The Apple

New York, 10 a.m. Wednesday morning. At first blush the Cafe Fabiane looks closed, but through the window I can make out what seems to be a long haired rat in a shopping bag looking snooty and bored while its owner explores the pastry display. Later Andrew will claim that only pig-savagers, glue-sniffers, and tourists come here, given that the Verve is right across the street, but on this particular morning I am without the benefit of my brother's contempt, and the Fabiane looks like an oasis of Sittingroom in a Standingroom city. I take a seat by the window, my lips on a mug and my eyes on the street.

In just about any other city in America, Wednesday morning foot traffic is pretty much limited to delivery men, grandmothers, and a few homeless guys. Maybe some scurrilous and dissolute college professors. But as I look around, I note that all I'm seeing are 20-30 somethings, a restless trickle of Young Hopefuls whose collective streaming etches small grooves in the face of the neighborhood. A river of distinct, luminous points, whose movement is the result of a physical law rather than will or need: the expected downward flow of an urban watershed. And as I sit and watch these young men and women shuffle by in ones and twos, each one so carefully crafted, each sartorial signifier so obviously considered, their faces begin to blend, and soon all I see is the macroscopic flux, the general move from Dream to Life, punctuated with a parade of rich particulars: leather satchels, dark jeans, small glasses, business-casual, tattooed forearms, fishnets, heals, hats, scruff. The flotsam of the flow towards identity.

I have only spent twelve hours in this city, eight of them sleeping, and already the spirit of the place has sunk its claws into me. On the way over, I got lost (of course) and ended up driving around docks and warehouses in Newark as night was falling and the wolves began to howl, but every guard, station attendant, businesswoman and beatnik from whom I sought directions responded with warmth, detail, and a smile. As if they were delighted for a chance to show off their city, proud of the fact that they had secured a bit-part in this ongoing production of urban identity; genuinely concerned for the Visiting classes. And the conceit (that New York is special, that it lies in the center, that its history and destiny subsume the individual) is strongly infectious: who can visit this city and not feel the pulse of something huge and central and great? The rough contractions of hope and abandon on a national and historic scale.

Symbolism has a way of fading under the onslaught of Time Logged, of course. I dimly recall that when I moved to Pittsburgh, I did so in part because it too was a symbol, of working class America, of blue-collar struggle, of democratic advance. The power of that symbol lasted about a week. For the middle-aged woman in the toll booth who told me to take U-turn and get another ticket, the City-as-Symbol may take second place to City-as-Crushing-Economic-Reality. What does this place mean for that bearded bum in the gutter, or the trash-talking adolescents, or the Chinese delivery guy? For these, the city may be less the heart-and-soul of America than the everyday, crushing background reality from which it is the duty of every thinking, feeling soul to cut his bonds and find his distance.

But here, in this café, in the heart of this bougie, expensive Brooklyn neighborhood whose streets are crawling with mopey young men in tight jeans and artfully uncombed hair, women with short skirts, bare shoulders, and leather writing pads, here New York is about proximity, not distance: it is about being in the epicenter. This is the young person’s New York, the New York to which every thirsty and questing soul must make ritual pilgrimage early in life. Some of these kids are making six figures on wallstreet, others live hand to mouth, some furnish elegant single residence apartments with high end furniture while others pay what in any other city would be a fortune to occupy a small chink in a crawling rat’s nest. They walk the streets, they watch each other, they wonder who is who and where they’re going and who will succeed and who might be interesting or powerful or seducible. They are Pynchon’s Crew, Sick and colorful and sad and endlessly entertaining.