New York Squared

Landing a life in New York City is like stepping into the lead role in the Hollywood action version of your own life. To be a New Yorker, I had to sign a contract with the city of More. But she is an addiction, from the first New York minute my soul hit Manhattan’s grubby sidewalks, I felt as if I was home. It was the closest I have ever felt to belonging. The city is a shelter for the dispossessed, we who find comfort in each other’s longing. When empty eyes meet in the abyss of a passing stranger’s gaze you know this is all that we all are. This is it, right here and right now.

A persistent fizz permeates Manhattan nights. It’s a barely discernable buzz that emanates from the street lights, the subway tracks, the boiler rooms and the machinery that combine, many pieces of the same engine, to make it all function. This visceral vice soups up its residents, there’s a constant loop of energy, passing between inanimate technology and the sleeping. We need our fix of this to survive, but there’s never enough, and we wake exhausted. The city, like a succubus drained us of everything we accumulated in our waking, during the night. Then she took some more.

I was nineteen and pretending to attend NYU, studying French and Art History. It was an easy cop-out, this pseudo arts degree but I was fooling no-one. My parents had realized that I wasn’t coming “home” to take up the promised place and they sent me money for rent and bills and paid my NYU fees. A few days were spent attending some lectures if I felt like it; more often I was at the gym.

The Saint, Xenon, and Limelight took off, the latter in an abandoned church in the forgotten wasteland of the East Chelsea. A bouncer in a Barneys’ suit with an earpiece waited for commands that only he could hear. He was the centurion at the gate of the altar where I worshipped. They were the new oracles of Chelsea with immeasurable power. They predicted who was in, who was not. Life was lived behind the velvet rope.

The first time I sniffed cocaine was in a car, zooming into the entrance of the Midtown Tunnel that delves deep below street-level, under what was the Helmsley Palace Hotel. It was twilight and Maya Angelou’s smoking carnivores scuttled like ants out of office buildings. It was a surreal time, when the limestone-fronted buildings of mid-town seemed to sag a little, stooping into the central reservation that separated the traffic.

It wasn’t a life changing moment.

I can tell you with all the fervor of an addict, I swear, I wasn’t addicted from the first hit. I didn’t feel anything straight away. Then, about halfway through the pale orange lit tunnel, the lights started to sizzle, they were brighter. My friend (who cares who he was, one of half a dozen interchangeable yuppies) was more handsome and his eyes shone, highlighted by the reflecting chrome from the dashboard of his sportscar. Immediately, it felt as though a blueprint for a real life had been overlaid and there was a wholeness where previously there had been incongruence. I could feel the freshness of an early autumn evening more palpably on my flushed cheeks.

Cocaine in small quantities feels like coming home. It’s surrendering back to the embrace of an old lover and that same seductive comfort of someone familiar in whose bed you’ve been before. It takes less than a minute to come through the tunnel but by the time we reached the other side, the sky was velvety, cobalt blue. Manhattan sparkled as we raced up her Grand Avenue. We thought we could handle it all and have it all. We were untouchable.

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