This is Gotham
“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”
“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” ~ John Updike
I get it now. I do.
New York City is everything.
By some mysterious alchemy, it transmogrified itself into the center of the world. It expounds by contraries, being both awful and glamorous, beautiful and grotesque, heartless and welcoming, terrifying and kind. But make no mistake—it is the crucible, and we the liquid metal that under heat and pressure are cast into new shapes and alloys.
The City is incurious. It’s a Gershwin jazz symphony. It feeds directly into your central nervous system. The historian Tom Morgan said, “In Rome, I am weighted down by a lack of momentum, the inertia of a spent civilization. In New York, I feel plugged into a strong alternating current of hope and despair.”
If that’s not a mic drop, what is?
We are wrong to compare the two places, of course. It’s intellectually dishonest. And yet, what do we have besides our personal experiences, our memories? I happen to love Rome. But I love a lot of things and people whose faults (including my own) I am not blind to. Rome has many beauties, but I do sense the “inertia of a spent civilization.” That is, perhaps, part of its appeal.
There’s nothing inert about the City. And the only thing “spent” about it is all the money it takes to live here, which is a lot. Airbnb, the bane of many a European city, too, is to blame for part of an inventory shortage that has driven up the price of rent. Most New Yorkers have fled to the boroughs to find affordable housing, if by “affordable,” we’re talking $30,000-$40,000 a year for a closet-sized apartment. When I think about what we left behind in Italy (90 square meters, frescoed ceilings, views for days), I could cry.
And cry I did when I first got here. I can only equate it with the trauma of being born. First, you’re floating in warm amniotic fluid; next, you’re rudely thrust onto empty streets that you see under a spectral light. Even the low-rises of Brooklyn initially seemed like hostile territory. I wandered with my mouth open. John felt alien to me, as though I had to re-learn him. I felt alien to me.
Gone was the cozy familiarity of home.
But the next morning, I awoke with a sense of purpose and excitement that I hadn’t felt in a while. We trekked up to Union Square, Madison Square Park, and Midtown between 6th Avenue and Broadway. I saw dog parks full of pampered pooches in designer jackets, baby carriages pushed by Islander nannies, finance bros in bespoke suits and fancy briefcases, women in activewear barking into cellphones in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, dorky tech bros in hoodies and sneakers. I went inside a four-story Barnes & Noble bookstore—four floors with an escalator!—lined floor-to-ceiling with books in English.
Do you know how long I’ve waited for books in English? A long damn time.
There were oh-so-many specialty stores: here a handprinted paper boutique, there a Mediterranean bakery, here a high-end pet store, there a non-Starbucks’ coffee shop. We found one that served coffee in soup-bowl-sized mugs along with gluten-free cookies, and then sat at a wrought-iron café table in the sunshine.
I didn’t feel like a “true” New Yorker, whatever that is, and maybe I never will, but I didn’t feel like a tourist either. As an American in Italy, I have long become accustomed to existing in that space between.
Compared to the expatty insularity of a small Italian village, life in the City is mostly external. You’re either trying to protect yourself from it or absorb it from a safe distance. It exhausts you as it exhilarates you, and you are buoyed along by a current you have no control over, which is its own form of Zen. You can’t fight it. There’s no point.
This past month, I had mostly been petrified of being a stranger in a stranger land, which is how I always felt when I went stateside. It was the repatriation part that I most dreaded. Ironically, I needn’t have worried. I wasn’t returning to the United States. I was coming to New York City.
It’s not the kind of place that gives you enough time and space to miss the life you left behind. I’m sure my reckoning with Italy has yet to come, and I remember fondly the slower pace, the in-depth conversations one can have when there is time enough to enjoy them, and the abundance of smart, like-minded friends. But the energy flows only one way here in Gotham, and that way is forward. I’ve never felt anything quite like it.
John and I were fortunate enough to score a pair of tickets to see The Classical Theater of Harlem’s retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and not only was I blown away by the level of talent, ingenuity, creative inspiration, and sheer energy of the production, I was impressed by the audience. The theater was packed, and the theatergoers understood the material, laughing at all the right places and showing an unabashed appreciation for the performers. They felt like brethren to me, like at long last I found a tribe just as nerdy as I am.
I find myself cycling through the whole gamut of emotions these days: joy, terror, fear, confidence, sadness, worry. And I’m having to trust people in a way that is not easy. John and I have thrown ourselves, homeless and jobless, upon the mercy of friends. But I do understand the starry-eyed love so many people have for this city. It beguiles you, Gotham does. You fold each experience of the City into the batter of who you are, and eventually, your flavor and consistency change.
You remember things in flashes: the grimy subway turnstiles, the smell of red sauce, perfume, unwashed dumpsters and warm baguettes, parks full of spiny winter trees, the gray gleam of the harbor in the distance. You dream of these things and try to make sense of them. How did they happen? Why do they happen here?
Now that Gotham is before me, I don’t know what to ask. I observe it with a wary glint in my eye, waiting to see if it will absorb me or devour me.
The late writer Joan Didion said, “I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.”
It’s interesting to feel the first stirrings of fascination and excitement that are the precursors to love. This isn’t the giddy, head-over-heels feeling I had when I first set foot in Italy; it’s something different. A love that has the potential to deepen, perhaps. A love that demands unconditional acceptance. But I do recognize it as love, and I never in a million years expected that.
New York isn’t mine and never will be. But I do belong to it now. In my blood flows the syncopated poetry and bleating horns and stuttering sirens.
It had to take me in.
And here I am.
Copyright © 2023 Stacey Eskelin
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(à Tenneessee Williams) "There are three cities in America: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland...".
New York doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s a cat not a dog. It doesn’t give you unconditional love, it tolerates you. It lets you stroke it twice, but then it’s had enough and snaps at you. It demands you feed it because it’s its due. When it gets used to you, though, and you to it, a bond forms. That bond never breaks.