My young sister is absolutely obsessed with New York City. She seems to believe that it's the best and most exciting city on the face of the earth. To her, people in New York are living the dream. They remind her of the film stars she watched, when she was growing up, in shows like Gossip Girl and Sex and the City. When she looks at New York , she sees a world of fashion designers, chic nightclubs, expensive bars, and success. She sees an open and happy lifestyle. A progressive place. The one and only place to go to.
I do not blame her for her image of New York City. After all, it's mostly true. It's one of the richest and most successful cities on earth, just like my sister believes.
And yet, I suppose I cannot help but find it fascinating (and very strange) how much my sisters current image of New York City, differs so mightily from the image I had of it, when I was her age, and a young guy, instead of a girl. For the thing I find most curious of all about my sisters love for New York is that, indeed, I think it all connects completely with the fact that she's my sister. A girl.
When I think back to conversations that I had with my group of friends as a young guy about New York, when we were all only 17-20 years old, it's very comical to me that the image we had of the city, as young men, was so radically different (and worse) than what my sister sees. For most of us guys--- the way I remember it---the idea of New York city went something like this: It is a really hard place to live, and you have to be unbelievably tough to live there, always ready for a brawl. If not that, then you have to be rich, which of course we did not believe we would be. Instead of seeing New York as the home of fashion designers and coco Chanel, we saw it as the home of gangsters like the Teflon Don John Gotti, and as having hard hit areas like Harlem and the Bronx, that went far beyond what we used to call “the little Bronx”, here jn our own home city, with a mere 120,000 residents. If we thought our own city was a pain in the ass, and filled with gang issues and drug wars, we did not even want to begin imagining what the hell happened in New York. It was another level of problems, and of course, we weren't the only ones who felt this way: A television show like the Sopranos, which was very popular when I was younger, uniquely examines just how much happier a mob guy can be, when he's in “quiet” New Jersey, instead of New York. Every time tony soprano met with the New York bosses in the show, it was always a potentially life threatening event. He was mortified. They were bigger and scarier sharks who swam in a much deeper sea. Better to be in jersey. For everybody.
Well, as I say, as young men, that was our idea of the city. It simply wasn't seen as aomewhere you would want to go, unles you had plans to be a particualely vicious shark. But beyond that idea, there was also another one that I find even stranger: Though we interpreted the New York lower class as being one in which we surely never wanted to swim, because of how tough we imagined such boys were, we also never wanted to move there because, well, there was also something really feminine about the city to us. That's right: the city of the vicious sharks, of the Teflon Don and the strange subways, the city that practically birthed gangsta rap, was also really feminine. It wasn't the place you would want to go to pursue your absurd dreams of being a masculine American boy.
New York City was at once this vicious place with the most vicious sharks, whilst also being this place that represented the literal antithesis of what masculinity was really supposed to be. How is it possible, one cannot help but ask.
When I think of distant places my childhood friends used to mention as where they'd dig living, it seems literally almost all the places were out in the woods, or the country, and keep in mind that many of these guys had never even lived in a country setting, yet it was what they dreamed of, when they did dream. The country was where it was thought that a man was free to be a man, whatever that was supposed to mean. He could be dirty and wear no shirt and just a pair of ripped jeans there. He could have a woman who didn't want a $4500 Chanel purse and high heels. He could catch fish and maybe even buy a gun and hunt something , to get “free food”. . This was the dream. The country was seen as a place of riches. New York , dreadful poverty.
It was yet another strange area where the idea of New York again got confusing: A New Yorker -- any New Yorker --- was rich, but he was also poor. He had no real personal space. Is that not the definition of being poor? A house with noting in it in the middle of no where in Tennesse, looks like a mansion, to a poor New Yorker.
I remember how my cousins used to speak constsntly of the pot farms they would one day have in Colorado or Oregon, my friends used to dream of hiking the Appalachian mountains or drilling for oil in Alaska, many used to discuss a state like Texas and how they wanted to move there to shoot guns and “live easy”. And, quite literally, out of probably all the young men I can ever remember talking to back then, maybe all of one or two ever mentioned New York City. Oddly enough, those two were both rich boys. Beyond them, literally no one wanted to go there. It wasn't even about the money. It was merely that something seemed wrong about the entire scene out that way. It didn't feel inclusive. Even I, as a writer, never felt that New York City would make for an interesting subject. I thought my own city was trash, as I say, and its garbage stink had caused me to spend half my childhood inside fantasy stories.
Of course, it's very strange to think that none of my boys back then felt that New York City was inclusive, considering New York prides itself -- so we are told---on being this ultra inclusive, ultra liberal and progressive paradise. So what the hell is going on? How can the most inclusive place somehow seem like this to so many people? Specifically young men?
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