By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON
Two years ago, Christopher Solomon moved to New York City from the Pacific Northwest and wrote about it in the City Weekly section of The New York Times. Things didn’t quite work out as he had hoped.
Two years ago, Christopher Solomon moved to New York City from the Pacific Northwest and wrote about it in the City Weekly section of The New York Times. Things didn’t quite work out as he had hoped.
Dear New York,
I left you today. I know you didn’t even pause long enough to notice; you’ve never had much use for the past tense, New York, or for those who use it. You’ve always been a forward-looker, a destroyer and reassembler, the Great What’s Next. That’s why I shouldn’t have been surprised when I cast a last backward glance at you from the doors of Grand Central on the way to catch my train, and you returned it with the F-sharp blat of a taxi’s horn, and you kept moving. And I knew again it was time to go.
Two years ago this week, another taxicab picked me up at La Guardia Airport and dropped me in the West Village to begin my life as one of yours: a New Yorker. It was 1:30 in the morning. West 11th Street was empty, the asphalt glazed with rain, the scene as still as a movie set. I groped my way up the dark stairway to my two-week sublet where a low bed sat beside a window grilled with bars that looked out on still more barred windows. The night was muggy, and I lay on the bed in my underwear with the window open and listened to the sounds of my new city — first the hydraulic wheeze and grumble of the 3 o’clock garbage trucks, then at dawn the unlikely wop! of tennis volleys from some millionaire’s rooftop court.
Everything about you was new then, New York, even your intrusions, and I was exhilarated and exhausted by you — just as I was by the red-haired girl I had chased East.
Within a year, the red-haired girl had said “I’m sorry” and left with another man. And you, fickle New York, where did you go after our nights lying awake together? Oh, I pursued you. We went to the opera, to plays, to gritty little restaurants in Queens. You — the city — were always my date. But you never belonged to me. Eventually you, too, moved on, taking your buzzing neon promise of fame to the next newcomer.
And now that I have finally found the willpower to leave, there are a few things I’ve long wanted to tell you.
New York, I won’t miss your fierce morning halitosis exhaled from your subway grates along Third Avenue.
I won’t miss you drooling on me from your high-rise air-conditioners in the burning heights of summer.
I won’t miss how you stood too late outside the bars and smoked until there was a blue nimbus around your head like some strange halo, and how to me you always smelled like spent Camel Lights, and warming urine, and the No. 14 bus — a perfume I never could quite embrace.
New York, I’ll never forget how dating you made me so poor that when I wanted to read I had to unscrew a bulb from the bedroom and carry it to the living room.
Most of all, I won’t miss how you daily reminded me of this: that once a red-haired girl has said “I’m sorry” and left with another man, there’s no more lonesome place on earth than your East Village on a warm summer’s night when the girls and boys cling to each other as if to keep the other from floating away.
But, Oh, New York! who am I kidding? You are that red-haired girl who welcomed me here and then did not want me. And like her, I still love you, and even now I miss you.
I miss seeing you slapping down dominoes with the Puertoriqueños on the card table you’d set up in the street on steamy August nights in Alphabet City (not gentrified yet!).
I miss you standing listlessly with the homosexuals in their tube tops outside dark-windowed clubs as they waited for rescue from their boredom.
I miss your neon running in the gutters like blood.
I miss the grudging, sweaty democracy of your subway cars, and your fragrant bodega arboretums at breakfast, and the harp strings of your Brooklyn Bridge when your summer evenings recline, stretching warm and pink across the East River.
What I love about you, New York, and what also breaks my heart is the same thing I loved and lamented about her: You are everything and yet you are slippery, standoffish, ungraspable. You will never need a me to be you. You are yourself, always.
