New York is My Boyfriend
A love affair in two cities, and a lifetime of withdrawal.
I’ve never done drugs, but I often compare my obsession, or maybe it’s an addiction, to New York City. I arrive and the high kicks in, the way I imagine the harder drugs must feel, and like an addict, the moment I return home, I need another fix.
Los Angeles is where I live, and I love it here. The beaches, the weather, the tacos that ruin you for tacos anywhere else. But New York is a different relationship entirely. I once saw a sign that read: “New York is my boyfriend.” I laughed, because I knew the rest of the sentence. “New York is my boyfriend, and Los Angeles is my husband.” LA gives me peace, comfort, space, fresh air, and freedom. It loves me completely, satisfies me, and asks for nothing. New York throws me on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet, runs every red light, keeps me out bar hopping until sunrise, then spits me out and sends me back to LA where I can get the rehab I need. I'm sober for a while, and then the craving starts, and I'm booking flights again.
My New York habit started young, and I know exactly who got me hooked: my mother.
We were living in New Haven then, one of the many in-betweens of our lives, depending on where my father was in his “businesses.” My mother had been a dancer in New York, and every so often she’d take me on the train into the city to see a play or, if it was holiday season, Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes. Going to New York required dressing up. Mom would wear her best dress and high heels, even though we’d be walking the city all day. She wore them as comfortably as tennis shoes. I wore one of my fancy dresses with patent leather shoes. I’d press my face to the window of the train as Manhattan rose up out of nowhere, crazy tall, crazy loud, crazy everything. It was so big for a little girl, and I loved every minute of it.
We’d eat at some restaurant she remembered from when she’d lived there, usually grabbing sandwiches you couldn’t find in New Haven. She loved a Monte Cristo — ham and cheese dipped in egg batter and fried golden like French toast and dusted with powdered sugar. It was more of a dessert than a sandwich. I’d order something American like a BLT, because in New Haven, ninety-eight percent of what we ate was Italian. We always ordered some ice-cream-and-soda-water concoction to drink.
But what I remember most is watching my mother watch the city. She had lived inside it once, danced inside it, and seeing New York through her eyes made it more than a place. It was a former life, and it made sense to see my mother there, because she was always as lit up as New York.
I was born in Miami but raised for a while among our Italian family in New Haven, who had come from Italy to New York before settling in Connecticut. I was fifteen when we moved to Los Angeles, and I’ve been here ever since. I am more than grateful for all the years of sandy beaches and sunshine, but gratitude is not the same as desire.
For years I traveled back and forth to New York on business because our magazine publisher was there, and every single trip, I’d walk those tree-lined streets in the shadow of those tall buildings and think: I have to live here. Why don’t I live here? The rivers, the cafés, the smells (yes, even those), the vibe. New York has a pulse you can feel through the soles of your shoes. Los Angeles has a heartbeat too, but you have to drive three freeways and at least one winding canyon to find it.
The strangest part about New York is that it’s the only place on earth where I feel fearless.
This is interesting in itself, because I’m a person who seriously fears death. In my quiet town in Los Angeles, twenty minutes from Malibu, all palm trees and bumblebees, I have plenty of time to think about dying. LA gives you space, and I fill that space with dread. But in New York, there’s never any time. I’m too busy. Too alive. And on the rare occasion the thought of death crosses my mind on a Manhattan sidewalk, I feel an odd relief knowing an ambulance is seconds away. In LA, everything is twenty minutes away, at least forty in traffic, including my rescue.
The sleep tells the same story. In Los Angeles, in the silence, I rarely sleep. I’m up for hours in the dark, thinking. In New York, I sleep like a baby. Taxi horns and ambulance sirens lull me to sleep. My husband understands this completely. He agrees that I was made to live in New York City. It has everything I need: good food, great fashion, culture, an exciting nightlife, and the best hospitals.
Speaking of my husband, he’s from New York, which, when we were dating, was a big selling point. And because I married a man who wants all my dreams to come true, a few years ago he took a job there, for one year.
I took a leave of absence from my tenured college teaching position, packed up my LA life, and moved in with my husband, and my boyfriend. The two get along well.
It was the best year of my life. But first, I had to get there.
He started three months before me, so while I stayed behind in LA closing the sale of our house, we flew back and forth to be together. I’d found him a sublet on the Upper East Side, on the fourth floor of an eight-story building on a tree-lined street. It was a studio with glass doors that opened to a bed set against windows overlooking the trees, the cafés, and the shops. I loved visiting him there, right up until I saw my first cockroach. Where there’s one, there are many, and they started popping up everywhere. In a bag of potato chips on the counter. In the silverware drawer. On the walls of the elevator. That was it for the sublet. I hired a real estate agent, a gorgeous designer-dressed blonde, and to say that she understood me is an understatement.
She showed me three apartments. The first was one of the most beautifully restored brownstones I have ever seen. I was ready to sign the lease in the doorway, but she assured me there were two more to see. The second was a high-rise where Aida Turturro—Janice from The Sopranos — was walking out as we were walking in. Impressive lobby and impressive residents. And then we arrived at the last one, on the Upper East Side. We stepped into the elevator and she pressed the button. P.
Yes. P. For penthouse.
Anyone who knows me knows I am probably the biggest Sex and the City fan to walk the planet. Try me. I can practically recite every episode, and yes, I’ll even defend the two movies. And here I was, standing in the first movie. I was Carrie, and my Mr. Big was at the hospital and couldn’t come with me. She opened the doors and I lost all feeling in my legs. Floor-to-ceiling windows holding what looked like all of New York City. And then I turned to the right, and there it was: the 59th Street Bridge.
