Goodbye to All That Again

I have stayed too long at the fair.

Article voiceover read by the author

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” - JD

My New York ending has been creeping up on me like spooky ground mist in a low-budget horror. Compared to the electrifying shot to the chest of the start, this gradual building of doubt, this untethering, has felt destabilizing and insidious.

I’m not the first. Joan Didion, born before WW2, has been dead for four years, and yet here I am in 2024 finding complete and utter relevance to every single word of her 1967 essay, Goodbye to All That. A younger, more hopeful version of me is reaching back to a 20-year-old version of Didion who still exists somewhere in the past, eating a peach on Lexington Avenue.

I am a cliché. A transplant writing about leaving a city full of transplants. A white hanky in a sea of hankies waving from the same train window. I am one of a thousand women leaving New York City referencing the best and only essay that ever needs to be written about leaving New York City.

But it must be done. The situation calls for it. I am not so original or immune, and just as I was compelled to come here with a million others, it is my right, perhaps my duty, to make a meal of leaving.

Be warned. In my summing up of the city I will be extremely dramatic, long-winded, and, quite often, flat-out wrong. I’m going to do many embarrassing things. I will pull hack moves like compare the city to a lover, a character, and a work of art. New York is a parody of itself and so demands I become a parody of a writer. The medium is the message! New York is making me do this!!!

Besides, even a bad writer in New York City is still a writer in New York City.

We are all happy clichés.

“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month”- JD

I came to New York City in my early thirties, sold on the same stories that Didion was in her twenties; stories of something - what?- happening. Kerouac, Dylan, and Salinger reeled me in. Ephron, Power, and Seinfeld finished the job.

The exact moment I knew I wanted to live here occurred on a family vacation in 1999 while I was up late sketching the apartment buildings I could see through a veil of snow and fire escapes outside my hotel room window. As I filled up the back of a Best Western napkin with a million little windows and considered the million little lives being led behind each one - fuhgeddaboudit, I was a goner. Just like leaving, coming was inevitable.

When I first moved here, everything was romantic, cinematic, and entirely OK by me. It did not matter what was occurring, how bad things were, how cold the weather, or violent the subway, this was New York City and I was here, surrounded by life, energy and history; a humble percussionist in a cacophonous orchestra, a minor character in a major play.

New York was a dance with a devil, a bucking bronco, a raging current. It was a million mixed metaphors that were all perfect, all true, and all happening at the same time. New York was a novel - a city of 8 million people has to be, it is bursting with such detail. Gorgeous neon liquor signs dangling precariously over a steaming oil drum bbq. A flock of Orthodox Jews hurtling through Crown Heights on e-bikes. An ancient Guatemalan in a cowboy hat selling flowers in the middle of traffic. Dappled light falling across a row of brownstones as violin sounds leak into the start of a summer evening.

As I write this, someone is playing Landslide on the piano next door and I’ve moved into the kitchen so it feels close enough to be a private serenade. I’m telling you, this is New York. It’s so easy to be a writer here, just list anything that’s happening in the vicinity. I bet even NYPD police reports read like poetry.

Anything can happen here because everything has happened here. This is a place of statistical inevitabilities. You’re just as likely to be discovered as you are to have an air conditioner fall on your head. You can be reborn here on the same day you die.

New Yorkers act so invincible because they live in a city that is actively trying to kill them, and every day they wake up and it hasn’t succeeded, they are somehow both richer and poorer for it. Recently, Mary Beth Barone pointed out that this is the only city that can get away with being both the most expensive and the most likely to swallow you up in a sinkhole full of rats. I couldn’t find the exact story she was referencing, not because it didn't happen, but because there are too many New York sinkhole stories to choose from.

In New York, everything becomes lore at the speed of light. Trip over a dead cat? Someone should make a Pixar movie about this! Fall down black ice on your stoop? Pretty sure Carrie Bradshaw did the same in Season 2 of Sex and the City! Black mold in your bedroom? Paint it “Millennial Pink” and transform yourself into “The girl living in a tiny pink bedroom- IN NEW YORK CITAAAY!”

New York is all curation, a work of art. It’s Nitehawks and Great Gatsby. It’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and When Harry Met Sally.

It's also American Psycho.

One morning, pre-pandemic, I got off at Penn Station and was corralled in a swarm of commuters past police tape cordoning off a dead body sitting bolt upright under a white sheet, as four police officers stood around absentmindedly looking at their phones. The scene contained everything: cruelty, tragedy, ennui, and absurdity. As if dying in public at the worst station in all of New York City wasn’t enough, they threw a sheet over his head and made him a ghost.

I was so disturbed by what I’d seen that I spent the morning trying to find out who this man was. Did he have family? Did they know how his body was being treated? How many strangers' eyes would pass over him before a more loving human arrived to lay him down?

