Pete Hamill - Piecework

Two floors above, there are four windows so filthy that the glass resembles membrane. I conjure an atmosphere of retreat and withdrawal, some final decision to avoid all further disappointment, to move until the end through loveless rooms full of shrouded furniture, dusty books, and old newspapers, like the Collyer brothers when I was young. On such days, I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.

Those apartments are part of the Secret City, a place that is a part of New York, and therefore dense and layered and always plural. But that very density is always changing, those layers shifting, new elements being added to the pluralism. As soon as you think you have figured out New York, have located its poles and its center of gravity, the city’s axis shifts again. A disco or restaurant is suddenly hot; a year later, it’s in Chapter n. You read learned treatises about white flight, the triumph of the suburbs, the end of middle-class New York; within months, white families are contending with black families for the same run-down real estate and, hey, where did all those Koreans come from? The place is simply too large, too dynamic, too infinitely various and mysterious. Almost all of us live with what Alvin Toffler might have more properly called present shock.

That might be why there has never been a great novel about New York. The best New York novels have been fragments, pieces about the garment district, Wall Street, the lives of the rich, the agony of the slums, the treacheries of the theater or the Mob or the magazine business. They are often as brilliant as tesserae, and as incomplete. The New Yorks described by Scott Fitzgerald and Jerome Weidman, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow and William Styron, Jimmy Breslin and Henry James, Jay Mclnerney and John Cheever, Edith Wharton and John O’Hara, John Dos Passos and Daniel Fuchs and Mario Puzo (to name only a few), simply have nothing in common with one another. Forget literary mastery, craft, the sense of place. It’s the vision of each writer that is completely different. Each sees a certain New York and reveals it to the rest of us. But it’s usually not our New York. We can go to London and still see Dickens. Balzac’s ghost prowls Paris. Raymond Chandler seems to have invented Los Angeles. But we never see one writer when we look at New York. The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News.

There are, of course, a number of forces that sometimes unify the city we know and the Secret City: weather, sports, television. But when you see the children of the rich prancing like Lippizaner stallions through the Upper East Side, you do not need a degree in anthropology to realize that they are different from the people on the corner of 5th Street and Avenue C. Not better or worse. Simply different. Separated by money, history, and unearned privilege from their fellow citizens. The woman in Crown Heights, her husband gone, struggling to keep off welfare and send her children each morning to school, inhabits a universe different from that of those women with predatory faces that you see in Bendel’s. I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn; I know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall. Class separates us. And rank, identity, esteem, and prestige.

All such distinctions express themselves in a variety of ways, and many of them can seem alien. Young black kids in the Secret City of Bed-Stuy or Brownsville talk endlessly about “my image.” Not about the self. Nor about a true understanding of one’s strengths and limits. No: They preen and pose and brag about their elaborately constructed masks. They aren’t alone. The white kids downtown spend endless hours creating punk uniforms to trundle off to that week’s rock club. The rest of us stand off and watch, usually amused, almost always separated from any true contact because of the impenetrability of the masks. Look (we say): inhabitants of the Secret City. Sometimes we can marvel at their amazing labors and ferocious choices: They have decided to perform their lives instead of living them. But after the glance and the wisecrack, we move on. That’s their New York; it’s not ours. And, of course, they are making similar judgments about us.

Sometimes the appearance of people from the Secret City can be disturbing. Most New Yorkers succumb easily to the instinct to make the world smaller and therefore more manageable. We construct our own parishes. Here are our friends. There are our restaurants and shops and the movie house. This is our favorite bar. There is the church or synagogue. Here, among these familiar streets and places, we are known. We are safe. We hope such places will last a lifetime. And, of course, they don’t. One morning the butcher dies and his children sell the place and move to Florida. The condominium racketeers show up and soon Mrs. Flanagan and Mrs. Moloff are no longer on the bench beside the park across the street and we’ve lost a piece of the intricate mesh of daily life. A nameless developer alights on the block and a few months later the earthmovers and cranes are pummeling away, and two bars vanish, and a bodega, and the barbershop where the bookmaker took bets.

Now there are new people on the block. And new buildings. And the parish has permanently changed. Who are these people, asks the old New Yorker, and where did they all come from?

They came from the Secret City. That is, they came from beyond the parish. Their vision of New York is not ours. And often the older New Yorker closes up, denies the new, retreats into those entombed cities of memory and loss. Many of the young can’t understand the almost permanent nostalgia of older New Yorkers.

Why are the middle-aged always talking, at the risk of maudlin cliché, about the Old Neighborhood, about places gone and buried, about Ebbets Field and Birdland, the Cedar Tavern and the old Paramount? The reason is probably simple: In those places, they were happy. Sentimentality is almost always a form of resentment.

But in a very important way, this is terribly sad. By retreating from the new or the foreign or the strange, the New Yorker cuts himself off from the throbbing engine of the city itself. The city’s fabled energy is the result of millions of small daily collisions: the push and shove followed by resistance or collapse. That remorseless process often affects individual lives; it alters entire neighborhoods; and without it, we would be dead.

So the other New York, the Secret City, shouldn’t really be a blank on the maps, marked with the legend DRAGONS LURK HERE. Whether we accept it or not, the unknown, remote, and alien city is there, all around us, relating to the city we know the way anti-matter relates to matter. There are zones of the Secret City that can provoke rage; you must enter them with a patient fatalism. In New York, there will never be an end to self-importance, malice, the iron heart, so you learn to cherish the latest exhibits.

After a while, you smile in appreciation of the idiotic snobberies that so many people embrace as substitutes for thought. You await with enthusiasm this year’s Golden Couple — there is one every year, in every set — and watch them migrate as if they were the center of the population, serene, self-absorbed, supremely blessed. Then you wait for the line in the gossip columns announcing the final rupture. The details don’t really matter. For the time that the Golden Couple was everywhere in the hamlet of society, they offered delicious entertainment. That is the way to see them. Not with envy or spite or some nagging sense that you are missing something by not moving in their orbit. Such people exist in a New York of their own making; next year, their successors will unfurl their diaphanous flags.