My closest friend was recently sentenced to four years in Midtown Manhattan. I remember where we were when he told me. I was sitting on a hard gym floor and he snuck in behind me, craving to seem just the right amount of eager. Eager to tell a friend the news, not too eager to flaunt it. The sentence was for two years at ninety thousand dollars per year. I smiled and shook his hand. He asked if I wanted to join him, if I wanted a similar sentence. Maybe we could live together. I shook my head and patted him on the back. I hoped he wouldn’t drag me down with him. I’m glad he didn’t sell me out for a shorter sentence. He’s a great friend. Trustworthy and consistent. But I’m glad we won’t be sharing the same cell.
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Everything they tell you about New York is a lie, even at it’s worst. All the great religious texts teach that lying is wrong. The God of Judaism is absent whenever a lie is told. The Fourth Buddhist Precept demands that one refrain from “incorrect speech.”
The Christian God detests “lying lips.” To tell a lie is to commit the Seventh Greater Sin of Islam. Taoism leaves space for an ethical lie. One of its basic moral rules is that one still ought not lie.
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They’ll tell you the subway is hot and cramped. They’ll tell you that’s the worst part about it. On your commute to work, it might get a little muggy if you’re in a car without air conditioning. Sure, the air conditioning breaks every other day, but you can just unbutton your top button or fan yourself. It really won’t be that bad. Maybe you’ll have to stand because the train gets crowded in the morning. It’s good for your legs. You might be uncomfortably close to a total stranger who is sweatier than you are and only getting sweatier. No worries. It’s only a forty-minute commute from your place in Brooklyn to the office on 72nd Street. It’s really not all that bad. Bring a book or watch another episode on your iPad. It’s just a little hot and kind of crowded.
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The subway is hot and it is crowded. A lot of places are hot and crowded. Your local bus is hot and crowded. Some movie theaters are hot and crowded. Invite too many people to Thanksgiving dinner and kitchen will be hot and crowded. And people will be eating your food. You’ve been in a hot and crowded classroom. Chances are if you have a place of worship you it’s often hot and crowded. You temple or church or pagoda is the worst kind of hot and crowded, the type where you can’t move without drawing glares and whispers and promises of punishment from your parents. Mortified that you cannot bear to sweat for the sake of a higher power. But the subway is special. It’s not merely hot and crowded. That’s not enough. It’s hot and crowded and you must sit with your eyes on your feet. You must accept your fate once you have found a seat. No matter who sits on either side of you, no matter how close they sit, no matter how firmly their thighs continue to bump into yours as the train shifts, no matter how loud they shout on their cellphone, not matter how many bags they stack on your feet, you cannot move. In the pipeline of people underneath the city, this great city of culture and commerce and power and freedom and opportunity and individuality, you cannot move your legs or your arms. You are not allowed to move your eyes or your feet. You must clasp your hands in your lap and bow your head, praying to the exalted gods of the MTA that you don’t miss the express. You must stand when others stand, only to cram yourself through a door not wide enough for two people as quickly as possible. You must contort your body, hanging onto a pole to dodge passengers spring away from the heat and the crowd. Then you must sit again, hands clasped, head bowed, now praying to the conductor to shut the doors and fix the air conditioning. But they told you it was just hot and crowded.
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No city is free of lies. South Bend, Washington is not a city. It is a town, in the most generous sense of the word. It’s maybe closer to a village. The population is eighteen hundred. More of a hamlet than a village. People in South Bend have lied before and they will lie again. But they won’t lie about their hamlet. There are no buses. They can’t tell you the subway is crowded but you’ll get used to it. There is one traffic light. They won’t say you’ll love your commute. There are two grocery stores, a Chinese restaurant, and a Mexican place. They won’t say they have the best food in the area. The town survives on fishing and welding. They won’t tell you you’ll love your job. Some people love to fish for halibut and salmon in sub-freezing temperatures. You might not. So they won’t tell you it won’t be too bad, life on a boat isn’t that bad. It snows, a lot.
They’ll tell you the city stinks when it rains. There are not a lot of good things they can say about winter in South Bend, so they won’t tell you you’ll enjoy it. They’ll tell you it’s going to be a wet snow that lasts all afternoon and sticks all night into the morning and you might slip when you step off your front step. A lot of people in South Bend go to church on Sundays. They might tell you you’re welcome to tag along. They won’t tell you it will be a fun hour and a half. They won’t tell you that you should go.
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They’ll tell you it can be expensive to eat in New York. But the city has the best restaurants in the world, they’ll tell you. If you budget well, it won’t be a problem. Just make a small tithe to New York’s best restaurants. The most diverse cuisine you could ever wish for. You’ll taste things you’ve never tasted. There’s nowhere else in the world where you can eat like you’ll eat in New York. Every meal is a new experience. It’s an experience of a new culture. The food will open your mind. Italian. Mediterranean. Middle Eastern. Jewish delis. The pizza you see in movies. Sushi. Chinese. Authentic Mexican. Come to New York for the food, they’ll tell you. You’ll be a fanatic. You’ll make pilgrimages to Queens for the tacos and you’ll journey to Chinatown for dim sum. You’ll worship at the altar of halal.
