Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 4)

(please consider a paid subscription...)

*If you’re enjoying my work, please consider a paid subscription for as low as $5/month!

Chapter 4

Life was a crisscross between violence and solitude in Manhattan. At least I was used to my apartment now. It was early May. It had been warming up considerably, and now it nearly seemed like early summer. (Again, minus the staggering heat and humidity. But it was sunny and nice out.) I developed a routine. I’d sleep in until about eight, then get up and drink multiple cups of black Irish Breakfast tea with half and half. (I’d quit drinking coffee nearly a decade ago, after I quit alcohol. Ditto cigarettes.) I’d spend a solid hour reading whatever book I was devouring at that moment. (Anything from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Colson Whitehead to Kafka to Kierkegaard.) Reading had always been my Achilles Heel, my Other Addiction besides alcohol, drugs, sugar and sex. (And writing, of course.) Walking by a bookstore—especially a small hipster local one—was akin to me pre-sober walking by a bar. You knew I was going in.

After tea and reading it was time for a fast, efficient shower. Then I’d dry and get dressed and sit down at that big wide wooden desk near the kitchen and, after feeding Lucius (he’d bite and scratch first thing in the morning, letting me know who was boss), I’d write a couple thousand words. For now it was just journaling, long autobiographical sketches about my days in New York City. Five weeks into my stay, I still carried that trembling lust for the city. That draining, enraptured excitement, a burning flame which still hadn’t died down completely. (The same burning passion I had for writing.) After writing: That’s when I would finally explore each day.

Sometimes, I’d jog down the four flights of stairs, sleep-deprived, exhausted but smiling, head out onto 2nd, and trudge south for nine blocks to 96th Street. It was interesting living in Harlem, seeing the difference between “my” hood and the transformation which occurred south of 96th. I’d heard supercilious New Yorkers downtown saying things like, Oh, I never go north of 96th Street. This could have been a sneering, backwards veil for racism, but I figured it was also simply a plea for safety. The reality was that once you morphed into Harlem, the culture and vibe became very different. There did seem to be a stark dividing line which was 96th: Rich white people on the Upper East Side to the south, working-class and poor blacks to the north. Of course it wasn’t this simple or cookie-cutter exact. There were some middleclass and upperclass black locals in East Harlem, and there were condos and apartments there which sold for over a million dollars. And there were complex historical reasons for why this was the case. So what was I doing here?

I’d lived in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods ever since I left home at nineteen. Starting with The Avenue in Ventura, a Latino-gangbanger area, moving through Kay Street in the Beach Flats in Santa Cruz, then multiple neighborhoods in Oakland, and finally, after I got sober and briefly moved to Portland, Oregon (spurned on by my one sober friend from high school, Maggie), an area in North Portland by the railroad tracks. Each of these places highlighted my whiteness, my wealth and privilege. I think subconsciously I partly chose these locations as part of my rejection of my parents’ wealth and what I perceived to be their “money-obsession.” Growing up rich and white in Ojai, with two overprotective, coddling parents who’d both come from money themselves, I’d yearned, from a very young age, to break through the delusions which surrounded me. I didn’t buy the small, safe, white bubble of Ojai. It felt superficial. It reminded me, later, of that film The Truman Show, with Jim Carrie, where his whole existence is a farce, recorded and acted upon.

Sometimes I’d jump on the Q train at 96th and ride to wherever. It didn’t matter. I loved riding the 1 train to Christopher Street or taking the A/C/E train to West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village and exploring Washington Square Park and looking at all the fancy NYC buildings, walking around the Paris-like cobblestone streets of the Village. I’d often end up at Café Reggio, on 119 MacDougal, the famous writers’ café near 4th. There were always characters there, Bohemian-types. The café had been there since the twenties. Surely the Beats must have written there, gotten drunk there. Dozens of little crammed round tables and rickety chairs with skinny wooden legs sat all around. Massive prints of Caravaggio paintings hung on the walls. The supposedly first ever American espresso machine was bolted to the wall in a corner. They had Italian food, shakes, coffee, tea, dessert. I’d slam mugs of hot English Breakfast tea and sit with my black-and-white composition notebook and write write write.

Other times I’d get off at West 4th and watch the basketball players behind the tall fencing right by the subway stop. It was fun to watch them run and sweat and curse, flailing their muscle-bristling arms, stern expressions on their faces, mad with raging youth and energy. It made me think of the first time I ever came to New York City, in 2006, when I was twenty-three. I’d taken the 5 train and gotten off on Lexington—I can’t remember exactly where anymore—and had seen the same urban battle occurring behind the same type of tall black diamond fencing. The men looked huge and tough and hard. Their pectorals gleamed with sweat. It made me, again, feel so white and small-town and parasitical.

