the greatest loneliest city in the world
Early days living in Manhattan were both thrilling and bleak. My first apartment was on the Upper East Side and whenever it rained I got that Blade Runner melancholia — my soul actually ached, like I'd been nudged into an abyss within an abyss of isolation. Walking home down 5th Avenue at 2am, table tips bulging my pocket, too exhausted to go out with workmates, stepping across homeless men warming themselves over subway grates like dogs on a grill. Rats scampering to and fro. I envied the rats. They seemed to have friends.
I had no time for friends. I only worked. All day I went to look-sees my agency would text me, then nights at a restaurant to pay for it. Six days. On the seventh I rested — but unlike God, I had nothing to show for it. My first agency check was for $2.48. A $1,000 gig returned that, after fees. I never cashed it. I framed it and hung it on the wall as a reminder to be cautious in the shark-infested waters of the greatest city on earth.
I'd get home at 2am and collapse on the couch. My roommate — a chef — would arrive, sit next to me, and smoke heroin. When he left for a friendlier state, I invited a girl from my agency who needed a room. She also smoked heroin, and had an asshole boyfriend who was an early YouTuber. One night she got high, forgot her keys, broke in through my bedroom via the fire escape and knocked my CD collection down onto 1st and 63rd. Next day I collected fractured plastic in a Trader Joe's bag — annoyed, but grateful it wasn't pieces of her I was picking up.
That's Manhattan. Interjections without preface or conclusion. People there for a minute and then gone, recalled afterward like dreams, or hauntings.
One night a girl I'd met called — she was visiting for work, staying at the Chelsea Hotel. Meet me, she said. I did. We never left the room. When I came up in the notoriously slow elevator the night before, I'd had a two-minute conversation with a stranger that contained more humanity than the entire preceding year — authentically friendly faces, intoxicated smiles, a brief and profound exchange with someone I'd never see again. I made an appointment with Stanley Bard on my way out.
A few days later I sat in his ground-floor office and it felt more like an interview. That surprised me then. Later it made sense — guests at the Chelsea were passing through; residents were curated. We conversed easily, laughed. He offered me a room on the fourth floor: a single bed, a sink, a piano, a view of 8th Avenue. Silly cheap. I stayed two years, until the money-grubbers kicked Stanley out and a small band of us left in worthless protest.
The Chelsea was everything NYC at large wanted to be and wasn't. Or used to be and no longer was.
My mother lived in Manhattan in the 60s and tells a very different story — one closer to the Chelsea vibe. A city of tight-knit communities, culturally aligned by love of language, food, country; sometimes just aligned by love of culture. Affordable and proportionate. You could eat cheap at any number of great diners. You could smoke in bars. The city attracted misfits from everywhere that misfits grew but didn't feel at home — I was one of them, I knew it. We loved that we could be anyone we wanted to be, don a persona or try a few on until one stuck, and no one knew or cared. That's why everyone went there. Not to make their fortune, as it is now. To make their character.
I stepped off the plane at Newark with $108 in my pocket. Within two days I had a job and starter friends. But the city was already changing. By the time I landed on 63rd and 1st it was dog eat dog.
Stanley's banishment was the final act. The last stronghold taken, the guerrilla holdouts dispersed and disarmed.
That's when New York lost its heart.
Chickenlist is a light on in the abandoned mansion atop the hill of New York's last stand. I've restored the electricity. Can all you lonely, lonesome loners haunting the streets of this great city restore the buzz and hum of loving connections?
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chickenlist is a classifieds for real people to meet in real life. no algorithm. no swiping. no cookies. the corkboard is at chickenlist.com