Nice Try

by Josh Gondelman

  By midnight, Leah and I had become fairly convinced that we hadn’t taken any of the kind of powerful psychoactive substances that necessitated constant hydration and prohibited drinking alcohol. I felt pretty confident about this because my mental state was such that I was still concerned with proper hydration as opposed to which people, objects, or ideas I could rub up against for maximum physical pleasure.

  Relatively certain we weren’t in any imminent danger, Leah and I decided to participate in the champagne toast when the clock struck midnight. We clinked glasses of whatever vintage is handed out at bowling alleys in Brooklyn, as the Roots emerged to play “Auld Lang Syne,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and several other standards, backed by a full-on brass ensemble. The single glass of champagne sent me almost immediately from zero to “Hooray!” where I settled comfortably for the rest of the night.

  The last note of the final encore receded into the night around three o’clock, at which point ?uestlove announced that after a short break, he would reemerge and deejay until 7:30 a.m. Even by the most generous allowances, that is significantly past my bedtime. By my estimation, once a party approaches the length of a full day in an office, any amount of Having Fun is still essentially Doing Work. Leah and I agreed that staying out until three in the morning after trying to do drugs constituted a successful New Year’s Eve, and it was time to head home.

  We walked out into 2011 for the first time. It was cold and dark, as most years are at the beginning. It also felt hopeful and full of potential. In exactly seven months, I would live in New York City, a big step that started to feel more possible after New Year’s Eve. I felt capable of anything that night, except for catching a cab back to Manhattan.

  We were still living in (as unimaginable as it sounds) a pre-Uber world, so the process of finding someone to drive you home consisted of the draconian method of shooting your hand into the sky like a fleshy road flare. Finally, at four a.m., we arrived back at Leah’s apartment. As final proof we were not on ecstasy, we fell asleep without having sex.

  The next morning, Leah texted Ben that his friend had sold us bogus molly. Hours later, when he woke up, he replied:

  Bummer. You got a blank postcard.

  At first that felt like kind of a cute stoner euphemism for his friend screwing us out of seventy-five dollars. But with time, “blank postcard” has made more and more sense to me. What we’d paid for wasn’t the uniform tourist experience of taking MDMA. Instead we’d spent seventy-five bucks for the chance to fill in the space as we saw fit, and we managed to make it uniquely special and lovely.

  Still, that New Year’s Eve provided a microcosm of why Leah and I eventually broke up. My ceiling for excitement was her floor. We were always slightly off, two words listed as synonyms under the same thesaurus entry that weren’t quite interchangeable. I was trying to be a partner; she wanted an accomplice. She was out for an experience; I turned it into an experiment. I was Doing Drugs; she was just going out.3 Those two things are technically the same, but they also very much are not. Exactly what I thought would make me Boyfriend Material is what made me a bad boyfriend in this situation.

  It’s hard to want different things from someone you’re dating, but it’s somehow also hard to want the same thing but for different reasons. That’s something I learned in a unisex bathroom at a bowling alley-slash-music venue as I swallowed a square inch of toilet paper wrapped around Ajax or crushed up Advil or rat poison or whatever it was I actually ingested. In the long run, trying to do a drug to bring us closer highlighted the chasm between us, and no matter how much fun we had that night, it wouldn’t cause enough of a tectonic shift to close that gap.

  Years later, I hope the guy who sold us the fake molly is still living in a semihabitable warehouse in Bushwick. Yes, I mean that mostly as a hipster curse, but I also think the world needs him there, dispensing psychedelics and placebos depending on what he perceives the needs of the customer to be, teaching them something about themselves in the process.

  But it’s been eight years, so by now it’s more likely his band has broken up and he works for a hedge fund.

  Things I Have Tried (with Varying Degrees of Success) at the Behest of Women I Was Dating at the Time or to Whom I Am Married

  Dancing

  MDMA

  Oysters

  Moulin Rouge!

