Welcome Back to All That
(with appreciation and apologies to Ms. Joan Didion)
New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down,
New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down,
Like a death of the heart, Jesus, where do I start?
But you’re still the one pool where I’d happily drown…”
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends …and much of the middle…and whatever part this is. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the muscles in my lower back spasm and my stomach churn, when our flight from New York began and suburban sheltering-in-place started. I can pinpoint when it ended, that’s geography. But I can’t lay a finger on the moment through all the ambivalence, privilege-guilt and cynical uncertainty to the exact place where I (and my urbane and subtly successful family) became spiritually homeless.
When we first left New York in March, my wife and I were close to 50; our son was approaching 13 — milestones all around. Spring was beginning to bloom and we crossed the George Washington Bridge with five days of clothes, myriad electronics and rescued houseplants. Our hastily packed Honda CR-V cruised through the Palisades and up the Throughway as it had for countless weekends and holidays before. We were wearing clothes that were simple, even by Upper West Side athleisure standards, and the air carried a deadly virus that caused just about everything to cancel and close. We knew, programmed by every apocalyptic movie we’d ever seen that leaving was the right thing to do and in time, as every television commercial assured us, “these challenging times” would lead to a “new normal” and that we were “all in this together”… “now more than ever.” But none of that feels true. In fact, normal hasn’t come, but we couldn’t stay away forever.
Over those months, when a song popped up on some streaming service shuffle, celebrating “concrete jungles where dreams are made of) with nothing you can’t do,” I’d pause wistfully, grab another local craft beer or pop a (legal) edible from just over the state line and consider the lyrics. I knew then as I do now, that almost everyone thinks about the City that way, and one of the mixed blessings of being twentysomething is the conviction, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that the town has these magical properties. I am older now.
We might have left for some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different. It might have been the Hamptons, a Connecticut lake house or Berkshires retreat, but because I’m talking about myself, I am talking about suburban upstate New York.
Even as we left, I checked the rearview as we spanned the Hudson and watched for the skyline to recede. We always used to say to our son during his car seat years, “There’s your City, buddy,” but all I could see was the Porsche SUV crawling up our automotive ass and a Trump-Pence 2020 bumper sticker on the pick-up in front of us, plastered just above its truck nuts.
Within days upstate, a March snow storm blew in (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for we had come out of the City where “snow” was rarely much more than slushy-gray rain leaving filthy, shoe-devouring puddles in its wake), and for a while I sat wrapped in blankets in a living room whose TV volume was set to “blaring NCIS” by our host and my mother-in-law and I wondered if my pounding headache was caused by high-decibel Mark Harmon or if I should be getting my affairs in order before being put on a ventilator to die alone in a COVID wing surrounded by strangers, becoming another nameless statistic, a single digit in an unthinkable number. It did not occur to me to try a virtual doctor’s visit, because I didn’t know any doctors there and David Blaine’s internist is at my doctor’s Upper East Side practice, why go anywhere else? It did occur to me to ask her to turn down the military crime-fighting (is that what that show is about?). I never did, because I didn’t feel it was my right to ask — was anyone ever so ridiculous? I am here to tell you that someone was.
All I could do during those days was order LL Bean slippers, a stack of books and a lap desk while making lists of shows to catch up on and zooming with the friends I barely spoke to or saw when we were in the City or the family I would only see fleetingly at holidays. “We’ll be back in a couple weeks when things calm down,” we told them. And “we’re so grateful and fortunate to have more space and feel a little safer.” We’d get demonstrably drunk on virtual happy hours and extol the access we had to a backyard and spacious supermarkets and big box stores nearby. Those “couple of weeks” stretched to over six months. And now, we have to go back.
In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the quickest route to the local pharmacy where we’d forwarded our psychiatric meds and the names and quirks of the local weathermen were happier than the ones that came later, a welcome pause under hideous circumstances followed by an overstayed welcome then dread. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to leave New York, how twenty-plus years can feel like six months and vice versa, in the case of the pandemic. With the deceptive ease of a high concept Bill Murray movie plot — a long flat sequence of sameness — I sat on a couch…and then a hammock a veteran New Yorker, and came out feeling a good deal older and far less interested in the key differences between Zabar’s and Fresh Direct. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process more to myself, why we went back even if my heart no longer truly feels at home in New York.
