I like New York

There is no reason to justify my like of this city. It comes out of a thousand small things I have seen and heard and smelt. Like the buskers singing "Easy like Sunday Morning" on Sunday afternoon in the squalid subway station, or the man selling newspapers every single morning on my walk to work ("I got Sunday Times. Fifty Cents. Good Mornin'!"). It is the wit of the common person (In a petrol station, my friend looking for air for her tyres, the attendant: " Only air we got is the air you're breathing, darling").

In many places in the world it is important to fit in. In New York, it's important to be different. That is liberty.

I like the bustle of this place, even while I hate cities. I do not feel crowded here, even though I am surrounded at all times by more people than I have ever known.

Most of the world hates America. I never liked that. I came to New York and now I don't care. If Europe and travelling alone taught me to look within, New York is turning my eyeballs around, inverting my introspection. New York is the first place I have been where I can say I am in the centre of the universe and the smile on my face is only half joking.

I know how much some people (A?) will loath this. It's subjective. I know. I don't care.

What follows is something I wrote a while ago - in my first week here:

I like New York. I like it more and more as I am here inside it’s stomach. I walk in the streets: I see bad things and I smell bad smells but I like the city more.

I met a man. I met him because he was advertising rooms for rent in an apartment on the upper west side. He is a strange man, but not crazy. He is old – a retired criminal trial attorney. His apartment is messy and unclean. One room has a great view of the Hudson River – no buildings between it and the trees lining the parks and the river.

The man lives, essentially alone, in this apartment on the 5^thfloor of the beautiful old building. He rents the rooms at the back of the apartment to people but he has had many bad experiences with people. The last two people in the rooms left after months of not paying their bills. One fellow used Pierre’s phone for $1400 of calls.

The old man, Pierre, fascinates me with the stories he tells and the innately useful facts he produces. He is the kind of charming person that is often considered undesirable. I like him.

I felt very sad when I sat with him and he talked to me. Small things I did touched him slightly, but when I tried to talk to him he did not listen. He has developed that old person’s habit of only listening properly to themselves, even when all they crave is the company of other people. They do not crave company any longer, they crave audiences.

He needs money – at least enough to support him. He does not have enough money to reconnect his phone. He does not have any way of communicating with anyone except through the people who stay in his rooms.

When I first arrived, while I was looking at the rooms, a girl arrived to look also. Her name was Melissa and she was very scratchy and itchy about the dog that she had not expected, and the strange situation that Pierre and I presented. She stayed though and looked around and after a while it looked like we were both keen to take the rooms. I was suggesting that I would take the room. We left Pierre promising to come back the next evening.

We did and when we arrived Pierre met us with glee, at his door. He had cooked us dinner. He had cut vegetables in the shape of flowers and he had broiled meat. He had steamed vegetables and he had laid the table for three. He had bought a bottle of Hungarian wine that he could probably not afford. It was only $9, he said, but worthy of a place beside a $60 bottle, he said. The first thing I had to tell him was that we had not decided to take the place. In fact, I knew we would not.

Neither of us wants to stay in the apartment now – not really. I would love the experience but could not stay more than 2 months and when I would leave it will be worse.

I feel so terrible about this old man. I do not know what he will be doing right now in his 5^th floor apartment with his dog and his view of Hudson River. I do not know what he will do with the rest of the Hungarian wine that we did not finish. He cannot drink it. He is on medication to numb his face because he has a serious dental problem that causes him bouts of excruciating pain.

He has no family and no real friends. He has no children, he says, “that he knows about”, he says.

I feel sad for this man. I see the terrible cruelty of the world. I knew about the cruelty and injustice but tonight I was part of it. I had not intended to be and my plans changed without any real intention for them to, nor guilt in the process. The guilt is here now, when I think of what he looks like and how he was.

I will meet him again, probably at the weekend. I will take him a bottle of wine, perhaps, and hopefully an old mobile phone. I will buy him some prepaid credit and hope that will help him. I will try to get him a tenant.

I won’t have done enough. The situation is set and unchangeable and horrible. The worst is: in a day I will not care any more.

I feel this city seeping into me, fringing my edges with character and seeping into my being. I feel it changing me and I feel myself growing dependent and hating and loving and knowing I will never find myself or my ideal place and I will never be satisfied, nor truly lost.

I wish and hope that Pierre gets happiness. He deserves people to be much kinder to him.

I never went to see him again. I didn't find him a phone, or a tenant.