If you want to get notified every time I post, subscribe to my email list here. No spam. No ads. Just my stories.
I’m not supposed to like New York City. I’m at my best when warm beach days are plentiful and easily accessible. I thrive with daily saltwater meditation. I require an outdoor space with some reasonable sunlight and wind exposure for my wetsuits to dry. The first chance I got at 18 years old, I left the ‘cold’ of my native northern California in search of a warmer climate as far south in the state as my citizenship would take me — San Diego. I was raised with easy access to nature and copious amounts of street parking, neither of which could be used to describe New York City.
But New York has a certain enchantment. It’s a beacon that lures people around the world — still burning as strong as it did four centuries ago. New York promises people greener pastures, a greater sense of purpose, a bigger piece of a bigger pie.
I felt that pull, too. On the busy streets of New York, whatever it is that you are dedicated to — a trade, an art, a profession — you get a sense that here it has the greatest potential to flourish. The timeless words of Jay-Z, “Since I made it here, I can make it anywhere,” reverberate throughout the uninterrupted concrete grid, down into the depths of the rodent-infested subway tunnels and ubiquitous storefront basements, and up into the troposphere where skyscrapers fade into clouds.
When I travel, I jot down thoughts, ideas, and opinions. I write lines that capture the essence of a moment that I don’t want to lose in my memory, or quotes that might become useful in future writing. It’s like silently narrating my life in poetry. My list of poetic observations in New York grew exceptionally long, longer than any such notes I have created in my travels. So through these observations, I have created the following: a take on New York through the eyes of an out-of-place Californian.
An NYC friend told me, “New Yorkers are kind, not nice.”
I thought it was a clever quote that he had invented and bestowed on me, but then I heard it again and again from others in the city. I realized it was more like the city’s unofficial slogan, not one person’s astute opinion.
The stereotype of the loud, abrupt New Yorker is pretty spot-on. New Yorkers have a cynically dry sense of humor that could be interpreted as rude to the outsider. It’s not a realm for the overly sensitive or insecure. Personally, I was entirely amused by the brutal honesty. I suppose this hardened NYC personality is the inevitable result of having no natural forests to bathe in, limited days of favorable weather, and close-quarter apartments in which the neighbor’s irritatingly squeaky floors force the entire building to keep to the same sleep schedule.
I’ll recount a few of my favorite New Yorker interactions.
“Get the fuck outta the road,” one motorist yelled from his vehicle at me and a group of pedestrians while we waited for a walking signal. We were a step down from the curb, instead of safely on the curb as he would have preferred. New York drivers sprinkle f-bombs like confetti on New Year’s Eve, and they are experts at running late yellow lights.
“You know what I’m saying, homeboy? I’ll fuck your ass up!” a man too-perfectly dressed in a Yankees jersey screamed in a flawless New York accent out the window of his minivan. The recipient of the tirade was a man whose vehicle was blocking the road, creating a dilemma that I saw repeat every morning with honking horns and more f-bombs. The man in the stopped car commensurately responded, “Suck my dick!”
“DON’T TALK TO PLAYERS DURING THE GAME, it’s bad form, OK?” my beach volleyball partner sternly instructed onlookers at Central Park, without the slightest concern for whose feelings might get hurt by her harsh undertone. Their shocked facial expressions didn’t quite know how to respond to such an unexpectedly forceful statement.
That said, in New York, beyond the cold, crusty defenses of the city dwellers, lies a welcoming, warm interior that doesn’t take long to crack. When I showed up at the volleyball courts to find a pickup game, I was met with standoffish body language, too. But it soon turned into an invitation to play (accompanied by aggressive roasting), which then transitioned to utter acceptance and subsequent invites to play (and go salsa dancing).
In New York, I observed two types of people: the salaried office folk and the artsy creatives. This is, of course, an absurd oversimplification of eight million people, but I found that, at least as far as the transplants go, most can fit somewhere on that spectrum.
The salaried folks are paid handsomely for plying their trade in the rat race of the city. (Even I was tempted by the local LinkedIn job listings.) They can afford their own apartments and tour the city’s endless supply of fine eateries. They don’t mind spending $20 on a drink, like I sadly did on more than one occasion. While clanking my keyboard at a Midtown Manhattan coffee shop, I overheard my neighbors say, “It was maybe the best trade of my life,” and “He’s going to go from $10 million to $200 million.” These were definitely the salaried folk.
