Another big bonus was the lady from the airport custodial crew who had a side hustle as a purveyor of the most delicious empanadas. The chicken ones were the spiciest and best and were even tastier when cold. I was dying to write about them but didn’t want to get her in trouble. It seemed unwise to get an entire airport pissed at me if I compromised the secret empanada stash. When Alex and I weren’t planning trips, we struggled for commonalities. We relied mostly on remixing the movie conversation from our first date. It’s probably what we talked about when, for New Yorky real estate reasons, we decided to move in together. It was the start of year two.
I date well but move in poorly. Circumstances didn’t help. Alex was unhappy at the airport, and the magazine I’d launched folded. I got a real-person job and then that went bust. He stewed and I cooked. I got fat and smoked cigarettes late into the night to slow the roll on chewing. I puffed away out on our beautiful private patio that featured a large stone walkway, hydrangeas, and grapes. It was the garden apartment of a brownstone, and he hated it for “being dark.” He just wanted some vitamin D since some days at the airport were spent in the “dungeon,” where there were no windows and zero cell reception.
That year, many more magazines shuttered and I went on unemployment for the first time since I started working at 16. One afternoon at the unemployment office, I saw a former colleague who’d sold print ads, and she was holding her newborn son. Her husband was also in publishing. We laughed our heads off about that. Everyone was so multigenerationally fucked.
My friends called Alex the “cop” to my face and the “narc” also to my face, and he never did anything wrong. In hindsight, he was just depressed. Everyone was. It was just harder to tell because he rarely complained. Alex was a stand-up guy that way. He was reliable, chose to eat the same thing every day, and appreciated uniforms because they were simple. He was also really, really angry. In the end it was a comic book that broke us up. I’d written one—my first—for a big-deal company. And he didn’t want to read it. He was always too tired and couldn’t get it up for relationship homework. I ended things a week before my brother’s wedding in California.
Alex moved out while I was gone and left two boxes of government-issued bullets. I still have them in a cupboard because I don’t know how to throw them out. We are not friends. I suppose we never were, and maybe that was the problem. Or one of many. He was a rebound that had gone too far, and I should never have had the capacity to hurt him. Months later, the boss-ex accused me of clinging to a nice guy with a steady job to offset the turbulence in my career. And also said that I’d ditched him when things got better. The only reason I keep boss-ex around is to tell me hateful, accurate things about myself. He keeps me around so I can help him pick out an engagement ring for his new girlfriend (who is lovely, by the way).
Another really stupid thing about dating a guy who works at the airport is that you heighten the chance of running into someone you don’t want to see in a high-stress situation. It’s been three years, but I steel myself for it every time. I haven’t run into him once. I travel a lot for work, so I have to imagine he’s gotten a different job. I hope he likes it. I tried googling him, but he never comes up. His SEO either sucks, or it’s perfect for whatever he’s doing. Some days I worry about what his new job is. And that feels about right.
HOW A CITY WINS YOU OVER AS REWARD FOR YOU GIVING UP
“I was sitting on my stoop, drinking coffee, and out of nowhere this crazy-looking woman just starts screaming, ‘I am inside all of you,’ over and over,” Bronx resident Sarah Perez, 37, said. “Then, we both had this moment where we looked at each other and realized, okay, we have to get out of here.”
—from The Onion’s “8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City a Horrible Place to Live”
I moved to New York City when I was 22, with two suitcases and more money than most, having sold a four-door Honda Civic in Austin, Texas, and having worked at least 30 hours a week all through college. I lived in New York for 12 years. Most people agree: 10 years is enough.
I’d taken to cheating on the city with Los Angeles. On every trip I’d convince myself of how thin I’d be if I moved out West. It’s a cinch to spurn carbs when there’s sunshine. My mother would worry, dispatching care packages of dense, rich food. Despite the warm light, I’d be freezing all the time, touching people’s necks with my icicle fingers. “See?” I’d say, smiling, a thick vein rising on my forehead. “Feel how cold my hands are.” In the cab on the way home, I’d think about cutting my hair short. Skinny people look great with short hair.
I could hike instead of drinking wine to drown the lambs that scream.
My brother moved from Austin to Houston to Portland and entertained the notion of moving to New York (briefly) before opting for L.A., where he now lives. That was seven years ago. The cousins on my mother’s side have always lived there, and most of them have babies, which is the surest sign that you’re content enough to completely give up on yourself.
