This morning I walked up Greenpoint
Avenue and started introducing myself sheepishly to local
business-owners: “Oh no, I'm just looking around. But I love your
malt shop. I'm new to the neighborhood.” Most of the local
business-owners were hefty-looking veteran types with trace Greek
accents, psyche, most of the local business owners were Latina women
in blue jeans, psyche, most of the local business owners were thin,
bespectacled Korean women who reminded me – improbably – of one
of my grandmothers. If you've never been farther into Queens than
Astoria, I am here to remind you that if there is a New York melting
pot, this might be the place. In Brooklyn, where I have witnessed a
few cluttered kinds fighting for resources (this is called diversity)
groups of people have seemed less integrated; in Crown Heights there
are the entrenched Hasidim, the slightly less-entrenched
Afro-Carribbeans, and the new-to-town biracial couples with their
children in hemp sweaters. In Sunnyside everyone looks to have
been here for years and years, seemingly un-ruffled by what is, to
the rest of New York, a housing crisis. All of the 'r's I've heard
roll off everyone's tongue the same way.
Which is almost to say, not at all.
When I told my friends I was moving to
Queens, a lot of them had strong reactions: long, exasperated
'ugggggghs' were the norm. A dear one told me, “That's great for
you, but if I wanted to live in the suburbs I wouldn't live in New
York City.” I can't entirely defend this. There is an element of
Sunnyside that is decidedly Mayberryan; now I live a block from a
public library, and a post office, and many un-ironic diners and
playgrounds and schools. There is air and space and generally
un-interesting architecture. I can actually feel where this part of
the borough stops being cool: riding the 7 train, I pass PS1 and the
graffitied walls at Court Square and suddenly the wash of people
getting on and off are second tier businessmen, are high school
field-hockey players, are greengrocers (one assumes, with the
reductive gaze of the starry-eyed transplant). And most of all, there
are families: in sneakers and blue jeans, families going to church,
families recognizing each other in the street, families running
errands for the week. Not bars but pubs. Not cabs but buses. Still I
will maintain that this is New York, it is obviously New York, it is
only New York. It feels suburban out here in that it's a place where
people live who work somewhere else, but people in Queens have chosen
to be here, and nothing about it feels anecdotal or aspiring to
Manhattan. Lugging groceries back to my apartment, I thought, “I
live in a neighborhood now.” I can imagine sticking around.
For the record, my rent is something
like $850.00 a month.
II.
I went to the Whitney museum this
Thursday, with the same dear one who disdains the whole concept of
the suburbs. This was both of our (only) day's off in weeks, and it
was designed to be lovely, and I rode the 7 to the 6 and bought
bagels and muffins and coffee, and we ate breakfast on a high ledge
looking out over Madison Avenue. We talked about art and boys and
politics and a little below our ledge we watched unhurried women in
David Yurman jewelry walk in and out of Carolina Herrerra. We watched
packs of pedigreed dogs vying for sidewalk space, some wearing
sweaters. Old men with caps and papers and coffees and elbow patches.
Many subtle spins on the navy blue business suit. Gold-braided
doormen! People with the best haircuts getting in and out of town
cars! Then, on the ledge, we two, munching, wearing battered Tom's
shoes, clutching disintegrating tote bags. My friend had cause to
interrupt our conversation and say, “I actually feel like a tourist
here.”
The Upper East Side is just where you
left it, Pierpont Morgan. There are brownstones and sandstones and
limestones in the east eighties with Juliet balconies that do
actively take my breath away, that fill me with the most peculiar
kind of lust. Leaves fall on cobblestones outside the park. I
remember visiting New York before I lived here and tooling around the
Upper East Side with my family, playing the 'pick your dream house'
game on each street. I “remember” the Upper East Side from a fair
amount of Woody Allen movies, and from Sex and the City, and if I am
honest the Upper East Side is a lot of what I was dreaming of when I
picked New York for keeps. “How New York,” people say here. “This
is New York!” people say here. This is a part of the vision, the
postcard. It is not where I live.
