It
is very easy to sit at a Think Coffee in, say, the Village, or a Joe in the
Upper West Side, and to believe in the pervasive illusion that New York is only
five hours from California by air.
The truth is that Think Coffee and Joe are only five hours from
California by air. New York is
somewhere else.
Many
people in the West (or "back West," as they say in New York, although
not in Think Coffee or Joe) do not believe this. They have been to Union Square or to Midtown, have biked
down the Hudson Greenway and have seen the East River glazed by the afternoon
sun off Long Island City, Queens, and they claim to have been to New York. They have not been to New York, and
probably never will be. I happen to
know because I come from New York, come from a white Latino family that has
only recently been in central, gentrified Brooklyn.
You
might protest that no family who has "recently" moved here knows
anything. But it is characteristic
of New Yorkers to speak grandly of immigration as if they had just stepped into
the Consulate General office to receive their approved papers, and studied
facts that not even fourth generation Americans know about their country in
order to pass the citizenship test.
Excelsior--"Ever
Upward"--as the state motto has it.
Such display of ancestry makes authority nebulous; my own childhood was
saturated with too many accents to emulate and too many cultures with which to
identify. But that is not all I
want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like
Brooklyn. I want to tell you that,
but I want to tell you what it is like to never feel like you've come from any
place at all. If we can agree on
that contradiction, then perhaps I can make you understand New York and the
vibe it carries, for Brooklyn is New
York, and New York is a place in which the anonymous chaos and a sense of
hyperreal paranoia meet in awkward camaraderie; in which the skin tingles with
the weight of exhaust fumes, vibrates with traffic honks, and glows with urban
decay because here, beneath the shadows of streetlamps, is where the final stop
lies.