Subterranean alien blues
August 20, 2004 | 12:00am
NEW YORK–Forget Sex and the City. This is hell on impractical shoes. My New York (so far) is not quite Mean Streets, but fits somewhere between the silences of Jim Jarmusch and the tangled triplespeak of Woody Allen. It’s easy to fall in love with the romanticized notion of the city, one glossed with grime and highlighted with low lives, the other fought in high-fashion and endless cocktails with the strategically hip. One week, my first week in New York and I’ve barely scratched the thin veneer on the patina on the surface of this city, a tightly-wound coil on a tiny island, a city that sprawls out into wide boroughs, spilling over the frayed and overfolded corners of my subway guide.
I’ve forgone the usual tourist spots – statue, park, empire, landmarks from You’ve Got Mail can and will wait – I’ve been too harassed with this process called "settling in" that I’ve simply been whizzing by in subways, feet exhausted, arms falling off from heavy lifting, always tired, and hardly ever getting to settle down. The city has indeed gathered its huddled masses on her steaming streets, oblivious to its human traffic, crawling ass to ass. The only moment I had for hushed contemplation came on the way from the airport. Crossing the river, a wall of skyscrapers rose up like an army of giants pounding the night sky. Even my Haitian cab driver silenced his Creole rapping on the CB, instinctively understanding the need for it.
There are millions of hellish moving stories in this city, and I can finally say that one of them is mine. The plan was to rent a U-Haul, get my uncle to drive it, and ransack the apartment of a friend of a friend who was moving out. I would end up with decent second-hand Ikea furniture with only the car to pay. When we got to the apartment however, the bitch of the building manager said that we couldn’t use the freight elevator without a check deposit of $500. Did I have a check? No. Did I even have $500? She wasn’t keen on bribery or sweet talk, either. But the meter was running. After much hawing, we returned the van to the U-Haul guys, who demanded we pay for gas, after having driven all of two miles. "You drive 100 yards, you buy gas," the store clerk said with a steely glint in his eyes, an old immigrant to a new arrival, and promptly took my credit card on which I was charged $65. For nothing, except perhaps the lesson on the law of the jungle. U’d howl, too.
So I was back at ground zero with no furniture. But I decided to buy bedsheets and pillows anyway, because I’m a positive person. At the counter of the linen store, the cashier tried swiping my card. No deal. She tried another register. I waited for 30 minutes of futile swiping. Both registers bleeped angrily before suddenly shutting down, and the store manager gave me horrifying glares, as if I was transmitting an infectious virus from the Philippines via my Visa. It was a brand new card, too. That damn U-Haul.
In panic, I ended up buying an overpriced, understuffed mattress, ordered a desk at target.com, which will arrive by the time I graduate, and am using my suitcase as a shelving unit for clothes which will soon be rendered unseasonal. My flatmate, who already lived in the apartment, still remains a mystery as she is away on vacation. Uncharacteristically, I will refrain from judging her by her book covers (DaVinci Code and The Alchemist mingles uncomfortably with Still Life With Woodpecker and Salman Rushdie).
First day of graduate school, an orientation that unsteered me more than anything. The faculty and students are all brimming and self-congratulatory. Well, we’re spending this much money we should be able to say that we’re in the best journalism school in the best city in the world, right? My classmates, 205 of them, are mostly older, unnervingly articulate news junkies who actually bring copies of the New York Times to class in the morning. They particularly love questioning authorities, with authority (a loud voice will also do.) One student stood up and challenged our opening speaker, the managing editor of Time magazine, with a question about WMDs and whether Time was vigilant enough in reporting fairly about their alleged existence. Me, I kept looking around. You mean I don’t get a press kit and goodie bag? Where the hell am I?
My small group classes were the chance to prove ourselves worthy, or conversely, reveal ourselves as shams. I don’t know what Anima felt, the only other girl from the Philippines and probably from a South East Asian country, but I was definitely taken aback at the amount and quality of work we were expected to do. Hard work I don’t mind, but covering the upcoming Republican National Convention? That must be a hidden circle of hell special for Michael Moore extremists.
One thing I am looking forward to is my neighborhood beat. Because Manhattan is the overplayed equivalent of the Simpson sisters on MTV, J-school students are assigned to cover lesser known, lesser wealthy neighborhoods in remote boroughs. Do stuff like talk to the locals and scam for info, but avoid getting arrested for loitering. Out of a hat I picked "Bushwick" as my adopted hood for the semester. Groan! A Rep Con and a boondock with the unfortunate name of the party’s presidential nominee? Could writing be any more challenging?