  Riding a bike for the first time in ten years (not as easy as popular wisdom suggests)

  Getting a massage

  Sushi

  Enjoying the beach

  Being slapped in the face during sexual intercourse (I did not try this by choice.)

  Having a dog

  A Disney cruise

  Celebrating Christmas

  Going to the gym

  Seeing other people for a little while

  Paying a little extra for the direct flight

  Good Will Hunting Isn’t Science Fiction

  It was ten o’clock on December 31, 2014, and I had taken the stage in front of a sold-out crowd of 1,100ish at the Wilbur Theater on Tremont Street in Boston’s theater district. The audience was not there to see me. They were there to see John Oliver, a much more famous and successful comedian, who was also my boss at the time. But—surprise!—they had to sit through fifteen minutes of me first. I wore a suit because these people had come for a “night out on the town.” I had drunk one glass of whiskey, because I was also out on the town.

  “Thank you,” I began, as the unearned round of applause that begins most shows died down. “It’s so lovely to be here with you tonight. I grew up just outside the city, and I started stand-up here, so it’s really meaningful to me to get to be here in this beautiful theater with you tonight, on New Year’s Eve.”

  The crowd applauded again. I would contend that I didn’t earn that ovation, either. Anybody can pander to the hometown crowd.

  “That said,” I continued, “I did move to New York about three years ago because I wanted to be happy and successful.”

  The audience booed, which I will admit I deserved. I smiled, waiting for the jeers to crest and begin diminishing.

  “Oh, come on,” I twisted the knife, “you don’t get to boo me. Anyone is allowed to leave. Good Will Hunting isn’t science fiction.” I wasn’t wrong. You can leave your hometown if you’re not satisfied with your life there. Just ask every Bruce Springsteen song.

  Despite my being objectively correct, the audience’s disapproval rained down on me again. I luxuriated in their contempt. I’d achieved what professional wrestling fans call “heel heat,” a visceral engagement with the audience based on their excitement to hate you. I’d never had that before.

  In three and a half years, New York had made me a worse person, and I was all the better for it.

  Sorry, Not Sorry

  On New Year’s Eve 2014, a little more than three years after moving to New York, I made a single, unambiguous resolution: I decided to stop apologizing when people bumped into me. It sounds like a simple rule to follow, but it proved deceptively hard to abide by. I am an apologetic person by nature. I apologize to inanimate objects I collide with. I apologize for taking up people’s time in emails they have specifically asked me to send them. I apologize to my dog for not being able to give her more treats, no matter how insistently she sneezes in my face.

  I’m not especially religious, but my favorite part of Judaism is the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when you’re expected to make amends for any slights you’ve committed over the previous year. A week of scheduled, regimented apology. My dream. I used to fulfill this obligation with a mass email to friends and family members, expressing contrition and asking forgiveness. One time, I accidentally sent it without bcc-ing the recipients, so everyone could see who was on the list. I sent a follow-up email apologizing for that.

  The change came slowly, but it did come. A few months after my “no apologies” declaration, I was transferring subway lines at the Times Square station, which is a little like squ
eezing through the bar at the Star Wars cantina, but with worse music, and you’re directly underneath a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. I joined the human colloid spilling out of the downtown A train. As I stepped onto the platform, another passenger bumped me shoulder to shoulder as he squeezed onto the train, not hard, but hard enough.

  Now, if you do not live in a place with abundant public transportation, here’s the problem with that: the rule is, you let everyone off the train, and then you get on the train. There are no exceptions to this rule. I realize that we live in a highly individualized society, where we are alienated from communities and encouraged to look out primarily for ourselves. But without accepted norms, we do not have a society at all; we are living in anarchy.

  If you push through the torrent of disembarking passengers to get aboard a subway train fifteen seconds sooner, you are a true sociopath. You’re the kind of person who would drive on the left side of the highway because there’s less traffic going that way, or who would wear another person’s actual human face as a Halloween costume.

