Notes on Home, Part 3

I’ve been putting off blogging. Mostly because I’m not quite sure what I have to say. Perhaps it would have been easier if I had just taken some pictures, and then I could give a dry report of “What I Did On My New York Winter Vacation,” but as many of you know at this point in my blogging career, that’s not really my style. I didn’t take a single picture in New York.

I think I’ll try something new. Perhaps all of the pictures in this blog entry will be furnished by the internet. Yea, that’s it! New York life has always been the most ubiquitous thing; people who have never been there know exactly what it looks like, feels like, etc. So it shouldn’t be too hard to fabricate my trip, compliments of Google Image search.

Let’s start at the beginning…

I flew into LaGuardia Airport in Queens. I was not going to Manhattan this time– all but one of my friends have fled that borough. To my cab driver’s dismay, I was on my way to Bushwick, Brooklyn. I know nothing of Queens– if I was blindfolded and dropped there I might not recognize it. But soon we were driving over the BQE and I saw this:

…and I cried.

And then we were in Brooklyn, and I was with my friends. Just like that. Back to my life.

I don’t know how to describe how I felt, wandering through all-too-familiar neighborhoods and streets in the next few days, except to say that I was feeling so many things at once that I was downright emotional. I suppose it was love foremost, and comfort, the feeling that I was returning to myself somehow, holding close that squirmy, elusive idea of “home” that I have been trying so hard to pin down since I left New York 9 months ago. It was nostalgia next (oh, I am just too sentimental!), and I walked around feeling everything that had happened to us (because there was an us then, a large group of “us”) in specific places– feeling almost that there should be a landmark there– it was that beautiful. I walked with my eyes opened to the changing storefronts, frowning a little (and often) at the new things, disturbing my memory of the order of businesses on a certain avenue.

But there was fear, too, persistent and competitive with all of the other fuzzier feelings. I visited Howie in her apartment on 23rd Street in Manhattan– bedrooms that only fit beds, where you squeeze between “rooms” through barely opened doors, the space behind them now essential for storage. I won’t tell you what that apartment costs. I’ll just say that even my friends in Bushwick will pay up to $800 a month. They have more space, but they pay for it in peace of mind. There is a strong police presence there with intentions of easing the tension between the black and Hispanic communities and the young, gentrifying white population, but it seems they do little to stop the muggings and instead serve as a conspicuous reminder of the tension itself.

This is Broadway in Bushwick, where I lived on my visit:

…forever in the gloomy shadow of the above-ground J train.

I spent too much money while I was there: dinners that weren’t supposed to be as expensive as they were, transportation (the subway mostly, but some expensive drunken late-night cab rides), entertainment (museums, movies, music, drinks, drinks, and drinks), and other things that I cannot pinpoint. It seemed that at the end of even the most idle days, days where I could not recall a single activity, I had somehow spent $100 or more. I cannot say that this is a foreign feeling– I remember it well. That city sucks your money. Tiny things add up. Suddenly, you’re broke.

Hence, the fear. New York is home. This is certain. I feel it and know it everywhere- mind, body, and whatever else is left. But will I ever be able to go home again? After living in Spartanburg, in a luxury apartment (washer! dryer! full kitchen! appliances that work! heat and ac!) and painting sometimes 10 hours daily, can I really go back there? New York chewed me up and spit me out to Spartanburg. If it hadn’t, I would have been swallowed. I do not know that I can survive that again.

And so even though I told my friends with absurd confidence that I would return, had to return, I must admit now that I am just not sure. As we learn from countless stories, sometimes even the strongest love is not enough. Since I was a small child, visiting my grandparents in New York, it has felt like home, but I may have to live the rest of my life in exile…

In any event, the trip was wonderful. I saw all of my friends and we had lots of fun. New Years we were all together at a potluck turned dance party at Rachel’s house in Bushwick (thanks Rach!). At midnight, we hugged and kissed and celebrated, yelled with true New York cynicism, “It’s 2008! Everything is different now!” and that was nice.

I took deep pleasure in indulging a few of my favorite things: a wax with Ula at Gemini Salon in the West Village, followed by a walk east to Bagel Bob’s, a bagel to eat in Washington Square Park.

(this last camera phone picture of the park is actually my own, the only one I took on the aforementioned outing)

Ula was so happy to see me, she was getting sentimental, reminded me that she was, in many ways, my first friend in New York, as she met me my first month there, in September of 2002. “You were so cold,” she said, “and you were getting so fat eating bagels.”

I ate borscht at my favorite vegetarian hole in the wall, B and H, with Cliff and Howie:

…and then we went to the New Museum on the Bowery to check out their opening show, “Unmonumental.” I spent the rest of my trip taking sides in arguments with people I went to art school with about whether or not it sucked (it did. Art needs to move towards some level of accessibility. Art objects need standalone power. It’s fucking boring already. That’s all I have to say about that. )

By the time Sunday came, I was ready to get back to the Spiz and get some work done. I was exhausted and financially destitute. Derya thinks that New York is best for visiting…