Ah, America! Truly a bizarre, wonderful and disgusting place all at once. I am writing this with my mind cast back to a trip I took to New York and California sometime last year. I remember being introduced to the enigmatic qualities of America as early on as the plane ride. The free, in-flight catalogue selling new toys and shiny objects was filled with blond models, sun-kissed with six-packs at the ready, a devastatingly perfect set of pearly white teeth ready to flash at you instantaneously as they 'felt the burn' on the latest piece of home exercise equipment which you simply have to have. I suppose we have the same things over here of course, but there it's a little different. It's as if you're purchasing a piece of pure Americana, a delicious segment of life in these modern times from The Land of the Brave. You can almost smell the essence of The American Dream, peeling off the tarmac as you land. Unfortunately, if you arrive in Philadelphia as I did, you are greeted with the part of the country which woke up before the dream really began. A sea of twisted faces vomiting words in a strange drawl which never has the clarity to be indecipherable awaits you. The hushed manoeuvring of passengers at invisible gunpoint is mirrored, in terms of intensity, only by the violent gesturing through gritted-teeth (known locally as hospitality) or, much more likely, sheer bovine ineptitude. It seems somehow startling that passengers are actually willing to pay money to be treated with such disregard, or to be threatened with taser retribution and penal correctitude if the cigarette lighter they carry in their pocket accidentally sets off the security door. But I decided to hold off on judging the place fully until later, as making an opinion on an entire country based on one airport might be seen as a bit premature.I remember flying in over the ocean when we eventually made our way to New York City. The moon above the clouds was casting their shadows over the water, where there were vast expanses of insipid darkness interrupted only by the weary single light of some passing ship, drudgingly maintaining its lonely vigil. Above the clouds, on a plateau with the moon, there was perfect stillness: no waves, no lights, just a darkness so fragile that the sea seemed to ache to carry its weight. And then, one by one, the lights of the city came into view, first few, then many. As quickly as the started to appear, they multiplied, until the entire earth was blanketed with lights, each one representing a hundred lives or so, teeming and spilling over, breaking like surf into one another. I remember riding in a taxi on the way to my girlfriend's brother's house, and being both strangely in awe, and also annoyed at Jen for inhaling the life so deeply. My girlfriend lived in New York for 6 years before she met me, and adored it, which she tells me about constantly. At that moment, I could not understand why she kept aggrandising the magic and soul of the place. It began to instill in me a fear, a sense of invading hatred and inferiority towards everything that her life had once represented over here. I began to instantly despise every ray of summer sunlight that had broken through her bedroom window in the afternoon, the smell of every blade of cut grass that Central Park had offered out, palms outstretched, to all the crazy and wistful lovers that had strolled leisurely through its gates. The life she bleated about perpetually angered me because I could not understand it - I had not been part of it. For me, there were no memories of drizzle-scented evenings in the rain, and I disliked every moment in her mind that was a threat to me. At first, I could not see the upside of New York at all. The first real site that greeted me on exiting the cab was two men having a fist fight while some girl, an attractive, vacuous entity floating somewhere around and in between them, tried half-heartedly to pull them apart, secretly enjoying the experience of having two men fight over her. The less said about the flat that we were staying in, the better. Even when we went to Brother Jimmy's, it seemed to me to be like Bodean's or a million other places in Camden, or anywhere, for that matter. Perhaps due to Jen hyping up the place so much, or perhaps it was due to a sense of stubbornness on my part, a sullen, petulant refusal to accept that anything in Jen's life had any real significance before I entered it, but I felt that, for the first of my time in New York, I was waiting for magic to happen that was hard to spot. But it finally came.
