The Weekly Screed (#617)

A Big Apple Bye-Bye
By David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Once a week, in its “Metropolitan Diary,” the New York Times publishes anecdotes from readers about life in the Big Apple. This section is heavily larded with charming tales of Good Samaritans, unexpected kindnesses and urban camaraderie. The weekly message from “Metro Diary” is that New York isn’t as cold, impersonal and perilous as its reputation suggests.

As my wife, Hotlips, and I prepare to depart Fun City, I’m inclined to endorse the “Metro Diary” tableau. As a group, ordinary New Yorkers are among the savviest and most socially sophisticated citydwellers on earth. They’re typically friendly and helpful to outsiders, sometimes seeming to take actual delight in the cluelessness of strangers. In my three years on these streets, I can’t recall a single incident of conflict or menace with any of New York’s nine million pedestrians.

More typical was an incident in Brooklyn. I was about to cross, just as a man on the opposite curb was doing the same. Suddenly, without so much as a toot, a driver turning right sped between us on two squealing wheels, forcing us to retreat suddenly, lest we both get flattened. He and I both looked around warily for any more pedestrian-killers before venturing forth again. As we did, our eyes met, we smiled ironically and agreed — without a word as we passed each other — what a shmuck that driver was. It was a moment of we’re-all-in-this-together bonding that came and went in 30 seconds, unique to New York.

That moment also reveals one reason I’ll be glad to escape. There resides in the bosom of every ordinary New Yorker a POW’s sense of superiority — which the stranger and I shared as our near-assassin roared off toward the horizon. We were street-savvy enough to avoid this reckless driver and we were so mutually battle-tested that we could shrug it all off with little more than a fraternal nod.

The lowliest New Yorker, because he’s a New Yorker, has triumphed over more urban outrages than anyone in any other city on earth, in all of history — or so he believes. New York is the ultimate in both magnificence and malevolence. New Yorkers know this for sure because they’ve never lived — or lingered — in any other city, and the idea that other cities even exist (especially Boston) tends to slightly piss them off. New Yorkers harbor an abiding appreciation of their own importance, and a charitable outlook on the unimportance of everyone else, everywhere else. A New Yorker might be an abject failure at everything he has ever attempted. He might be little more than a food-stamp wage-slave in a dead-end job, but by virtue of his birthright, residence and survival in this urban jungle to beat all urban jungles, he is elite. He’s a New Yorker. Read the front of his baseball cap. It says, “NY.” He can sneer down disdainfully on the mayor of Chicago, the governor of California, the Queen of friggin’ Sheba.

New Yorkers, blessed with this innate distinction, are convinced — by the acclamation of their fellow New Yorkers and by the silent acquiescence of all non-New Yorkers — that they are masters of the right way to do just about everything.

Manhattan, for example, has taxis. Brooklyn has “car services.” You can’t hail a taxi in Brooklyn. You’re not supposed to hail a car-service limo in Manhattan, where it becomes a a “gypsy.” In other cities, cabs are cabs and they’re available all over town. New York doesn’t agree; other cities are wrong.

To an outsider experienced in mass transit, New York has the worst, filthiest, most dysfunctional subway in the world. New Yorkers swear by their chaos, make up songs about it, and mock tourists who foolishly hunt for subways that go from the east side to the west side, or vice-versa. Why would anybody want to do that?

To a Frenchman, the “French” restaurants of New York are overpriced and pretentious — and the food tastes vaguely German. To a New Yorker, French restaurants in France are, well, fake.

New Yorkers, who agree that they live in the world’s most beautiful city, also live in the only city in the world where the first thing you see in front of every building is its garbage.

New York evokes the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I — smug and isolated, possessed of obscene wealth and breathtaking poverty, nestled cozily on a termite-infested pedestal. It is America’s most hidebound and rigidly conservative village. Although New York is slavishly trendy, it’s instinctively hostile to new ideas and new approaches — bickering bitterly over petty changes — because, after all, New York has been doing everything so right for so long, what folly to even entertain the notion of doing anything differently!

The song says, “If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere.” The implicit lesson, however, is that if you can make it anywhere, why bang your head against New York, where everyone else is going to make sure they make it themselves before even thinking about giving you a chance? The dirty little secret: New York is going to make it harder for you to make it here than anywhere else — regardless of whether you deserve to “make it” (which nobody in New York will ever tell you) — because that’s what New York does. New York is Catch-22.

New York makes hard things hard. It makes easy things hard. It makes everything hard — just to show everyone that, yo! This is New York.

Once you’ve wised up to the built-in futility of this mighty, cruel, preposterously overpriced city, then maybe you’ll find yourself composing a “Metropolitan Diary” anecdote of your own, extolling the sympathy of New Yorkers who, before giving you a hand, have collaborated quietly, en masse, every day, to mock, shrink and crush your dreams just as their dreams have been crushed.

Anyhow, Hotlips and I still have big things to accomplish with our lives. We’re getting out before New York convinces us, too, to give up.