I was in love with New York before I lived here. But this isn’t some groaning “Love in the Time of Corona” tale, but an old-school unrequited love story (which would somehow be labelled “incel-y” these days). This was a meet-cute/star-crossed/rom-com/kissing-in-the-rain kind of love. Vintage Nora Ephron material. You know, fiction.
Even now in retrospect, my relationship with the City has gone from marrying up to staying with an indifferent and sometimes abusive partner out of some sense of duty, familiarity or a lack of imagination for something else.
I can remember shambling home late on a random weeknight — they were all alike for a while — stopping at Hot & Crusty (now shuttered permanently) and grabbing a slice, dripping neon-red grease into the trash can as I bit into its hot, folded form on the corner where our local and benign homeless person frequented. Now there are whole clusters on every other corner and benign has become belligerent at worst or depressing and uneasy at best. There was a time when it felt like the ultimate freedom and indulgence. I could get a piece of pizza anytime I wanted and hear the screeching train brakes underground harmonized with the EDM bass thundering from an idling Uber, all with the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs, smelling of urine, garbage and a faint top note of mango or crème brulée Juul vape fumes.
The check always comes sooner or later. But you hold out hope, thinking that at some point, you will have the high emotional (in lieu of financial) balance to pay up. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense that something extraordinary could happen any minute, any day, any month. And many times, it did. Even though “extraordinary” doesn’t always mean “good.”
I was making a good salary and working in show business. I had lived for years in a hovel but now resided in a modest building with enough space for my small family and enough money to afford a level of comfort. That job (and most of that money) were gone months before the pandemic, a fact that went unmentioned in the numerous zooms, texts and emails that filled those months in self-imposed exile. Because vulnerability is anathema to being a ‘real’ New Yorker.
Making a living seemed a given to me until arbitrary and capricious external forces upended that narrative and what felt like organic progression and a realization of potential became a study in grasping desperation. And except on a certain kind of winter night — crossing an Upper West Side street, bracing with the dark and bitter wind off the river, speed walking from the subway after working among bold faced names with matching bank statements — I’d look into the bright floor-to-ceiling windows in a row of brownstones that looked like Wes Anderson dioramas as smart-professional moms cooked locally sourced organic meals while aromatherapy candles infused each high-ceilinged room with soothing jasmine or bergamot. Perfect-looking children in t-shirts of bands they’d never heard of doing schoolwork on shiny bright tablets before reading picture books written by aging downtown hipsters and former punk rockers — except on nights like those, I never felt poor. I had the sense from growing up that if I needed money I could always get it. It wasn’t so much grit as a delusional belief in providence.
Even before work evaporated and a virus descended on the town, I remember going to parties — obligatory work parties, glitzy premieres (where I might as well have been one of the cater waiters), friendly get-togethers. As I got older, I remember baby showers and kids’ birthday parties where the cool parents had discreet stashes of booze for those of us who had to stand around making awkward small talk. Blind dates without stakes. We were entering bar/bat mitzvah season where the well-heeled members of the Tribe would go all out for their newly-minted men and women, renting out the restored TWA terminal at JFK for aeronautical themed celebrations with a Mad Men-era vibe or taking over clubs that used to have regular rotation in Page Six. Countless brunches, dinners and far too many bespoke farm-to-bar cocktails. Like-minded conversations and complaints about Giuliani, Bloomberg, DiBlasio or the all-purpose: “I blame the City.” We marveled at the way other Americans lived and voted or indulged in work/industry gossip that was universally interesting because, showbiz. By now, you will have perceived that my time in New York was glorious. That there was a time when my employment status levelled up my New Yorker points. I could get restaurant reservations, tickets to Hamilton (even if not on a moment’s notice…or with Lin-Manuel on stage); I could get free…anything. It was a long time before I stopped reveling in my mid-tier backstage pass to the City and began to understand that, indeed, it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
While I can’t recall a recent party that I didn’t “Irish Goodbye” after half an hour, the engaging prospect of meeting and greeting — of new and interesting faces — faded, and at this point, most of them would be obscured by (inevitably chic designer) masks…and parties are no longer a thing. Over the years, I’d grown used to the familiar. And now, that was all that was available, like a song playing on endless repeat. I mourned that stimulating feeling of possibility and cosmopolitan diversity of access and interaction across every level, but it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story. There are still plenty of new faces. Mine just wasn’t one of them.
