On Not Making It

“On a late night bus ride from Hartford to Times Square/here I come New York, yeah here I come,” Bill Whitten croons jauntily on the opening track of Grand Mal’s “Love is the Best Con in Town.” It’s an interesting moment for Whitten, a driven, hardbitten and prolific songwriter who’s weathered all the vices of rock’n’roll, several major label record deals, the accolades of NME and somehow artfully dodged the success he deserves. After seventeen years in the New York’s rock trenches, he’s still able to travel back to inhabit that starry-eyed, fresher-faced version of himself stepping off the bus that first night, a guitar case in one hand and a suitcase full of songs in the other, not unlike young Robert Zimmerman more than 30 years before him.

Of course, it hasn’t been Bob Dylan’s New York for a long time, and it’s no longer even Bill Whitten’s New York. He was driven from the Lower East Side years ago by New York’s “rebirth” and then from Queens when the rent explosion of Manhattan burst its bounds and annexed huge swaths of the outer boroughs to the delight of real estate douchebags everywhere. One might wonder just whose New York it is these days. It certainly ain’t mine.

I arrived in NY in October of 1998 with $300, not completely unlike Whitten or Dylan, but maybe more like the young William Bailey stepping off the bus in the “Welcome to the Jungle” video or hell, even Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy—a naive, cocky redneck almost completely unequipped to navigate the ceaselessly churning, heaving hustle of NYC. I meant to become a famous writer and musician. I was 21.

My stepbrother was living in a one-room apartment in a glorified dormitory near Columbia so he carved out enough floorspace for my dingy single futon, pushed his shirts to one side of the closet and I moved in. I had a BFA in Creative Writing, which I assumed would qualify me for some low-level reporting job at a newspaper. I was wrong. At least I assume I was; I was so terrified of failing in this city that bled money from you the moment you hit the street that I don’t think I ever got my head together enough to apply to a single newspaper.

I left the room as infrequently as I could and sponged off my stepbrother, girlfriend and friends when I did. Apparently, a Creative Writing degree from the University of Colorado and two bucks only got you four 50-cent hot dogs at Mike’s Papaya, and so that’s how I subsisted, stretching my money out, things getting almost imperceptibly worse each day. Of course, Mike’s Papaya has long since been “disappeared” by Columbia University and the building torn down. A D’Agostino’s occupies the first floor of the high rise they erected on the footprint of the old two-story building. They sell little wedges of cheese there now that cost 15 bucks—more than a week’s worth of hot dogs.

One day in January, my stepbrother returned home from his workday and asked me if I’d gotten a job. “No,” I said, “but I did make a lot of progress on Legend of Zelda,” not realizing quite how hopeless that sounded until the words had left my mouth. The next day, having almost completely given up, I put on my only suit, an old man’s blue wool herringbone three piece from a Salvation Army in Denver, colored in the bald spot on the side of my head with my girlfriend’s eyebrow pencil—where she had fucked up my haircut—and dragged myself down to a temp agency. Incredibly, one week later I was finally employed… doing order entry in the Women’s Apparel department at Bergdorf Goodman, the first of a long series of humiliating jobs I would never deign to do anywhere but in New York City. Somehow I managed to last five months until a dude I regretfully must describe as looking like our beloved Phil Hartman put his head under the bathroom-stall door and offered to suck me off.

As much as I loathed my job, I decided it was too small-town to let one unsolicited come-on scare me off. I made up my mind to stick it out until I returned to the scene of the crime the next day only to encounter a monstrous rope of semen incredibly spanning the 18 inches from the toilet seat to the polished and gleaming marble floor below.

Finally, I got my break. I borrowed 75 bucks from my girlfriend’s parents (well, actually I saved $75 and then got a ticket for an open container that cost exactly $75—then I borrowed) and applied to the MFA Writing program at Columbia and was awarded their largest merit based scholarship. Now I sponged off my girlfriend, friends, parents and friends’ parents in order to do my coursework and still play music. I interned at The New Yorker and did sound engineering for NPR at the Radio Foundation. I did medical studies and marketing focus groups. I crashed art openings and collegiate functions, got blitzed on shitty wine and filled my pockets with hardening cheese cubes and softening grapes. At the end of more than one semester, I retrieved dry goods that departing undergrads had thrown in the trash. I recall chewing up ice cubes to curb my hunger and wondered if I could eat my own hair. Everywhere I went—trying hard not to ralph in the Condé Nast building, reading Virgina Woolf on the way to band practice—I felt on the verge of being found out, caught between my two equal and opposite lives, colliding and straining against each other. In the spring of 2003, I received my MFA. And then nothing happened.

••••••••••••

In my nearly 10 years of barely scraping by in the city (nearly all of which I’ve spent trying to leave) I have worked as an order-entry clerk, sound engineer, editor, visa agent, ghostwriter, caterer, doorguy, trash picker, barback, bartender, talent buyer, envelope stuffer, night manager, ship’s mate, carpenter, laborer and office bitch. I’ve sold the contents of abandoned storage units and worked a couple days cleaning out the apartments of people who’d died. They let us keep any open bottles of liquor we found as a perk. If you are looking to hire me, my scale ranges from $8 to $150 per hour, and believe me when I tell you that I am a full-service operation.

