Where I Live

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.