It’s Sunday night before I start Fitzmaurice Voice Teacher Certification classes for a month in New York. I’ve been here since Wednesday, and I’m afraid there may be too many impressions rattling around in my head to flow cohesively into any sort of congruous story.
My room is in a 3-bedroom apartment in Astoria that I share with 4 roommates: 2 human and 2 feline. The cats run the place. They’re very friendly and very bold, and if they get into a bedroom they shed everywhere, destroy things, or crawl under the bed never to be retrieved. So we all keep our doors shut all the time, and our schedules are so different that we rarely see each other.
Since I’ve been in town, I’ve reconnected with a friend from college, five friends from my Russia program, and two friends from South Florida. I’ve been to the Metropolitan Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Central Park, and I’ve seen a play called Cradle and All. I’ve admired the Empire State Building, walked through Times Square, and used the bathroom in Trump Tower. I’ve gotten the songs of various street names stuck in my head as I navigated between these places: “42nd Street,” “Broadway,” “6th Avenue Heartache.” I’ve bought an “I <3 New York” T-shirt. I’m living the romantic, adventurous city-girl life.
And yet, I don’t love New York. Perhaps my brief stint living in L.A. soured me on all big cities forever, or maybe I’m just a suburban girl by blood. I’m glad I’ve figured out that even though I’m an actor and most of us resolve to move to a big city at some point to make our breaks, the city just isn’t for me. It’s fun to visit, but I don’t want to stay.
Homeless people abound here. I suppose that’s true of any city. But there seems to be something different about the homeless people here. Last night as I got off the subway, there was a homeless man sitting by the subway exit who had fallen asleep in a half-eaten bowl of soup (at least, I think he was sleeping. I didn’t check to see if he was alive.). In the same spot tonight as I left the subway, two policemen were leading a very drunk homeless man down the stairs toward a waiting ambulance and more cops. I saw a woman who looked comparatively clean and “normal” holding a sign saying she was recently widowed and had lost everything. If she hadn’t been sitting on the street holding the sign, she would not have looked homeless at all. But the girl who made the biggest impression on me could not have been older than 21 or 22 and like the widowed woman, looked comparatively clean. She was sitting on some steps with a cup and a sign that said “scared, desperate, HUNGRY, please help,” and her deeply circled eyes had, not the expression of mental instability or vacancy common to the homeless, but such a deep sadness that I couldn’t help but think she had moved to New York to make her dreams come true and was mourning the inexplicable loss of those dreams. A lady walking in front of me handed the girl a Ziploc sack of quarters, and this action startled the girl out of her depressed gaze. She looked blankly at the change for a second, and then smiled at the lady with a combination of relief and awe that, although genuinely thankful, barely covered the sadness with which she was so clearly consumed.
New York can swallow a person. The sheer number of people here is incomprehensible to me. My apartment in Astoria is not in “the city,” but still out my window all I see are tall buildings – people on top of people on top of people. They fill the sidewalks, the subways, the cafes and bookstores. They move in throngs to the designated “park” areas, the only grass that exists anywhere. Sucking the exhaust and wafting aromas of garbage, urine, and the sewer, they don headphones to drown out the noise of traffic and go jogging, darting between the dog-walkers and slow-moving tourists. They chase The American Dream that everyone believes exists here, but I am hard-pressed to find it. What I see is dirt, impatience, and the thick shell that necessarily develops on everyone who decides to put up with it all to live in a place where everything happens. I suppose it’s laudable. I couldn’t do it; I would crumble within a year.
Despite my cynical tone, I truly am enjoying myself here. I am grateful to experience some of what New York has to offer without having to harden myself permanently against everything that bothers me about the city. And I hope I haven’t offended anyone who loves New York. I think my opinion of the city is a minority one: 18.9 million people choose to live here, and another 48.7 million (and rising) tourists visit yearly. I’m just one Western girl with one opinion, looking forward to a month in The Big Apple, and to going home at the end of that month.
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