Leaving, even under dire and fearful circumstances, forces you to deal with that.
I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination, it was always a movie or an episode of 30 Rock. I was always going to be there, where else could I do all these amazing things among these amazing people? I had found a comfortable company with showbiz pros and fellow strivers, all of us expats from wherever we called home awaiting their big break to settle into their long and lucrative career.
In time, we became people who lived with an intimate knowledge of alternate side parking rules, or in our case had a former super we paid to move our car. We knew we could leave anytime we wanted, family was never more than a couple hours away. Leaving — and coming back — was easy. Other people could suffer the rental car places gouging them for essentially passage off the island, sweat in the squalid perpetual construction site of Penn Station or await a sketchy Bolt Bus to shuttle them out…or, in other cases, fly away to gorgeous locales. For us, we left because we could. We were average people pretending to be special.
Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone who hasn’t lived in the City to fully appreciate what the idea of New York means to those of us who put in the time. Living here was a badge of honor, proof of some rarified internal mettle that allowed us to weather the indignities of cramped quarters and howling gaps in incomes. Enduring being standing-ass-to-seated-face on a crowded L train that crawled, or more often stalled beneath the East River. Having a favorite spot for a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich and a preferred bench on the Broadway malls to eat it with an overpriced free trade latte. Having a 9/11 story because you were there, it was personal to you. It was all currency to those that didn’t live here.
But you can’t live in an idea. Before our exodus, much of the City’s charms were fading. Local spots were closing while luxury buildings continued to jut out of Midtown like profane preposterous middle fingers. Surely there can’t be enough Wall Street bros to fill them. No doubt oligarchs will launder piles of foreign currency in these empty dwellings while countless local, personal businesses and local landmarks like Fairway or Gotham Bar and Grill can disappear leaving Duane Reades and Starbucks to alternate storefronts with banks and nail salons. But now, even our local Duane Reade is gone.
New York is just a city, for many, the capital-C City. It is also an implausible place for people to live upon closer inspection. But to those of us who came from places where no film crew would ever shoot, New York was the center of the universe, the fulcrum of the culture where titans and nobodies lived on top of each other and mixed and mingled on any given block at any given moment. The best and the brightest. A wonderland of power, art, money, romance and dreams. New York isn’t a quotidian place — it’s all events and momentous occasions all scenes and electricity. After all, Batman lives in Gotham normal people don’t. Though, technically, Wayne Manor is outside of town (spoiler alert: Batman is billionaire Bruce Wayne) and now even the Caped Crusader tested positive for the Bat-virus. (So did the Joker.)
Living there was not all an idyllic Woody Allen movie: all cafe conversations and long chatty walks between movie houses and multi-room well-appointed-yet comfortably lived-in apartments. Even Woody Allen isn’t the same now. Black and white Manhattan has gone from sublime to problematic. It was never Central Perk or Carrie Bradshaw. It was a daily dare.
In fact, it was impossible to imagine families for whom New York was a real place, where one had permanent fixtures and no stored moving boxes, just in case. I never truly settled in New York. I couldn’t imagine roots ever able to get deep enough through the pavement and bedrock to last even these twenty years later. For years, I rented apartments inexplicably exclusively in the West 80’s and filled them with optimal New Yorker signifiers — art posters from the subway, photos from key locations as well as items that further clarified I was someone in the know: a kitchen stocked with unique ingredients and gadgets and countless four-star cookbooks whose spines were never cracked, shelves swollen with the latest, coolest and smartest books and DVD’s available (and not in meticulously color-grouped interior-designed stacks that now meticulously populated the background of every Zoom window on television). No matter the size of the apartment — there was always enough room for guests, a pull-out couch so we could invite others to see how great it is here.
We would decorate and rearrange rooms willy-nilly. My son’s bedroom was currently in its fourth iteration. Chairs would come and go, rugs rolled up and spread out. All to build what felt like a good life in a great town, nesting without a tree. Once the virus hit, it revealed that the promises of New York, its mythology, wouldn’t hold up. And none of those trappings were native to New York. In fact, they were all accessible from anywhere, and made Jeff Bezos a cartoonishly wealthy, Bond-villain-level mega billionaire.
