Rebecca Johnson

Word Count 1236

Summer, 1979. New York City. My father is sharing an apartment on Charles street in the West Village with Jo Deen, a wholesome stewardess type from the Midwest who sells Amway products on the side. Every lamppost in the neighborhood bears a tattered poster of a missing 6 year old boy named Etan. In the picture, the boy is smiling. He’s missing a tooth. His body will never be found.

My father lives in a renovated police precinct. The only windows look out on a grim courtyard. The divorce agreement stipulates that my sister and I spend a few weeks with him every summer. Nobody seems happy about this. The meat packing district is only three blocks away. When we drive to the West Side Highway, I can see the bloody carcasses swaying on their hooks. The workers wear white aprons spattered with blood. The hookers hang out here too. When we come to a stop sign, one of them leans over and raises her shirt to show my father her breasts. He raises his eyebrows in appreciation. I am 13. I hate New York.

*

I go to boarding school in New Hampshire. It’s too far to fly home to Memphis for short holidays so a friend invites me to New York for the weekend. We stay in a townhouse on the Upper East Side owned by a relative, an older woman who wears pearls and a cardigan. She used to be married to the man who directed the movie Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. There are posters for the movie in all the hallways, including one in French-- ‘Butch Cassidy et Le Kid.’ The man is gone but his presence is everywhere. A townhouse in Manhattan must cost a fortune, but the house feels run down. The flowers in the vase are dead. The wallpaper is peeling. I am beginning to understand the often repeated truth about New York. It’s not one town; it’s a thousand towns.

*

When it comes time for college, I choose a school in New York City. This is not entirely rational. A part of me is still terrified by the Hieronymous Bosch-like aspects of the city. The homelessness, the crazies, the crime, the dirt, the grime. But there’s another other side of me that is excited by the promise of culture and living so close to so many souls. I might dislike New York, but I don’t want to be the kind of person who dislikes New York. Like Sondheim said, another hundred people are always getting off the train. If you can’t find a stranger to love in New York, well, that’s on you.

I hate my college roommate. She’s short and tubby and her eyes are really close together. Do I hate her because she’s ugly? Sometimes I wonder. All I know is, she hates me too so I’ll do anything not to go back to our shared dorm room on 116th street and Broadway. I am 17 and become a flaneur of the Upper West Side. The mansions of Riverside Drive appear thrillingly European, the shabby burlesque of Broadway in the 90’s, the stately limestones of West End Avenue. I walk everywhere. I have no money but I like clothes, so I will walk forty blocks down Broadway to the Charivari store on 79th street where an elfin teenager with jet black hair says what suits me. His name is Marc Jacobs. In the back, there’s a basket where you can buy t-shirts for a few dollars because the seams are on the wrong side. The cut is good and the cotton is high quality. I buy the lot of them.

I have a boyfriend who has already graduated from college. He lives in a railroad flat on West 106th street off Amsterdam with two other men. The halls smell like roach poison. They all want to be writers and are studying with Gordon Lish, the man who edited Raymond Carver, the man whom Esquire calls ‘Captain Fiction.’ People are constantly crying in class because Lish tells them they are ‘boring’, but all the men worship him. One night, I am up late reading Middlemarch in the living room. I am doing the stupid thing of majoring in English. Too late, I came across a quote from T.S. Eliot in which he mocked people for studying novels in college. But it’s the only thing for which I have a talent. I am wearing a Lanz flannel nightgown. There can be no garment in the universe less alluring. Suddenly, I feel I am being watched. I look up and see a naked man in the window across the street masturbating. When he sees that I have seen him, he starts stroking faster. This, I think, is the human condition. We are all yearning to be seen.

Does this stuff still happen to young women? One day, decades later, my stepdaughter and I are walking to the subway after visiting the zoo in the Bronx. She is 17. We pass a man. Hey, baby, he says to her, grabbing his crotch. So, yes.

After my disastrous year in the dorm, I live in a series of apartments as a roommate. In my senior year of college, the writer Tama Janowitz publishes The Slaves of New York. The ‘slaves’ are people who don’t have leases so stay stuck in bad relationships because they have nowhere else to go. It is one of many books that shapes the way I think of the city. To this day, when I cross the Queensboro bridge, I think of Fitzgerald’s columns of ash. When I worked at Conde Nast and fetched my daily sandwich at the deli around the corner on Madison Avenue, I’d think of Frank O’Hara and his (not very good) lunch poems:

There are several Puerto

Ricans on the avenue today, which

makes it beautiful and warm. First

Bunny died, then John Latouche,

then Jackson Pollock. But is the

earth as full as life was full, of them?

Biking over the Brooklyn Bridge, it is Whitman who is in my head. “Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!” I see you too, Walt, though you’ve been dead a century.

*

I graduate from college. A friend has a mother who is a real estate agent in Brooklyn. Leaving Manhattan for an outer borough is a bitter pill but the apartment she finds me is rent stabilized on Clark Street, the first stop on the IRT. The rent is $535 a month. Norman Mailer lives nearby. I had no idea he was so short. His knees must be shot because he walks with an odd, rolling motion. From my window, I can see the awning of a topless joint called The Wild Fyre. I can also see the Hotel St. George, where Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy once swam in the tiled pool. The previous tenant, a junkie, (as evidenced by the needles left behind) has disappeared, leaving his cat, his clothes and rotting food in the refrigerator. I tell myself something good may have made him go Pompeii on his life. Maybe he won the lottery? I know that is probably not what happened, but I don’t linger too long on his fate. In New York, those hundred people coming off the train are all looking for the same thing. A lease of their own.

Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.