They Say the Neon Lights Are Bright

I heard this guy on his cell phone, on the M5 bus tonight:  

"You know how when you get home you just want to chill?  Well I get home and my mom is like, 'He been here all day.'  I'm like, 'That motha-fucking nigga, he got to learn responsibility.'  He been crashing here and crashing there since 1997 word up!"

Ahhh..  Inhale.  Exhale.  I was on my way home from yoga.  The bus swerved.  An old man wearing an ascot, leaning on a titanium walker tripped sideways.  The loud-talking bus rider went on,

"Bro, I don't know if it's genetics or what, but I don't let no one sleep in my bed.  I'm muscular you know so I take up most the space!  But when I sleep with shorty yo, we fit just fine--HAAAA MARCUS BRO!!!  No but for real bro I got to get this cock sucker out of my apartment."

The very old lady behind me was whispering, "Shut the fuck up" over and over.

I'm not sure if this kind of thing (you know, these typical "real," New Yorkey moments that Robert DeNiro's always alluding to in interviews and American Express commercials) is a good thing or a bad thing.  You can't go on with your life sheltered from all grit, can you?  Admittedly, I could have done without this lyrical gangster's discourse.  

But then again, I could do without most things.  

I could do without coming home and knowing that if my neighbor went away and didn't take her garbage out then I probably have one of those sick, six-inch roaches with twitchy antennas waiting for me.  (Those things, I swear they stare right back at me and a mini-tumbleweed rolls between us).  I could do without smelling cigarette smoke and curry chicken whenever the person upstairs has a craving.  

Everyone on my floor can hear my toilet flush.  

Oh, and I could do without the constant subway delays and the even worse- ambiguous "earlier incident" announcements that purport to explain it.  On rainy days the subway tracks get too wet; in the summer they spark and start fires.  On foggy days the buses never show up.  

And then they hike the fares and raise your rent and ask you to work without benefits.  And soon you've been hand-to-mouth for as long as you can remember.  

So you take a big-girl breath and try to walk wherever you need to go.  On the way you pass a discarded mattress on the sidewalk, wrapped in plastic with duct tape and a sign that reads "BED BUGS."  So you cross the street, but before you get to the other side you are ankle-deep in sludge.  Bye-bye new suede shoes.

And then you see a teenager getting arrested before 10AM.

And you get the wind knocked out of you when the crowd around the Rockefeller Christmas tree gets too thick to pass through.

And then you see a woman who's fallen, lying on the ground and among the crowd around her is a passerby who's stretching to take her picture with his camera phone.  And that is not the first time I've seen that happen, by the way.

Want to do something in NYC?  Allot 45 minutes, minimum.  Doesn't matter where you're going.  Grocery shopping?  The simple act so simple it's practically a God-given right-- of purchasing food for the intent of survival?  Good luck.  My neighborhood grocery store is a ground zero of guerrilla warfare.  I do not know where these old Upper West-Side ditties learned their dirty-fighting tricks.  They will use anything as a weapon- a sharp-edged crate of clementines can get you to the front of the miserable 8-items-or-less lane.  Yup, you gotta be quick in the Big Apple.

Above the grocery store is a dance studio.  "Five six seven eight!" Da-da-da-da-- tap tap!  It's the beginning bars of "God I Hope I Get It" from "A Chorus Line"!  My heart races for a second-- a play about resumes.  Could anything be more New York?

What kind of city thrives on the delicate and unlikely dreams of so many starry-eyed kids anyway?  I haven't lived here long enough to know the odds of "making it."  But I know they're slim.  And if you leave for a different town, are you giving up on your dreams?   

...The glitter rubs right off and you're nowhere....

Now, I can knock it all I want, but when I do a career search for various cities, I have to say, New York City by far has the most open positions.  At least in my field.  And it's not just that.  It's not just that there are jobs here, it's that everyone wants them.  If you're working, you're doing a job that a dozen other people would die to do.  People here push forward and scratch for more.  Your career is the pulse of your day.  It sends you out into the twists of the transportation system like a little oxygen bubble coursing a vein.  People are doing what they love, or are striving to, because they wouldn't be living in this God-awful, uncomfortable city just to pass time and spend money.  People come here because of work.  Every day on the street, on the trains, in the halls, in the elevators-- everyone is reaching and pushing to move around.  

We're so close to where we want to be, we can taste it. 

...And there are perks.  You can get a manicure at 10PM.  You can grill Korean beef strips and within an hour slurp Vietnamese cow-cartilage soup.  You can walk under the giant snowflake-shaped Christmas lights on Mulberry Street and be serenaded by the maitre d' of the Italian restaurants.  You can sample red-bean cookie shaped desserts in Chinatown (Girl Friday didn't like those so much, but I still dream of it).  

If you go to an amped-up movie premier (i.e., "X-Men") you can wait for hours with hundreds of other crazies and then race into the theater when they swing open the doors so that you and all your friends can sit together-- this might involve running up the down escalator.  

You can walk for hours and never really see a deserted street.  You will see trees and cobblestones and art deco designs on old brownstone fronts.  You could get lost in Central Park or you could see the stunning red, orange and yellow autumn leaves that cover the ground in Washington Square.

And if you get your heel stuck in a subway grate, it's possible an old man will stop walking to grab your ankle and pull you out without even giving it a second thought.

Or if you fall as the city bus takes a sharp turn, an old lady might catch you- rather heroically- and then say, "Now you've got my back."

Or you can kiss a boy on the street and maybe- just maybe- a jolly, red-faced young man might come up and wrap his arms around you both and proclaim:  "This is love!  I know it when I see it!" 

Have I seen a roach on a subway car?  Yes.  Was my NYU friends' favorite past-time called "Jump Rat Alley," which involved going to a street in Chinatown where hundreds of rats were known to scurry between a dumpster and a pile of garbage bags all night long and trying to jump over the vile creatures without any of them touching their feet?  Shamefully, yes.  Have I gotten stuck on the subway, in between stops for longer than two hours while sweat from the forehead of the man next to me dripped on me?  Yes, it's all true.

BUT.  Have I seen Britney Spears in my neighborhood Sephora testing mascaras?  Yes!  

Maybe one of my favorite movies of all time, "Working Girl," left such a huge impression on me as a child.  The idea that a dopey girl from Staten Island with a bad perm can make it if she worked hard enough-- only in New York.  

Or maybe I've been permanently charmed by:  "Citizen Kane" or "Annie Hall" or "Miracle on 34th Street" or "Rear Window" or "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or "Funny Girl" or "Midnight Cowboy" or "The French Connection" or "The Way We Were" or "Three Days of the Condor" or "Saturday Night Fever" or "All That Jazz" or "Fame" or "Escape from New York" or "Trading Places" or "Ghostbusters" or "Wall Street" or "Big" or "Bright Lights, Big City" or "Green Card" or "Goodfellas" or "Six Degrees of Separation" or "The Family Man" or "Someone Like You" or "American Gangster" or "Reign Over Me."