New York City, For We Are Many

The demons must certainly come to their victims with whispers of sweet beauty and promises of dancing lights. Slowly, then, your right mind departs.

Jack, my 17-year-old son, is studying cello, having a mind to take a degree in performance or education, so he cajoled me when we were in NYC the week after Easter to go to Carnegie Hall, where its Weill Recital Hall was occupied by a group from Down Under, who were led by Zoe Knighton, a wonderful cellist. So, for the first time, I would participate in a New York City fine arts event.

Carnegie Hall was a madhouse. At the same time, Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho was holding court in the main hall, so when we emerged from the train, from track level to street level the tide of Cho fanatics swept us along past the initial wall of security until our tickets were scanned, and we were redirected, very politely, to another entrance, where there was just as much energy loosing all sensibility from those attending the smaller performance.

My friends from nearby will not be angry with me for not wanting to visit with them because they know I love them, and they know my annual trip to NYC is a balm for me. The last thing I want to do is carry on in half-hearted verbal intercourse while I long to experience the city for my personal convalescence. In the late winter and early spring, I develop a longing to endure the jostle of hard, rounded humanity, literally pushing on my person in many and various ways. The city is to me a deep-tissue massage, without delicacy, indeed rigorous and cleansing, a veneer of discomfort which mercifully drives out all the year’s kinks.

A fine arts event, then, answers that longing only until I take my seat in the stall. At that moment, I desire not to endure the jumbling sea, but to ride on air. My ire rose almost immediately when, after Zoe made her entrance, a lady with a newborn infant stood up and thundered up the aisle, “Thump, thump, thump.” (Later, my ire induced guilt when I met the baby after the performance: she was the newborn daughter of the composer of a fabulous piece performed delightfully by Zoe and two of her compatriots manning the piano and the clarinet). When Zoe struck the first note, eliciting the chirp of evening songbirds out of her cello, someone else began to take his seat. A baseball crowd in Los Angeles during the first inning of a Dodgers game is more settled.

Throughout the entire performance, the barbarians paraded through the recital hall and through my concentration: coats came on and off; the baby returned; the couple behind me whispered continually in Alsatian French, which is the worst German you’ve ever heard; and, I swear, a man produced some cellophane and proceeded to fold it around some cardboard box lids he’d stolen from a homeless person. Or maybe he was opening a bag of Easter M&Ms; I don’t know. The noise was outrageous. The thought crept into the space where I had hoped the arts would occupy: “New York City audiences have been spoiled.”

I had just read somewhere that European crowds of yore were wont to applaud between movements of longer pieces. Now, when I was a boy down in Mobile, Alabama, my father strictly taught me, very strictly, that applauding between movements was a sign that you were an illiterate hillbilly, shoeless, and transgressive. Here in Buffalo, the unwashed are invited in, and they do applaud between movements, but we teach them, less strictly, and by the end of the third movement, they know erudition. They no longer applaud, and they walk out of the concert hall not only artistically fulfilled, but also wiser in the ways of proper societal comportment. We have all improved together.

New York City, with her eyes ever eastward in her transatlantic courtship, as she has always been engaged in that ménage à trois with London and Paris (and sometimes Moscow, when London has a sick headache), has apparently gone and done it: they’ve gone hillbilly, not yet applauding between movements, but otherwise illiterate culturally, intellectually shoeless, and wholly transgressive, donning the thin veil of European sophistication. “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations,” Dad said, growing up. “The working class sent their children to become doctors and lawyers, and their grandchildren squandered every penny of the prosperity.” And the East River runs its short course to the sea, but the sea is never full.

Zoe Knighton was an absolute Aussie princess, showering Jack with all her attention. “You will be in a famous chamber group one day,” she fawned, and she took a selfie—for herself—with my Jack! Jack was over the moon. I slapped him on the back, saying, “Thanks, pal. This was a great night. What an absolutely divine performance.” And it was. The three of them performed Brahms, where he demands of the adagio a feather-landing, and they dispensed. “It was dangerous,” she said. “I was no longer performing, and I woke up after the adagio not-knowing.” I said, “Brahms loves to put the performer in danger; for him, the art lies within the dangerous.”

So Jack and I descended from Carnegie Hall into the clutches of the Metro Transit Authority. Once on the train, the deep-tissue massage resumed, and I was feeling pensive and impressionable. I looked around. A homeless man occupied a bench across from us.

“Here in Brooklyn,” my son had said while we were traversing its 5^th Avenue earlier in the evening, scouting for food, “there is always a smell.”

Yes, upon the twin foundation of garbage and pot is built the Empire State Building of aroma: halal; Hispanic; couture; hamburgers; fruits; pork; unclean spirits; the sea. Always a smell, acrid, sweet, perfume, nauseating, and acrid again. When the breeze takes away one smell, pot always steps forward, like the empty frame between each of Grandpa’s old vacation slides. It reeks. New York City reeks. The homeless, men, mostly, stumble around in various states of mental degradation, screaming at street corners (almost in the narrow sense), laughing at nothing, dozing anywhere, and occupying benches in subways, lying motionless within the rollicking hundred-year-old infrastructure. It is a cruelty disguised in the trappings of mercy. Better mercy in the trappings of cruelty, but we have no merciful leaders, for they cannot win elections. I don’t understand how New York City hasn’t discovered garbage totes. It is the same mystery as the 16^th Century Chileans having not yet discovered the axled-wheel. I suppose it is the steep slopes upon which the city is built.

I imagine the marijuana is the good stuff, mind-bending.

Is New York City a cross-section of the United States of America? Is it wholly representative? I argue that it is. If you come to New York City, and only New York City, you have truly been to America. Perhaps Los Angeles is also representative, with its ceaseless Hollywood swing. The saying among Europeans is, “We have all the time and no space. Americans have all the space and no time.” I think Los Angeles and Chicago and Houston lack that urgency, the New York Minute, but the New York Minute has made its way into so much of the American spirit, the suburban hustle from school to work to school to home to after school to recreation, then roll up the sidewalks, take the anti-depressant, go to bed, and repeat until Sunday brunch. This is Brooklyn, USA, except with all the space.

A sign passes by, for the hundredth time: “We <heart> healthy vaginas.” The text overlays a photograph of a human Caucasian female, upside down, lying down, the erogenous zone alone, its shame covered by lacy black panties. What sort of unhealthy vaginas are cavorting around the city so that a massive public service campaign should be pervasively underway? Are unhealthy vaginas a nationwide concern? I reckon, judging by the high school girls flirting with the high school boys in the park behind our house, so. One judges, not passing judgment, remembering. Is the “We <heart> healthy vaginas” campaign considerate nationwide? I think so. It’s a tragedy of our young women, and their men, but shall we not have mercy? Let New York City lead us, though they have their eyes cast ever transatlantic, lusting for the salons, whose madams promise harmlessness. We love healthy vaginas, yes we do.

The AirTrain rises above Brooklyn as it approaches Queens. It was somewhere between 7:00 and 8:00 o’clock PM, and the sun was settling himself in the heart of Manhattan. All of Lower and Midtown is visible from sixteen miles away, now a silhouette, a thing of beauty, dancing in light. I looked at Jack, who was likewise being impressed, and I thought, “Even New York City is redeemed in her many graveyards.”