She dresses like a Hawaiian criminal, loose, patterned shirts and oddly fitting suits, loafers without socks. Her attitude toward sex is more modern than mine and has a radical element I chased but never found. She wakes up with her hair knotted and leaves the house like that, often not returning home until late. She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions. She has a strong sense of social justice and an eye for anachronisms and contradictions. She is thin but physically lazy. Guys love her.
1. Because everything is everyone’s business, but every story starts with “There I was, minding my own business …”
2. Because the rules are really more like suggestions.
3. Because it’s more than just Manhattan, or even Brooklyn. Places like Roosevelt Island and City Island and Rikers Island! Did you know that there is a commune on Staten Island that has a dwarf chef? Did you know that there is a Colonial mansion in Brooklyn where a Japanese surgeon lives with his blind wife, or so I was told? Did you know that you can buy a tiny turtle with highly contagious salmonella in Chinatown that is so adorable you will want to risk it?
4. I have a passion for cabdrivers. I forever stand by the statement that there is no more brilliant, diverse, eccentric group of human beings on this planet than the men (and rare women) employed by the Taxi & Limousine Commission of New York. My father drove a cab for six months in the late seventies, and I told everyone in the second grade it was still his job.
5. Because everyone hates a suit. Even the suits.
6. Because if I see another film that’s a “love letter to New York” or in which “New York is really the third character in this romance,” I’m going to explode with rage, and yet I still recognize that nothing looks better on camera than a Midtown corner in winter or the Staten Island Ferry in high August.
7. Because of the twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Forty-eighth and Eighth, where a 3:00 A.M. plea for a Klonopin refill is treated like buying milk at 5:00 P.M. in Bethesda.
8. Because the people may not be polite, but when it counts they’re something better than polite: they’re kind. They’re always letting you take your tea when you’re short on change. Or letting you take the first cab if you’re crying. Or letting you pee when you didn’t even buy something. Or rushing to your side when you step in a pothole wearing platforms and eat it, hard. Helping you trap the lop-eared, terrified rabbit that has been living in a Dumbo parking lot for weeks. Giving you directions home.
9. Because everyone gets catcalled. And I mean everyone. If you have a vagina, by birth or by choice, you will be called “mami” or “sweetie” or “Britney Spears.” And the catcalls can be so creative! Once, my little sister was walking down the street in her thick black glasses, and a homeless man muttered, “Talk nerdy to me.”
10. Because I was born here, and New York is no alien: she is in my gut like an old sickness. Sometimes I’ll be walking in Soho or Brooklyn Heights, and a smell, some brand of stale air, stops me dead in my tracks. Bound up in that smell: what it felt like to be dragged home from Balducci’s on a hot night with a blister from my jelly shoe, begging every step of the way for a cab, realizing with horror that I was so close to my house I could see it and still I was on foot. The shady view from the window of my dentist’s waiting room, before she stuffed her fat fingers in my mouth. The day we were so late to school and it was raining so hard that we caught a ride in the back of a soy-milk truck, which my mother denies to this day. Sitting in an alley with some guys from a different school, watching them smoke. Waiting for my parents to get home because I’d lost my keys and pissing in someone’s potted plant. Looking down and realizing I am inexplicably up to my knees in mud. The time I took a cab on my birthday and it hit an old woman, and she lay in the street, teeth knocked out, while the cabdriver held her bloody head in his arms, and I shrunk down low until finally a pedestrian tasked with moving the car out of the intersection noticed me cowering, and I gasped, “It’s my birthday.” The time I was in a sundress walking my dog and locked eyes with a guy on a bicycle, and he rode right into a parked car and I ran. Each corner is a memory. In that way, it’s just like every town.
NOBODY BELIEVES THIS STORY.