I step out of the Back Porch bar and the streetlights come on. It feels like magic whenever I catch that moment. Like there ought to be a prize. What do I win?
The city is dazzling but uncompassionate. It always has been, but I feel it more now.
Winter, at bay for weeks, has taken sundown as its cue: The wind seems to clear a path for the dark as the chill the weatherman promised gathers in the unruly air. The end-of-shift sidewalk crowds have lost their common purpose and are on more particular errands, some suspect if not outright sinister. So it goes these days in my city.
A green Dodge on Third guns its engine to beat a light, startling me, although the Negroni has done much to calm my spring-loaded nerves. As it speeds off I notice that its stereo is playing a song I recognize, one that I’ve heard playing many times in recent years from other cars and apartment windows and portable tape players but that I’ve never learned the name of, a song about hotels and motels and hipping and hopping and not stopping, a song without any real singing in it. Rap, I gather, is what this is called. I wish the Dodge had stopped, so I could hear more of it.
I have always worked hard to keep myself up to date, to be mindful of trends. At first I did this in order to stay sharp at my two jobs, copywriter and poet, which both required me to know what my audience knew. Lately, since I retired, I do it just because I enjoy it, and because it keeps me from feeling old. I very much enjoy that MTV, for instance, those music videos, and I watch them often, though I still find that a long walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood teaches me more about what’s new and exciting than any number of hours of television can. As ever, the street is the source of the latest things humans have invented—culturally speaking, at least. The last new things, maybe, that humans will ever invent.
These days, when I think of history, it occurs to me that maybe we have stopped moving forward, and are now just oscillating.
The last new art form I’ve seen was a group of Puerto Rican teenagers on St. Mark’s Place, jerking and spinning acrobatically and robotically atop flattened cardboard boxes. This, I gather, is called breaking. The last new art form I’ve heard is rap music. And I love it. It thrills me. The joyful mastery of language, its sounds and its rhythms. Rhymes and puns and nonsense, ranging from dumb and fun to witty and profound.
It troubles me that among my few remaining acquaintances there is no one with whom I can share my enthusiasm for these new things.
It wasn’t always this way. In my youth, before I had made any of my most consequential choices—and isn’t that what we always mean by in my youth?—in the days when my friends and I were the word-mad ones, earning our keep by saying things fastest and best, the new thing then was jazz. Without a second thought we’d ride the East Side Line to Harlem to listen to the bands and dance among the Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy on Lenox Avenue. It was new, but it wasn’t a novelty: We knew it was important. We weren’t tourists, or didn’t think we were; we wanted to be part of it.
What happened was what always happens. The best Lindy Hoppers earned minor celebrity, became a draw. The ballrooms started paying them, and rightly so. They in turn became more serious, more competitive, more and more skilled, working out heart-stopping flips and spins and somersaults that no casual dancer could ever hope to duplicate without injury. It was amazing. It was also a show, and not—to lift a term from my son’s teenaged lexicon—a scene, not the way it used to be. It put a barrier between us and the Lindy Hoppers, or it shored up barriers that were already there, of which color was only the most obvious.
So who was to blame? The dancers, for taking what they’d earned? The crowds of Midtown gawkers who brought the dollars in? Or we young bohemians who blazed the trail they’d followed? Maybe there’s a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle’s where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I’m missing.
Nostalgia for what’s new: The French probably have a word for that. In any case, there’s precious little trace of the avant-garde in this neighborhood, which has been successfully staving off the advances of fashion since J.P. Morgan moved in a hundred years ago. I’ve come to prize its stodgy constancy.