Oh
Great New York, Tomb of my Youth!
It was a discouraging time.
All I had to show for a lifetime’s literary ambitions were four clumsy short
stories, a few translations, and the age-yellowed reams of juvenilia. Yet, having no choice, I remained a student, of life and the ways of New
York City, and I crafted masterpieces in my mind. Among other things, during my
fifteen years in the navel of the universe I learned the following:
1) That it is impossible to succeed
in New York without beauty, money, and/or connections, and that reports to the
contrary are lies;
2) That the long hazy summer sunsets
on cross-town streets are of a rare beauty and possessed of an Adriatic
melancholy reminiscent of Pola in the dying years of the Habsburg Empire;
3) That no New Yorker really cares
about the outside world;
4) That I both loved and hated the
place.
Yet I went on putting up with it, as millions do.
Where could I move to?
Well, for a start, away from the bleak and
blasted slums of Alphabet City. A friend was getting married and moving
to Brooklyn. He let me in on a sweet deal on a rent-controlled apartment he’d
lived in for years on Fourteenth Street, hardly the Champs-Elysées but more congenial than East
Third. Accordingly, in early’ 80 I moved from the boulevards of chop-shops and
broken dreams eleven blocks uptown, squeezed into a moving
van alongside two burly East German brothers who’d started a moving company
called 2 Krauts 4U—one of the numberless New York stories of striving and
desperate ambition, if not of actual success. One was a would-be actor, the
other a former Trabant mechanic from Leipzig. They were good movers: hefty,
silent, diligent, and soon gone. Left alone, I looked around my new
postage-stamp empire and felt happier than I’d been in almost exactly two and a
half years, since my return, or migration, Stateside.
The new flat, although it was really just
another little top-floor walkup, was safer and better-lit and in better repair
than the one in the Lower East Side, and it was in a slightly more salubrious
neighborhood, near Union Square of working-class legend. Rich were the ambient
memories of New York’s dense, compacted history: the site of Tony Pastor’s
theater, featured in Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie, was a block away; Leon Trotsky had lived on the same block as I,
possibly in the same building, brewing strong tea and muttering over his émigré
journals and crossword puzzles; Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall had sat just down the
street, toward Union Square, on the site of the massive neo-Babylonian Con Ed
building that filled the night sky in that direction. From the living-room
windows, over on Third Avenue I could see the Metropole Theater, the oldest
extant movie house in America, where D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation had had its premiere in 1916, now, or at the
time, showing such masterpieces of the seventh art as Hot Intruder II and Rx for
Sex. Looking past the Metropole, across the old tenement buildings of
Greenwich Village with their wooden water tanks and scrubby roof gardens, I had
a clear view of the mighty Twin Towers anchoring the city’s uttermost end,
their jeweled scaffolding of illuminated office windows and winking red warning
light atop the North Tower radio mast clearly visible at night: a visible
symbol of the unforgiving and magnificent city I was condemned to live in.
