All such distinctions express themselves in a variety of ways, and many of them can seem alien. Young black kids in the Secret City of Bed-Stuy or Brownsville talk endlessly about “my image.” Not about the self. Nor about a true understanding of one’s strengths and limits. No: They preen and pose and brag about their elaborately constructed masks. They aren’t alone. The white kids downtown spend endless hours creating punk uniforms to trundle off to that week’s rock club. The rest of us stand off and watch, usually amused, almost always separated from any true contact because of the impenetrability of the masks. Look (we say): inhabitants of the Secret City. Sometimes we can marvel at their amazing labors and ferocious choices: They have decided to perform their lives instead of living them. But after the glance and the wisecrack, we move on. That’s their New York; it’s not ours. And, of course, they are making similar judgments about us.
Sometimes the appearance of people from the Secret City can be disturbing. Most New Yorkers succumb easily to the instinct to make the world smaller and therefore more manageable. We construct our own parishes. Here are our friends. There are our restaurants and shops and the movie house. This is our favorite bar. There is the church or synagogue. Here, among these familiar streets and places, we are known. We are safe. We hope such places will last a lifetime. And, of course, they don’t. One morning the butcher dies and his children sell the place and move to Florida. The condominium racketeers show up and soon Mrs. Flanagan and Mrs. Moloff are no longer on the bench beside the park across the street and we’ve lost a piece of the intricate mesh of daily life. A nameless developer alights on the block and a few months later the earthmovers and cranes are pummeling away, and two bars vanish, and a bodega, and the barbershop where the bookmaker took bets.
Now there are new people on the block. And new buildings. And the parish has permanently changed. Who are these people, asks the old New Yorker, and where did they all come from?
They came from the Secret City. That is, they came from beyond the parish. Their vision of New York is not ours. And often the older New Yorker closes up, denies the new, retreats into those entombed cities of memory and loss. Many of the young can’t understand the almost permanent nostalgia of older New Yorkers.
Why are the middle-aged always talking, at the risk of maudlin cliché, about the Old Neighborhood, about places gone and buried, about Ebbets Field and Birdland, the Cedar Tavern and the old Paramount? The reason is probably simple: In those places, they were happy. Sentimentality is almost always a form of resentment.
But in a very important way, this is terribly sad. By retreating from the new or the foreign or the strange, the New Yorker cuts himself off from the throbbing engine of the city itself. The city’s fabled energy is the result of millions of small daily collisions: the push and shove followed by resistance or collapse. That remorseless process often affects individual lives; it alters entire neighborhoods; and without it, we would be dead.
So the other New York, the Secret City, shouldn’t really be a blank on the maps, marked with the legend DRAGONS LURK HERE. Whether we accept it or not, the unknown, remote, and alien city is there, all around us, relating to the city we know the way anti-matter relates to matter. There are zones of the Secret City that can provoke rage; you must enter them with a patient fatalism. In New York, there will never be an end to self-importance, malice, the iron heart, so you learn to cherish the latest exhibits.
After a while, you smile in appreciation of the idiotic snobberies that so many people embrace as substitutes for thought. You await with enthusiasm this year’s Golden Couple — there is one every year, in every set — and watch them migrate as if they were the center of the population, serene, self-absorbed, supremely blessed. Then you wait for the line in the gossip columns announcing the final rupture. The details don’t really matter. For the time that the Golden Couple was everywhere in the hamlet of society, they offered delicious entertainment. That is the way to see them. Not with envy or spite or some nagging sense that you are missing something by not moving in their orbit. Such people exist in a New York of their own making; next year, their successors will unfurl their diaphanous flags.
You can maintain some distance by looking at another Secret City: that of the mendicants, the poor and homeless, that squalid Calcutta of the New York heart. This is most certainly not entertainment; these people are not mere performers. Most are trapped in a permanent indigence, steady reminders that there is nothing ennobling about poverty. It is a simple matter to look away from them, to ignore their desperate marginality. But to do so is to live an illusion, to invent a New York that doesn’t exist. These people, along with the almost 900,000 men, women, and children on welfare, are part of a city that doesn’t read the New York Times, doesn’t think about takeover bids, the hot new restaurants, the bond market, the next Democratic candidate, nuclear war, or nuclear disarmament. They are not waiting for tickets to Les Misérables. They have more elemental concerns: food, drink, shelter, survival.
Such people give us perspective about our own lives, serving as heartbreaking reminders that living in this city can be precarious at best but that even our most fruitless encounters and dispiriting defeats are as nothing compared to the life of the man living each night in a cardboard box on the street. Our relative freedom from want should encourage mobility, propel us into small adventures. In New York, we don’t have to go far. On almost any given day, we can face grotesqueries; the next day might be riddled with ambiguity; and even for those of us trapped in offices, stamping away at a million documents like the man in Kurosawa’s Ikiru, there is the possibility of surprise.
You walk down an avenue in Chelsea and hollow-eyed men in filthy coats implore you to grant them alms; two blocks later, every other woman is beautiful, with dark, flirting eyes; at the next corner, a religious lunatic pursues you, flaying you for your sins, preaching your doom in capital letters. At lunch, a friend’s wife starts blabbing on about channeling and past-life experiences and the joys of life in dear old Atlantis; the waiter tells you that the Mets have scored two runs in the bottom of the second; word arrives that a guy you knew has died of AIDS.In a little over an hour, you have experienced pity, lust, anger, incomprehension, elation, loss. At last you leave, and at the corner, a group of hustlers, peddling crack, fake Rolexes, used books, sees you and is suddenly tense, poised for action, like an orchestra awaiting a downbeat.
And all around you lies the Secret City. Forgotten alleys, houses with lost histories, streets turbulent with the emanations of power. Places so new the odor of paint stains the air; others so old that they are to a neophyte explorer incredibly new and surprising. There are places only a few know about; others that are so commonplace we forget they exist. All are there to be savored, enjoyed, rejected. Some of my own favorites are those monuments to the great swaggering days of nineteenth-century capitalism, whispering to us across the decades. The shades of old brigands seem to be looking on in judgment from these places, mocking the arrogant ziggurats of the Trumps, sneering at the assorted felonies of their successors on the Street. But surely if they could look down from the ramparts of those old fortresses, they would also be comforted. Certainly the rampaging ferocity of the present crop of the newly rich makes the old robber barons look nearly austere. You see the new crowd all over the city now, feverishly spending, talking ceaselessly about money, being cruel to waiters and rude to their neighbors. They are citizens of that Secret City whose only fulcrum is greed.