I Can't Escape From New York
New York always beats the shit out of you, but it used to actually be worth it.
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It was last August, during the Hot Vaxx Summer, which lasted six whole weeks before the Delta variant reminded us that to know hope is to know suffering.
I realized, after spending my entire adult life living in New York City (and my entire childhood in its near-abroad), that this place has lost its thing for me. The thrill is gone. Let someone else live their NYC dreams. For me, it’s time for another chapter.
I was crossing Park Avenue—unique among all north-south mid-Manhattan thoroughfares in being not only a two-way street, but a bustling avenue with multiple lanes on each side. It’s not quite as insane as crossing Queens Boulevard, but that’s only because it would be physically impossible to have a sixteen-lane highway in Manhattan.
Still, traversing Park Ave. is dangerous. It’s also a pain in the ass, requiring both speed and urban awareness—those New York City skills you’re either born with or must accrue. If you’re unable to time your sprint to reach THREE “Walk/Don’t Walk” signals, you’re either going to die or be stuck on a narrow median for an entire traffic light cycle, as angry motorists speed past you mere inches away in either direction.
On that night I was covered with dirt and sweat—just as I expected I’d be—and feeling fine about it. I had just wrapped a weeknight Central Park pickup softball game—organized by a profanely hilarious septuagenarian Upper West Side Jew. The guy’s a Damon Runyon character in the flesh—the kind they just don’t make anymore, because it’s probably illegal.
Our softball capo’s teeth might be falling out and he sure can’t run anymore, but he can still swing the bat, and he’d be dead and buried before he missed a game. More importantly, he holds the NYC Parks Department permit that bestows exclusive access to this field from 5-7p every Wednesday between April and September. He’s been the sole owner of the permit for at least three decades (a gregarious exaggerator, he’s tough to fact check but that’s the best estimate I’ve got).
For 16 years I’ve played on and off with this guy and the rotating rosters he’s assembled, which at various times have been comprised of undocumented immigrant restaurant workers, Wall Street bros, retired semi-pro ballplayers from uptown and the Bronx, show business hangers-on, media tangentials, schoolteachers and college students—as well as washed-up neighborhood dads looking for a couple of hours to run around in the sun (ahem).
It’s a quintessentially New York experience. It’s one of the joys of my life. I’ve played at least a hundred games on that field, and there’s never been a single one in which I haven’t felt in awe of the beauty of the skyline, the menagerie of international tourists, or the fact that this is the city in which I live. But it’s the experience itself—this communal game among both friends and strangers ($8 a head, to pay the umpire) that seems to exist in an alternate 2022 universe—one where we’re not segregating ourselves by politics or identity.
On either side of the southern tips of Central Park—a few hundred yards away from the ballfield—are properties named for/or owned by Donald Trump. The carousel perched on a hill mere feet behind home plate had for over a decade been named for Trump—until last year, after the city severed financial ties with the Trump Organization a few days following the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
The specter of the most polarizing person in America—and the least popular New Yorker in New York—is everywhere. But nobody cares about any of that shit for the two hours we’ve got to work with. Just play ball.
I don’t remember how I did at the plate that night, a sure indication I didn’t do anything much. I do recall making a better-than-average catch in right-center field, one of those sliding grabs that any rickety, part-time beer league player over 40 immediately accepts will be a source of great physical discomfort once the game is over. But in that moment, and its immediate aftermath, all you feel is the highlight reel in your head.
As is custom, at the game’s conclusion I retreated to the bleachers with my temporary teammates and opponents and bought a $4 Presidente tallboy from an unauthorized vendor. I changed my cleats, sipped my cerveza, and bullshitted about the Yankees and/or Mets with whoever was in the near vicinity. It was in the high 70s and not too humid—unusually pleasant for NYC in August.
A quietly beautiful, everyday “Reason to Still Live in NYC” experience.
But minutes after it was over, crossing Park Avenue, I heard my inner monologue say “I’ve had enough.”
“I’m Almost Ready”
Lou Reed and I don’t have a lot in common, but we did both grew up in the suburbs right outside of the city, hated it, then made NYC our homes. We also have something else in common—however much we wanted to, we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave this goddamn city.
“I don’t know very many people who live in New York who don’t also say, ‘But I’m leaving,’” Lou Reed observed in the 1995 indie film, Blue in the Face. “I’ve been thinking of leaving for 35 years now, I’m almost ready.”
