Testimony of a Crazed Urbanite

"I worked at a place called Lima, Ohio. When you travel in these towns there's nothing to do during the day, they're very boring. Like, all right, the first day you go through the five and dime, that's one day shot, all right. The next day, you go to the park, you see the cannon, and you've had it, that's it. Forget it. Lending library at the drugstore: two Fannie Hurst novels, Pearl Buck. Yeah, doesn't make it. At night in these towns, you step out of the club and you don't see anything but stars, beautiful stars, and one Socony gas station. You know. And those guys who work nights just don't swing, somehow."

--Lenny Bruce, Lima, Ohio

"The future belongs to crowds."

--Don Delillo, Mao II

I live in the big city. Dangerous. Polluted. Nasty. Full of strange, sweaty people, kids with guns, dented vehicles, rats. Every surface is paved or poured, hard, dark, (continued on page 214)Crazed Urbanite(continued from page 172) ominous. On a hot and greasy summer's day the streets glare at me with heat and hostility, the noise seeps like poison into my skin, the air hangs thick and gray like a shroud. Hydrants gush. Pedestrians play chicken with gypsy cabs. Ragged, red-eyed men fall out of doorways, flinging their bad karma at me, onto me, into me.

Common wisdom is that big cities are jungles, big cities are where the poor live. Big cities should be avoided. They are polluted, crime-ridden hellholes, and they are getting worse all the time. A dozen "megacities" dot the globe, each saddled with crushing populations exceeding 10 million. By the year 2000, these megacities will burst their seams, teeming with poverty, disease and violence. The last place on earth any sane person would want to be is stuck in traffic in Mexico City or hanging with drug addicts in a Cairo alley or waiting to catch a bus in Calcutta.

The city I live in, New York City, is one of the all-time greats, right up there with Paris, Amsterdam, Bangkok, London, New Orleans, Rio and San Francisco. It has its bad side, but for my taste there's still plenty of good left, and, you know, you can't argue taste. My tastes run toward hard rock, passion and clash. I don't like easy listening.

A few years back I had this friend visiting from Canada. We're walking down the street and he's nervous and jumpy because the 'hood we're walking in isn't in the Michelin guide. I'm telling him not to worry, that he's being paranoid. As I say the words this shirtless guy holding a long steel pipe steps in front of us, walks over to a car parked by the curb and bashes out all the windows. My friend almost faints. We had walked into the middle of a drug dealers' tiff, and the shirtless guy was beating up another guy's car to get even.

Swinging metal and bursting glass raise blood pressure. But the way I look at it, there's plenty of time to be serene and easygoing when I'm old and dead and stuck in a box. Before I get to that stage, I simply want to see everything and do everything. And the best place to get the full dose is in the big bad city.

The city is like a giant game of Dungeons and Dragons: What's around the next corner? Something thrilling, I bet, or at least interesting. Every walk is a walk on the wild side. I used to live on the top floor of an old empty church off Times Square. I could hang out the window and watch the straight hookers yell at the transvestite hookers: "Three holes is better than two, baby!" I could hang there for hours, watching the police watching the homeboys watching the pimps watching the straight hookers watching the transvestite hookers watching the johns.

But you don't have to live in Times Square to watch the parade of humanity, to witness the spectacle. "Look, there's the dog man! There's the cat lady. There's the pigeon freak." Or "There's the tallest building in the world. Wow, somebody just blew it up!" "I never saw a dog like that before. Oh, it's a huge rat! Cool!" Or simply: "There's John Gotti!"

People who don't live in the city have a bad attitude: "You'd bring your kid up in the city? How could you do that?" Easy. The city is fun, the city is diverse, the city is a learning experience every day. Definitely preferable to that arid wasteland, suburbia, where the latest insipid treat at the multiplex is called art, where the biggest thrill for a 17-year-old is racing in his dad's Volvo while chugging a six-pack, where cutting the lawn is a pastime, where all roads lead to the mall. Suburbia is where everything looks the same in your neighborhood, the next guy's neighborhood, the next suburb, the next state, the next coast. Suburbia equals anonymous boredom.

It was my suburban dad who hipped me to the charm of the city. The World's Fair in Flushing, 1964. The Unisphere. Pavilions. Lots of people. I was 11 and we were tourists and of course we visited Times Square one day. My dad held my hand on the corner of 42nd and Broadway and said, "If you stand here long enough, everyone in the world will walk by sooner or later. Abraham Lincoln walked here, so did Teddy Roosevelt, so did President Kennedy." And in fact I was standing there at that very moment and so was my dad, so I had no reason to doubt that nugget of truth. Just then a protohippie lurched by us, tripping out of his skull. He was howling that he had just met God. That did it--even God hung out on that corner. I was sold on the city.

Nowadays Dad won't visit me in the city because he thinks he's going to get shot or run over by a crack-crazed cabdriver. Shows you what a steady diet of Kojak reruns and caffeine will do to you. I want to say to him: Look, a lot of people live in the city. Some are going to smoke crack. Some are going to carry guns. Some are going to work for the post office. There is some statistical chance of mayhem. And maybe Dad is going to get riddled by homeboys on the IRT. Maybe. But personally, given a choice, I'll take my chances and risk death by gypsy cab over a slow spiritual suffocation any day.

