At the Strangers' Gate

1
The Blue Room and the Big Store
A Bus to the City, a Train to a Wedding
 
On the morning I was to be married in New York, I went to a bookstore, as I always did in moments of crisis or bliss—until all the bookstores closed and you had to seek some comfort or inspiration somewhere in the ether, like a monk. There I found what I hoped would serve as an epigraph for our approaching wedding. It was from the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Issa, the most humorous and tender of haiku makers, and it ran simply:
 
The world of dew is
a world of dew,
but even so . . .
 
I grasped it at once, or thought I did, in all its pregnant simplicity, its simple bow and implicit enormity. Life passes, and it’s difficult, but within it, pleasures and epiphanies arise—you marry the prettiest girl you’ve ever met in the greatest city on earth. Don’t kid yourself—but maybe you can kid yourself a bit. (Years later, when I was writing “Talk of the Town” for The New Yorker, I would interview one of The Andrews Sisters about Bing Crosby: “You couldn’t kid him a lot,” she said warily. “But you could kid him a little.” It depended on the angle that he wore his hat. Life, it occurred to me, is like Bing Crosby, its moods indicated by the pressures of the time, like that hat. That morning, the hat was on at just the right angle.)
 
Years later still, when she was pregnant, Martha, the girl I married that morning, made me promise not to go to a bookstore while she was in labor. As it happened, the labor was drawn out, and, wanting to avoid an argument with the obnoxious obstetrician, I took a break during hour six, and did end up in a bookstore around the corner from the hospital. It was a good move. Martha was so panicked by my absence—with the constant noise of ambulances arriving at the emergency entrance nearby, she easily imagined some tragic-karmic accident—that she dilated. I arrived just in time for the birth of our son, and carrying a wonderful copy of Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, which, I swear, I really did intend to read aloud to her, if things had gone on any longer.
 
But that, as I said, was years later—actually, only a few, as older people reckon these things, but at the time, what would stretch to a decade seemed a lifetime. It was a lifetime.
 
When I say “married in New York” I know that it might sound rather like top hats and morning coats and a ceremony at St. Thomas Episcopal. In fact, on a bleak December day, we would take the 5 train to City Hall, with a license and blood test results in hand, and submit to a minute-and-a-half-long ceremony administered by an official who looked a bit like Don Ameche in his guise as host of International Circus from my childhood. And so, after approximately forty-five further seconds of obligation and vows, we took the subway back to the nine-by-eleven basement room where we were beginning our life, a place that we had dubbed “the Blue Room,” in honor of an old Rodgers & Hart song that I was insane enough to remember, and that Martha was insane enough to accept as a guide to living. The song was about a couple who choose a “blue room,” a single studio where they can start their life: “Not like a ballroom, / A small room, / A hall room . . .” Away from everyone else, in the smallest studio in Manhattan, they were happy.
 
The subway trip downtown was, in a way, only an extension of a trip south we had begun a few months before in Canada, getting on a bus marked “New York City,” like something out of a 1940s musical. My father saw us off. Fathers are supposed to give advice to young men and women leaving the provinces for the metropolis. D’Artagnan’s father in The Three Musketeers tells him to fight duels with everyone once he gets to Paris—sensible advice for a guy with a sword who knows how to use it. When Sky Masterson—you know, the hero of Guys and Dolls—leaves Colorado for New York, his father tells him that if a guy in the big city shows you a brandnew deck of cards, seal unbroken, and wants to bet that when he opens it the jack of hearts will leap out and squirt cider in your ear, don’t take that bet: the jack will leap out and start to squirt. That is to say, in the big city, nobody makes an apparently crazy bet if the deck isn’t already gaffed. (This is, of course, a corollary to the famous advice that if you’re sitting at a card table and can’t figure out who the sucker is, you’re the sucker.)
 
My father’s advice when I left Canada for New York was simple: “Never underestimate the other person’s insecurity.” This was excellent counsel, and what trouble I would get into came mostly from forgetting it. Everyone, even the apparently powerful, is struggling inside with a raging fear of being unloved, or at least unappreciated, an emotion only magnified by the enormity of the city. Thinking it over decades later, I suspect my father was getting at the real point of Sky Masterson’s dad’s advice about not taking the bet on the squirting jacks, or its corollary, anyway: everybody at the table may be a sucker. The guy with the gaffed deck is playing with a gaffed deck because he doesn’t think he can win with one that isn’t. Even the wise guys are most often suckers inside, or feel like it. That’s what makes them insecure. It is the dapper and self-contained card sharp who is the illusion of the card table—or the city
 
My father spoke in the summer of 1980. I arrived in New York that August, and the next ten years of my life were big ones. But I was twenty when I got here, so they would have been big for me if I had spent them at a recording station in the Arctic Circle. With the special energy that we have when we first arrive in a new place, Martha and I diligently explored all the odd corners of the city. We inspected what seemed like every navigable inch of Central Park, going in and out of all the gates that Olmsted and Vaux had named, poetically, when they designed it, with the Strangers’ Gate, up at 106th and Central Park West, having for us a special resonance. We were strangers, and we had arrived, and we dreamt of becoming citizens.
 