Even as we prepared to return, New York was still broadcasting its narrative of promise and image of resilience: the seven o’clock ovations for healthcare workers who were ravaged as they tried to fight back the infection. New Yorkers can get through anything. But as much as New York is celebrated in most memories that have come to me since our escape, I am not taken to the great restaurants where friends ate and lived well, savoring their time together and their time here. Instead, I am taken to a simple question: why? New Yorkers can get through anything but why go through it at all?
I suppose that a lot of us who have been young in New York swipe through the same scenes in our mental photo library. I remember sleepless nights in apartments so hot, you’d keep the windows open in February. The feeling of discovery of places, people, points of view. I remember taxis and enjoying the unexpected, often uninvited conversations thick with foreign accents or wild opinions. I remember those quiet late night/early mornings, where the City felt empty but still humming. Now it just feels empty.
Even without any sleep, I still enjoyed brewing the first pot of coffee in the morning for my wife, and hectoring my son to get out of bed and get to school, via subway which was always an insane proposition for a pre-teen to be so free to roam, even if he didn’t fully grasp it. And once everyone was out of the house, I could sit for a minute, sometimes doze off. I used to like going to work, liked the daily grind of making or promoting television. I liked the making more. I liked the orderly progression of production meetings, rehearsals and then putting on my mandatory blazer (because, we were instructed, “it shouldn’t look like anyone can be on the studio floor”) and feeling the energy of an audience of two hundred and millions more at home. It was a fantasy. Few people know or care about the work that goes into making something look effortlessly jovial in glossy high definition. I savored all the minutiae from the research to working late on a tricky edit. From my various offices over the years, I could look at a perfectly framed image of the Empire State Building from a 25th-story window, or marvel at “Manhattanhenge” the summer phenomenon where the setting sun lined up perfectly with crosstown streets, flooding 49th Street in magic hour lighting. I could watch tourists mill around below marveling at the Shangri-La I called home. Later, on my way home, I could pass families taking their toddlers out for Thai food, or pass a cellist struggling on and off the 2 train in a tuxedo, heading to or from an orchestra pit somewhere. There was always something happening.
And while much has stopped happening for me and for many in the City, I still have some residue of that sense of wonder about New York. Even if it’s through a jaundiced filter that Instagram doesn’t offer. New York can be lonely. Not working in New York is oblivion. You can come to cherish the anonymity, the sense that you can be anyone at any time. After years of feeling harried, I had time to spare, but to not work in New York is to be truly invisible. Without real purpose. Even with other roles and responsibilities — husband, father — what you do becomes who you are. And no amount of romance for a city can offset that. New York is a working city. It demands that you perform, that you deliver.
Leaving and coming back requires an adjustment of rhythms. Indolence in the suburbs is easy. There is no mysterious $20 surcharge for leaving the house. In all my years in New York, at least twenty dollars cash would vaporize every day, spent on God knows what. You don’t bump into people in the suburbs, as a matter of course. The occasional hello at the market, but since you’re not walking everywhere (and carrying everything you think you may need for the day on your person) there’s less pressure that you’ll be ‘seen’ and therefore judged. When you come from New York to the hinterlands, you realize that judgement is far more acute in the City, and not most other places. But the training helps.
What I know is that now, a couple decades, one marriage and child later, struggle is not glamorous. What I know now is that returning will not feel as much as a homecoming as it ought to. The concerns of infection are real. Unemployment, urban decay and decline are vividly on display. Much as I miss show business, I am as wary of its easy dopamine hits in the same way I am weary of a city whose profile doesn’t match its day-to-day reality.
All I know is that I don’t know where else to live.
All I know is that there were plenty of bad times for plenty of those years. Endless expensive Uber commutes (chalked up to ‘self-care’) where I’d sooner jump off than cross one of the City’s bridges. Where feigning interest felt impossible and everything felt done to death; I had run out of small talk that’s interesting. I have no interest in talking with Type-A super-achieving parents at school mixers. Most of the things I love about the City are gone or on hold seemingly indefinitely. Restaurants and bars, movies, theaters all shuttered. Grocery stores often have theme-park length lines just to enter, never mind the circuitous checkouts, claustrophobic aisles and perpetual panic shoppers (crowds that pale in comparison to the city-block-spanning queues outside church food banks). I would no longer sit in charming little bars listening to other people’s conversations or gleefully picking up mentions of things I worked on or people I knew. There were no new faces that made a difference to me — if anything they’d make me feel old. And many parts of the City were already places to avoid. Going to Times Square was unthinkable without theater tickets to give you a hard out, ditto the “sneakerhead canyon” visits to SoHo with my boy — who has that kind of money or patience anymore? And never mind the years wasted in Brooklyn with all its forced artisanal faux charm. There is nowhere to go to get out of the apartment unless you want to elbow your way into the park. There is no laptop lounging in coffee shops or libraries. There will be again, but why work so hard for so little?
