New York I love you, but you're bringing me down

Just like Al Pacino in Godfather III, no matter how many times I try to leave, you keep pulling me back in.

My earliest memories of New York City are of being on graffiti covered subway trains where the doors didn’t close and the lights would go off as the train barrelled through the tunnels. We’d be plunged into darkness as we lurched in our seats, the warm, musty, wind from the cavernous, pitch-black underground swirling around us. It was scary. I was little. I didn’t like it.

Brooklyn stoop life, circa 1980.

So many of my memories of this city are sensory in nature - when you are a kid, a lot of what you process are smells and textures and how they make you feel. Like the wooden barrels full of preserved fish and pickles in the old delis on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint: I would stand on my tippy toes, as my mother bought kielbasa sausages at the counter, and peer into the briny blackness where the pungent contents could not really be seen, but they could certainly be smelled. Or the crinkle of the plastic that covered all the clothes hanging from the rails in the little clothing stores around Orchard Street on the lower east side, where my mother brought me every September to buy new outfits for school. And the smell of piss that wafted from the concrete corners of my public school playground — playground being a rather sunny word for what it really was: a vast expanse of cement along side McGuinness Boulevard where the heavy trucks thundered by, filling the air with fumes and noise. 

If you look carefully, you will see my Belfast granny standing next to the car, and next to her is a little girl in a blue skirt and knee-high socks. That’s me, circa 1982.

Compared to the industrial, broken-down New York of my 1980’s childhood, the New York I returned to as a young woman in the late nineties was a green urban paradise. Rudy Giuliani had been in a few years by then, and he cleaned the place up more than a bit. My parents had come up in the world as well, living in a leafy, brownstone-lined neighbourhood that on hot summer days was refreshed by a sea breeze coming off the harbour. The loud blast of the Staten Island Ferry slowly moving through the water replaced the sound of trundling trucks. The days of playing on concrete were long gone.

New York and I had a great run, we really did. At times, I even thought that maybe we were gonna make it. You know, be one of those outliers that everyone doubted, but somehow figured out a way to stay together. But if I’m being honest, I had misgivings from the very beginning, even was I was having a blast. Returning from Europe in my early 20’s, I had severe culture shock, having been away from America for so many years. Even in the early days when New York was meeting all my needs, I thought about ways to get away. Deep down, I only ever considered New York to be a very fun, very hectic, very satisfying, fling.

Things started to go downhill when my father died, in 2004. The golden years were, at that point, over. But then, a year later, I met Chris, and New York got a reprieve. Chris was kind and present, he was dependable. He wanted to travel through Europe as much as I did. One day early on, I explained my goals thusly: “I want an interesting life,” and he seemed to fall in love with me even more. And we already knew each other’s friends, from our local bar, where the wannabe intellectuals gathered to drink whiskey and talk late into the night. Just a few blocks away, he had a cool studio apartment on the very top of a four storey walk-up, and shared a roof deck with an adorable gay couple who were both tiny but very, very buff. They had a poodle called Beauregard. We would sit up there and drink wine as the Manhattan skyline twinkled across the river.  New York and I were back on good terms.

Slowly at first, then quite fast, things started to fall apart. A certain bitterness started to well up in Chris, which he said was not aimed at me, but at New York. Bitterness over the fact that New York was the kind of place where a graduate of the best art school in the country and a man in possession of a decent, low-six figure salary could not provide for his wife and family much more than a tiny apartment in a beautiful, central neighbourhood, or a slightly less tiny apartment in an ugly, far-away neighbourhood. I took him at his word, and I too blamed New York. I suggested to Chris that we leave the damn city once and for all. Who needed it? The oldness of Europe was calling me back. She was a much kinder mistress, and she would treat us right.

Now I see very clearly all the signals that we were mostly engaging in what AA calls geographical escape, but at the time, it all made perfect sense. All we had to do was pack up all our belongings and start anew in a different country, I thought to myself, and all the bitterness in my husband would disappear. I genuinely thought that. I never thought of myself as a particularly naive person, but I actually thought that by changing the scenery, I could halt Chris’s detectable slide away from me and toward a dark place. We just needed to get away from that demanding bitch, New York.

Spoiler alert: I was wrong.

18 years have gone by since those happy, drunken evenings on the Bergen Street roof. The people who we shared those good times with fell by the wayside, either out of the normal ebb and flow of life or because they sat in judgement of me for leaving my husband to salvage what stability I could for myself and our son. So for all their professed concern for his well-being a decade ago, none of them were there a few months ago to mark his death and mourn with Danny and me. 

A few weeks before we left New York, we visited the still-being-built new World Trade Centre for Chris’s birthday, pictured here with our son.

What happened to the young, optimistic versions of me and Chris is unrelentingly sad. Last Wednesday, going to meet a old friend from my peak fun years in Brooklyn, I got off the train at Canal Street. Turning around, I caught sight of the apartment building where Chris lived after I left him, and where he died last September. I felt a spasm of heartache, a sense that it was unfathomable that he is no longer in this world, even though he absolutely hated it, and didn’t much like me either. Looking back, I realise that my moving Chris out of the city that he professed to hate was like moving a rangy tom cat. He was always going to go back, and he was always going to die here, alone. I just got in his way for a few years. 

I have spent the last decade not missing New York in the slightest, except maybe the odd time, when I have a hankering for a bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll, or a fit of nostalgia for the late summer nights on Brooklyn rooftops. But far more often, I thank my lucky stars that I had the good judgement to leave. Not being in New York allowed me to cauterise the catastrophe of my first marriage, keep the toxicity contained and out of the new life I built for me and my son. My ability to walk away from both bad relationships (one with a man, the other with a city) now fills me with relief.

But Chris and New York conspired to bring me back: Chris by dying without his affairs in order, New York by having exacting rules concerning death and its attendant tasks. Together, they have brought me back four times in less than a year, after 9 years in which I visited a grand total of three times. Last Monday, on my train in from the airport on this last trip, I watched in horror as an infirm old man, his trousers slipping down his body, leaned forward perilously, and from his slack jaw drool drained onto the floor of the subway car. I felt like I was in hell’s waiting room.

So my dysfunctional relationship with this city drags on, even after my first marriage and the man whom I met and married here are dead. The bad memories I have of this place at this point outnumber the good ones, every other block brings me to the verge of tears over some cursed remembrance or other. Yet there continue to be flashes of recognition, of knowing, between me and this damned city. A connection to these streets that knew me as a child at my most innocent and a young woman at my most beautiful. These streets that sharpened my powers of observation from the continual sensory overload. In more ways that I can count, this place is part of my personality — all the parts of me that are impatient, cynical and intolerant of bullshit — and sometimes I feel like I’ll never really escape. 

On Friday, which was my last day in New York, I finally closed down Chris’s bank account at a branch in Rockefeller Center and then felt unexpectedly bereft, as it was the last remaining filament of him. He’s now fully unwound, struck off the ledgers of administrators and removed from databases, his name remaining only in the memory of those who knew him. It didn’t feel right, to just let a man vanish like that. So I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and I lit a candle in his memory. Then I took a pew and I prayed for him. I prayed for his soul. I prayed for the soul of my son, that he might have guidance from some other world, as he proceeds into manhood without his biological father. 

Then I stepped out into the noise and commerce and gawking tourists and the traffic of 5th Avenue, and I couldn’t wait to get home.