I began and ended the last three years in California, by a campfire or in a hot tub, celebrating with all of my New York friends who are happily complicit in my philandering. I have always had a kind of seasonal affective disorder but recently became financially secure enough to relieve it by getting the fuck out of Dodge. We would fly in to L.A. and then drive to Palm Springs or Baja, renting houses with pools, wrapping ourselves in Mexican blankets, smoking strong, plentiful weed, eating seafood and laughing at weather reports back East. The short trips were never enough.
The sad thing is, my boyfriend moved to New York a year and a half ago, just in time for two winters. We’d accidentally started dating when he lived in San Francisco, a place that afforded a climate and quality of life that suited his low-key vibe and active lifestyle. He would run in Golden Gate Park, sit contentedly on that massive grassy hill on Dolores, right by that overpriced, overhyped fusion Korean restaurant that I hate. He’d clear his mind on long bicycle rides to the beach or else take his vintage BMW motorcycle all the way to Big Sur. He’d fill his lungs with the eucalyptus-tinged air, and his linings and membranes and smooth muscle tissue would sing with vigor and promise.
I loathe San Francisco. Sure, it looks like Jurassic Park in places, and the fog layer is enchanting with its plumes and trellises interweaving with the leaves and lichen on the redwoods. But everything else is like if New York’s Gramercy neighborhood got a whole town. On any given night there are way too many “going-out shirts” and the women dress like there was a fire sale at some emporium that only sells clam-diggers and kicky little jackets with ornamental zippers. I have never so frequently witnessed pinstripe and patchwork meeting in the middle as I have on the tragic A-line skirts of Valencia Street. Every man who isn’t contemptibly rich enough to be famous for it reminds me of Matthew Lillard’s pigtail-braided Rollerblader in Hackers. I have never tallied so many “Pick-Up Artist” hats or labret piercings outside of 1996. Fashion is no more than an indication of larger trends. Certain parts of San Francisco are what happens when white people have no natural predator.
Which is to say that I wasn’t going to move there.
Which is to also say that I found myself defending New York to my confounded boyfriend all the time—just as I was getting well and truly sick of the place. In the beginning, I just thought he was soft. Spoiled by a cushy corporate job and crunchy lifestyle. “Get this,” I’d tell my friends at brunch, the four of us huddled next to four other humans at a table big enough for three, “he only eats heirloom tomatoes. The hothouse ones give him heartburn!” He was as delicate as an orchid, and I was determined to toughen him up.
I’d laugh when he tried to accomplish more than two things in 12-degree weather.
I’d laugh at his horror at the rats that crawled onto the platform at the East Broadway subway station.
I’d laugh at him for thinking there existed words that could be strung in a combination that would compel our superintendent to replace the moldy
caulk surrounding the tub in our windowless bathroom.
I’d laugh at his adorable rage at a mediocre $18 burrito.
I did not laugh when the crazy-eyed guy with blood on his cheek chased me out of the subway shrieking about my “chink pussy.”
I did not laugh when I got laid off and was sobbing in the street, only to lock eyes with another woman who was also crying.
I did not laugh when my slumlord hired a private investigator to sniff out housing violations when breaking my toilet wasn’t enough to evict us.
I did not laugh when a well-dressed older white lady stopped me with a smile to tell me that I “walked like a prostitute.”
I did not laugh when I responded with, “Fuck you, you crazy cunt!” and people looked at me like I was nuts, which made me want to set fire to it all.
Maybe none of it’s funny. Maybe that’s the point.
When my boyfriend moved across the country, the deal was that we’d both go freelance—he would take photos, and I would write. I’ve since learned that New York makes no sense when you have no job. It just happens to be worse when you do have one. I used to have a real job. A cool, sexy job for a great big company with a corporate card that had the company’s logo next to the MasterCard logo. Even my parents had heard of it. But sitting through six hours of meetings in conference rooms that required a combination of three different elevator banks just wasn’t my bag. Neither were the hundreds of e-mails—never mind the subsequent hundreds of e-mails that said nothing more than “adding Traylor!” “adding Jenni P.!” “adding Nolson!” Plus, that thing of how your entire office can tell who’s at their desk and who isn’t by the activity of your desktop freaks me out. Same with eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the air of a building where none of the windows open and someone is always sick. The problem with corporations is that too many people work for them. So I stopped going. Turns out, institutional urgency isn’t real. And your boss’s boss is just some dude getting a divorce.
