New York Dreams

No audio file today, friends, as I’m sitting in the airport after a very hectic week. I will try to send it out as an audio file separately early next week.

New York City is for strivers. It’s for dreamers. Everybody knows this. Nine time of out ten, when you fall in love with New York City, you are not falling in love just with a metropolis. Concrete jungles with streets that smell of piss and fish are hard to love. You are falling in love with your vision of yourself, in the mix with the other strivers and dreamers, conquering the unlovely, unruly, unforgiving New York City, and making her your own. You are Narcissus, gazing at your reflection in a fetid New York puddle.

I was back this week, participating in a documentary about The New York Times, where I worked for three years when I was in my early to mid twenties. (You can read all about it here.) For documentary purposes, we returned to the Times Square neighbourhood, where I was filmed walking around, doing my best to look natural while gazing upon large buildings.

The filming took us to 8th Avenue and 42nd Street, where the new Times building is located. For anyone who might not be aware, Port Authority is a portal to hell. Always has been. If anything, it’s cleaned up a bit, but it’s still truly an awful place.

As we were filming, myself and the two young producers, a junkie outside Port Authority spotted us, and decided to take a break from lying on the sidewalk to check out what we were doing. He was tall, with high and fine cheek bones, and piercing blue eyes: a mixed race boy who you could easily see was, not long ago, incredibly beautiful.

“I was a model,” he told us with a defiant tone. “Just down there,” pointing south along Eighth Ave, “in the fashion district.” The camera man told me where to stand and where to walk to, trying to ignore the guy, but he was determined to prove to us his knowledge. “I know how to do that!” he insisted, pointing at the sidewalk as if he was about to hit his imaginary mark. Normally I have a hard no-engagement policy with street drinkers and hobos and unknown men in crowds, learned from years navigating big cities as a girl and a young women. But this guy, volatile and desperate and in our faces as he clearly was, I did not ignore. 

“I believe you,” I told him, looking him square in the eye. Because I did. He seemed appeased by that. Off he walked into the traffic, screaming at nobody in particular. 

The young producer then told me that only a week or so before, they had been filming in the very same spot, and another street person came up to her — pointing excitedly at their camera equipment, and saying “I went to film school!”

In Belfast, where I now live, the street drinkers are just humble derelicts who came from nothing and have nothing, most especially not dreams. In New York, they’re models and film students, still in possession of their dreams, if not their teeth.

Talk about the boulevard of broken dreams. The avenues littered with crushed aspirations, the young people who step off the bus full of hope only to have their ideas, bank accounts, and dignities destroyed. The old trope from a dozen movies and musicals still holds true. 

Last week, news broke of the death of author Paul Auster. Not being a big novel reader, the only reason Paul Auster was ever on my radar was because the movie Smoke, that was made out of one of his novels, was filmed at the Brooklyn Inn, which was the centre of my universe for about a decade of my youth. Paul Auster was a Brooklyn celebrity. And I was proudly, avowedly, a Brooklyn girl. I scorned Manhattan because Brooklyn, to me, had it all.

Reading about Auster’s death, for the first time I came across the terrible story of his son, Daniel. There would have been a time when the life of Daniel Auster, my contemporary, would have seemed to me to be the apex of cool success. So to read that he not only been a party kid who was implicated in the gruesome murder of another party kid, he had also been charged by the NYPD in the drugs overdose death of his baby daughter, before he himself OD’d on the platform of the G train in leafy brownstone Brooklyn in 2022. What a terrible waste of life.

I’m saying nothing groundbreaking here, but guys: being born into the lap of privilege and success does not in any way guarantee any kind of happiness or peace. Growing up in a brownstone with a father who wins literary prizes and is as famous as a rock star in Paris and can give you an entrée into any rarified circle in the most sophisticated cities in the world, does not — it turns out — inoculate you from despair, degradation and death. Daniel Auster, Gen X rave kid who DJ’d in Berlin and dabbled in photography, ended up worse than that former model turned hobo who desperately tried to impress me and the camera crew on 8th Avenue.

New York brings out these ruminations in me. I have lost the thick skin — if I ever had it — that protects you from picking up on other people’s pain as you jostle for space on the subway or a crowded sidewalk. It exhausts me and haunts me. 

I write this from the airport bar where I await my flight back to modest little Northern Ireland, where people with dreams keep them private lest they be accused of having notions, of getting above themselves. I had a great trip though, and I have come to realise that hopping back and forth between the too ambitious New York and the too self-effacing Belfast provides just enough of both.