But within 24-hours, I was recounting the story with the roll of an eye and a slap of the knee- Oh, New York! Classic New York! Whaddayagunnado? I’m walkin’ here!!!

The city is a wayward scamp you can’t stay mad at- or shouldn't -if you want to stay. It requires superhuman levels of delusion and subhuman levels of compassion, lest your Home Alone 2 turn into We Need to Talk About Kevin.

“It was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand [...] that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” - JD

Some people will tell you that New York is dead. That the New York scented with lilac and jasmine that haunted Joan Didion in 1967, no longer exists. That all the good places, the authentic places, the “real” places have been swallowed up by Shake Shacks, Urban Outfitters, and Warby Parkers; by monstrous Instagrammable handbags on Fifth Avenue, by over-lit vape stores decorated by 14-year-old boys on Adderall; that capitalism has feasted on the last corners of the city's culture and sucked the marrow dry, and we’ve all been living in an expensive facsimile, chasing a dream used up by people long-dead, two generations ago.

It really doesn’t matter. People will continue to come here generation after generation to curate their own version of the city, of a life, and not one of these versions, including Didion’s, is real. We’re all making it up; riffing and improvising based on borrowed memories, song lyrics, and end credits. New York is a nostalgia machine. It's so perfectly American.

There’s no doubt the city has changed, that COVID shrunk it, gutted it, killed large swathes of its best and brightest with not even a memorial to remember them by. There’s rising cases of deed theft and rampant gentrification, homelessness is on the rise and people are suffering violently and publicly on street corners and subways stations in all five boroughs. Our mayor is a crook and a creep, and all his deputies have been indicted, and because of him, our delusion meters are forced off the charts in the face of the price of a studio apartment. People are tired. Tired of the corruption, the dirt, the noise, the expense; of the lies they’re forced to eat - about trickle-down economics and the health of The American Dream - lies that are getting bigger and bigger and harder to swallow. The city is stuck in our throats.

But this is happening all over the country. New York is just a symptom of America and none of this is new. Capitalism isn't eating New York, it is New York. New York is not dying, New York is New- Yorking. Harder, faster, better, stronger. Growth at all costs. A million bubbles fit to burst. The mold has spread so far and so wide, that no amount of Millennial Pink will cover it up.

New York is not dead. New York is at the epicenter of a much larger awakening.

It is no coincidence that a recent cultural flashpoint, a hint of revolution, happened last week on the streets of Manhattan. In the richest country in the world, in the richest city in the country, where medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, a vigilante shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in broad daylight. The assassin, who was at large for almost a week, avoided almost all of the city’s 25,000 CCTV cameras, and made his escape on an e-bike. And when the NYPD - a force whose budget has skyrocketed under Eric Adams, a force who recently shot into a packed carriage of civilians in pursuit of a passenger dodging a $2.90 fare - asked for the public’s help, the good people of New York City held a comedy lookalike contest in Washington Square park.

I love it here. I hate it here. New York is the internet.

To the people who say New York isn’t the same, which version would you like to go back to? When Didion wrote Goodbye to All That, this country, her country, was entering its deadliest year of the Vietnam war; a conflict that would go on another eight years and claim the lives of over 58,000 Americans; the only material profit being the millions of dollars Hollywood reaped through its cinematic catharsis. Nostalgia machine.

The same year America tapped out of Vietnam, New York City’s debt reached $15 billion and was on the verge of bankruptcy. In response, the city slashed public services and laid-off city workers en masse, resulting in nearly a million middle class families fleeing to the suburbs, leaving the poorest communities to fend off rising crime, crack cocaine, and the incoming AIDS epidemic. But when people talk about wishing to live like a starving artist in New York City, this is the city they’re talking about. Nostalgia machine.

As far as I see it, this is simply MAGA with a wise-guy accent. A comfortable, cozy lie. New York is Thanksgiving. New York is Friends. New York is The Obama Years. New York is the way this country sells us itself. Nostalgia machine.

“Part of what I want to tell you is [...] how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots” - JD

There's no denying we’re really doing something over here. We’re all working on an enormous group project independently and without communicating. It’s completely selfish and entirely collaborative. Deeply human, if not humane.

But, as Lily Tomlin once said,“ The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

And for me, it’s time to tap out. New York is my Vietnam, my verge of bankruptcy. Perhaps I am weak or unimaginative. Perhaps my convictions were never that strong. I am under no illusions that New York has been much harder on many more people with much less privilege than me, and that to New York natives this place is something else entirely; a place they’ll never leave or ever want to. A love I’ll never know.

And yet, a small universe is collapsing and it matters a great deal to me.

In saying goodbye to New York, I am dismantling one profoundly specific dream of a life, and wherever I end up, I now know it will not be here. It will not be New York.

