Entrekin

I am on the bus to Manhattan.

I’m trying to remember the last time I took this bus, made this journey. I can’t. This surprises me; there was a time when Manhattan was a big part of who I was. Or at least I thought it was. I may have been wrong.

Lord knows I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.

The last time I was in Manhattan was definitely before I left for Los Angeles. It was also definitely before that spring, and the previous year I dated a girl for, like, 8 months, during which I’m fairly certain we never made it up there. I started dating her that April. I don’t remember that previous spring, well, but I know I was working at a medical publishing company, and I don’t recall making the trip then, either.

Was it really September of the year previous? It may have been. I was dating a (different) girl, and I took her up to Manhattan as a birthday surprise, though it was as much for me as for her. We’d only been dating a few months at that point, but still I wanted to show her the Manhattan I knew and loved. We packed into the car and headed north. Almost the moment we got on the highway, one of my rear tires blew out, so I changed it there, on the side of the turnpike. In the process, I broke my left ring finger, top-most knuckle, a tiny, stupid fracture that showed up as a slight chip off the edge of the bone. Calling it broken probably gives it too much credit, really.

We stayed at the Hyatt on the Hudson, Jersey City, with its panoramic view of downtown Manhattan’s financial district; if the World Trade Center were still there, the towers would be pretty much all you could see from the lobby. We took the PATH train into the City, and we went to the Cloisters, and we went to Candela, and we met a few of my old friends, and . . .

That’s about the extent of my memory. Or at least of those details I might share publicly.

Which is a digression in the first place. Because what I was talking about was returning. Going back. Can you go home again?

I just got home, actually. If by just we can mean four months. I’ve been taking business classes—and must interject here to smile that I just saw, out the window, a billboard for my old college, Saint Peter’s, where I have a job interview tomorrow—and I finished all of a novel and part of a screenplay.

Mostly, I think, I’ve been recharging. Which I feel silly saying, but I think that’s what it’s been. I went hard in LA; had I those years to do over, I might slow down a bit, take an extra year at USC and complete my degree in three years rather than blowing through it in two, but then again I couldn’t wait to leave LA by the time I was done. I am allergic to the sun, and break out in hives after prolonged exposure, and that was how LA was; it felt like it got under my skin and I couldn’t scratch it away. The air reminded me of September 11th, hazed and thick as it was, full of smoke and fog and exhaust instead of dust and crumbled buildings but no more easy to breathe.

I had always eyed Manhattan again. I had thought I might settle back in Manhattan, ultimately, but the problem there was that I had just turned 30 and didn’t feel ready to settle. I wanted to see more, do more, experience more, and Denver was at the top of my list of cities. It sounded like the right balance between nature and citylife, and there was a girl, too, but several months into my stay in Denver I realized pretty fully neither was right. I can’t call it a bad relationship; I learned a lot, both about myself and about life and the world, and if nothing else, I’m at least grateful that it made me so intent not only on Manhattan but also on myself.

To wit:

A moment. I think I was just about to shower. I know I was in the bathroom, and I remember I was standing. And a feeling came over me that I wanted more. That I wanted different. A realization that I wasn’t happy, for myriad reasons, and that I hadn’t been happy for a while. I had spoken to the girl several times, I had thought, had attempted to find words for things I didn’t like, things I didn’t want, things I needed, but in the end I’m not sure I did it effectively. In the end, I ultimately felt like I had found deaf ears, and I realized, then, I had hit my breaking point. I could try harder, to help things change even though nothing had in several months, or I could choose change, choose myself, choose the life I wanted, choose happiness.

I was thirty years old, and I chose happiness. I chose myself.

Selfish, perhaps, but otherwise what’s the point?

It’s worth noting that I knew, too, the girl I was with wasn’t happy, and it is worth noting here that though we (in general. Not the girl and me) might well be able to cheer each other up, that we might bestow upon each other some small kindness like a smile on an otherwise gloomy day, we cannot make each other happy. We cannot make another person happy. And if another person is not happy, no amount of external influence—with perhaps the exception of psychiatric help/agents—can change that. Something might turn a mood around, some small event might brighten an otherwise dark day, but happiness is more fundamental than that.

I knew I couldn’t make her happy, and I knew I wasn’t happy where I was, and that was when I realized I had to find my own happiness. That had to be my first priority.

I had already been thinking about New York. Since last year’s anniversary of September 11th. It hit me differently last year. I don’t think I’ve ever slept past the moment the first plane hit the first tower in all the years since, but this year . . . this year, Manhattan called to me again.

***

I am not a New Yorker. Even when I worked in Manhattan, I lived in a crummy little apartment in Jersey City, and commuted every day into the most glorious City in the world. I went to the afore-mentioned Saint Peter’s College, spent those four years (blowing through two degrees, one in Bio and one in English; earning degrees in half the time it takes other people is not entirely new to me) in dorms just fifteen minutes from a train I only took a dozen or so times into Manhattan proper, two lines—one to Christopher Street (where one of my roommates freshman year forbade me from going along, saying I was too pretty) and 9th and 14th and 23rd and then 33rd and Herald Square and six blocks to Times Square; and the other to the World Trade Center and downtown/Financial District.