Why, I asked even then, was I staying in low-income black neighborhoods? To some degree I definitely was part of the post-90s, 2000s white-hipster-upper-middleclass gentrification phenomenon. Good white kids from good wealthy families moving to the inner city. We claimed it was for the cheap rent. But it was more than that. It was a rejection of our parents’ wealth and success. It was the Original Millennials’ generation who’d been born in the early-mid eighties and had grown up on MTV and pop rock, who’d been saved by time from high school Face Book and Tinder and iPhones, but who’d easily adapted to them when they shook the very foundations of western culture. I had been part of that “movement,” yes. Thinking myself so powerfully unique, so different from “them,” getting sketchy, badly-thought-out tattoos of rock stars I knew deep down I wouldn’t care about a year later. (Jim Morrison was tattooed on my right forearm, Iggy Pop on my left.) I was shedding my snake skin, trying to find myself by pushing as hard as I could against my parents’ desires for me.

Other times I’d wander around 42nd Street, looking at the architecture and artistic genius of Grand Central Terminal, or walking around 7th Avenue into the chaos of Times Square, those mega buildings stretching to the sky (hence “skyscrapers”) and the never-ending looping gargantuan flat TV screens ceaselessly showing ads and weather and the latest news minute-by-minute. I’d tromp by places like Bubba Gump on 44th and 7th, or the Hard Rock Café or the NYPD Times Square precinct. People were everywhere; omnipresent. You had to constantly watch yourself, stepping around ogling tourists or tall, thousand-dollar-suit-wearing executives, or else tough urban hoods.

The people became one gelatinous, porous, liquid blob. Homeless begged for change. People wore Marvel costumes gesturing madly at you. Toughs drank from bottles on corners. Everywhere you looked: People. And the constant, heraldic noise. Tires clinking over manhole covers. Honking to a staggering degree. The reek of trash along the sidewalks. I’d head back north up Broadway or 8th Avenue, making my way north to Central Park South, the very bottom of the park, 59th Street, and head west often to Columbus Circle, seeing that tall, grand statue of the man who had supposedly “discovered” America. On occasions I’d walk all the way back home, taking Broadway and then crossing at the very top of the park, Cathedral Parkway, aka 110th Street, and then dipping once I arrived at 2nd to 105th. Home-sweet-home, my loud, tired, artist’s retreat.

But usually I’d jump back on the Q train or the 4/5/6 and head back uptown. I liked living uptown. I’d always done that. I’d never really wanted to be completely “downtown.” Explore there, yes; live, no. In San Francisco I’d lived in the Outer Sunset, where the Asian neighborhoods were smothered in fog, far away from Market Street and downtown. In San Diego I’d lived in Pacific Heights thirty blocks from the ocean. In Portland I’d lived in the suburban north part of the city. I liked being there but not totally there. I wanted to be close but not inside. In many ways that captured my inherent nature, too. I wanted to be close to people, but not that close. I wanted to be included, but not too much. I wanted to be relied upon, but not often. It was a classic push-pull: Come close, go away; prove you love me, leave me alone.

I saw this trait in my mother. My father, too, in a different way. Given what my mom went through growing up, is it any wonder she had serious trust issues? She once said to me, The world would be a lot better off without people. At the time I’d been a teenager, just loosening my parental leash, drinking, meeting girls for the first time, going to rabid punk shows every night in Ventura and LA, practicing the art of being both cool and a rebel and a reject and a tough-guy.

I didn’t understand what she meant back then, about people. That revelation would come later. People, I would come to grasp, were unsteady. They could rarely be relied upon. You could mostly not trust them. If they had a chance to screw you, they certainly would. It was social Darwinism out there, survival of the fittest. When I realized that I had many of these same traits—both as my mom and as people in general—for a long time I tried desperately to convince myself that I was somehow better, different, not like “them.” But I wasn’t better. I wasn’t different. I was just like them. Just like my mother. This was both a good and a hard thing to understand. My mom had many positive qualities. But she struggled as a human in the world, in the same way I did. She had, after all “installed” the genetic features to begin with. She’d carried me in her body for nine months. She’d birthed me on New Year’s Eve, 1982. I was a hair under ten pounds and broke my mother’s tailbone. It was as if I were born flipping off society.

I discovered a writing group through the Meet Up App: Shut Up and Write. We literally would do as the title suggests: Meet up—usually at a coffee shop near Columbus Circle on West 58th—say very little (talking seemed to be discouraged, hence the name of the group) and then we’d all silently write for an hour. Doing this I met a few other writers. We exchanged numbers and emails.

Around my immediate neighborhood I found it cold and hostile. The young men in this area seemed to somehow avoid looking directly at me while with their energy reminding me in a swaggering, cocksure way that I was a foreigner, both in terms of race and in terms of non-New York-ness. I think my California-ness practically wafted off me like bad body odor. Pussy, their eyes constantly seemed to be saying. Or, This ain’t your hood, White Boy. And I agreed. It wasn’t. Again I asked myself: What am I doing here?

Since childhood I’d tapped into reincarnated, ancient anger. And now, at thirty-six, eight-and-a-half years off the bottle, the same kind of anger welled up in New York City. Cars nearly hit you as you crossed quickly on a crosswalk when it was your turn. People yelled things out the window at you. The stupid electric scooters almost crashed into you all the time, even on the sidewalks. People had no sense of personal space: The city was so jam-packed with residents that everyone “lived” on top of each other, both in apartment complexes and on the streets. The frenetic, coiled energy like a rattlesnake about to pounce and bite. You had to be ready for anything; tense.