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They don’t tell you that the best food in the world means you’ll be out of money after one week of eating out. The groceries aren’t cheap either. That mystic deliciousness of halal will get old very quickly when you have to eat it for lunch and dinner four nights in a row. It’s only five dollars for a whole meal. Just a small bill in the donation plate for the temple’s ministry to the poor. That five seems so small, so insignificant until it needs to last two meals. All that halal grease and white sauce and rice and red sauce seems so insignificant until you’re cradling your stomach in your hands the next morning, your belly just a little infant swaddled in your scratchy sheets and crying out for mercy and redemption for its sins of lamb of rice.
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It’s the city that never sleeps, they’ll say. You can be up all day and all night every day. You can party any night of the week until six in the morning. You can grab a bite to eat any hour of the night. Someone’s working in every office building every single second of the day. Every artist you know will play a show in the city this year. A concert every weekend for fifty-two straight weeks. The city never sleeps so you’ll never need to sleep. You can work 75 hours per week and still get in at least 20 hours at the bars. Just make sure you juice cleanse every two months.
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Eventually you’ll start to question the apologists and the forgivers and the fanatics. You’ll realize they’ve lied to you and you’ll have to ask why. Hopefully you’re near the end of your sentence before this happens. That way, you can escape before your next sentence starts and before you have to find a realtor to help you look for another cell you can’t really afford. You need that cell just so you can spend less time on the subway. Everyone had told you it really wasn’t that hot and didn’t get all that crowded. And you’ll ask yourself why you bought in, why you believed what they told you. New York City is still growing. New pilgrims every year. It might gain eight hundred thousand people in the next thirty years. Everyone else must know something you don’t. They have it right, and everyone else is wrong. The food really isn’t that expensive. The subway isn’t really that hot. They didn’t lie to you. You just don’t get life in the city. You’re missing some mystical sensibility, some connection to the city that is greater than you. You just don’t understand. They’ve dove to the depths of the city and come up anew, refreshed with a new purpose and a new desire to stay in New York as long as they can. Maybe they’ll even raise a family in the city. It has some of the best schools, you know. And there are actually plenty of parks for kids and dogs and parents to run around. You should really give it a try, they’ll tell you. Just give Central Park a try. Really, the city is so rewarding.
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They’ll tell you the city isn’t really that loud. The noise is all just part of the charm. That’s what people always said about that one lady in the choir who thought Sunday mornings were her chance to impress the opera scouts. The stained glass shook with every high note she tried to hit. But she was such a sweet old lady. So much charm. Things wouldn’t be the same if she weren’t there every week singing her lungs out for the heavens, all for the greater glory of her higher power. It had nothing to do with her failed pop career. It was holy noise. Just like all of New York’s noise. It’s all port of the feeling. That siren that wakes you up every morning should make you feel at home. The train bouncing past your door and into your apartment at three in the morning shouldn’t even be a problem anymore. The house music from the club beneath your friend’s Midtown cell is just a reminder that you should be out on a Tuesday night and not in bed by midnight. The city never sleeps and neither should you. Native Americans used sleep deprivation as part of the visual quests that were integral to their experiences of their own religious systems. A three-night bender across the clubs in Meatpacking is just a vision quest if you try hard enough.
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Who knows what you might see. Native Americans sought spiritually empowering dream visions. They don’t tell you what kind of visions you’ll see at a Ne York Club, but they won’t be of the spiritually empowering variety. They might be of the variety you should bring up in confession. They’ll tell you you’ll have the time of your life with the prettiest people you’ve ever seen. They don’t tell you about fifty dollar cover just to get in the door. Or the two hour wait in ten degree rain just for the privilege. Or the beer bottles thrown across the bar. Or those times when the bathroom line can’t move because every stall is occupied by someone vomiting up that night’s fun. Those are the vision quests they don’t tell you about. Surely there were Native Americans who didn’t survive their vision quests. Those must be the quests they didn’t like to talk about. New Yorkers won’t tell you about all those friends who didn’t survive their Meatpacking vision quests.
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No, they lied to you. You just can’t figure out why. You would never do that. You’ll find yourself back on the subway. You might be on the 3. Or the Q. Or the 1. You’ll probably be on the shuttle from Grand Central with the inside of its cars all plastered from floor to ceiling with movie propaganda that wraps itself from the front of the train to the back of the train. Every head around you will be bowed, some eyes closed, some eyes staring at the ground, at nothing. All hands will be clasped. You will bow your head and clasp your hands. And you will tell your friend that the subway isn’t usually very loud or hot or crowded.
Brian Aubrey Smith 