How the sound of those words used to thrill me. … "Why not come over and have some wine on the roof deck?"
This is the very first place I ever lived in New York that had access to the great outdoors. (This means access to open air, not nature, although there are two trees that I can see in the back.)
I've been living in NYC for 20 years now. YES, 20 Years!! Oddly, I only just realized this. I've been saying 17 years for about three years now.
Odder still, September 11th would have been something close to my 20-year anniversary. I moved here sometime around late August or early September of 1981.
This was during New York's high-crime era. My present neighborhood, Alphabet City, was nothing but a sea of heroin needles, Polish immigrants, homeless people and dealers.
My first two apartments in New York were in a Chasidic neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, during the height of Crown Height's racial tensions.
You could say I pretty much moved to New York during one of its worst times and promptly moved to one of its rougher neighborhoods.
I was broken in quickly.
I grew up on the Jersey Shore, only an hour and 15 minutes away, but it might as well have been 500 miles away. I was practically run out of town on a rail the day I highlighted my hair in pink.
However much Jersey has progressed since then, it wasn't exactly the hippest place in the universe in 1980.
I was born to be a New Yorker.
Since the murder of The World Trade Center, a lot of folks seem to be talking about what exactly makes a New Yorker. I think that's pretty easy to figure out. The New Yorkers are the ones screaming "Get out of my town, you %$#&%% terrorist bastards!" or "You think that's enough to make me leave Manhattan! $#@!! I've got rent control!!!"
Well, that's not quite fair, actually, because most of the real New Yorkers I know can't afford the rents here anymore, so they're spreading out into Jersey City, Westchester, wherever is commutable. But make no mistake about it; they're still New Yorkers.
You can pick them out in the check-out line at the supermarket. They're the ones drumming their fingers on the magazine rack and chanting. "Just how long is this gonna take … ladyyyyy!"
From my early days, here, I saw a lot of people come and go. My roommate, Davy, ran home screaming after he was mugged. Another roommate of mine high-tailed it back to the Midwest after watching the news too many nights in a row.
As I said, this was the high-crime era of NYC.
If you made it here for three years and still liked New York, you were a New Yorker, and nowhere else in the world would ever do again.
I think of New York as a drug of some kind. Once you get hooked, you're hooked for life. You can move away, but you'll always be known as the New Yorker.
Once I moved to Provincetown, Mass. For six months. I loved it. I still do. Six months was great! A year would be fine, too. A year is probably a perfect amount of time to spend in a town dedicated to sex, booze, beach and partying in the spring and summer, art, writing, reading, all sorts of culture in the fall and total unending depression in the dead of winter.
I fell in love with the town, but there wasn't a single day that I ever felt like a townie. I was always the New Yorker in P-town. Wearing black in July might have given me away. Even my bikini was dark blue.
I don't know why we New Yorkers have such a disdain for wearing anything that isn't black, white, gray, blue, smoke, teal or dark green, but we do.
There's a reason New Yorkers wear sunglasses in Miami … at night.
For the past 20 years, I haven't thought much about being a New Yorker. My friends and family say I am what they'd call "the quintessential New Yorker," or some say "the most New York, New Yorker they know." I guess the fact that I always take this as a huge compliment means it might be true, or perhaps it's the fact that I wish they'd just get to the point already.
Since September 11th, I feel as though New Yorkers have been baptized.
We've been baptized by fire.
I went up on the roof deck yesterday. This used to be one of my favorite places in the world. The World Trade Center on the south end of my roof, the Empire State Building on the north. I felt perfectly perfect in their valley.
I don't last long on the roof anymore, hardly ever come up now. I walk my big, fat, black cat on the roof. He's a tad, well, challenged, so I keep him on a leash and walk him, else he might take a nosedive off my charming old brick building.
Everything's fine until I look up. Then I see it; the carved out place in the horizon that used to be the WTC.
Then the slide-projector in my head starts up again, and I see the first tower implode. I hear my neighbors screaming. The goose bumps crawl over my arms and legs just like they did that day. I usually start to cry.
I've haven't been able to erase the feeling of watching thousands of heartbeats end.
I doubt I ever will.
I fight the urge every day, to close my business and go back down there and beg to dig in the rubble with the clean-up crews. But I know I'd only get in the way.
Besides … going out of business is no way to help New York.
I love the common roof deck of my little 10-unit building. It's on my list of the things I always dreamed of having one day in NYC: a roof deck, a terrace, a fireplace and front steps to sit on. Oh, a front stoop; that would be like a dream come true.
Life is strange.
I might even leave New York one day, (when I'm very, very, very, very tired) in search of open space, green (dark green) things around me and the chance to live somewhere in my old age that's larger than 700 Square feet … or I might just move to the Upper West Side.
Hey that's right next to Central Park!! Practically rural!!
