Oh boy! Did you read the news today? I hope you did, because I sure didn't. I missed what Eurasian pan-epidemic was stirring the global marketplace, didn't seem to catch the newest allegations against the Revenge Department (I'm sorry, did I say revenge? I meant Justice), didn't even examine the latest ex-starlet toxicology screen or wade chest-deep through any month-old, drug-ridden stomach contents.
How could someone like myself, so devoted to divulging the dirt and dissecting down-low doings, find themselves so completely out of the loop?
The same way I found myself brunching on scrambled tofu and soy bacon next to an equal parts transvestite, Egyptian pharaoh and black Jesus-esque personal stylist named Andre J. I went to New York City.
It's really the only place I know that can be so disinterested in the general happenings of the globe, despite being so instrumental in influencing, shaping and relaying these events to everyone else outside the five boroughs.
Coming from Washington, D.C., a city where local news constantly blurs into or is transcended by national matters, it's confounding to imagine a locale where endless diatribes about insignificant socialites or stories like "NYPD Jew," a crack investigative piece about New York's first Hassidic police officer, can take up the entire front page of one of the self-proclaimed greatest city in the world's most widely-read newspapers.
And yet I can't fully blame the city for its isolationist tendencies, its fanatical embrace of some sort of downsized and repackaged neo-Monroe Doctrine, because what's falling off the tree in the Big Apple is often just too delectable to not readily devour.
All these world-class goings ons, filled with promises of instant intellectual and cultural enlightenment, all these cracked canals of concrete, paved in golden opportunities, leading to emerald-tinged midtown towers and winding their way toward relative immortality, all of which categorize this self-aggrandizing and endlessly narcissistic megalopolis, have rendered me utterly hypnotized.
That's why I find myself standing moments away from my ultimate taste of emancipated existence before real-life enlistment, assimilation and the crude and dehumanizing buzz cut with which they go along take over my being, I have chosen to tempt fate and move from the comparatively quaint and pastoral setting of the nation's capital and make my way to the big city. I plan on arriving as less of a wide-eyed farm boy than a grizzly, battle-hardened 'Nam vet, having attempted trial runs at New York life while still in school.
But before I can further prove my ability to negotiate the bustling outposts of trade and transportation like Fulton Street or Grand Central, deftly dogging iPod-skin salesmen and skirting by disgruntled money-managers at break-neck speeds, I would need a sublet and some fleeting prospect of even the most meager economic compensation. These were the bitter practicalities that brought me to New York this most recent instance.
And its hard to imagine two things more acrimonious than finding affordable, convenient and livable housing and securing a job as a journalist/writer in this gurgling wasteland of luxury condos and verbose, self-important manglers of the English language.
That's why I wasn't surprised when my dream sublet, a "large room in a loft" in the heart of Chinatown, available long-term for $800 a month, as it was advertised, turned out to be a complete hovel, a place not even worthy of housing multiple families and rats in cramped, windowless quarters. Nor was I flabbergasted that despite my connections and talents, I garnered no responses to my queries for interviews and employment.
Just as the masculine-sounding Tamal, who actually was a time and tobacco-withered feisty, middle-aged Israeli woman still living with twenty-somethings, lied to me and practically bamboozled me into taking a small room for only a month in her rotting warehouse apartment, so too would everyone else be gunning for me, a neophyte living amongst the fangled, fratricidal few, in this droning environment of deliberately-dolled damage and deceit.
Or worse, no one will be gunning, because no one will care or even notice my existence. I have resigned myself to this possibility. It's easier this way, acknowledging the fallibility and general unimportance of what you are and what you do.
But an outright attempt at failure can, at worst, lead to success. Full of bravado and gumption, New York, here I come. Next time you end up in a vegan caf? in the village, you might just overhear the musings of a Tutankhamen look-alike, complete with full-body Technicolor dream smock, shining and glittering in all his messianic glory. Feel free to call me Benjamin J.