I moved up there when involved with a girl (girls and the sometimes silly things they inspire me to do is not an unfamiliar theme in my life). We were engaged at the time I moved in just a couple weeks after graduating, but she broke it off a month or so later, and by the end of the summer, I was single again. By the end of that summer, I was young and naïve and overeager and overexciteable and ready to piddle over myself at every opportunity I got, and of course, I was where I was, so there were many. I had gotten a job as a temp at an advertising agency, but it was like one of those odd relationships that continues without much reason either party can really enumerate.

But that was okay. I didn’t mind not being a full-time worker. I liked the idea I could pick up and go anytime I pleased (which continues to be something I value in life even if it may in addition be something I don’t actually make use of all that often). I liked my crummy little apartment where pretty much all I did was write and sleep. I liked my friends, and I liked traveling home on alternate weekends to see my buddies I’d grown up with play in dive bars before returning, again, home for work Monday morning, and I liked thinking of both places as “home.”

I liked not being certain of anyone home, because sometimes that makes home everywhere. If home mostly where you’re comfortable, and I think it may be, but you can be comfortable anywhere, the world becomes a more intimate place.

I liked so many things. There were things I didn’t like, of course, but that was just ungracious. It was also not realizing what I had till it was gone.

***

September 11th. I’ve written about that day to great enough length and in great enough detail before, but I can’t help it sometimes. It wasn’t just a moment when I literally experienced all my childhood nightmares made gruesome, terrifying reality; it was also a day something . . . broke.

It may have been my heart. Of that I cannot be certain.

What I know is this; I’d been falling for Manhattan. I’ve fallen for girls before, sometimes easily and sometimes at greater length, sometimes too hard and too fast and other times simply not enough at all, but I never fell for any girl, and I probably never will, the way I fell for Manhattan. I fell for Manhattan like you’re supposed to: in the beginning, the giddy rush of every new text message, the near quantum uncertainty inherent in the romance of handholding and first kisses, giving way later to an extended but sincere courtship you very nearly don’t realize it’s happening until you’ve been doing it so long you can’t imagine other things feeling so right. I held Manhattan’s hand, and I bought Manhattan flowers, and when Manhattan kissed me for the first time, I clicked my heels home. I fell for Manhattan like you always hope to fall.

I was very much in love with Manhattan. I was in love with the way she walked and the way she sounded. I was in love with how she carried herself, because she carried herself every which way she knew how, uptown and downtown and totally around the way; I fell in love with her as the young punk sucking nicotine into her slender, tattooed throat in front of CBGB’s (OMFUG), as the perfumed executive in two-piece and heels and pearls who could buy and sell the street in front of her, as the freshly manicured and pedicured and saloned woman in the Audrey Hepburn dress and the opera glasses at Lincoln Center. No matter whom I wanted, whom I needed, Manhattan was there, and Manhattan was her, in the span of a single block the girl I wanted to bring back to my mother and the girl who was going to steal me away from home.

And in the same way as falling in love with the right girl can bring out the most positive aspects of a man, I felt like Manhattan did the same with me. I felt stronger and faster and smarter and cooler. I felt taller and hotter and sexier, and the most important part of those feelings was that I never once felt like Manhattan made me better; I always felt like Manhattan stripped away everything I never was, all the insecurity and pretension and falsity, and left me with only me, only myself, and that that was enough. I can describe no greater feeling in the world than realizing you just can’t pretend anymore, but that’s okay, because you’re awesome. In Manhattan I bought tattoos of Chinese symbols (just before such body art became “cool”), and leather pants, and an awesome leather jacket that fit me like a cape, and I did those things not because I thought they would make me cool but rather because I loved to and wanted to and I didn’t much care what people thought of it.

In a way, then, September 11th was like a betrayal. It wasn’t like Manhattan broke up with me; it was more subtle than that, more complicated. There is a moment in a story I am working on, a version of which appears as “A Little Heaven” in my collection, in which the narrator, Donovan, makes a point about being in love, and how sometimes romance ends the moment you realize that all the idealistic love in the world simply cannot save a relationship. Watching that first tower crumble down and disappear into dust that day . . . I felt as though it had brought a piece of me down with it. There are so few moments in life when the world changes so literally and so extremely from one moment to the next, and that moment marked one both for the City and for me.

Just like there was suddenly in the skyline a negative space occupied only by dust and hurting, I felt like something in me was gone, too. I think it was that comfort. Not with life and the world, but that comfort being me. I started to wonder what I was doing with my life and fearing whatever it was wasn’t enough.