You have to understand about this bridge. My cousins Denice and Lucia, longtime New Yorkers who actually had a car, used to take my sister and me on wild adventures around the city, several of which involved hunting for the bridge from Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. Keep in mind this was pre-Google. It took us multiple trips to figure out it was the 59th Street Bridge. And now here it was. Literally in my face. I may have died several times that day.
It was a two-bedroom with a large living room, a full kitchen, and a balcony that wrapped around the entire apartment.
I called my husband to ask him about leasing the apartment. His answer, about our own heaven on 65th, was pure Mr. Big: “I got it.”
For one year, that wraparound balcony was mine. I stood out there at night with the city lit up below me like spilled champagne. On sunny days, I dragged big fluffy pillows outside and lay right on the balcony floor, the skyline above me. I drank coffee out there in the mornings and prosecco at night. And every single time I came home and opened that door, I gasped and said out loud: Oh my fucking god, I live here.
I didn’t have to ration my fix. I mainlined New York daily.
Los Angeles has its own stories, and they usually involve celebrity sightings, or overhearing someone at a café talk about their next acting part or the script they’re writing. But my best celebrity story is an LA-in-NY moment. My husband and I were at Orso in the theater district, one of those long, narrow restaurants where the next table is practically in your lap, and two guys were smashed in next to us. One of them was on the phone, talking loudly about a new movie. Across from him was Lorne Michaels. I said to my husband, sarcastically: “I might as well be in LA. Obnoxious!”
And then it happened. A third man walked in wearing a hat and a coat, sat down with them, and ordered pea soup. He began to speak, and I realized this man was one of my idols, Steve Martin.
I tried to signal to my husband between labored breathing that Steve Martin was sitting next to us, but the doctor in him decided I was having a heart attack. Are you alright? he kept asking. When I finally got the message across, he also received the second message: we would be ordering everything on the menu if necessary to stay in their world until they paid the check. So we lingered and listened. They talked about how Tina Fey is more beautiful than people give her credit for. They talked about Meryl Streep and a new movie Steve was working on with her.
I know this sounds like just another celebrity sighting, but in New York, it’s different. In LA, a sighting is an occurrence, something that creates a paparazzi stir. And you rarely run into people like Steve Martin anyway. The Kardashians, yes, but rarely The Jerk himself. And it’s usually at a place like Erewhon. The real difference, though, is that in LA, that’s the moment of the day. In New York, all the moments are memorable. Every day, from the second you leave the apartment until you get home.
One evening during Fashion Week, I left the apartment for a walk, passed some event, and was asked if I’d like to come in. Just like that. Free champagne, models, and more celebrity faces than I could count. In LA, to get into an event like that, you’d need to be not only on the guest list but ready to hand over a copy of your investment account. And that’s the glamorous version. Think Steve Martin’s LA Story.
On the normal days, I sat in cafés and had conversations with some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. The older grey-haired woman with twin gothic models in tow, who told me they were all modeling for a new brand. The cab driver who told me the story of his life, how he’d fled a war-torn country for New York, but dreamed of LA. The woman I met at a church who told me stories of a haunting; I swear the lights flickered as she spoke. There are hundreds of these stories, all living in my New York state of mind. New York is old, but it’s new. It has buildings older than the Palm trees lining Sunset Boulevard, yet every single day is new. A new restaurant to try. A new cocktail made especially for you. A new story. A new friend.
The people are kind, and the neighborhood quickly becomes home. Within the first two weeks of living there, everyone from the doorman to the bagel guy to the woman who pours the wine at the local bar knows your name, your story, and what you order.
Then the year ended, the way years do. We had talked about staying, which meant me giving up my job, my tenure, my lifetime benefits. But the day we knew we were going home was the day we stood in the freezing cold in front of the PacSun store, watching its floor-to-ceiling video of Malibu on a loop, surfers and beach dwellers glowing in the warm sun, two people shivering in front of a commercial for their own life.
We looked at each other and said it out loud: I miss LA. It was time. Or maybe we just knew it had to end. LA is better for us, we told ourselves.
So I came home to my husband, my city. Back to the beaches and the space and the comfort and the peace and the unconditional love. Back to rehab, or as we call it in Los Angeles, spa day.
People ask me why I don’t just move there for good. It’s a fair question, and I’ve thought it over on many of those sleepless LA nights. Maybe the honest answer is that I’m afraid the marriage wouldn’t survive the affair becoming permanent. Maybe New York is only New York to me because I always have to leave it, because the high depends on the withdrawal. Maybe if I lived there year-round, I’d start noticing the noise and the slush and the garbage in July, and my boyfriend would slowly turn into somebody’s husband, the kind they’re thinking of divorcing.
Nah. That would never happen.
I need the sirens and the smell of the garbage and the noise and the heartbeat of New York, and I need the beach and the sunshine and the plastic-fantastic of LA.
The truth is, I need both in my life. And it turns out, I need both in death.
I’ve planned for the end. When my husband and I were writing our wills, I told him I want a New York death. I asked him, the doctor with access to the best drugs, if he learns I’m dying of an incurable disease, shoot me full of a killer drug and let me go out on the streets I love. Take black-and-white pictures of me. Hold a service where the photo slideshow plays to Madonna’s “I Love New York.” Then cremate my drug-filled body, fly me back to LA, and release my ashes into the ocean off Malibu, where I can rest in peace, while Joni Mitchell’s “California” plays.
Some people spend their whole lives searching for the one. I found two, and I’m keeping them both.
NOW I undersand!