RafaelFajardo

At the age of thirty I came back to New York to be literary, and it worked. Return of the native in the clothing of the naïf. Wolf in clothing of sheep. I had abruptly tired of outposts, of decentralized living—the city still an epicenter—and I had something very specific I wanted to do, within the specific culture of the literary. And I had noticed that every time I came back to visit I had a marvelous time, suddenly, in that specific culture.

So I came back, and said hello again to all that, and it genuflected back at me. I sucked up the transitional, transactional energy like a newborn mosquito. That’s where language is. I get my total buzz on when the buzz is there to beget. I am supremely familiar, you could say “comfortable,” with cityscape—noise, bustle, crowds, action, stimuli such as the very poor, the very rich, the very beautiful and the degraded, lights and smells of food on the street, shouts of people selling things for lots of money or begging for money or scamming with infants in their laps. Bumping into people I know in parks and bookstores and arthouses. For six or seven inexhaustible years I was one of those culture-workers who expends themselves beautifully, for whom the city is working, and what I did there I probably could not have done anywhere else.* Once I had accomplished that, I was just as abruptly done with New York, and I left. New York is a place for being public, for wanting to be famous. I achieved a degree of recognition in my field and became a public figure and found I didn’t like it. It served me well in launching my Literary Project, but did not serve my soul well.

I didn’t move far away, but I will never move back and I don’t visit often, or as often as you might think, and when I do I am happy to leave again, often on the same day. “SOHO GIVES ME HIVES”: that’s a t-shirt meme I brainstormed in the late 90’s, as the transformation of that deathly quiet neighborhood from artists’ cheap housing and site of freewheeling conceptualism to Mall of Outrageous Crap was completed. There are lots of neighborhoods and enclaves and scenes and nodes of NYC behavior that give me hives—too many to give shout-outs to. There are wonderful people I see only in the city, who refuse to get on the Amtrak to come visit upstate—train of diminishing signification—and who I sadly bid farewell after each lovely brief encounter.

I go down to the city, about once a month, two hours on the train with the other suckers, usually to attend or present or facilitate a potentially dazzling literary event. In New York City, in the dusk-filled streets or in the cold wintry streets, in streets when the light is pretty or streets when everything looks crappy and grimy, I see a tremendous amount of samey-ness, the kind that didn’t used to be there. Posers and wannabees and money-hounds EVERYWHERE, when in my youth they were restricted to the bridge-and-tunnel funnels of Eighth Street and midtown, Lexington Avenue and Central Park and, eventually, Soho. You could spot these chumps a mile away, and they were different from tourists, who came to gawk and then went back home; they were tourists who overstayed, put down roots for no good reason, who could lay no legitimate claim to the greatness of the city’s historic convergent energies, who had simply made money here and could therefore make it anywhere. New York City manifests itself now shamefacedly as a chump-factory, a chumphouse. It’s Chumptown. Artists who live there are living dangerously, close to extinction, dangerously close to the source of their art’s diminishment, an ouroboros of economic exigency. It’s well documented: Chumps need artists and artists need chumps, but they’re supposed to stay out of one another’s sight in order to maintain the necessary illusions! There have always been chumps in New York, but they used to be bashful chumps who bought the brilliant ones their drinks.

There’s this thing that happens, where I speak to a 20-something or 30-something sweetheart, a Joan Didion who’s moved to New York recently, and I realize at a certain point that their expectations of it are actually very low, compared to my own, because they cannot possibly imagine what it used to be like, the New York of the recent past, of the late 70s, 80s, 90s. They have no idea how far any of it has fallen, how sterile Chelsea, how horrorshow Soho, how lame-ass the LES. All by comparison. I’m not even going to mention Brooklyn, because Brooklyn is nothing but a brand name. Forget Queens.** Visual culture does not often represent what’s past; I’m sure a slew of movies soon will, but right now with the exception of Chico and the Man and early, secret, legendary Madonna as incarnated in Lady Gaga I don’t know what is widely culturally understood of what was cool in those times. Whit Stillman? The 80s art world via Basquiat? Graffiti? Michael Douglas in Wall Street? I’m afraid this latter giant face has eclipsed the faces I knew, the faces of the brazen, the bold, the class- and culture- and gender-vultures, non-rich aspirants to splendor, gamy artist-class fast-talkers, children of choreographers, children of sculptors, excitable children of alcoholic Midwesterners, those for whom there was no money changing hands.

There is the fallacy of nostalgia, and there is the fallacy of the fallacy of nostalgia. You’re not supposed to ever say that something used to be better, because then you are vainly trying to hold that something in stasis, cold in the frame of reference in which you knew it, and this is narcissistic and regressive and cranky and blinder-ed. It is ungenerous to those whose references are framed more recently, to those who we must make way for and learn from: to the young. Those who are making their way in the world, and making the world. Those who could, at this point, be our children, if we had given birth to the children we aborted in high school and college and graduate school.

But we have already said goodbye to all that dualistic relativism, in this new world. It’s a “both/and” world we live in: Every cranky, aging generation feels that things used to be cooler, or more imaginative, or riskier, or etc.; many things actually did use to be cooler, riskier, etc., and this argument against the insistence that something could actually have been qualitatively so, probably quantifiably if you had the time, serves most those for whom the status quo is best maintained: Chumps. For if it’s never true that things have degraded, deteriorated, absolutely—and of course the same is true of improvement—then there’s never any impetus to halt the degradation. Or to look for something better elsewhere. You’ll keep paying rent until you can’t.

So yes, it’s true. New York City used to be cool, and now it’s not. It’s not at all. It is boring and dismaying and stymied; everything potentially cool in it is overwhelmed and inflated and parodied and sold. You can’t even love the absurdity of it because it’s too painful and we cannot be allowed anymore to callously love, for their absurdity, systems that oppress and impoverish. New York is a giant sinking pile of crap compared to what it used to be. Literally sinking, now that the waters rise so much quicker, the winds blow so much harder than even scientists predicted. Lately I like to imagine that I will have the privilege of seeing in my lifetime real estate values in the city plunge wildly, freefall, as Climate Events force visitors to admit that they pay top-dollar to perch on coastal landfill.