Bright Lights, Dirty Pavement

I've been meaning to mention Jeremiah Lewis's journal-type entry about a visit to New York City, in particular, his description of Times Square:

Times Square was simply overwhelming--New Years on TV just doesn't cut the live experience. Imagine a river gushing through the streets, like what is depicted in The Day After Tomorrow. This is Times Square, only the river is made up of moving organic bodies--human beings, each one earnestly resting his or her eyes on the feet and back in front of them, each slightly overwhelmed in their own way.

A person is never content in Times Square. The endorphic rush of images and sound is comparable to, say, being caught in the maelstrom of a well-orchestrated asteroid bombardment. It simply demands attention. But where's the payoff? Maybe it's just in getting out without having succumbed to abject worship of the gigantic video billboards. Honestly, I felt that was my great triumph in leaving Times Square behind and heading to the polar opposite of Central Park.

Perhaps it's because living just outside of New York made it "the city" rather than "The City," or because I was introduced to it so young, or because of the pre-Giuliani era in which that was, but it never held the magic that is evident when others write of visiting. People, a lot of them; buildings, big ones; filth and the smell. New York was always just a place, but bigger.

Marching blocks upon blocks to drop in on people to whom to hand demo tapes (that they, in turn, would drop in the garbage), I passed decked-out ladies who were just women in fancy clothes. The rough young New Yawkahs were just kids with screwed up ideas about what it meant to be young.

As the biggest thing within ten miles from home, New York was a night out. Sometimes the home of girlfriends, whose mothers shook with anger when they discovered that their daughters had gone all the way to New Jersey. For them, that was like another country. For us, being in New York was like being lost in the wrong neighborhood, not because of something unique about the city, but because people are animals, and the city had a lot of them.

Perhaps it's strange, then, that Times Square turns out to be the critical point in the universe toward the end of A Whispering Through the Branches:

With this resolution, Nathaniel plunged through the bodies that flooded the sidewalk around him and marched across the street, unthreatened by the racing traffic that seemed, miraculously, to sway its own course for his sake. In the space of a breath, and not a bit disheveled, Nathaniel hopped onto the concrete island in the midst of the pandemonium. Even the light around him seemed to have changed, even the smells. This was not the same world that had watched the sun disappear to the West. This world had hope. Nathaniel looked up triumphantly.

It isn't surprising that I would use the city as a literary device. We always used the city, we kids from the suburbs. It made us tough when we met people from far away. It put us in a different world from home. It gave us a place to go for the forbidden — alcohol (most often). All of which made it ours, in its way for us. Our experience was always drawing from it, never giving to it. In a different way than for those who only visit as well as those who never leave, it was ours.

But it wasn't ours, obviously, and deep down in that arrogant, fearful disdain was the admission that New York, just another place, defined us. Made us its. That City that others strain to describe — that must be "imagined" as grand metaphors? You don't know it like I know it, and I hardly know it at all.

Posted by Justin Katz at May 24, 2004 12:07 AM
Diary & Confession