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New York, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, was where I was from, I just hadn’t gotten there yet.
From Nick I learned to play the city like a video game: always keep moving, score points for knowing that diner on south Broadway has killer pea soup or that bar on St. Mark’s doesn’t card on Wednesdays or that one pool hall on Houston has Monster Bash pinball and stays open twenty-four hours. Every choice, from what you wear to how you walk to which street you turn down next is a potential portal to another level, to a part of the game you haven’t even seen yet, to the unimaginable.
Everybody is living through their own golden age, but you only realize it afterward, so start living it now.
You’d go around the world and you’d have respect because you are from New York. “Oh, you’re from New York?” People who don’t live in New York bow down to this mythic thing. Because you needed to have a certain courage to live here. Your exposure to everyone was full blast. If you could thrive in this little petri dish of intense humanity, that deserved a bit of honor.
Everyone is here to do something. They’re here because they’re smart, and they were able to cast off the chains of their small town.
