Hello to All That

New York began for me on Sunday, the nineteenth of August.  As my plane began its descent into LaGuardia airport I looked out my window for views of a glittering skyline or the Statue of Liberty.  Instead I saw muddy brown waters and brown buildings, gray roads and a sad, gray sky.  When my plane had left Chicago that morning I had watched the skyline tower and shine in the hazy silver morning mist, keeping my eyes on the city until the very last skyscraper was out of sight, as if I was taking a last look at a one-time love – and I was.

I spent the duration of the flight writing about Chicago, crying quietly behind my dark sunglasses, and rereading my favorite Joan Didion essay, “Goodbye to All That.”  I had read “Goodbye to All That” almost every night this summer and on almost every flight I had taken during my travels around Europe this past spring.  The first time I read “Goodbye to All That” was a year and a half ago on an April afternoon in Chicago, as I sat at my favorite spot at the Diversey harbor and stared south at the downtown skyline while wind blew from the lake to my hair, tangling it more terribly than sex or swimming. 

That was the year – my twenty first, like Joan Didion’s twenty eighth – in which, like Joan Didion had done before me, “I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”  Joan Didion learned that lesson in New York.  I learned it in Chicago.  Ever since that April day I had clung to that essay and to the idea of Joan Didion as proof that my experience of coming to a city – in my case, Chicago – and falling in love with it as deeply as I had ever been in love with a person was not entirely unusual and the tears I had cried when sitting at the harbor were not the only tears in the world to be shed over the betrayals of the hopeful-hearted promises of first love.  I grew to quote Joan Didion – all of her writing, not just “Goodbye to All That” – the way some people quote the Bible.  Slouching Towards Bethlehem, my favorite of her essay collections, even came with me to every country I traveled to. 

So when my taxi driver took me over a bridge on my way from LaGuardia to my New York City residence, I asked him the name of the bridge.  And when he said it was the Triborough I smiled and made a note to write about how I had rode over the same bridge that Joan Didion had rode over when she first came to New York.  And then, five days later, I had stood atop a subway grating on Lexington Avenue, feeling the hot, wet air climb up my bare legs from the cracks in the grate and noting the comingling scents of rotting garbage and Chanel perfume.  And I had been surprised to see that even in 2012 it was still possible to buy a peach from a street vendor as Didion had done in the sixties.  And I had thought of how she had written that it was during just such a moment that she knew she had “reached the mirage” – that she had made it.  And then I thought about how I did not feel that way.  I had felt that way in Chicago – and, to some extent, in London and Paris too – but New York was just another place to me. 

In particular, that first Sunday I arrived New York was not even a place but a sad, gray, misremembered embodiment of all other places I had been before.  I had wandered from my residence to a street lined with open-air shops and vendors.  Somehow, something I had read before informed me that this was the Fulton Street Market and I had looked at it as if from a distance even as excited tourists bumped up against me, for I was not seeing this market so much as I was seeing London’s Portobello and Camden markets. 

I walked on Fulton until I came to the South Street Sea Port, a place of cobblestones and life-size pirate ships, acrobats and storefronts that looked like London.  And as crowds merged and swirled around me I felt lost and alone even though I knew exactly where I was and even though I knew that while I missed many of the places I had been, I had yet to find a place or a person in any of those places who truly fit me.

From there I did the only thing I could think to do – I put on the big, dark sunglasses that I had purchased the previous summer so that I could look like the picture of Joan Didon from the cover of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and I walked to the Tiffany’s I had passed on my taxi ride earlier that day.  That was the other thing about being in New York – it didn’t feel like mine, nor did it initially feel like a place that I could be.  It felt like it belonged to the tourists of the world and to all of the writers and singers and movie characters who had existed there before me.  Joan Didion, Woody Allen, Truman Capote, and all the rest had lived and articulated New York so well that it seemed to me that my presence in it and my words on the subject were utterly unnecessary.  So I stood outside of Tiffany’s experiencing what Holly Golightly had called “the mean reds” because I was afraid of something so big that I didn’t even have the words with which to say what it was.

For the first couple days I moved about New York not in youthful or touristy awe but in the practiced irritation of someone who has lived and worked and loved in a city, someone who has run to catch a train and missed it and showed up late for drinks with a friend and been overly bothered by the inconvenience of the whole thing because it had been raining all day and the wind had blown their umbrella inside out.

But New York did begin to endear itself to me, though not in the way Chicago had.  With Chicago I had fallen head over heels in love at first sight.  I have loved the hot pavement of State Street in the summer and the lights of Michigan Avenue in the winter, and the route that the 146 express bus took down Lake Shore Drive.  I had loved Chicago the way I had loved a boy for the first time – not because this particular place was the right one for me, but because it was the first place to ever even come close.

With New York I sense myself slowing slipping into the kind of love that is real and grounded in common interests and understanding and that can thus withstand the tests of time.  This began on a Tuesday night in Brooklyn.  I had taken myself to see the latest Woody Allen film, To Rome With Love, and I had then wandered into a small bookstore.  The movie was everything I loved about a Woody Allen film and I had been glad to be able to enjoy it without the extraneous company of a lackluster date or a shallow but well-meaning friend.  And then, inside the bookstore, I found on the shelves every title and author that had carried me from my childhood home in Platteville, Wisconsin to that very moment.  And I stood talking with the man behind the register about his travels in Turkey and my travels in Turkey, his travels in Scotland and my travels in Scotland, and about why Reality Hunger by David Shields is a wonderful piece of literary criticism and why How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish is not.  And I had left the store feeling happy and at ease with who I was and – for the first time ever – where I was in the world. 

The following day was even better.  That evening I attended a reading at the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo and then I met up with a friend I had first met in France.  Together we found ourselves on a rooftop in Spanish Harlem drinking Coronas with men we had met outside a bar on the Upper East Side and to whom I was reciting Woody Allen’s opening monologue from my favorite movie, Annie Hall – a thing I have done on various occasions over the years to no particular effect on the people to whom I have recited it.  However, this time when I had finished quoting Woody Allen paraphrasing Groucho Marx saying, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member,” one of the men in front of me smiled, stepped a little closer, and said, “That was good but here’s how it really goes.”

And so it goes that a week later I sat at a small candlelit table at a tequila bar and tequeria on the Lower East Side with the man who could quote Annie Hall even better than I could.  And now I was quoting Joan Didion to him, saying, “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” 

Four days later, in bed on a Sunday afternoon, I asked him what he had first noticed about me.  He replied that he had first noticed the passion in my eyes when I had quoted Annie Hall and then again when I had quoted Didion.  That is where my New York began: in a bookstore in Brooklyn and on a rooftop in Spanish Harlem and in bed on a Sunday.  In my New York I found not the possibility of being able to become somebody but a hope of being able to be precisely who I have always been.