Odd Man Out of 8 Million

The day I learned that I did not belong in New York was the day of the blackout in 2003. It was a week after I had returned from Budapest, where Julia and I had broken up after six years and three cities. We had moved to New York together so that she could attend Columbia Law and I could pursue an acting career. That first year proved to be a gauntlet for both of us. Julia was saddled with the workload of an Ivy League law school, and I was faced with the daunting world of auditions and agents—a world that my acting conservatory had not prepared me for. I could cry on command. Not that anyone was asking me to. I would generally walk into an audition, read about half a page of script, and be thanked by people who had never actually looked up from the papers spread in front of them. I ended up working two jobs, not at all acting-related, and taking more acting classes. Not because I needed more acting classes, but because I needed the shelter of something I understood.

All the while, Julia was growing colder and more distant each week. The drowning-man-style flailing I had been doing was becoming a distraction from her work and the new purpose and social life it had provided her—especially the new social life. By spring break, we were barely speaking. She went on a trip to New Orleans with classmates. I stayed in New York. The United States invaded Iraq that week, and I felt this was a big enough event to warrant a phone call. She seemed frustrated that I had interrupted her fun.

After the first year was completed, Julia got a summer internship with a gypsy rights group in Hungary. I arrived for the last two weeks of the program to find that there had been a Serbian boy—and lots of drama and torrid emotions and forbidden romance. My role was to provide the foil to all of this excitement. I had returned to New York, this time to pack alone. Julia returned three days later to begin interviewing for the next summer’s associate programs at law firms in Midtown. There was still some time left before I could move out, so I would go to the job I had on Columbia’s campus, and she would go to her interviews. Then at night, we would try to make nice, then argue, then go to bed angry.

I was in the first third of this ritual—at my desk in the basement of the school library—when the lights went out. Word of what was going on quickly spread throughout the building, and we were released from work.

Our apartment was within walking distance, and I made my way through the growing crowds of people emptying out of the darkened buildings into the sunlight. Since 9/11, there had been a lot of talk about New York becoming a kinder place—a place where people took more time to look after one another—and that, after seeing so much suffering in the past two years, they would band together in the face of whatever came. Now the test of that new spirit had finally come, and there was a tense vibration of uncertainty in the population spilling out onto the streets. If this devolved into the blackout riots from the seventies, then 9/11 meant nothing. You could sense a slow intake of breath as New York itself seemed to look into its soul and try to figure it out.

Then there was an exhale, and the tension broke. Just like that. As vendors rolled out coolers of water to give away for free, and the pizza guys started handing out slices from their doorways, there was a growing sense that the city was passing the test. As it passed the test, its populace seemed to grow giddy with the feeling of accomplishment and victory, and the people on the street began to laugh and celebrate. It was like a goodwill snowball: the more the city didn’t turn on its own, the better it felt, causing it to extend that good feeling outward and get it back double. It was as if you could put whatever intangible thing keeps people who constantly live elbow-to-chin from killing each other into a Tesla coil. New York had said it was different, changed by recent events—that it was stronger, closer, forgiving in a way this city had never even aspired to be before—and now it was proving it to a nation.

And all of this celebration was in the face of the knowledge that passing now, passing today, guaranteed nothing. If the blackout lasted two days, three—would this new spirit last as well? No way to tell, so all the more reason to celebrate harder. Boom boxes were brought out, and folks who might not otherwise say hello to one another gathered around to listen to music that a good portion of them might not otherwise listen to or even tolerate. Convoys of cars and trucks that had picked up total strangers started making their way up Amsterdam Avenue, and instead of the usual honking in anger, now the horns were accompanied by people hanging out the windows of the cars to shout and wave like they were in a victory parade.

I had returned to our apartment and made my way up nine floors in a darkened stairwell to check on the cat. I fed him, made sure he had water, and that the windows were all open. Then I gathered up some change and headed back down to the street to search for a pay phone. My cell wasn’t working. I didn’t know if anyone’s cell was working. When I found a phone, I tried calling Julia a few times but got nothing. I had images in my mind of her trapped in a subway tunnel somewhere. I called her mother in Baltimore. She had heard from her—she was fine. She was in the 50s with a bunch of her fellow students, and it looked like they were going to have to walk back to 119th Street. I was relieved.

I went back to the apartment and got out all the candles I could find. That was the extent of my blackout preparation ideas—and it was still daylight out. So I went back down to watch the city have an impromptu party and wait for Julia to make her way back home. I walked down to the corner and leaned on the wall. I smoked and watched the people shout from the overflowing cars as workers from bodegas ran out and handed off still-cold bottles of water. Occasionally, a flatbed truck piled high with hangers-on would come rumbling past. I didn’t know any of these people. The only people I had met so far were Julia’s law school colleagues. They were all with her in the 50s, and they were all with her in the post-breakup reality in which I was slowly becoming irrelevant. Some of the single guys she went to school with looked at me like they were ready to help me pack if it would move things along.

I got it. But it left me with no one—no roots in this city. Law school had given Julia a kind of instant context here. I shared nothing with this city; I hadn’t made any part of it mine yet. I was an interloper on this strange, intimate moment it was having. I stood on the corner, watching my fellow citizens dance and laugh and holler, and felt like I was peeking in a window.

Julia and her schoolmates had grabbed a cheering flatbed home. Late afternoon, they came walking down the street, all of them smiling and laughing, their interview suits in varying levels of disarray. They all had fruit punch Gatorades that some guys on the street had given them, and they had spent the afternoon as part of the NYC post-apocalypse victory procession. She saw me standing on the corner, and her smile faltered. She did her best to try and shove it back into place. Now, she said, they were going up to Mark’s place because he had all this beer that he wanted to drink before it got warm. Mark was one of the guys who wanted to help me with my bags. Then she asked if I wanted to come.

And just like that, Julia was a New Yorker. She had found a place here, somewhere she belonged, a niche to fill. And as a New Yorker—on this day when all New Yorkers were celebrating what that meant, what it had always meant, and which parts were newly wrought from difficult times—she extended this freshly minted compassion and goodwill even unto me, even though it was likely the last thing she wanted to do.

But I hadn’t been part of this grand day. I had spent it searching and then waiting for her—waiting for the return of the last place I could remember belonging: at her side. Now it was clear. I didn’t belong there anymore, and I didn’t belong where I was. For a response, I fell back on Midwestern manners and discretion.

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “You go ahead.”

Eventually, I would belong in New York, but it wasn’t that day—the day that everyone belonged in New York.