Two people on two separate occasions recently reached out to me and asked if I had any sage advice on the best way to go about moving to New York City. Person One is the guy who manages my finances. He was asking on behalf of a colleague whose post college-age daughter is moving to New York. Person Two is a man who is enduring a breakup and decided, now that the chips were down, to make a run at his lifelong New York dream. If I was a sporting man, of these two candidates, the man with the broken heart is the one who I’d put my money on. He’s the one who will likely “make it” in New York. If I’ve learned anything in my four decades on this planet, it’s this: never underestimate the power of feeling like you’ve got nothing left to lose.
I no longer live in New York City. In fact, as I type this, the paperwork for the sale of my New York apartment—which was a really terrific apartment, by the way, in a great neighborhood called Jackson Heights—is begin sped via Canada Post from the Pacific Northwest, where I currently reside, to a lawyer, a.k.a. Larry The Lawyer, in New York. For some reason I always tell people that I lived in New York for 15 years. The truth is this: it was probably closer to 12 years and a few months. I’ve also been guilty of telling people that my New York apartments over the years were much larger than they actually were, and that my commute on the F train each day took only 25 minutes when it actually took closer to 40 or sometimes 45 minutes, because I conveniently decided against factoring in the amount of time it actually took me to walk to the train from my apartment.
This is one of the known side effects of living in New York for 15 years: you start telling people tall tales in small ways.
When approached by these two individuals, my reaction on both occasions was exactly the same. First, I let out a long, theatrical sigh. Then I said the following words: “This is not going to be easy.” What I meant by “this is not going to be easy” is this: Terrible things will happen to each of these individuals. They will suffer in ways that they can’t imagine. Even the wealthiest people no doubt suffer some unanticipated indignities when moving to New York. But if you’re poor, if you’re an artist, or an actor, or a filmmaker with a broken heart, or a young girl asking her father for help, or like me, a writer with a suitcase full ‘o dreams, and if you don’t have a crazy aunt who has lived in a rent-controlled apartment (more on rent-controlled apartments in a bit) for the last 45 years on Great Jones Street—my favorite street in New York, for obvious reasons—your indignities will be legion.
Mine were.