After we walk into and out of Central
Park (and past the Plaza hotel...) I have the weirdest little flicker
of mania. Dear One and I are strolling down Lexington, passing stores
with haute couture children's clothing, and I see a pastry shop. She
tugs on my arm, but before I fully realize what I'm doing I go in and
purchase three very posh desserts at the St. Ambreuse cafe. A
beautiful woman in a deeply fashionable print dress sells these
desserts to me, and as she's ringing up the tartelets (there were no
prices in the case) and wrapping them up for me (in sheafs and sheafs
of paper and stickers) she says something cute like “just the other
day, I went home with a whole cake, these are un-resistable.” And
I think, someone has to be having a joke somewhere, right? When my
eyebrows flinch up to see the purchase total appear on the register,
when I try to imagine this 95 pound woman eating even a bite of cake,
anywhere, ever? And I get so sad for a second. I think about all the
things I may never get to have. I start to feel stupid and incredibly
guilty about feeling sad. There is an article in The New Yorker this
week about Sudan. A lot of people move through their lives without
unchecked hope, and a great deal of them can't even visit the
best-looking part of an American metropolis. So deal, Britt, go home
to your outer borough.
For the record, the desserts came to
something like $35.00. For three.
III.
I'm reading E.L Doctorow's Ragtime,
which is a smashing love letter to the American mythos. I say mythos
because Doctorow bleeds fiction and fact by putting characters like
Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit and JP Morgan side by side with anonymous
creations like a family made of Mother, Father and Mother's Brother.
I also say mythos because Ragtime reads
like a history book while telling big, sweet stories about The Dream:
people pull themselves up by their bootstraps (or try to), people
confront their prejudices. A lot of the book's about New York, in one
way or another. I'm also about to start making a play about America,
a rambling folk musical kind of to-do, and have been asked as a part
of this process to start pinpointing My America, not yours but MINE.
So in
the aftermath of the Roosevelts' and the Wild West and the Empire
State Building and Marilyn Monroe and Broadway's Golden Age and Lewis
and Clarke and the Civil War, even Woody Allen, the meat of it,
history, the fun parts, I am really trying to think about My America,
what it is in My America.
This is not the same as what's in the newspaper this morning, or even
what's in my diary on September 11, 2001. Really thinking about My
America has got me dancing between the odd not-quite-nostalgia I
chased all the way to the Big City (the Fosse, the Rent,
the Carrie Bradshaw, the Upper East Side, all the pertinent fictions)
and the day-to-day gristle of what it feels like to actually occupy
this place. Modern New York hipster-culture is preoccupied with the
past, with the idea of the thing, this we know: vintage clothes,
toys, ideas are the coolest kind. And I am an actor. I followed a
very particular, well-tested recipe when coming to audition for New
York University all by lonesome, with a guitar case full of clothes,
in April 2008. Still, I am surprised by how hard it is getting to
face that my life does not always measure up to the life I feel I
aimed for and engineered, in moving here. I go to the Whitney with a
friend I love, I have the most wonderful days, no cause for
complaint. Still, it is about money. I cannot afford fancy dessert. I
am also not famous yet. My America is married to Me because the
country's whole premise is a storybook template for the life I'm
seeking. I am testing a hypothesis every day I live in New York. I am
paying for it.
Beyond
the cold glory of the upper eighties, where I was not welcomed, I
turned around and looked for My America in the places where I
actually hang out. I was surprised by the elegance and dignity of my
new neighbors in Queens, who seem at my first glance to be content
outside scrutiny, electing to make homes and lifestyles away from the
Manhattan that everyone everywhere else I know is actively trying to
get to. And – joke part two – the people in my part of Queens
are physically quite close to the Empire State Building and the Great
White Way and even the Whitney Museum, they are a Reality next door
to the Myth. People in families, who one assumes have sacrificed
something at some point, have decided to make homes in Queens. Some
water separates them from someone's idea of a glittery paradise. I
wonder, the longer I stay here, which myth is shed first.
We are
lucky, lucky, lucky.