The best way to experience the city is to simply allow it to entice you: you have to forget everything you think you've seen in the films or read in the books, you have to suspend your disbelief and entreat yourself to play with the culture and the street life, and soon enough you'll find your mind dancing around the cliches and taking part in the beat of the place. Patrick and Jen would say things like it would amaze them how you could be in a nice part of town, then walk ten minutes and be on the wrong side of the tracks, but I hardly noticed that, that happens everywhere. I was taken aback by the way you can do certain meaningless things, like walking down the street eating a bagel, and it feels as if you've lived in the place all your life. It's as if the more you enter the discourse and place both feet inside the map, the more the city gives you: it feels as if she wants you to take part, to be a piece of the cycle. The first time I really felt like I was enjoying myself was when we walked around Central Park in the afternoon, the sun shining down through the roofs of the skyscrapers onto the trees, atop the heads of the careless ice-skaters. At that moment, I felt I could have put my ear to the ground and heard all that was bubbling away inside her: the city would open herself up to me, life a first-time lover hesitantly quivering with anticipation in the back seat of a Sunburst Red Camino. Of course, one of the greatest and most troubling things about New York is its contradictions. On the one hand you get the sense that the place exhales a tingling and tangible sense of that most precious of things, acceptance - on the other, if at times feels as its New York is a melting pot, a bubbling crucifix where people of all races, colours and creeds gather to hate each other. In the same breath in which the place has a sense of magic and beauty, in the same moment it seems to have a rippling underbelly of violence, a whole community of heathens, tramps and addicts scrabbling underneath to survive, to make themselves heard.
One such neighbourhood is Chinatown. The first sight that greeted me here was a gang of teenagers, children really, who were being chased down the subway steps by an enraged Chinese woman, having quite clearly stolen something of minuscule value. The shame was not in the loss of monetary profit, but in the crime itself: one more beaten act against a hopeless immigrant, a constant reminder of how she shall never belong, and how the advantageous urchins of the street will perpetually punish her for it. The streets are teeming with such unfortunate people, polished beggars who have alleviated themselves from serfdom just far enough to own a stall, perhaps even a shop, selling broken sunglasses and poorly-stitched T-shirts saying "I [HEART] NY". Even here, life seems to be a pastiche of itself, a hotpot of cobbled memories and hastily strewn together stereotypes. I remember the food kitchen that Patrick and I went into to get pork balls. It seemed almost like an exact replica of something one might see in Shanghai; even to someone who has never been to the East, who has never smelled the burning Jasmine incense or listened dreamily to the tinkle of temple bells across a rice field, the organism of voices, faces, and a hundred thousand smells dances on the back of your mind, like a forgotten movie or a splintered newspaper archive. The city is like a tailor of culture; it cuts, sews, discards, blends strange fabrics together in unruly patterns that seem like they could never fit each other, until you take a step back and examine the piece as a whole, critique the design in terms of a certain aesthetic, and realist that the work succeeds in the way it selects the minor elements and transposes them into a larger frame. The feelings of conjunction and synergy rose again in Brooklyn Heights. Wandering around, certain streets idled lazily into the footpaths of my memory, and reminded me of towns and forgotten places in Spain and France, distant memories of childhood holidays that suddenly come rushing to the forefront; a beach, a walk, an ice-cream. The world can seem so monstrously large, so gargantuan and ancient as to freeze the soul in a dead terror, until you realise that little pieces of the life you know pop up time and again, and that the new things that you learn are really just the same things that you've always known. You listen to the tales and the sea-soaked ballads and they seem new, and so instantly more important, but they are the same stories, the same folklore that you have heard all of your life. The outlines are already there, it's just that the shading is a little different. The thought of living there becomes instantly easier to swallow, as the things that I will miss will already be there. And more than that; a million new chapters await, for the city breathes life into stagnation, and can arouse the soul in even the most weary person.
Jen and I had a conversation at one point that summed it up pretty well. She had the idea of opening a coffee bar somewhere, and it seemed so plausible and even easy to accomplish that the concept ridiculed me for not having thought of it sooner. More than that; with every breath, the aromas of freshly percolated beans and laid-back Bohemia advanced towards me, and I immediately began to form in my head such plans of grandeur that my hands started to shake. That is why people go there. The city resonates hope, and the sense that the ordinary amongst us can do anything leaks out of the walls, the sky, the gritted paving stones, a high-jolt ultra-shock buzz out of apathy. Something as banal as sandwiches in the park - an incident of such meaningless occurrence that I feel embarrassed mentioning it on this page - was an event, was 'something that people do', was a piece of the action. It holds a wonderfully comforting sensation - when everyday acts in your life hold even a little significance, the world begins to change. You begin to feel your spine crack gently as you stand up straighter, and the people look at you with an air of fascination. You are metamorphosised, evolved from this drab little creature that gets on the bus and goes through Bank to work every day, stooping your malformed neck to stay out of the rain. You are a part of the significance, and a finer glory there isn't.