  So, one of those kinds of people jostled me as he psychopathed his way onto the train, probably on his way to dump a barrel of crude oil into a lake just to see the swirling colors. My body contorting from the glancing contact, I swiveled my head to face the reckless commuter.

  “Sorry!” I called after him.

  But the thing is: I wasn’t sorry. In fact, it was he who should have apologized to me. Something inside me broke, like a dog’s leash snapping in two, allowing for unfettered pursuit of a mail carrier or a squirrel or some other formidable dog nemesis.

  “HEY!” I shouted into the train, as the bing-bong chime sounded and the doors began to close. “I’M NOT ACTUALLY SORRY!” Adrenaline flooded my body. I felt powerful, limitless, a subway etiquette vigilante, standing up for himself and for all New Yorkers.

  Over the next couple of years, I did not become a renegade passenger, enforcing the mores of the underground with gentle rebukes from behind closed doors. I did, however, manage to curtail my compulsive and unnecessary apologies. I also got more conscientious about finding old people to whom I could offer my seat and then shooting very judgy looks at the people who didn’t, but that’s beside the point.

  On Halloween night 2016, I felt for the first time like a Real New Yorker. Granted, the “Real New Yorker” is kind of a mythical concept. Some would argue that unless you were born there, you’ll never be one. Others claim you can earn your Real New Yorker stripes if you’ve done enough Real New York City Shit. For example, fistfighting Joey Ramone over a slice of pizza or peeing on the street next to Lou Reed, who then winks and tosses a bag of heroin neatly into your shirt pocket.

  The city is changing, with shifting demographics and rising income inequality. In a lot of ways, the culture and grit has been scrubbed away from it. Opportunities are evaporating for all but the richest and most privileged, which is alarming. But longtime New York residents often romanticize things that don’t even seem good. “You used to be able to get your dick sucked for a nickel in any building south of Forty-Fifth Street,” they might lament, “but now some of those places are ATMs.”

  Or: “Back in my day, just to get on the crosstown bus, you had to let an NYPD officer punch your mother in the face and then tip your hat to him. God, I miss Giuliani.”

  My Real New York moment came unexpectedly, which I think they always do. I had taken the L train from Brooklyn into Manhattan. The L runs from the West Side of Manhattan through north Brooklyn and out to Canarsie. Along its stops from west to east in Brooklyn, clusters of cafés serving vegan baked goods have spread like blood poisoning down a vein.1 Rents along the subway line have risen, contributing to the difficulty of living in the city. And I’m sure there’s also a contingent that’s purely nostalgic for the days before Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood was dotted with tattoo parlors and yoga studios, when you could simply walk up and down the unlit streets and get murdered in any abandoned warehouse you wanted.

  I hopped off the train at Sixth Avenue, and instead of transferring to go one stop south, I climbed the stairs to street level, eager to clear my head on the eleven-block walk through the warm October night. Unfortunately, I found myself on the wrong side of a parade. That’s not a figure of speech. Being surprised by parades is a not insignificant part of living in New York. Normally, you feel like an asshole for getting mad at them because they’re celebrating things like LGBTQ pride or Puerto Rican heritage. When you get mad at the traffic caused by those parades, you’re basically being racist and homophobic.

  A Halloween parade, however, is just a nuisance. What kid even wants to be part of a parade on Halloween night? It just means you still have to go through the effort of getting into costume without the benefit of your neighbors giving you candy on demand. I should have ducked back into the train station and emerged from the exit on the opposite side of Sixth Avenue. Instead, I started walking south, totally confident that at some point someone would let me cross the goddamn Halloween parade, an entity whose integrity could not possibly mean anything to anyone.

  As I walked, the crowd of spectators grew thicker. Thousands of people had shown up to watch costumed revelers march by, which felt ridiculous to me because it was Halloween, so they could have seen that anywhere. City workers had set up metal barriers along the route to protect the integrity of a phalanx of seven-year-olds dressed as the grim reaper. Every few blocks, I encountered a police checkpoint where an officer assured me that at the next checkpoint I’d be allowed to cross. I’d already wriggled twenty blocks downtown when it dawned on me that I’d probably have to go all the way around the parade, which would entail making my way to Canal Street, almost a mile and a half from where I started.

