On NYC, Mamdani, and No Politics

The Mayoral Race and Love Letters

Hemmingway said you can’t write about Paris while you’re living in Paris.

I saw it earlier. The pizza delivery car rattling along some country road with a New York Pizza bubble sign on the roof, heading into the emptiness of an Appalachian Friday night.

New York. I hope they don’t kill it.

I sat on the back porch of the mountain lodge after everyone had gone to bed. The mood lights shone through the fog, and I begin to think.

There’s a radical socialist heavily favored to be the next NYC mayor. It doesn’t seem good.

Is this the place to rail against, trying to counter oiled plans of destruction (oh so reasonable) with the crackling megaphone of a street pundit, the abstracted fire of Internet prophets? Probably not. None of us are here for that.

But Havel says to “seek a pre-political solution. Tell the truth and live a good life.” Solzhenitsyn labored in the Soviet gulag, asking himself how he helped build the nightmare. I’m wondering the same of myself, and of COVID, and other tyranny.

For starters, I’ve been so ungrateful. If I meet Yogi Berra when I die, or George Gershwin, or Frank Sinatra, what would I say about not mentioning New York? Well, nobody remembers sayings or songs or love letters.

I guess Hemmingway was right again. You can’t write about a city you’re in. I sat in the dark and quiet and cloud on the back porch of the lodge, and begin to write.

You’ve got to say thank you.

I Heart NY

Emptiness is noisy. A thousand ghosts appear, and since there’s nobody there to muffle the sound of their feet, their footsteps echo, subterranean.

A subway platform is the emptiest place in New York right after the train leaves. I stopped strumming the guitar. The tunnel exhaled darkness and ozone and the sound of the wheels rumbling over some unseen set of points–and all the ghosts flew out, whispering.

See, even if you don’t know anyone in New York to say goodbye to and feel bad that they took the 7 train uptown and didn’t stay a few more minutes, the ghosts still haunt you, even if her perfume doesn’t. The steel beams and grimy tile is steeped in memories too old to be under copyright or thought-right or any right, except that they exist no matter how many times the MTA paints the station. The city has a patina of ghosts and dirt and the faint reverberations of a Yankees game in 1938.

I used to go to the city to play street music. Saturday night hits hard when there’s a disco band in the subway playing “Stayin’ Alive” on one platform, and three levels down an ace banjo player, and then the most beautiful girls in the world walk by and a horde of teenagers shouting before some train arrives and another train and brakes shriek and you’re buffeted by a warm wind from the tunnels. Then you know what it means to be alive.

I ate pizza in Queens. Pizza in Queens. How charming. Suddenly I was related to Italian grandfathers I never had, and caught the hint of what it’s like to work a long day fresh off the boat.

I thought of my great Uncle Eddie–not Italian, but optimistic in that classic New England way–and baseball, and possibility. Somebody should play some Billy Joel or a polka.

More pizza, a block north of Times Square. A homeless lady needed pizza too, so we ate together. She was getting her act together, just a few more weeks and she’d be good. Some Wall Street dandy yelled at her, and I yelled at him with a New York affectation and she joined in and we all felt part of the city.

The air is polluted, but electric. Dreams: sleeping, moving, dashed, waking, waiting, are all piled up, and the little water towers on top almost disguise them as buildings. But if you stop for a New York Minute in the crosswalk, and gaze uptown at this wilderness of human striving, you’ll see right through it. Central Park gives a respite–or are the plants bustling, too?

Another time it rained, so I took to the underground like a rat. I stayed there all day, going from station to station, making four dollars I think.

Oh, how will I ever get anywhere?

A long shiny tiled tunnel connected some platform to another. I set up opposite a mural, reveling in the acoustics, but growing tired of being ignored. I felt small, like a firefly blinking against the Milky Way.

The mural said Dripping Water Hollows Out A Stone.

The ghosts sauntered by, this time wearing overalls. We built this, you know. Don’t forget it, Sonny.

I love New York.

A younger me waiting for a train north. Photo credit Noah Urban.