***

If someone offered me any superpower in the world, my gut and instantaneous response would be to ask if telekinesis would include moving myself, as well as objects, with my mind. Because if it did, of course, that would mean I would be able to fly.

And if it did not, I would only want to fly.

In one of the five books in the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, Douglas Adams writes that the secret to flying is to throw yourself toward the ground and miss. In Peter Pan, the secret is, of course, happy thoughts, while Dumbo has the feather magical only in its ability to make the elephant believe. In each example, I think it is less about happiness than about that moment of misdirection; it’s less about belief or non-belief and more about just not thinking about it anymore. There’s an old story about a man and a bird: the man asks the bird which foot it leaps from to take off, and the little bird stops to think about something it never has before, and it starts to try to figure it out and discovers it can’t fly anymore.

Lately, over the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about a lot of things. I have tried to figure some things out, even if I’m not sure I’ve been entirely certain what “things” are, nor what “figuring them out” means. It seems like a mature and responsible thing to do, this figuring of things out, and I think the inclination came from a lot of factors, personal and professional alike.

***

If this has seemed disjointed, it is because I had to leave it aside. I began it on the bus but could not finish it there. As I neared the Lincoln Tunnel, as I saw for the first time in years the skyline minus those towers, I started to sniffle. Almost cry. Part of it was just because I was writing about having fallen for Manhattan, while another part again was the sudden realization I’d never wondered if I was ready for the emotions that were about to return.

By the time I did, it was too late. By the time I did, I was in the City.

I couldn’t wait to get off the bus, and I felt like a supernova as I stepped out of Port Authority onto 8th Avenue, smiling hard enough I could feel it with my whole body, like I could feel Manhattan in my body again. Walking along 42nd, over the glittery sidewalk, past Madame Tussaud’s and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I was walking on air, and I never thought I could be so free. I was flyin’ away on a wing and a prayer, and Manhattan caught me up and kissed me like she meant it and every damned thought I had, every worry I chewed on like a dog working on a bone, every uncertainty flew out of my head. I would say I immediately gained a swagger, that I had a spring in my step, but that would imply that my feet ever once touched the pavement, and I’m not entirely certain they did, nor that the smile ever once left my face. And over the course of four-ish days, I talked to old friends and discovered new ones, drank amazing beer and ate street-vendor sausage and fine-cooked chicken, felt proud of the glorious people in my life and lucky as Hell to know them. I was called a genius and a best friend, easy and devastatingly handsome, a hero writer and a pimp. I declined no invitations nor turned down any drinks, rode the carousel and sat in the cemetery, and buzzed through Times Square like mojito-fueled neon at four in the morning. I bought awesome new shoes and upgraded my old hat, and even a book I had wanted to read for a long time, “So Brave, Young, and Handsome,” and was a little surprised the clerk who accepted my payment didn’t confirm I was, in fact, all three. I watched the most talented dancers I have ever seen dance like they meant it, like they felt it, like nobody was watching, but I was and I cried with pride for friends and pure empathy for their passion, and then I laughed like the damned fool I have always been when the mohawked-future-dancers in fishnets and leather like oil fired their confetti-filled boomsticks in a glorious burst of glitter and gold and bubbles.

Most important, I stopped trying to figure things out and just went with it.

In other words, I flew.

Manhattan wasn’t my magic feather, nor even my happy thoughts. It just showed me once and for all I didn’t need either (though I had plenty of the latter), that I can fly on my own. That many years have passed since I lived there, and in many ways I have changed, but still I am me, and still I can soak up life and love and the world.

All of which less rejuvenated me than reset me. I don’t feel refreshed so much as brand spankin’ new again. I want to do things again. I finished one novel a few weeks ago, and now I want to finish another, as well as a screenplay I’m still working on. I may want to start blogging again, but I may want to do it differently; I like that I can micro-update on Twitter, that I can share videos and links via Facebook (so you can follow me on the former and “friend” me on the latter), if only because it frees up this space for some other things I’ve had in mind. Because one thing Manhattan showed me, all over again, was that I have some of the best stories in the world, and I think we all know the best stories in the world are even better when shared.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I feel like if I throw myself at the ground, I’m going to miss completely.

Mainly, because, this weekend, I felt like Manhattan’s old flame, and was constantly reminded that, when you love something, you let it go. You let it go without condition, without qualification, and most of all without expectation that it will return. And turn that around, now, because I never let Manhattan go; she let me go, let me return home, let me sort some stuff out and do what I needed to do, and when I returned, when I came back to her bed of concrete and asphalt and neon and brownstones, she pulled aside the covers and accepted me all over again without reservation. She told me I had done good, that she was proud of me, that I had changed but still had the same eyes, the same smile, and then she kissed me like she always did and took my breath away.

And when the weekend ended, she watched me shower and pack, and she straightened my collar as we stood at the door, and she kissed me like she meant it and said come back again soon, lover.

She’ll be there when I do. She always is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.