I must have mentioned somewhere in the various incarnations of this blog that in the late 1970s and the very beginning of the 1980s, when I was in my 20s, I had a dark epiphany on the Express Bus to Manhattan on my way to work. Not only the morning but the streets and the buildings that passed before my eyes looked dreary and dead. This was the Koch years, when the city was crime ridden. You couldn't walk in Central Park. Bryant Park was needle park. The subway was cold in winter, hot in summer and devoured by graffitti. Folks might have been singing the praises of the place since the 1920s, but for me it was an overwhelming world smelling of trash, turds and tar all at once.
Most of my immediate family had lived, and died, in the Bronx or Manhattan, or, if they got out, in the "wilds" of New Jersey. A couple of my braver, more securely employed friends, lived, as roommates, in brownstones in the still seedy but slowly up and coming area of Columbus Avenue. Yes, there were half price Broadway tickets and restaurant evenings out, but only if someone had a car, the subways at night were no where to be. I had good friends from college I didn't want to leave, and some family, but the natural gray within me--I tended toward anxiety, obsessiveness and depression anyway--was burgeoning as the press of the seemingly decaying city pressed from the outside. I had seen the more open space and the nearly always blue sky of California, and the blue ocean so nearby urban Los Angeles, and I was craving, well, anything else than where I was. I worked in a cramped, virtually windowless office on Madison Avenue, by Grand Central, with a screamer of a lawyer whose favorite word began with "F". I was loved by my widowed father but his overprotective fearfulness for me had since become my fearfulness for myself.
I had to escape. Maybe I didn't really hate New York, though it surely felt like it. Maybe I had to reject New York in order to try something different from the life I had always known. I had to show some gumption.
I have told that tale here, the six week plan, finding a job, taking the California Bar. Although I was in "Hollywood" where the sitcoms were mostly still written, I had little time for that dream with long work hours. I lost a writing partner who remained in New York and connected with another aspirant. I was sad at the loss, but I have never otherwise regretted the now 35 year arc of this life.
I never really became a Californian, at least in my soul. The antipathy for New York that drove me out of it to the land of palm trees did not change the fact I was a New Yorker, and always would be. Why did that mean something? I don't know. It just did. It does. The extremes, the energy, the intensity--I suppose I am much like New York, the good and the bad of it. I think I wanted to like it again, though I knew I'd never go back to three months of humidity and five or so of cold and slush. I came back every few years and after a while the smells and sounds became less unpleasant and the city was cleaning itself up. Formerly dank and dangerous parks developed flowers and restaurants and the flow of business people eating lunch and sharing after five happy hours. A revitalization began.
My last visit, until the middle of this month when I picked up that book about New York vibes at the Strand, had been in June 2010. I had a short, happy, and what would be a final encounter with a college friend, Noreen, who would die toward the end of that year. I enjoyed myself, but was delighted to leave behind a week's worth of humidity. After I lost my job in 2011 in a political shake-up that ultimately would claim nearly all of the management team, moved apartments, made a short trip to Boston for a graduation, I just didn't get back to New York.
But this time, with another graduation to attend in the Boston area, and in real need of a change, and the realization that six years away from the few family members I have in the area was too long, particularly for an 89 year old aunt, my mother's sister, I felt myself being drawn back.
I stayed at the Old Roosevelt Hotel on East 45th Street, a place where Guy Lombardo once held his New Year's orchestral bashes in days gone by. The location allowed me to walk, and walk, and walk, east side to west side, uptown to the 60s and 70s. Maybe it was nostalgia, seeing my aunt in her Manhattan high rise, looking through old photos with her, and my cousin Carol and her husband, walking past the horse carriages awaiting passengers for a Central Park tour, attending Mass at the renovated St. Patrick's Cathedral, reconnecting in person with a childhood friend I had not actually seen (though we had spoken) in about 35 years. I shed a tear at the site of the new World Trade Center. The speed of the city has, if that is possible, increased. There are even more people, from even more places, walking criss-cross and parallel to each other. Everything is hawked on street corners, from food to clothes. Bringing the LIRR railroad to Grand Central, meant jackhammers in the night. I supped at Circo, took in The King and I, driven in a town car hired by my childhood friend. I spent many hours with my aunt and cousin, the only thing I had "planned" and everything else just happened, catching up with a few, though not nearly as many people I might have hoped, and always on the fly, at restaurants they chose, French, American bar (PJ Clarke's), Greek (in Hell's Kitchen, still a mix of seedy and slow to develop gentrification), Middle Eastern.
I was oddly relaxed in the midst of a whirlwind. I didn't live in New York, but I wasn't a tourist. That appealed to me.
As I sit on the terrace of my little West Hollywood condo, the palm trees being brushed by a late afternoon breeze, I know that I would never be happy living in the chaos of Manhattan or even the suburbs of Westchester. I like my life in California. Still, although I may not love New
York enough to go back to it, I like it again, very much.
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