The Snug: A Blog

      Becoming a New Yorker was as close as I got to tailoring an American self. After a couple of years the massive essence of the city imposes itself and, drained of resistance, you acquire a perverse pride in just surviving from day to day. “We’re tough” is the subtext of all American identities, the swaggering machismo of the cowboy, the cop, the fireman: No effete Europeans here! (Nothing said about the fact that survival in Europe over the past century or more has been so much harder than in America, for most. Nah, don’t touch the stereotypes: they break too easily.) Little has changed over the centuries. Americans still see themselves as honest ordinary folk and foreigners as excitable specimens who can’t be trusted: George Washington versus Lord Cornwallis; Davy Crockett versus Santa Anna; Mark Twain contra mundum. It’s a fiercely provincial identity, of course, intent on excluding the rest of the world, like all provincialism. For a New Yorker there’s the added insularity of the psychic wall around the five boroughs—actually, around the main one, Manhattan. But, tough and self-deprecating at the same time, it’s probably the closest American identity to my own world view. It at least accommodates other cultures, if in a debased form: Irish, Jewish, Italian. The Texan worldview is comparable, and, ironically, I’ve divided my time in America between New York City and Texas, the only entities that stand on their own amid the greater American anonymity. But I’ve tried on both identities, and neither fits the kind of extraterrestrial Irishman I’ve become. (Of course, in New York it really doesn’t matter what your origins are, except in the raucous race-arena of politics and the hushed precincts of high-end law and brokerage firms. Certainly it made no difference on the ocean-floor of society occupied by such as I, who I could have been Guyanese or Goan or even Greek, as long as I kept my mouth shut.)

     In 1979 I moved into a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the midst of seething rubble-strewn Alphabet City on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, now known as the Far East Village and the acme of chic, but in 1979 and 1980 it was anything but. It was an urban wasteland unsought-out except by the paupers, the sexual loners, the drug addicts, the unartistic artists, the failures before the fact, in short the eternal marginals, among whom I include my then-self. What was I? I hardly knew. A translator? Barely; I’d translated odds and ends from the likes of Le Monde and France-Amérique and been paid little, because no one wanted to read them. A writer? Certainly not at that time. After a spurt of three or four short stories, my spring had dried up. So I concentrated on finding yet another job and living through the night. Nights I could do nothing about, but I found several jobs, each more ludicrous than the one before: bartender, foot messenger, tour guide. But by far the most ridiculous was the position of “transit assessor” for an urban-planning firm headquartered in the copper cupola of a redbrick Victorian building on Park Row, across from the venerable Woolworth Tower. (The mere thought of those places reignites the low-level, gut-gnawing anxiety that bedeviled me then.) The job required me to stand at a bus stop in Queens, clipboard in hand, and, from 6:30 in the morning until two in the afternoon, count the passengers getting on and off the buses; but I soon pleaded hardship and requested a transfer, as my first appointed post was just off the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge on-ramp, in front of a pink-flamingo house inhabited by Jewish versions of Archie and Edith Bunker.

      “Whatcha doin’ on my front lawn?” screeched the matron of the house, cigarette au bec, when I’d been counting bus riders for about half an hour on my first morning’s shift. Amiably, I ambled toward her, rehearsing an explanation: bus lines were to be streamlined, therefore the numbers of bus passengers lining up in front of her house would be reduced, and my mission was to spare her and her fine family the sound of farting bus brakes just in front of her house, and hey! cut down on the pollution while we were at it, saving the environment, an exciting prospect, no?….but she would have none of it, and retreated into her house in apprehension, snarling and snapping over her shoulder like a giant Chihuahua. It was her belligerent husband, in one of those sleeveless T-shirts charmingly known as “wife-beaters,” who took up the slack. He used the word “fuck” as if it were a charm… one of the gold charms, for instance, that dangled from the chain around his neck.

     “You don’t get da fuck offa my lawn I’m callin da fuckin cops.”

     “OK if I stand on the sidewalk?”

     “You don’t get da fuck offa dat sidewalk I’m callin da fuckin cops.”

     “OK. Then I’ll stand at the bus stop, at the corner.”