Obviously, Reed was no half-hearted Gotham carpetbagger. He was the city’s unofficial poet laureate and the creative impresario of the Velvet Underground—the impoverished-in-its-time art rock band that more than a half century later continues to define the filthy, detached, and impossibly rhythmic New York style of rock and roll cool. He wrote “Walk on the Wild Side,” for chrissakes—a song Frank Sinatra himself could not possibly have made more “New York.”
And Reed was no ivory tower rock star, he lived among us. No one made a big deal of seeing Lou Reed on the street or in a restaurant or at a show—everyone had already seen him somewhere, and in person he came off just as he was—an unapproachable grouchy old man.
But if a person could share a soul with a city, Lou Reed could. And yet even after decades of wealth, fame, and creative success—Lou felt the myriad stresses that this city imposes upon all of its denizens were maybe not worth the hassle.
This city is an absolute ballbuster. Yet, we always tell ourselves, it’s worth it. Because of all the good stuff.
Many people still feel that way. Perhaps some day I’ll feel that way again. I just can’t imagine that time, not the way I see this city now.
Don’t Tell Me It Hasn’t Been That Bad
I really don’t want to wave the bloody shirt, but please take my word for it. The pandemic sucked for me and my family, and living in New York had a lot to do with it.
Three young kids and two working parents in a Queens apartment. The refrigerated trailers filled with dead bodies down the street. The endless wailing of ambulance sirens. The lack of reliable information about just how transmissible the coronavirus actually was. The text messages from the city that basically said: “Don’t call 911 for anything but an immediate life-threatening emergency.”
The times I found myself flipping out on my stir-crazy, Zoom-schooled kids for rough-housing on the coach, because I literally could not take them for medical attention if any of them broke as much as a finger.
The time we were under curfew for a few days in early June 2020, when there was enough widespread rioting that the NYPD was forced to admit it couldn’t control the violence. (Perhaps to overcompensate for failing to protect and serve the public, the NYPD rioted themselves, beating the shit out of peaceful protesters with blatant disregard for the law.)
And it can never (and should never) be understated—public schools were closed for 18 months, which was 15 months longer than any science-based caution should have dictated.
While I reject the right-wing caricature of NYC as being in its “Warriors”-redux era, I too reject the left-wing fantasy that the only thing this city needs are fewer cops and more identity quotas.
There has been a spike in shootings. The subway system is experiencing a spate of random attacks and a marked increase in mentally ill people sleeping on trains and in stations. Despite spending more per student than any district in the country, the public school system (which was merely terrible and all but impossible to navigate in the pre-2020 halcyon days) is apocalyptically bad post-COVID.
A system which traps students into their zoned elementary schools (no matter how terrible they are) until middle school—at which time they are forced into a city-wide application process that is as inscrutable as it is unfair—is a system that should be blown to smithereens, not “made more equitable” by gutting the meager “Gifted and Talented” program.
So let’s get out of here, right? Let’s go right fucking now, right??? But where?
Housing inventory plummeted at the start of the pandemic, continued to tighten up throughout 2021, and because there truly is no bottom in this bleak horrible future we live in—somehow the availability is even worse in 2022. The supply chain disruptions haven’t yet caught up, so there’s still not enough new housing being built. The fed is raising interest rates, so the cheap mortgages of recent years are gone—meaning homeowners already locked into favorable mortgage rates will be disinclined to sell. Analysts are saying it’s the worst time in modern history to buy a home.
Meanwhile, my kids’ childhoods march on, and they get more and more “New York” by the day. I’ve been of the belief that parents can reasonably use the cover of the pandemic to uproot their kids’ lives—to make a new start and adjust their lifestyles in some strange and unfamiliar place, as risky and scary as that can be. But as the pandemic fades, the children’s roots grow, and moving potentially becomes more emotionally traumatic.
I suppose I could ride this out, and maybe it’ll all work out. Maybe bragging about “growing up in New York City during the horrendous time of COVID and its aftermath” will be a thing my kids do one day—mic-dropping their street credibility. Maybe staying in this shell of a metropolis won’t be as hard as it sounds when said aloud. And maybe I’ll just get used to the way things are now, growing yet another layer of calloused New York skin.
I’d like to say to the city I love that it’s been a good run, and that I know you’d welcome me back (New York is a Catholic church in that sense, you can always come home).
But I’m not like Lou Reed in Blue in the Face. I’m ready now.