BrIGHt LiGHts, biG City : New YoRK,, NY 1997

Everybody makes a mistake or two in their career.

Mine was in 1997, when I decided to go home and settle down.

First of all, let me state up front that I had never, ever had the slightest interest in living in New York City. I know, it’s the capital of the world, and all that crap. If you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Etcetera.

But I had been so inundated with TV programs, films, books and songs about New York that it seemed to me a strikingly unoriginal destination. What new could there possibly be to discover in New York? For a hundred years every moron that could lift a pen, a brush or a camera had been doing so at length in New York.

I stopped working in Seoul, Korea, at the end of January, 1997. I spent the next few months backpacking around the Philipines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, spending the fruit of my labors. Then, in May, I went back to America for the first time in 2 ½ years. I saw my family and friends, and considered my options.

I wanted to go to Russia, but it was at that time fairly difficult to find information about working in Russia. The internet was still in it’s infancy – computers still took up to 10 minutes to load one page. Web searches for “teaching English in Russia” yielded nothing. I bought a “Lonely Planet Russia” and was rather put off by the complicated visa process and the tales of corruption and crime aimed at foreigners.

Then I went to visit a girl in New York. I had met her in Greece in 1994, and she had, for some reason, after an afternoon spent together, decided I was the perfect man and corresponded faithfully with me for nearly three years.

Of course I knew it wouldn’t last ten seconds – she was a neurotic New York art fag type, and had projected her ideal of the bohemian dream man onto English Teacher X’s blank and featureless visage. Locked into her life in New York, she found it very attractive that there was someone who wasn’t.

Not yet anyway.

I came to New York in late August to visit her, however, and managed to fall under New York’s bright and shiny spell. The famous buildings! The counterculture! The nightlife! The cultural opportunities! The stores! Times Square!

Sucker.
I visited once, then went back to my mom’s place to organize my meager belongings and go back. I took the Greyhound bus there, a 24-hour ride. Anybody who has ever ridden the Greyhound bus a long distance in America won’t want to be reminded about it, and anybody who hasn’t is probably better off not knowing about it. So I won’t describe the journey.

I stayed with the girl and her roommate in their tiny shabby apartment in Greenwich Village for my first couple of weeks. I checked the Sunday New York Times for job advertisements, and immediately saw three positions for English teachers in private institutes.

I sent my resume to a couple, and got one call back from a polite woman who asked me if I could come in for an interview. When i called the third place I spoke to a somewhat sharp woman with a heavy Eastern European accent who said she didn’t want to see my resume, because she needed to see me in person. “Ze resume tells me nuzzing” she said. How true – most of it was fake anyway. I agreed I’d come in for an interview.

The first place was located in a huge midtown hotel. The school seemed professional enough and the woman I spoke to was pleasant. She offered me weekend and evening work at $14 an hour. She seemed terribly exhausted and weary though, and said she was about to take a leave of absence. That, to me, somehow didn’t bode well.

I made my way to another central midtown location for my second interview. The facilities were modern and the Polish secretary polite. Students of various nationalities bustled around. How exciting! The global village and all.

The manager was indeed Eastern European, a short and puffy yet doughty woman. There was another candidate there, a woman with a British accent. The manager saw the other candidate first, but wasn’t with her long.

When I saw the manager she offered me the job almost immediately. She only briefly scanned the resume, the diploma and the fake certificate. “I want to hire a man, not a woman. Women always have problems and miss classes.”

I asked a few questions about the place; she said the schedule would probably be nine to four, four days a week, the pay would be $15 an hour, and there would be no insurance and no paid holidays.

She seemed angry when I told her I still had another interview to go to.

I went back to the tiny flat in Greenwich Village to think about it. I decided to accept the second job offer, just because I hated job interviews and couldn’t stand the thought of stomping around Manhattan in a tie with a bunch of photocopies under my arm. Whatever happened, I could do the job for a couple of months and then go to Russia or something.

I would find it much easier to arrive in NY than to leave it, unfortunately.

This was the last week of August, I think, and they had classes starting the second week of September. Relations already souring with the arty girl, I moved into a “cheap” hotel in the West Village, the Riverview Inn. $168 a week got you a room that was about 7 feet by 4 feet, with a bed, a small dresser, and a TV. Without a TV was cheaper, but you needed something to drown out the noise of the crazy people staggering around and yelling at night.

The inhabitants of the hotel were about 1/3 European backpackers, 1/3 mentally ill people on welfare, and 1/3 Bohemian street musician and struggling artist types. I can’t say as I met anybody interesting there, mostly because I was afraid they might try to kill me. But some of them probably were interesting.

The location of the hotel was great, and it was relatively clean, if a bit cramped – plenty of showers and toilets. I’d just spent 2 ½ years living in cruddy hotels in Asia so it didn’t suffer by comparison to anything.

I still had a good chunk of money saved from Korea so I explored the nightlife of the Village and the Lower East Side. Man, how groovy! Bars had sofas and black walls and green lights and red metal chairs! They played music so hip nobody had ever heard of it except the DJ. How different from Asia, where it was all pop music and glitzy tacky discos. Everyone had cool clothes and dyed hair. Except me, of course, but I didn’t mind.

By the end of the second week I was convinced that the “downtown hipster” variety of New Yorkers are the most boring and annoying people on the face of the planet. They don’t curse. They don’t have opinions about anything, other than the fact that people who have strong opinions are bad. They vaguely support left-wing politics but spend most of their time complaining about how expensive their apartments are. They don’t get drunk. They don’t take drugs. They can’t really afford it, because they spend all their money on hair dye and rent. Nobody makes jokes, other than the most obvious and banal ones, because they might be offensive to somebody. They roller blade a lot. Conversations that don’t involve complaining involve current films.

Conversation was tedious with them, painful.

“So what do you do?” I’d ask.

“I’m co-producer at a small acid jazz label.”

“Oh really.”

“Well, during the day I’m an accountant at an asbestos removal company, but yeah, the label is doing really well and anytime now I expect. . .”

In Bangkok we’d talked about whores, venereal diseases, and drunken misadventures, while drinking enormous quantities of beer. In New York I couldn’t even mention I’d been in Bangkok. People would lecture me about how Thailand and its products should be boycotted, though most had only a very general idea why. “Because there’s a lot of prostitution there.”

To retort I would often open up to the back of the Village Voice, which featured about 10 pages of advertisements for “escort services.” “Should I boycott New York, too?”

One night, shortly before I started work, coming home at 3:00 am discouraged after yet another flashy yet dull evening watching homosexual men drinking martinis and talking to overweight women, I turned on the TV and discovered that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris.

My first thought was : conspiracy. They killed her because she was dating an arab.

The schizophrenic next door agreed with me. He muttered about it all the next day, sitting shirtless on his bed with the door open. He couldn’t afford a TV, I suppose.

I was to discover, however, that there was indeed something worse than living in New York though:

Working in New York.

Next time: Battered Wife Syndrome: Working in New York

BaCK to ramBlingS MenU