkered linoleum was peeling by the frozen foods, ammonia fogged a pile of open-air shrimp, and a sole crab in a basket looked as though it’d given up the fight days ago, his right claw stiffed in a salute to Tuesday.
A man was returning two cans of refried beans that had “expired over a year ago!” A Jamaican nurse come-along-now’d a shuffling old man. A woman raised a brow and peered down her studded nose at a jar of chutney.
I gathered my new cleaning supplies from the doll-sized cart, which refused to squeeze through the checkout lane, and placing them on the two-foot long conveyor belt announced proudly, “Hi! I just moved here so I guess this is my local grocery store. It’s so small. Are they all like this?”
She folded the change into my receipt, “I don’t know, honey, I live in Queens.” Such nonchalance, such elan: a real New Yorker. Like a movie.
In the quarter century since, I have often thought of those first few hours after my arrival.
I’d cabbed in from LaGuardia Airport with two rumbling Siamese cats in a carrier, and a tote bag with my Filofax and a beige landline phone. Clicking across the Queensboro Bridge, I rolled down the window and exhaled a wow at the skyline, the morning sun glinting the East River all the way down to the harbor and up to the Twin Towers.
We arrived in the lobby of our new building in the shadow of the United Nations. “I’m so excited. I’m moving in today,” I greeted the doorman. “It’s apartment 520.”
He opened a drawer, closed it, opened another. “Don’t see ’em. Hang on, I’ll call the office.” Placing his hand over the receiver he looked up, “Did you get a call saying you’d been approved?” he asked.
“Well, no, I mean, we paid a lot of money to some people, and signed things so we’ve been accepted, right? We reserved the elevator for later on this afternoon. The movers should be here in a couple hours.”
He called again and while it rang, he looked up again and furrowed his brow, “You sure you got approved by the board already?” My stomach fell out. What was I even doing here?
“Ah, yes. Yes, she’s here. I’ll tell her.” He hung up. “Thanks goodness, you were approved a couple hours ago.” I exhaled. My good fortune and ignorance of how the system worked aligned in my favor, and moments later in my very own hands were the keys to a brand new life.
I opened the door to our apartment, unleashed the cats, plugged in the phone, dialed my mother and left her a message on her answering machine. “Can you believe it?” I asked excitedly. “I live in New York now!” And then I held the receiver out toward 42nd Street, “Listen to this! This is what New York sounds like!”
I sat on the sill by the open casement windows and torched up a Marlboro. I looked out — at eye-level over the tops of the trees in the park across the way at the Chrysler Building — and decided that would have to be the view from the sofa. I was mentally blocking off furniture when the doorman rang. I had flowers coming up. They were from my mother. I cried.
There would be many tears and many, what I would call “New York magic moments” over the years. Sofas would go curbside; my fiancé and I would split; the cats would pass away in my arms years later in Washington Heights; I’d hock my jewelry on Diamond Row to pay my rent; I’d go to the Tony Awards at Radio City Musical Hall twice; I’d hug Joe DiMaggio and Maya Angelou, and smoke a cigarette with Grace Jones on Madison Avenue; I’d work in galleries, wait tables, manage restaurants, sell apartments, write articles, design logos, CDs, books and posters.
I’d forge lifelong friendships with amazing, fascinating people. I’d attend their shows, their bridal and baby showers, their weddings, and sadly for a few: their funerals.
In 2016 I’d marry my husband while surrounded by the brothers and sisters of my soul, most of whom I met on this island, under the arch in Washington Square Park on a perfectly clear spring day. On the periphery: a snake charmer, students conducting a survey about porn, a bubble maker swirling iridescent soap suds skyward, chess hustlers, a juggler, plumes of pot, a homeless man with way too much to say.
I’d watch as the city changed unimaginably to what it is today some 11 weeks into a quarantine. A city I love, cut off at the knees, devoid of all I moved here for — the Mondrian exhibit at MoMA; Haring at the Whitney; Purple Noon at the Paris, too many cosmopolitans (not yet cosmos) at Global 33 and later soaking them up at The Kiev with platters of pierogies at 3 a.m.; trapped for five hours during a blizzard at Cafe Asean; washing down burgers with champagne pre-theater at Joe Allen; hissing up at the Baroness from a picnic blanket on a clear summer night in Bryant Park — everything on hold or shuttered permanently, where the only signs of life left are the roaring in the streets for racial justice in a city still reeling from tens of thousands dead to a new virus.
In the months following September 11th people talked about leaving the city. People are asking it again. It’s a punch to the gut. It’s like someone you thought you knew peels back a mask revealing a complete stranger all you can do is incredulously shake your head and knit your brow. No. No.
You move here for all the things you thought New York was. It’s the movie you created in your mind from a thousand other movies that you crafted into an impossibly perfect, fucked-up, violent, dangerous, glorious, glamorous New York. But the projector wheezes low, the celluloid flips, flips, flips and as the house lights slowly lift, you stumble out blindly into a city stripped bare, limping as fast as it can and as pissed off as it ever was. And you’re home.
And it is on this day I remember that first New York magic moment when I strode up Second Avenue so proud to carry my very own mop—a tourist would never carry a mop in Manhattan — to my very own apartment to begin my very own life in the best goddamn city in the world.
Home.