There’s a parade of people I no doubt hurt or disappointed. Others I never need see again. Still more that I helped and guided professionally and no longer hear from. There are people I’ll miss and far more who will never realize I’m gone. I’ve logged countless hours on psychiatrists’ couches and have little to show for the time and pills. I thought I understood depression and despair. It got redefined this year and I remain unsure I ever understood how to deal with it.
Before we fled, unemployed and uninspired, I could barely make dinner each evening with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the 6th floor apartment paralyzed until my wife or son would come home and I’d do my best impression of a fifties-era housewife. Or would passive-aggressively convince the family to order in. The days of going out freely had passed us as unaffordable before, now it was also unavailable or unsafe. Now, my wife’s work IS home and waiting for my son to return will be tinged with a sense of dread and a need to have a makeshift airlock at the door for him to strip off his clothes and be hosed down Silkwood-style with an off-brand Purell mist.
I don’t wish to explain to others why we left or get into my ambivalence about being back, for fear of being labelled a quitter or scolded by Jerry Seinfeld in the NY Times. And while New York wasn’t “dead,” I was beginning to believe we were to it. And because our leaving was a half-measure, we have to return.
Instead of saying “Goodbye to All That,” we must say “Hello Again to All This.”
My son will don his PPE and go into school once a week for blended-learning classes until they close again when a new wave of infections inevitably comes. I will share our meager square footage with a hard-working breadwinning wife on endless high-volume video calls that now compete with street noise — sirens and SUV’s instead of SVU — and a dog who will be pining for the backyard upstate as I drag her on her walks around the neighborhood and in the process, treat myself to a halitosis facial and a fogged vision of the City, winded but protected. Our lone flat screen will be overtaken by video games when the Boy isn’t being virtually educated. I will find corners of the apartment in which to hide when I’m not unromantically making morning coffees…or lunches…or dinners and hovering over my teenager to keep his camera on, put his phone down during classes at P.S. Zoom and, for God’s sake, wash your damn hands, again.
I might find satisfying work again. Might return to some semblance of the continuum that fit so perfectly with my vision of what New York was “supposed to be.” But more likely, when the schools reclose, and my unemployment benefits expire, we will be forced to flee again, but it will be final. New York has instilled in me a myopia of place. What place could be better than here? Surely lots of places. But years of believing otherwise places blinders on when a wider view is needed. I made it there (sort of), I can make it anywhere, right?
New Yorkers like leaving town. They also relish the feeling of coming back. The breaks are necessary to alleviate the pressure of the simple act of being up to the task of living here. I have stayed too long at the fair, there is little pleasure to be had in the return trip. I am too tall to ride these rides.
Fewer and fewer people we know in New York think this a crazy notion. Most of the stock answers we give about how difficult it is to afford to live in New York, having space of our own are not met with retorts, but with sighs or rueful nods of agreement. We were all young in New York once.
Unlike the old barstool debates, I don’t “blame the City.” It was never “up to you,” New York. Cities are just places, real places, not magical ones. And while the City has definitely changed since we returned, I have too. It’s yet to be seen if those changes — for either of us — are ultimately for the best.
New York life is practically a literary genre with arriving and leaving a cottage industry. Didion set the bar high in the sixties and now seems prescient: “the last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired” has a grave new connotation. Do I wish to endure more of that kind of death and loss?
Many of the people I used to know have moved away to Los Angeles, Portland’s both east and west, London, Nashville, or are now running a seaweed chip company in the Bay Area. And regardless of if or when, we leave to return Upstate, I have little to offer by way of idyllic romantic descriptions of suburbia. In keeping with the tenor of the times: “It Is What It Is.”
There are still faint glimmers every now and then of the City I remember…of the person I remember. And maybe there are chapters left to write or read about this dirty old town. Maybe I can learn to “smize” through my mask. Maybe this is a new chapter, or to avoid dating myself further — a New York City reboot.