For someone who moved to NYC with the bald intention of getting famous, my anonymity remains so pristinely intact that one would think I’d been fighting to preserve it instead of annihilate it. (A reporter I know once told me, “Man… you never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”). I check your ID. I pour your eight Jäger bombs, two Alabama Slammers and one apple martini “short on the ‘apple’ and long on the -tini if you know what I mean.” I plunge my arm up to the elbow in the filth of the overflowing toilet in the women’s restroom, and force my hand deep into its inner workings to finally retrieve my prize: a tampon mummified in layer upon layer of paper towel as if it were some kind of hideous secret that we all bleed.  

I’ve been hustled for straight porn, gay porn and foot porn and somehow have only been lured as far as the outskirts of “comfortable with all the variant forms of human sexuality” and stopped just short of “gay for pay.” I’ve suffered through countless colds and bouts of the flu, not to mention that bizarre day that my hands, feet and mouth swelled up or the time I had to give a fake name to get stitched up in the emergency room. I’m as resentful now of folks with health insurance as I used to be of folks in love. There’s one important distinction: You can live without love.

Just last month I got laid off from the meaningless but lucrative gig I’d held for nearly two years with one day’s notice and no severance pay for reasons that were never made clear to me. Now, at 31, I possess neither house, child, girlfriend, vehicle nor job. I don’t have a couch, I don’t even own fucking ice cube trays. I owe $70,000 in student loans. One of the walls of my room is made up of two sheets. But, this winter, after thrusting my head deep into the lion’s jaws during my cavalier romance with a Schedule II narcotic, I emerged apparently unscathed; and somehow, after six years of convalescence, my writing abruptly reanimated itself. I appear to have been adopted by the comic Doug Stanhope, who just flew me out for a long weekend of the best-attended solo shows I’ve ever played. My substance consumption remains alarmingly high. The most compelling musical project I’ve ever been involved in—to which I’ve devoted two and a half years to—is now, best-case scenario, on the injured reserve list and out for the season but may very possibly never play again. Several weeks ago, after playing a sold-out show at Music Hall of Williamsburg, I awoke on the street in Greenpoint, saw a yellow cab and raised my hand to flag it down. The taxi became a police car and as I slowly lowered my arm, it slowly drove past. I appear to be walking the razor’s edge between a breakthrough year and a catastrophic one. Something’s approaching. Crisis? Enlightenment? Perversely, it never appears.

I have almost completely given up. Imagine my rational mind as a tiny agile-but-heavily-burdened crustacean like a hermit crab, scuttling around in the dark, narrow labyrinth of my soul, trying desperately to locate and snuff out that tiny persistent flicker of hope that is perpetually evading extinguishment, retreating around the next corner. Giving up completely would uncomplicate my life in innumerable ways. But I won’t; I can’t; I am unable to give up.

••••••••••••

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen New York destroyed in the last 10 years—whether it be Escape From New York, 9-11, a Discovery “science entertainment” program or just in my revenge fantasies. As much as they hate to admit it outside of the five boroughs, Americans love NYC, and that’s why watching its destruction is so gripping. Of course, my personal entropy has been neatly mirrored and mocked by the city collectively getting its shit together and even blossoming. At times it’s like I’m in some bizarro Planet of the Apes movie, staggering, awestruck and horrified, through a sterile, menacing landscape and stumbling upon a familiar landmark—Two Boots Pizza? Kellogg’s Diner?—surrounded not by ruins, which I can deal with, but by new construction, boxy condos or glossy retail shop fronts.

It’s hard not to wax nostalgic about the barely affordable NYC we once knew—does no one sell 20-bags anymore?—but no one seems to grasp that the same social, cultural and fiscal expansion that has priced us out of Manhattan (and Queens and now Brooklyn until we’ll all be commuting from fucking Philadelphia) would have to be answered by an equal or greater contraction in order for us to move back in. If New York were ever truly brought to its knees—whether it be by a hurricane, tornado, tsunami, global warming, a series of dirty bombs smuggled in through shipping containers, terrorists crashing a fucking fleet of airliners into lower Manhattan or the NYSE tanking and President Jenna Bush telling us to drop dead (yes, Virginia, these are all real possibilities)—then and only then could the artists and the musicians reclaim the Lower East Side.

In his songs, Bill Whitten’s New York is like a bad lover or a good drug: “In bedlam and in squalor/ it’s where we bloom like poison flowers/ but admittedly, aww the thrills ain’t cheap/ No matter how I try to leave/ I always come back to you.”

I’d offer up that it’s more like a beloved ex: You loved her and she broke your heart, and put your milk crates full of dirty clothes and scratched Nick Cave CDs out on the curb. But if you think about it, that was a long, long time ago. She’s with some realtor now, and been with him for a while and she seems to be doing really well. The only way she would ever consider taking a guy like you back is if something really awful happened to her. She’s moved on, and maybe it’s time you quit crying and do the same.

Yes, the awful truth is that even if it’s blander and more homogenized, the city’s much improved. For every hip cultural touchstone mourned through alternating layers of sentimentality and irony like Coney Island High or Kokie’s, 10 new rock clubs and coke-slanging operations have stepped in to fill that void, and most of ‘em push pretty decent product. Yeah, the subway on Bedford Avenue turns my stomach, too, but it may be worth pointing out that it’s quite a bit harder to get mugged, raped and/or killed in Williamsburg than it used to be.

And all these helpless rich folks moving into the high rise on Ludlow and the condos around McCarren Park? They’re still going to need us to hang their pictures and assemble their IKEA furniture. Those fuckers are never going to learn how to use an Allen wrench.