I know what it takes to be good at careers. Work like you might die for 10 years, and you can work a lot less for the next 10. But it all depends on how many people you can trick into working so hard for you that they think they might die. Convince a lot and you’ll be rich. Go figure: every job is a pyramid scheme. Convince enough and another rich person buys you and gives you more money and sometimes more people. But you have to be careful. If you’ve collected too many people and too much money, it can startle a different rich person who’ll lop off your head. When you’re gone, no one notices. They’re too busy tricking other people to take their place. Some of my friends are rich now that they’ve sold things worth selling, but their stories make me sleepy. My last days in New York were all about spending my not-very-much money on not being there. I’m all about that JOMO life: the joy of missing out.
It used to be that the proximity to staggering, hilarious wealth would spur you to greater ambitions. In my early twenties I used to work so hard and for so long that I kept passing out like a fainting goat. I would remember all the names and the affiliations and log them dutifully and follow up and meet and talk and drink and dance and fake-laugh and sometimes real-laugh, except that when you’re drunk with someone who has something you want, it doesn’t count. I remember caring about how I looked. I’ve walked thousands of miles in five-inch heels and dresses I couldn’t sit in. For seven years I dressed like it was New Year’s Eve. These days, if I make an appearance at a party or event, there’s a solid chance I’m wearing at least part of an outfit I wore to bed. I owe myself that much.
When I was 26 I entered into an ambiguous relationship with a man from L.A. I had a boyfriend at the time but feigned naivety about the loopholes that pertain to “work things” and found myself on what were basically dates with this man. Once, over squid, he described his penis to me. He was older, a Hollywood talent agent. I’d see him in the backgrounds of paparazzi photos and at the edge of the frame at awards shows. I wondered how long I could keep it going without sleeping with him. On a rare trip out to California, he arranged for me to meet with a Hollywood big shot, a woman who was the Oscar-nominated production partner of a Super Famous Actor. She never, ever granted meetings.
She worked from a sunny office with lots of plants. Her son had pinkeye. She had to pick up prescription eye drops for her whole family, whom she would be joining on a plane in a few hours for a well-earned vacation. I wondered if she knew how I’d gotten in. I was a struggling writer and editor of a small magazine and wanted to do something else. She was very nice and very clear that she didn’t quite understand the nature of the advice she was expected to dispense, but she told me, straight up, that I didn’t seem ready to leave New York. I, because I was young and stupid, thought it was a job interview of sorts, except that I had no book or other artifact that even hinted at applicable experience.
“I lived in New York,” she said. “For years. And I loved it and was lucky to do the work I do now but over there. But it’s a racket that New York thinks it’s so special or weird. New York’s small. You know what’s weird? California. It’s huge. People who you don’t ever hear about are doing the weirdest things that you’ll never see. You’re not ready.” I bristled in my tight DVF wrap dress and too-high Gucci heels. “You’ll come to L.A. when you’re ready,” she said. I was in there for 15 minutes.
I think about her advice a lot. Especially now that I know what she knew about a twentysomething nothing with an overeager benefactor. I was the worst kind of tease. It wasn’t just that L.A. was out of my league; it’s that I wasn’t ready to leave New York. There was still so much to do. I owe New York. It broke me enough times to cure me—of fear, of self-doubt, of regret. Each round I learned more. I don’t take anything personally anymore because there’s nothing special about your crazy when everyone everywhere is out of their fucking minds. I am grateful to my vast stores of procedural memory for knowing how to deal with every possible human indignity. I do not need to learn those lessons again. My governing principle isn’t to acquire things or get rich or be known, it’s to first do no harm. When you’re being buried alive in other people, it takes real work to be kind. Being kind is how you get happy. Being happy is how you make work that’s worth it. If you can only make valuable work when you’re sad, do something else.
But now I’m leaving New York because I’ve earned it. People say that New York ruins you for anywhere else. I hope it’s not true. I need it not to be true. I want sunshine and an outside that feels good. I want to live someplace that isn’t trying to kill me. Even if she* makes it look like an accident.
*New York is totally a girl.
THE END
Mary H.K. Choi is a contributor to The New York Times, GQ, Wired, Allure and Billboard. She is the head writer of Take Part Live, a daily news show. You can read more of her work online at choitotheworld.com. Follow her on twitter @choitotheworld.
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