What I’ve achieved I’ll be proud of, what I didn’t will haunt me. I didn't get published and made no real attempt at becoming a TV writer. I made a lot of money, and then I spent a whole lot more. I've never been to Marie’s Crisis, stepped foot inside 30 Rock, or skated in Central park. And there are a million bagel shops, corner booths, and noodle bars I will never eat at.

But I did have a dalliance with a man I met at karaoke night at Montero’s and openly cried in a yellow taxi crossing the Williamsburg bridge. I’ve tried stand-up at UCB and taught musical theatre in midtown. I’ve studied redlining with socialists on Utica and eaten baklava with Palestinians in Bay Ridge. I’ve marched on eerily empty streets in Manhattan and danced to house music on Dekalb. I have witnessed countless sunrises creep across the jungle of houseplants in my living room and marveled at a swarm of dogs in glow-in-the-dark collars barrel across Fort Greene at night. This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. I have lived a million little New York moments.

But that’s all spin and a deeply lopsided picture. When I say “New York” what I mostly mean is Brooklyn. Manhattan was for networking and the odd night out. I made a handful of treks up to the Bronx and out to Queens. And Staten Island? Sorry, never met her.

It’s also a narrative made up only of highlights. If I focused on the low points, it would be just as fair to say that my time here was mostly spent feeling either too hot or too cold. I have procrastinated, doom-scrolled, and sat through more disappointing dates than I care to remember. I have worried excessively about my future - in bed, on the toilet, eating cold pasta over a kitchen sink. I have felt bored at a Coney Island baseball game and confused about basketball at MSG. I have drunk so much alcohol that I finally quit, then spent the next two years leaving parties early and still woke up worrying I’d somehow embarrassed myself. I have watched hours, days, months, years pass while working behind the same desk in my living room, looking into the mirror in the opposite bedroom, asking myself, “ Is this it? Is this something? Is this funny or sad? Is this a bit? Is this just life?”

It’s all mixed in there, all the good/bad. If I’m being verbose it’s because it just keeps coming; the feeling, the narratives, the New York everything. I’m buttoning something up that will never be contained. I’m crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s on a bucket full of snakes.

I loved New York so much, for so long, and couldn't imagine ever feeling different; like a well person forgetting they have ever been sick. But for the last eighteen months, the delusions and dreams have splintered and chipped. In eight years, I have cycled through two groups of close friends - first, the ex-pats, and then the Americans - and now, all but a handful have moved to Los Angeles, Paris, London, or boroughs so far away they may as well be in another city. Big, cool jobs have turned into crumby, little ones, and I’m neither making it nor faking it. If my career was once a beautiful, plump carrier pigeon, it’s now just a dusty scavenger stumbling around the city on stumps. I am writing this in winter, in a cold so sticky, I cannot imagine I have ever been warm.

In the end, it came down to the numbers in the bank account. I have no time left to contemplate or pontificate if this is the end. It simply is. THE END.

I am attempting to create ceremony out of an unceremonious thing. I am snatching one last long look at the city as they wheel me away, like being knocked out of an insanely high-stakes dance competition. There I was, jitterbugging and jiving with the best of them; sweat cascading off my temples, panicked eyes, spasming back, wishing it would end whilst having the time of my life, before getting the dreaded tap on the shoulder: Come on love, time to go.

It’s a sad relief.

In the final scene of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jimmie sits on a bus eavesdropping in on a conversation between two valley girls who are complaining about the city he’s lived in all his life. He turns to them and says, "You don't get to hate it unless you love it"

I am not leaving New York because I hate it, and yet, if I had the money, I'm not sure I’d stay. But the love is bedded in. It is mature and based on as close to a full picture of the city as I can get. My version. I love New York in spite of itself, just like how you love a person. This has been a long goodbye and a complicated breakup preceded by a thousand moments of joy, laughter, loneliness, and regret. Connection and disconnection. High/low.

Of course, I’m keeping the apartment. Ask a New Yorker on his deathbed if he’s keeping the apartment and he’ll reply, “Oh yeah - just in case I come back” to which his family will all reply “Smart”, as one of them turns off his life support. I’m subletting mine to a British woman of similar age to me when I moved here. And Virgil, my old 4Runner, has been sold to a woman writer who, like me, mainly wanted him for his looks. Analog. Clunky. Nostalgia machine.

So, for now, it’s goodbye to all that. Didion was not the first and I won’t be the last.

(I'm worried that if I stop typing, it will make this all true, that this really is the end…)

♫ You say goodbye, and I say hello ♫ - switch that, reverse it, times infinity.

(…that if I contain this all in an essay, I can never come back…)

Little deaths and sudden endings are happening all over the city in perfect balance with all the births and fresh starts.

(…that it won't be perfect, that I would have done none of it justice…)

As one girl takes a bow, another bounces into the opening credits, and feels a sharp stab of cold air punch her in the chest - Shape up, look lively, you’re here!

(…but maybe that’s just how we feel about everything, in the end.)