The Monday after my 22nd birthday, I showed up for work with a black eye and a pierced ear.
“What happened to you?” my new friend Stephen asked.
The story wasn’t as interesting as it appeared. I’d moved a ten-foot ladder without realizing there was a hammer on the top step. The claw struck within half an inch of my eye, so it could’ve been much worse.
The earring, more-or-less a sober decision, was seemingly less consequential in comparison. This would change.
First order of business that day, take a car service out to Astoria, rent a decibel meter, then walk around midtown Manhattan, measuring noises. The magazine I worked for liked buzzy little side stories.
Grand Central Station seemed obvious, but it turns out it’s not really noisy at all. All these people coming and going, but the sounds float upwards like mists, vague and angelic by the time they bounce back from the cathedral ceiling above.
I picked one track in particular to clock the sound of an incoming train. It exceeded 100 db. Pretty loud. Out on the street, a blaring taxi horn hit 127 db, the highest single measurement that day. 127 db will cause hearing damage pretty quickly with prolonged exposure.
Autumn in New York really is a thing. The portal opens, the day is at one with every eternal autumn day on this island, ever. You share the streets with Pollock, Kerouac, Emma Lazarus, Peter Stuyvesant, your own ancestors…
Back downtown, my job was mostly in a windowless bullpen. Proofreading, copy editing, fact checking, phone calls. The internship scam wasn’t pay-to-play so much as work-to-work, but you went to openings and whatnot, so you got to play too. You just had to keep hustling a few more months, roll this thing into an assistant editor job. That had become the grand plan.
Then, the earring caught up with me.
Piercing cartilage. One cheap little hoop in the top of my ear, out of nowhere, blood infection. I was suddenly laid up, sick as I’d ever been.
My apartment smelled like rats and sewer gas, which wasn’t helping my recovery. I disappeared upstate a while, get myself back to a point of basic functionality.
By the time I hit the street in NYC again, the weather had changed. Even the homeless man who lived in the doorway of our building had moved from our stoop into a cardboard box beneath the fire escape.
The infection had led to walking bronchitis. I couldn’t shake it. I could hold my head up and walk to work (barking like a dog, must’ve been pretty) but my brain still just wasn’t functioning.
At the next desk, the other intern was sweet-talking someone at Rolling Stone over the phone. It was working. This guy was about to get himself hired.
Meanwhile, I was in some kind of speculative detective story. The mystery: what’s going on inside my own brain?
Why was I working in this place? Do I have the energy to do this kind of endless networking? Do I actually want to work in publishing? What am I even doing in this city right now?
All my life, ever since the late sixties when my mom took me to the Empire State Building and my first automat, I’d dreamed only of living in Manhattan.
Something was about to change.
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Nice - I can feel the pace you’ve lived through. Which is, curiously enough, why I’ve never wanted to live in NY. Not my tempo. Little did I know…