This Is New York

The first person I spoke to when I arrived in the city on Monday night was Dave’s girlfriend Elaine, who was lugging boxes from the house on 113th Street to her car. In a nimble bit of symmetry, it turned out that she was leaving the city for Los Angeles, while I was just returning. The weather was disconcertingly warm that day, not all that different from winter in Hollywood, and I had to remind myself that, “Yes, I am back in New York,” as though I was trying to wake from a nightmare.

When I awoke the next morning – in my old bedroom, where, as it happened, everything was pretty much exactly as I’d left it – I drove the rental car down to 34th Street. It was like my days in LA, waking up and jumping into the car before I’d eaten anything and then getting pummeled by an onslaught of traffic. Only this time, after I ditched the car, I stepped underground and onto a waiting train. And there is nothing quite like a subway car – with its noise, its smell, and the stoic, unimpressed faces packed inside – to determine one’s location as unmistakably New York. You could be nowhere else. For that reason, when I got on the Downtown One the other morning – my first subway ride in over two months – the feeling was an unexpected sense of relief.

Yesterday I painted my “study,” as I like to call it - the small room which precedes my bedroom – and I assembled a cheap, but great, desk which I purchased at the Reston, VA Target. May God bless this desk. I am so happy with it. In all the time I’ve lived in New York, I’ve never been pleased with the desks I’ve had. The last one was a shoddy, cramped piece of furniture that was made out of pine and was in a steady process of reconstituting itself as sawdust. My parents and I found it at a crappy resale outfit in a part of Astoria that a girl I was seeing had told me was a great place for furniture. Ah, the naïveté of the young.

And speaking of the young, has anyone noticed that it’s 2008 and therefore the year that I turn 28? Has anyone taken note of this fact? My younger self certainly did. There is a document somewhere in my parents’ house in which, as a ten year-old, I predicted not only fame and fortune, but also marriage, children, and “a TV show” by the time I hit 28. Well, it couldn’t come at a better time. And with that in mind, I say to you, 2008: hit me with your best shot.

It’s good to be back in New York, where no one can relax and nothing is easy. It is, as I am now grimly certain, better for me.