I googled Bushwick and instead of a Republican backwater, or even teeming immigrant ghetto, Bushwick turns out to be an old town in Brooklyn that was known, in ye olde days, as the beer capital of New York (how can you go wrong with that?). It was a settlement for German immigrants who put up breweries, naturlich, but has since been laid to industrialized waste and remains to this day a blighted relic of a town now populated mostly by non-whites. Have the attempts to revive and revitalize this historic but decaying section worked at all? Or will the neighborhood, gone to the dogs, be relegated to a past remembered by aging residents no more, only excavated time and again by gum shoe-gazing journalism students? If I title my piece "Bushwhacked" will it be ripped to shreds by my humiliation-loving professors?
Nice meeting you, Manhattan, but I must hop off. You’re just too full of yourselves, literally. Bushwick, here I come.
E-mail me at audreycarpio@yahoo.com
I’ve forgone the usual tourist spots – statue, park, empire, landmarks from You’ve Got Mail can and will wait – I’ve been too harassed with this process called "settling in" that I’ve simply been whizzing by in subways, feet exhausted, arms falling off from heavy lifting, always tired, and hardly ever getting to settle down. The city has indeed gathered its huddled masses on her steaming streets, oblivious to its human traffic, crawling ass to ass. The only moment I had for hushed contemplation came on the way from the airport. Crossing the river, a wall of skyscrapers rose up like an army of giants pounding the night sky. Even my Haitian cab driver silenced his Creole rapping on the CB, instinctively understanding the need for it.
So I was back at ground zero with no furniture. But I decided to buy bedsheets and pillows anyway, because I’m a positive person. At the counter of the linen store, the cashier tried swiping my card. No deal. She tried another register. I waited for 30 minutes of futile swiping. Both registers bleeped angrily before suddenly shutting down, and the store manager gave me horrifying glares, as if I was transmitting an infectious virus from the Philippines via my Visa. It was a brand new card, too. That damn U-Haul.
In panic, I ended up buying an overpriced, understuffed mattress, ordered a desk at target.com, which will arrive by the time I graduate, and am using my suitcase as a shelving unit for clothes which will soon be rendered unseasonal. My flatmate, who already lived in the apartment, still remains a mystery as she is away on vacation. Uncharacteristically, I will refrain from judging her by her book covers (DaVinci Code and The Alchemist mingles uncomfortably with Still Life With Woodpecker and Salman Rushdie).
My small group classes were the chance to prove ourselves worthy, or conversely, reveal ourselves as shams. I don’t know what Anima felt, the only other girl from the Philippines and probably from a South East Asian country, but I was definitely taken aback at the amount and quality of work we were expected to do. Hard work I don’t mind, but covering the upcoming Republican National Convention? That must be a hidden circle of hell special for Michael Moore extremists.
One thing I am looking forward to is my neighborhood beat. Because Manhattan is the overplayed equivalent of the Simpson sisters on MTV, J-school students are assigned to cover lesser known, lesser wealthy neighborhoods in remote boroughs. Do stuff like talk to the locals and scam for info, but avoid getting arrested for loitering. Out of a hat I picked "Bushwick" as my adopted hood for the semester. Groan! A Rep Con and a boondock with the unfortunate name of the party’s presidential nominee? Could writing be any more challenging?
I googled Bushwick and instead of a Republican backwater, or even teeming immigrant ghetto, Bushwick turns out to be an old town in Brooklyn that was known, in ye olde days, as the beer capital of New York (how can you go wrong with that?). It was a settlement for German immigrants who put up breweries, naturlich, but has since been laid to industrialized waste and remains to this day a blighted relic of a town now populated mostly by non-whites. Have the attempts to revive and revitalize this historic but decaying section worked at all? Or will the neighborhood, gone to the dogs, be relegated to a past remembered by aging residents no more, only excavated time and again by gum shoe-gazing journalism students? If I title my piece "Bushwhacked" will it be ripped to shreds by my humiliation-loving professors?
Nice meeting you, Manhattan, but I must hop off. You’re just too full of yourselves, literally. Bushwick, here I come.
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