Look, Ma, no hands
Once you’ve been nuts in New York City you wouldn’t want to do it anywhere else. I know this because I occasionally write and edit in Manhattan’s streets and attract no more attention than the millions of look-at-me’s who gab on their hands-free cell phones. I could be having phone sex or translating Proust, it wouldn’t make any difference to anybody.
But even when New Yorkers used telephone booths its legions who talk to themselves are legend—as much a fact of life in the city as cops and bag ladies.
I used to think you had to have acquired a certain patina to mutter or declaim on the city’s streets, but lately I notice humanoid young men and women doing it. I have even spent time casing them to make sure they’re not hooked up to the ether.
The exquisite dementia of it is reassuring. We’re not all consumer-machines after all. Some of us are nuts. No, all of us are nuts, but some of us let it hang out because a censorious public is so boring, so ultra-gauche.
Just the other day I stepped under an awning on Madison Avenue to scribble something in a notebook. I guess it was because I was looking as if my mind had gone fishing that a distinguished-looking man of about sixty gave me a thumbs up. He must have decided I didn’t look like a building inspector taking notes.
New Yorkers take creativity for granted. They know it has a price. I think they even know they provide the energy that makes the city so compelling to artists. Just as nerds sit near museums and such like to pick up Internet signals, New Yorkers know artists come to the city to plug into its human energy, and just as we’re never sure what the lightning is going to do to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, New Yorkers don’t know what their energy is going to do to artists. But they have great expectations.—DM
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