In East Harlem there was a new urban tension I’d never experienced before. I intuited the need to keep my head on a bobble; I looked behind me and around and ahead all the time. People shot up dope right on the street. Music blared from passing cars and buildings. Neck-tattooed, huge men walked around with their battering-ram arms hanging dramatically at their sides like wolves looking for prey. I understood that Harlem was a dangerous place. Everyone talked about how “safe” Harlem was now, how “gentrified.” (More so the west than the east side.) I figured they were either lying to not sound racist, or hadn’t ever lived there. This made Oakland seem tame. It wasn’t California ease; it was Manhattan machismo.

There were women, too. Always women. Women, another addiction. I hadn’t had sex until I was eighteen. A girl at St. Andrew’s Prep. She was in the cool popular crowd, I was one of the weirdo punk rebels. But I wasn’t a nerd. And I wasn’t a total loser. Most seemed to consider me a sidebar. Freshman year I’d been alone. Sophomore year I met two kids—one in my grade, one a grade above—who were bright and from the working-class. They’d gotten in on scholarships. They were punkers and they lived in Oxnard, south of Ventura where you smelled the pungent fertilizer in the strawberry fields mixed in with the scent of the Pacific Ocean. They were the portal; the entry; the door. They were how I transmogrified from lonely weirdo nothing to hardcore alcoholic punk in a mere matter of months. They provided me with shields and swords with which to battle my parents (the Enemy), books to read (1984; A Brave New World), and shows to attend and “dance” in the mosh-pit to. And yet somehow Amelia and I started dating. Went to junior year prom. Fell in “love.” Lost our virginity to one another. Got to know each other’s families. After a year, when we were seniors, I broke up with her. It was a bad breakup.

And since then, post-St. Andrew’s Prep, it’d been girl after girl after girl. Most of them were broken and alcoholic, like me. Some were thoughtful, kind hippies. Still others were attracted to my rage and my intensity and my intelligence and creativity, my hard gleaming green eyes a reflection of my torn, tattered soul. Relationships fell into a pattern: Sex-based; alcohol-based; deep in a superficial way. I had a habit of immediately oversharing with girls, going “deep”—trying desperately to impress them—which strangely always ended up making our dialogue skip along the surface somehow, our intimacy not truly intimate in any spiritual, moving way. It took me a long time to grasp this revelation. Intimacy—true closeness—scared the shit out of me.

I wanted to have a girlfriend, to really be with someone, but deep down I wasn’t sure if I could be. There’d always been that solitary aloneness. Even when I was inside of a woman. Or telling her my deepest fears. Or bragging—ironically and bizarrely—about my fucked-up past. (“Did I ever tell you about the time I shot up Heroin in Santa Cruz when I was 22?”) I couldn’t fully give myself because I didn’t have a full “self” to give. I didn’t know myself. I didn’t like myself. I certainly didn’t love myself. I drank to escape all that, but I added a false veneer of “depth” to the surface, spreading it around to hide all the cracks. I didn’t want any light to get in.

Adinah had exposed some of those cracks to the light. That had been my one sober, “mature” relationship. I’d never forget meeting her at the Puerto Rican restaurant she worked at in downtown Oakland. She was my server. She’d had short dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a pinched, slightly irritated expression on her face. I remember remarking to my table of sober friends (we’d gathered to eat after a meeting) how cute she was. One friend jabbed my arm, nodding back at her. She and I had exchanged a few passing glances; she always looked away quickly, her pale cheeks burning crimson. When we finished our meal and paid the bill, we all got up and started slowly walking south along the empty road. It was warm and dark out, an early June evening. I walked in back with the others. I decided I had to be courageous. What was the worst thing that could happen? She rejected me? I pulled one of my writing/editing cards out of my leather wallet, and walked back into the restaurant. She was punching buttons on the cash register. I steeled myself, swallowed, and approached.

“Hi,” I said.

She looked annoyed and distracted, that wrinkle between her eyes from stress. Her eyes grew large when she saw me.

“Yes?” she said.

I swallowed the lump down my tight throat, and said—thank God no one else was around—“I just wanted to say, I think you’re very beautiful. If you ever wanted to get coffee sometime…that’d be great.”

I handed her the card. She took it, still eyeing me, and then looked at it. “You’re a writer?”

I shrugged. “And book editor, yeah.”

She smiled then. Her eyes had this amazing sparkle in them. She reminded me of a little kid, excited at a new gift she’d hoped for but assumed would not get. She put the card in her jeans pocket.

“I have a friend doing her writing MFA at California College of the Arts.”

“Oh, cool,” I said. My cheeks flushed.

“What kind of material do you write?” she asked.

The door to the restaurant blasted open in that moment and my friend Paul said, “Michael, are you coming?” I wanted to murder him.

“Yeah,” I said, not facing him.

“Well, looks like you better go,” she said.

I laughed anxiously. She shrugged.

“Email me,” I said.

“I will.”

The first woman I got involved with in New York was Jenny at Sober Authors. She was refined; sophisticated; sexy; bohemian; artistic. But it was another woman—another serious artist—who changed me. Sophia Motte.