I've got this attitude because I was one of the suburban undead. I walked the walk. Up and down the mall, uhhuh. "Let's go look at those penny loafers at Thom McAn one more time." "Nah, let's see if they have the new Cream album at Record World." "Let's just go back home and throw rocks at cars." "I stole a Playboy--let's hang out in the hut and read it!"

I still spend a lot of time outside the city. As I write this I am sitting in a suburban Toyota dealership waiting to have my crumpled front bumper replaced (a little urban angst translated into metal).

And this waiting room, how can I describe it? Some sort of frightening Sartrian hell created by Jeff Koons: semigloss tan walls; a poster covered with happy, shining people hyping a contest; massive Coke machines humming with refrigerated menace; a wall-to-wall steel-gray rug; a little white plastic table stacked with Toyota trivia and magazines (Glamour: Better Butt Fast!; Time: Anguish over Bosnia, will it be Clinton's Vietnam?); a few half-dead spider plants along a window (an attempt at aesthetics, I guess); and out this window there is no view, only a chunk of abandoned pasture, a parking lot, a highway, traffic. In the distance, just visible, the golden arches of a McDonald's.

I absorb all this and then notice I am also absorbing the ubiquitous element of suburbia: piped-in soft rock complete with commercials. Huey Lewis! Whitney! Michael Bolton! Car auctions! Diet Coke! Benzoyl peroxide! Loud enough to eat away at my brain cells. If I go into the next room and ask the young woman behind the counter to turn the music down, she'll look at me like I'm insane, like I'm some kind of loony, freak ... street person! Yeah, I'm a freak, baby, that's why I live in the city.

You're not convinced. You watched the Los Angeles riots on TV. You know the city is horrific. You saw it with your own eyes. The city is incredibly dangerous. You saw people being dragged from their cars. You saw all those (continued on page 236)Crazed Urbanite(continued from page 214) angry African-Americans (as well as angry Koreans with handguns). You saw the buildings burning. The looting. You saw the scary inner city on TV.

I reply: Smell the coffee--shit happens, like any natural disaster. I saw the scary Mississippi on TV. I saw hurricanes. I saw tornadoes rip shopping centers in half. I saw this gross-out frog plague down in Florida. We don't get any of that stuff in the city.

As far as I can tell, the burbs aren't really any safer than most cities. The safety theory is one of those comforting semimyth truths. My personal experience tells me suburbia is plenty dangerous. I remember everyone in the school bus waving to Joe Lorton as he roared by on his Harley (Joe had been playing hooky). Joe turned and waved back, then drove straight into a telephone pole. Joe lived. Joe was cool. But a lot of my school chums weren't so lucky. By the time I graduated from high school, we had lost kids to drunk driving, thin ice, drug ODs and suicide. Underlying cause? Boredom. Anonymous boredom.

After the L.A. riots, Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, said, "The hatred of cities is the fear of freedom." Dig it. There is safety in lawns! There is safety in the malls. There is safety in the corporate campus.

Safety versus freedom (read: Freedom is dangerous). That's the way people see cities, whether they know it or not. Physical menace frightens people, but not half as much as the unusual, the diverse. Cities are full of lots of different sorts of people with different attitudes. My neighborhood (around Canal Street) is fully stocked with Chinese, movie stars, Italians, Soho artists, Dominicans, Hasids, African-Americans, dancers, pie makers, Wall Street players, Bohemians, straight and gay, rich and poor, old and young, all living cheek to jowl. I think people who find the city so fearsome are really afraid of all those different skin colors, those different languages and accents, those different points of view. Diversity is scary.

But diversity is why I live in the city. I like diversity. I think it's good for me to live with many kinds of people. It makes me bigger as a person. The most balanced people I've ever met grew up in the city. Contrast two men who have been in the news recently: Vincent Foster, who, according to his suicide note, found the city of Washington overwhelming. He was a Little Rock guy, and, theoretically, if he had stayed away from the big bad city, he'd be alive today. But let's look at Harvey Weinstein. He's the guy who was abducted and stuck in a deep dark hole for 12 days with hardly anything to eat or drink. Classic New Yorker: He comes out of the hole and says, "I love New York. I'm not going to change my habits. I want to be able to walk the streets of the city I love." Right on, Harvey. Guy's got guts. He's not afraid. He's a city guy.

A couple of years ago I volunteered to teach a class to some kindergartners at a predominantly Chinese school. Some of the children couldn't speak English very well. Those children were so beautiful, they were so much fun, they were so fine, they were so different from anyone I'd known in my life. One night I was walking through Chinatown and this ancient grandma came up to me and started talking rapidly in Cantonese. I didn't understand until she pointed to the child by her side, one of my students. Smiles all around, without a word of English spoken. I was transported to another world. Just for a few minutes.