**
 
Almost forty years on, the eighties in New York seem momentous in the larger life of the world, too. Forty years is the natural gestation time of nostalgia, the interval it takes for a past period to become a lost time, and, sometimes, a golden age. There’s a simple reason to explain why. Everybody’s shocking first intimation of the setting sun—which takes about forty years to happen—inspires a look back at the sun rising, and its imagined light makes everything from then look golden. Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers— the suits who control and create the conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings. The four-decade interval brings us back roughly to a point when they were becoming aware of themselves. Forty years ago is the potently fascinating time when we were just arriving, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.
 
Yet the eighties, though once again a set subject, still bear more disapproval than it seems quite fair to load on any past time. Their light shines in retrospect more brassy yellow than truly gold and generous. The time gets summed up in a phrase no one actually said: Greed is good. Greed was, perhaps, more unapologetic at the time than it had ever been before. It was not so much that we experienced capitalism with the gloves off as capitalism without guilt, or, to put it another way, without a conscience. A lot of people got rich and had no shame about it, along the way remaking the city in their image.
 
Still, the truth is that no period or place belongs to the neat summaries of popular history. Moods don’t change so readily; lives aren’t lived in such neatly determined packages. We live as much in defiance of the popular themes as in thrall to them. The headlines are of no help when we’re making up our own epitaphs. When I think of the eighties I can recall one or two shimmering nights when rich men did rule, but I recall more mornings when having a pair of sneakers and a Walkman seemed to mark one most as a lover of his time. History and experience still are measured out on separate cutting boards. We know that, exactly, by how badly they fit each other. When we put on our period clothes, so to speak, the pants puddle and the waist tugs and the jacket won’t quite button up. The adjustments that have to be made are the proof of how off the measurements are in memory. I used to tell my readers, during the part of the eighties I spent giving anonymous advice as a fashion copywriter, that God is in the details, or that a love for the details is what takes the place of God. I said this to the readers of a men’s fashion magazine, who must have been startled to find such chewy aphoristic atheism in its pages—or, rather, not “readers,” since they were, as intended, too busy looking at the pants. The zippers of experience and the broad cut of history never quite fit.
 
Still, something did change then. Not human nature, perhaps, something more like the national character. In the eighties in New York all the bounds of money began to loosen. At the same time, most of the certainties that rich people once had about sex and life and marriage and roles that people played came to an end. Most notions of equality dissolved, but so did most notions of gentility. The tandem effect is still baffling to a lot of people, who thought it had all along been the gentility perpetuating the inequalities, instead of the other way round. In 1961, Lenny Bruce was arrested and martyred for saying “cocksucker” in a nightclub in California. By the time Ronald Reagan was President, anyone could say “cocksucker” in any nightclub in California; or, rather, by the time you could say “cocksucker” in any nightclub in California, Ronald Reagan was President. Sorting out the contradictions—or at least living within them tolerably—is part of the work of getting the era.
 
Why, in a city ruled by brutal materialism, did things seem increasingly unreal? One answer was that the buying and selling had become so abstract that only unreal signs could represent them. Money had always meant a lot. Now some thought that money meant everything, that only money had weight in the world. Others thought that now money meant everything. Not just that everything had been pushed aside for the pursuit of money but that even what remained as art or music had no way of getting itself expressed except through money—or some fluid that represented it. Jeff Koons’s art was like this. Money wasn’t just its subject. Money was its essence—or was supposed to be. The cold, dead hand of the commodity was not to be juiced or colored or mocked or made to look religious—“iconic,” to use that awful word—as it had in the age of Warhol. It was all there was. Money had pushed every other value aside. Money was indistinguishable from art. Koons’s silver bunny was the demon of our time: once a plaything, now encased in bullion, ridiculous and sinister and cold. Money had made itself into art.
 
This was false, of course. As long as mortality exists, money will be mocked. You really can’t take it with you. There were plenty of things that money couldn’t mean. (Jeff Koons, encountered one time on the street, wept for a son taken from him, whom no amount could summon back or replace; later, I would also see the critic Robert Hughes, Koons’s bête noire, weep on the same street for his own lost son.) But those things led a more furtive or vestigial life.
 
I had the sense of another divide taking shape, one harder to see but just as important. To myself, I called it “The Blue Room and the Big Store,” and even thought already then of writing a book with that title. The world was getting blowsier and bigger and harder to capture; the counter-life was taking place in smaller and smaller rooms. It took place in stranger and stranger subcultures, in more bizarre and eccentric existences, lived more marginally than before. This made for a kind of broken disjunction between public life and private experience.