I Totally Meant to Do That (6 page)

This is important. Don’t wear your pearl earrings on the subway. A criminal will rip them from your ears. My friend Nancy Lily was in a taxi in New York and it was summertime, I guess, because the window was down, and somebody reached in and yanked her gold necklace off her neck! She could have been choked! She wasn’t; it broke. But they ran off with it. So don’t wear jewelry on the bus. Or on the subway. Just don’t wear it at all.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Now, costume jewelry is fine. Unless it
looks
real, and then I wouldn’t wear that, either.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And don’t ride the subway after dark. Promise me you’ll take taxis. Anytime after nine p.m. Don’t walk anywhere!”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good.
And don’t look at anybody!!
”

again, giving me advice before I moved to New York, which was a while ago, so you’re probably assuming that the above is a reimagining. It is not. Neither, however, did I record and transcribe our chat. How do I remember the script? I heard it anew a couple of days later, again a week after that, a dozen more times through the following months, and about once or twice a year since. Like a frat guy with a classic comedy film, I have favorite bits I like to quote.

First, I love how, in spite of the number of times I’ve previously heard the drama unfold, she always clarifies that her friend with the necklace did not choke. Spoiler alert: she was fine. I’m also particularly fond of my aunt’s suggestion that I should continue to wear costume jewelry, as if to say, “The criminals can’t keep us from accessorizing.” The best part, though, is her outro, “Don’t look at anybody.” Sometimes it varies. “Look down” and “Keep your eyes on the ground” are also in the mix, but, regardless, the intimation is the same: New Yorkers are wild animals; they will attack if provoked.

In short, she worries, thinks the city is very dangerous. And I think she is hilarious—she once paused midscript, pulled the phone away from her mouth, and shouted to my uncle, “Lucius! You have to remember to hide the barbecue potato chips from me!” So I ignored her advice. I shouldn’t have. As it turned out, my life was in danger the instant my feet touched Manhattan pavement. That’s when I was hit by a car.

The taxi I hailed at LaGuardia Airport delivered me to the northeast corner of Union Square, an intersection that I have since come to believe was designed by M. C. Escher, and I, with a duffel bag on my back as big and awkward as the grin on my face, opened the door onto traffic. “Other side!” shouted my driver.

Here is where things get fuzzy. I don’t know why I ignored his admonition—perhaps I mistook it for an overenthusiastic version of “Catch you on the flip side”; or maybe I thought he was screaming at the tape deck—but ignore it I did, and then stepped directly in front of a moving vehicle. Thanks to agile footwork, mine on the pavement and the oncoming driver’s on the brakes, I got off with a graze. It was more of a bump-and-jump. The offending automobile didn’t even stop. I landed on the intersection’s island, blinked once or twice, and looked back at the car just in time to catch the gaze of its stunned passenger, like an apparition through the glass.

“Other side”? Yeah, of the realm of the living. I may have been deaf to every warning preceding the incident, but I heard its follow-up message loud and clear: “I’ll get you next time.”

Uh-oh. This was worse than my aunt had imagined. Criminals were merely one component of a much bigger foe: the city itself. That’s when I realized New York was out to get me. The city isn’t evil; it’s simply in its nature to destroy. It can’t help itself. Kind of like the god of the Old Testament. Except New York is craftier, enjoys the chase. It will sneak up behind you, giggling, and stuff dynamite in your backpack. And if you happen to spin around too soon, it will hide its weapon, look the other way, and whistle. It’s a coy killer, a lethal coquette—when caught in the act, New York bites its lip and twirls its hair, and all you can say is, “Oh, New York, you’re
so
bad!”

“New York is sorry,” it will say, in its adorable E.T.-like way of speaking in the third person.

“It’s all right,” you reply, because you can’t stay mad. “Just promise not to do it again.”

“New York promises,” it says, but you know its fingers are crossed.

And sure enough, you later find a skull-and-crossbones bucket propped above your door. The city relishes its perdition. It’s a gremlin, a cartoon assassin.

It’s the villain in a 1980s video game: In order to keep us from stealing its coins, it throws poisonous mushrooms and deadly beetles in our paths. Most residents learn quickly to jump out of the way. But not I. During my first couple of years in Manhattan, I was foiled by them all.

Once, while carrying two laptops and headed to a sales call for my first job at an Internet start-up, I lodged the kitten heel of my right boot in a sidewalk grate obscured by the snow, and slapped the ground like an inverted rake. Another time, craning to see an art installation driving down the street on a flatbed truck, I walked into a pole. In fact, I frequently rammed into poles—and fire hydrants, bike racks, trash cans, orange traffic cones. Anything beneath eye level made contact with my groin. I was a live-action
America’s Funniest Home Video
.

A gust of wind covered my fresh vanilla ice cream cone with dirt and trash. A falling Diet Coke can—origin unknown—bounced off my head. It was empty, but still: That is absurd. I’m not making this up. I was under constant cartoonish attack. But why? Why me? Everyone else seemed to get through their days unfazed. While I moved frenetically, lost my footing, tripped, wobbled, and splat, the other pedestrians remained stone-faced through the assault, hardly adjusting their gaits or paths. And I’d wonder, What the hell do they know?

It couldn’t be that they’d memorized the board, because the
board is constantly changing. One day a pothole is on the left side of the intersection and the next day it’s on the right. Scaffolding goes up and down. There’s a fountain in front of
every
financial institution in midtown, and a Starbucks on each block. The only reliable landmark was the World Trade Center. Even so, knowing which way was south, while crossing an intersection, didn’t keep me from stepping into the wire netting of a slaughtered, abandoned umbrella. It captured my foot like a bear trap. I dragged it all the way across Houston, limping and shaking my leg, before I could beat off the zombie arachnid.