I love the parade of humanity that's marching every day. There are Jewish restaurants on the Lower East Side with waiters so old they knew Moses personally. I've had a complete course on the history of Pakistan from talking to cabdrivers. In Tokyo I met a man who is one of the two or three richest people in the world. On the Bowery I've met men who owned nothing but a bag of empty cans. In Chicago I heard Buckminster Fuller speak. At One Hundred Centre Street I've listened to patronizing judges lecture sullen muggers. In San Francisco a pretty girl said hi to me on the street in 1971.

Maybe I'm a voyeur. Watching people is my favorite pastime. I like being part of the teeming millions. All these people. Each one has a dream, a problem, a life. Each one has to get up in the morning and wonder what to wear. Each one believes in something: God, dope, Oprah. Each one wants to love another one. For me it's like living inside a nuclear reactor of possibilities. It's like never really knowing what's coming next: "There are 8 million stories in the naked city." I am one of them.

Where but in a big city will you see millionaire tycoons or fashion models or hipsters with green hair or five-part street a cappella singers? Get on a bus, a subway, a ferry, an escalator ... people everywhere, all kinds, all ages, all races. And that's true in London, Paris, New York, L.A., Bangkok. There's a word for it: cosmopolitan. There are very few cosmopolitan suburbs.

Everything good comes from cities: rap, Dostoievsky, espresso, Marty Scorsese, art, artists, bands, bagels, pizza, hot dogs, Frank Zappa, the Algonquin, the Tour Eiffel, Andy Warhol, Broadway, Muscle Beach, Patpong sex shows, boulevards, the Bulls, street vendors, the Ramones, museums, delis, parks, park benches, canals. Even Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, great singers of praise to the American heartland, lived in cities.

From surfboards to dollhouses to rubber bondage outfits to aroma-therapy massage oils, it's all there if I want it. Virtually every movie, every play, every opera, every dance company, every circus comes to the big city. There's a store that sells every record, every CD, every book, every magazine, every poster, every videotape, every computer program, every comic book. You can get hold of every cigar, every cigarette, every coffee bean, every ethnic food, every plant, every seed. You can play pool, swim, play pinball, bowl, meditate, learn to box, work out, play ball, Rollerblade and mud-wrestle in the city. Every sexual kink and every spiritual sect is here. You can be damned or be saved, it's your choice. It's called freedom.

For me it boils down to the courage to take a look, to try new things. If you're moving scared, your life gets smaller. If you're living large, your life gets bigger. Courage shapes and forms you. A subway train arrives at a platform. It is filled with people. Who are they? Is there someone on this train who might change my life? Love me, befriend me, kill me? When you live in a big city the deck is constantly cut and dealt, over and over, every day. A new hand is laid before you--do what you will.

Of course, there's a little bit of scariness to all this noise and diversity and unpredictability. What's the alternative?

"Let's move to the country!" But the country, country living, "away from it all," is a myth. First of all, the real country is called the country because no one lives there. Even people who think they live in the country don't live in the country. They're really just outside the suburbs. To these people, country means there are farm stands in the summer, the local people speak with some kind of Southern accent (even if they're from Newark), flannel is big, there's an antique store nearby and there is a trailer park over the next hill. Country means you have to fight for the Sunday papers at the local country store. The big fat Sunday papers, the ones that come from ... that's right, the big city.

I've lived in the country, and the vast majority of people who live there never set foot in the woods, don't really walk anywhere, don't farm or go fishing or do dick. They just stay in the house, turn on the TV and think how nice it is that they live in the country. "It's so nice and quiet here. And safe." Ever see that movie In Cold Blood? It was quiet where those folks lived, too.

Everyone needs a break, but you don't get automatic serenity when you move to the country. The country is where toxic waste dumps are, where interstate highways roar with semis, where you have to wonder if radon is seeping up from your basement or if there are raccoons in your attic.

What is this safety thing, anyway? The same generation that used to stick out its collective thumb and grab a ride to nowhere has turned into a generation of timid couch potatoes. The wild teenagers who made Easy Rider and Born to Be Wild into monster hits have grown into adults with fantasies about escaping to some sleepy Alaskan boondocks, living out a Northern Exposure episode. Or grabbing a snug three-bedroom "with easy access to transportation." Or the pinnacle of fantasies: gardening. Growing zinnias. Raising a herd of zucchini. Debating compost technique. Shopping for a trowel. An entire generation shifted from crystal meth to methadone.

Weeding the garden is a good thing. I've done it. I like doing it. It's very Zen. But it's not a life. It's retirement. You're 35 years old, for God's sake!

Have you become so traumatized that your best shot is occupying a couch? Mowing the lawn? Having the early-bird salad-bar special at the Sizzler? Come on, you can do that stuff after your first heart attack. You're not burned out, you're just a big baby!

When I'm strapped into my wheelchair parked on the front porch of some firetrap senior-citizen home, listening to the traffic whiz by on the interstate and hoping my children will stop by to see me after they take their kids to the mall, I'm sure I will really appreciate the manicured lawn and the fresh air. But until then I'm hitting the pavement and taking the A train, because the suburbs are a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

"There's plenty of time to be serene and easygoing when I'm old and dead and stuck in a box."

" 'The hatred of cities is the fear of freedom.' Dig it. There is safety in lawns! There is safety in the malls."