  I’d left myself plenty of time to make the trip from my apartment in Williamsburg to Greenwich Village under normal circumstances, but with the distance the parade had added to the trip, I was running late. I slogged west to Seventh Avenue, where the sidewalks didn’t so much resemble clogged arteries, and I broke into a jog.

  After a few minutes I had become moderately winded and more-than-moderately sweaty, but I was making decent time, weaving between trick-or-treating kids and drunk-in-costume adults, when I came across a Halloween Asshole. A Halloween Asshole is the kind of person who wants the credit of dressing up without actually wearing a costume. You see them every year. Frat guys in dresses. Women with kitty cat ears. Anyone in a rainbow Afro wig. Everyone is on to you, Halloween Assholes. And no one is impressed.

  This particular Halloween Asshole was wearing a Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign T-shirt,2 and in each hand he held a strand of Mardi Gras beads, which he twirled like nunchucks. I couldn’t even figure out what he was going for, cumulatively. Was it some kind of visual pun? Was he a Socialist Party Animal? Did New Orleans plus Vermont add up to the Big Cheesy? Although, we were in New York City—maybe he didn’t even know it was Halloween, and that’s just how he dressed in his everyday life. Maybe he was just a Regular Asshole.

  Regardless of this guy’s confusing outfit, I had to get around him. I jogged past, giving him what would have been a plenty wide berth, had he not been spinning Mardi Gras beads around like a dipshit. Unfortunately, he was indeed spinning Mardi Gras beads around like a dipshit, and one of the strands of studded translucent plastic whipped me in the neck. It didn’t leave a mark, but it did infringe on the cardinal rule of New York City sidewalks: “Stay out of my way, dickhead.”

  “Sorry,” he said, but not like you say it when you’re sorry. He spit out the word as if it meant “Uhhh . . . I’m inventing a new martial art here . . . idiot.”

  After half a decade as a New York resident, I was intimately familiar with the word “sorry” as an act of aggression, a middle finger disguised as a thumbs-up.

  “There’s train traffic ahead of us. Sorry for the delay. We hope to be moving shortly.”

  “Sorry to bail last minute after you definitely already left the house to meet me at the place I suggested for
drinks that’s nowhere near your apartment. A work thing came up. Let’s reschedule for soon!”

  “Sorry, we don’t have ‘iced coffee,’ just cold brew.” Come on. Cold brew is just coffee with ice in it. Just give me your pretentious, overpriced iced coffee, and spare me your condescension, please.

  I don’t know what it was about this particular indignity that made me so furious. Maybe it was the self-indulgent nature of the way he was hogging the sidewalk. Maybe it was the fact that I had planned so carefully and yet still found myself behind schedule, and this guy was slowing me down further. Maybe it was the fact that my chest had started pounding after a quarter-mile jog and sweat had rendered my back as slick and damp as the cheese on a Greek pizza, and I was really just disappointed in myself. Maybe it was the sheer laziness of his Halloween costume. But something about this guy brought out a level of rage I’d never expressed to a stranger before.

  What I wish I’d yelled was, “Hey, you’re a socialist, right? Well then, redistribute the sidewalk, asshole!”

  What I actually yelled was much less clever: “Hey, man! Fuck you!”

  The words surprised me as they came out of my mouth. Bernie Gras 2016 was not surprised. I imagine it’s because he seemed like the kind of guy people yelled “Fuck you!” at a lot.

  “I said sorry!” he shouted back, as if he’d done something totally reasonable, like accidentally bumping into my table at a coffee shop, or stepping on my sneaker on a crowded train car. He had not done something reasonable. He had hit me in the neck with Mardi Gras beads, which, by the way, are the paraphernalia of a totally different holiday. When you are the one who’s being a jerk, you have to both apologize and allow the person you have wronged to curse you out. Those are the rules.