In fact, in that incident, seeking a landmark had been the source of my downfall; for an instant, I stopped paying attention to my immediate surroundings. That’s what makes the city such a clever goblin beastie: Not only does it put you in an environment where, with one distraction, you’re toast; it then fills that environment with screaming, blinking distractions, daring you to lose your concentration. One night, I took a left on Broadway and fell into a sinkhole of paparazzi flashbulbs following Uma Thurman, who’d come to see the magician David Blaine, who’d trapped himself inside a hunk of ice—in the middle of Times Square.

If that scene ever occured in a small Southern hamlet, the town would rename itself Uma-Blaineville, Home of the Ten-Story Neon Pepsi Ad, and tourists would spend entire days strolling through the wax-figure exhibit built to commemorate the event. But in New York I had only a split second to glance at the circus lest I be trampled by the crowd, run over by a car, or electrocuted by a beverage on its way to fight Godzilla.

It’s too dangerous to dwell on any moment in New York because something else of consequence is always on its heels. “Oh my gosh,” I’d say to myself while walking to work at that start-up, Foodline.com, “check out that corporate dude riding his bike in a suit and Ugg
boots—ha! … Except no, laugh later, because watch out for these guys carrying a sheet of glass across your path. Cool: The Flatiron Building is reflected in it from … Stop! File that image away, and instead avoid these high school kids making out in the middle of the street. Wow, her tongue is all the way out of her … Wait, not now. Right now look out for that—”

Whap!

Seriously, my hips and thighs were a menagerie of infrastructure-induced bruises; the city was beating the crap out of me. I know that life isn’t fair, but it was a lot fairer before the Great Groin Assault of 2001. And if I couldn’t get in sync with the flow of the streets, poisonous mushrooms and all, then maybe I didn’t belong. Maybe I should just go home. I didn’t want to. But clearly New York was trying to weed me out; I’m surprised I was never rammed in the pelvis with a gardening spade.

As it turns out, though, there is a silver lining around pole thwacking. It is by nature a behavior-altering stimulus. Eventually, when I hit one, it hit me: My problem was that I had misunderstood the phrase “watch where you’re going.” I was failing on the streets of New York because I’d been looking for impediments in my environment, when I should have clocked the faces of people successfully avoiding those obstacles. I had neglected to tap into the hive brain.

Here’s how it works. Instead of scanning 360 degrees for danger, the potential of which is too voluminous and varied to manage alone, one covers only his or her immediate path—including fellow pedestrians therein. This way, the responsibility of assessing the landscape, knowing what to ignore and from what to run, is shared among the hive, allowing each bee to go about its duties. For example, if people ahead of you avoid a swath of concrete, you can deduce, even if you cannot see, the presence of something that might attack your crotch.

So, actually,
all
we do is look at each other. Aunt Jane was wrong. It’s precisely how we stay alive. If a zoo-escaped gorilla is behind me, I will receive that information in the facial expression—terror or lack of terror—of the person walking toward me. A dozen times a second, this silent conversation transpires:

“Gorilla behind me?”

“Nope. You’re safe. Me?”

“Nah.”

Gorilla? Gorilla? Gorilla? Gorilla?

It’s so efficient; it doesn’t even require eye contact. What beautiful cooperation is born from the perpetually imminent threat of death. It’s our form of the trust fall. I run to catch a subway train only if someone a hundred yards ahead of me in the tunnel does. Who needs traffic lights? Just cross when other people cross—or rather, when other
bees
cross; the behavior of tourists and rookies must always be ignored.

This city may praise individuality, but its residents are a herd. When one walks up Seventh Avenue, she is stepping behind one person, in front of another, around a couple holding hands, underneath a window washer, over the heroin addict nodding off, and between two piles of poo. New York offers only a prepositional life. No action exists without a modifier.

Buildings don’t even have solitary identities. No one cares about the specific address of a restaurant on Sixth Avenue; they only need to know that it’s between Seventeenth and Eighteenth streets. Entire neighborhoods are designated by what’s around them rather than what’s in them: SoHo is the area “south of Houston,” TriBeCa is the “triangle below Canal,” and SoBro is a Realtor’s transparent attempt to draw yuppies to the South Bronx. Just as every plank on a train track is nailed to another, so will every person in Times Square get shoved about.

I became obsessed with the New York hive brain, which was somewhat surprising as I was currently enjoying my escape from its North Carolina counterpart, a group mind whose effect is summed up thusly: Everyone knows everything about everyone. Scientists couldn’t prove whether or not it “takes a village” to rear a child where I’m from, because it would be impossible to devise a control group.

And I use the word “rear” instead of “raise,” because, as my grammarian mother reminds me, “chickens are raised; children are reared.” Wherever I went, people knew me. The amount of eyes in the backs of heads of the number of mothers and fathers standing sentinel over the locales of my youth would have rendered Big Brother redundant.

They watched each other, too. That’s just how it is in a small town. There is no unfamiliar vista. However Orwellian the effect, the intentions are predominantly innocent. Sure, some are gossips, and yes, schadenfreude does live, in spite of sounding foreign, in many Southern homes, but for the most part, those stereotypes are false. Southerners are no more nosy or meddlesome than suburbanites in other geographical locations. The reason our group mind is more consuming than most of its counterparts is simply because these familiar vistas exist in space
and
time. These families have been up in each other’s beeswax since the
Mayflower
landed. If Jung had studied the heroes in our dreams, he’d have discovered they all wear bow ties.