On the other side of the spectrum are the artists — actors, painters, photographers, writers, etc. In a city as expensive as New York (which, for the record, is not that expensive when you’ve grown up in the Bay Area), I was fascinated to learn how people made ends meet. Everyone had multiple hustles and/or saved money on rent by living in not-yet-gentrified pockets of Brooklyn or Queens. One friend I made joked that 25% of these people were probably operating at a loss to live in the city, waiting for a future payday or big break. I don’t think she was joking.
In New York, as a writer, I guess I fell towards the artist side of the spectrum. Thus, adhering to the unwritten rules of where the artists should live, I also stayed in a finance-bro-less Queens suburb some 10 subway stops away from Manhattan. I thought I would be underdressed with my limited clothing brought in my single small backpack, but thanks to the no-fucks-given (or many fucks depending how you look at it) attire of these artsy folks, I actually didn’t feel out of place at all. I certainly didn’t feel poor. Well, that was the case until I stumbled upon rain-drenched, public graduation parties of prestigious, six-figure-tuition universities that I could never have afforded. Umbrella in hand, I mingled around the purple-cloaked NYU graduates at Washington Square Park, or waited at crosswalks with the powder-blue Columbia students — all soon to assume their NYC salary gigs and probably become future leaders, bankers, and innovators of our nation.
Regardless of the category you fall in, in New York, every event is lubricated by alcoholic drinks. In just two weeks, I consumed more alcohol than I had in the previous five months living in alcohol-scarce Muslim-majority countries in Africa. The total amount of alcohol consumed in a night of networking and socializing in NYC could tranquilize every elephant on the planet.
Even though sublease prices forced me to stay in the peripheries of Queens, I actually preferred living out there. In my Latino-majority neighborhood, the truncated suffixes of Caribbean-accented Spanish danced around the street corners where old women used pushcarts to bring their daily haul of groceries home. The perfume of Cuban, Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Dominican food, combined with whiffs of spliff and the signature steam rising from the city’s underbelly, made a fragrance that could be titled nothing other than “New York.” The Cuban restaurant around the corner from my house stopped even trying to speak to me in English when I passed their probing language tests.
After two weeks in New York, I began to feel like a local when I could fluently speak train line lingo, seamlessly telling a New Yorker that I was going to “take the L train to the M.” As I got my bearings in the city’s boroughs, I could finally place neighborhoods mentioned in famous rap songs on my mental map. But then I’d hop on the wrong train and have to rectify my error by backtracking, reminding myself that I am far from a local in this tangled expanse of concrete and steel. I generally have a good sense of direction, but once I’d get turned around in a subway and step out into the monotonous grid of the city, I’d often find myself struggling to differentiate north from south. Anyway, despite learning how to talk about subway lines, a local could take me as a tourist from a mile away simply because no one in New York wears Vans. They wear Adidas.
I discovered that living in New York is like a natural injection of Ozempic. Gaining weight is seemingly impossible. I averaged five miles of walking per day getting around the city, even when mostly relying on the trains and buses. Given the moody, unpredictable weather, when the sun does come out, it entices you to get outside and get those steps up on the city streets. I must add, NYC has an elite roster of parks to enjoy this sun-induced strolling.
As a (Caucasian) American, there is something poetic about visiting New York, returning to the immigration hub my ancestors passed through. The city’s allure has withstood the test of time, and even as the world around us has changed and ushered in the era of technology, it still holds its stature as the global cultural capital where every language, race, creed, and religion mixes in a blender, spitting out a product that is not reproduced anywhere else.
I felt that magic in New York, being a part of that puzzle. It would be hard to pry this Californian from easy access to surfing and moderately reasonable weather. New York is the antithesis of how I’ve structured my ocean-centric life up to this point. But if anywhere could do it, I think it would be New York. I am not saying I’m convinced to move, but this visit definitely cracked open a door that was previously deadbolted shut. In New York, for the right opportunity or purpose, I wouldn’t mind (at least temporarily) reshuffling my priorities to call the place home.
Leave a Reply