New York City (Manhattan) Both Is and Is Not What You Think

Rediscovering Manhattan after 2.5 Years

For my wife’s son’s 18^th birthday (actually on 11/30) we took him to New York City for his first time for a short trip from December 16 to 19.

As many of you know at this point—I have written about this ad nauseum—I lived in Manhattan from March 26, 2019 (one year before the pandemic) until June 3^, 2021. I survived the opening months of the pandemic living in what turned out to be a hysterically rough part of East Harlem at 5^th Avenue and 125. I wrote a whole “fictional memoir” about that here.

I’d left the city to spend the summer—I thought—back in the Bay Area, which I’d left after a decade for NYC in 2019. But, as many of you know, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I never returned to NYC. I stayed with Dad and, alongside my mother, cared for him until he died on June 2, 2023. I wrote about this here.

Anyway, so I lived in Manhattan—lower East Harlem, upper East Harlem, Washington Heights and Lenox Hill—or 2.5 years, and I stayed away from it for the same amount of time.

Enter Brayden’s 18^th birthday.

*

It was an easy flight to JFK in Queens. I remembered the drive. The last time I’d flown out of it had been June 3, 2021, thinking I’d be returning to my small, narrow shoebox apartment on East 70^th between 1^st and York. We were picked up by a fat, kind Dominican man in his late to mid-forties. We immediately hit terrible traffic. It was late afternoon on a Saturday.

Britney and her son in the backseats, me up front, I remained silent adding only slight nods and semi-smiles when the driver attempted to strike up a conversation. Clearly, he was bored. He spoke as if to himself; I could join if I felt like it. (I didn’t.) He yapped lazily—in a humorously thick Dominican accent—about how terrible traffic to and from JFK was now, and how LaGuardia used to be terrible but how they’d remodeled the whole thing and how now it was brilliant. “Hardly any traffic at all,” he said.

Somehow—tenuously, carefully on my end—the driver and I’d slowly begun talking about politics. I don’t recall how it started. All I know is that before long we were vigorously agreeing that Black Lives Matter was more or less a hoax and had done vastly more harm than good.

What about the violence and the wreckage during the 2020 riots/protests? What about Covid raging at that time, how the media criticized a few hundred protesting Trumpers wearing no masks but suddenly when millions around the nation were protesting George Floyd’s murder—which we now know is much more complex and nuanced than originally thought; as always—the media told us it was just fine to be out in mass protests because “the real virus was racism”? What about the expensive houses purchased with BLM money? What about the Defund the Police nonsense that probably killed thousands of Black Americans who desperately need police (more, not less).

Just like with Trumpers, the lies, hypocrisy and gaslighting was shocking. Two wrongs have never made a right. That still holds.

Miguel—the driver—and I covered many bases: NYC history; the migration crisis; immigration in general; BLM; Eric Adams; the Woke DA who refused to prosecute crime; CVS and Walgreens closing down en masse due to stealing at unheard of levels; the foolishness of DeBlasio; the solidness of Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s (“Stop and Frisk” was a little racist but it kept NYC safe,” Miguel said); etc.

At a certain point our views diverged. I went left, he went right. I finally asked: “Are you a Trumper?”

“A hundred percent, my brother, a hundred percent.”

 I was surprised but I shouldn’t have been. As everyone knows, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians have been slowly peeling off more and more for Trump and the Republican Party. You’d think Dems would ask themselves WHY this is happening instead of narcissistically navel-gazing and claiming it’s 1. White Supremacy at work, and 2. Minorities voting “against their own interests.”

We semi-argued about Trump. “Name one thing he actually did that was bad,” Miguel challenged, raising his voice to an edgy, almost aggressive pitch.

I smiled and didn’t answer. Inside I said, You mean like trying to STEAL the goddamn 2020 election? You mean like January 6????? You mean like pulling out of the Paris Agreement? You mean like pretending Covid wasn’t real at first and then later telling people to drink bleach? I could go on…

But I didn’t want the guy to shoot me. Kidding. I didn’t think he’d shoot me. I just didn’t want to fight.

“The Democrats are such hypocrites,” Miguel added, in his thick Dominican accent. “They offer no vision, no path forward. Their idea is just to trash Trump. You can’t build a future that way. They don’t stand for anything. They’re solely ‘anti.’”

I couldn’t argue with that. He was right.

And I thought, How many of this guy’s working-class 1^st generation friends feel the same way? What does that mean for Democrats? What could Dems do to pivot away from the perception that they no longer care about the working-class? Dems have become The Party of Elites.