Frozen in Brooklyn: How I Began the New Yorker's Journey
Academically speaking: the first stage of becoming a New Yorker
The aim is not to see… but to realize that one is.
-Joseph Campbell
Harry Potter. Luke Skywalker.
The Father, the Son. The Holy Spirit.
Katniss Everdeen. Frodo.
What do they all have in common?
According to Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the answer is the “monomyth.” All our heroes symbolize a universal belief that defines every major religion, culture, and civilization since the dawn of time. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell outlines three stages to the hero’s journey: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Easy enough, right?
Here’s the hard part: you have to find “the essence of oneself and the essence of the world” and then realize, all along, that “these two are one.” You win by discovering yourself as part of a greater whole. You start as fragments. You try to fit the fragments together. Last month, I talked about leaving New York City - and all those that I left behind. Now, let’s talk about the “those.” The fragments of my journey through New York City.
The “hero” part of the journey is to be determined. As all hero parts are.
1. The Cold Stranger.
December 2014.
My dad and little brother drive away in an exhaust burst down Smith Street, leaving me behind in Brooklyn to start a new life. Back in Boston, Winter Storm Juno dumps three feet of snow across the city. Plows shove snow into the Seaport and leave a seventy-five foot mountain of snow that lingers until the end of the summer.
In my new home of New York City, February 2015 sets a record as the third-coldest February in history. The average temperature blisters at a vile twenty-three degrees. Wind tunnels flay faces between brownstones and skyscrapers, howling savagely.
My new home is a repurposed hotel. I live with a lawyer going through a divorce, a Russian body builder who cooks chicken thighs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and a French girl who insults the rest of us on phone calls from the thin walls of her bedroom. We don’t get the language, but we get the idea.
A week into my sublet, a guy moves in who calls himself a producer. His clients are explicit websites. He uses the apartment as a set, sending group texts to warn us when naked people are posing in the living room. This is the Brooklyn Experience™ of the early and mid-2010s. The Golden Age of Girls millennials.
The scene is real. Was real?
Our unit of the building appears to have been the lobby of the hotel. The stairs to the second floor run up the wall to join a waist-high rampart hugging the second floor. I imagine families waving at each other, the kids from the top of the stairs by their room to their parents in the lobby as they check in. From the second floor railing, I watch the Russian burn chicken thighs and swipe on Tinder. From my room. This is easy: My room has a window-shaped hole in the wall that looks onto the inside of the apartment and down into the kitchen. I cover the hole with a hardened yellow towel. I’m not sure if it’s clean. I never check. In the third-coldest winter on the history of New York City, I sleep with no heat. In a winter jacket. Rent is one thousand something-or-other and fifty dollars a month. Split between five cold strangers.
At my new job, I bite back tears every Friday when my coworkers talk about weekend plans. I spend my 27th birthday alone at a bar staring at a stained glass window that the bartender claims is imported from Germany. I write a novel about automation in a notebook. Walking home and lying in bed without taking off my winter jacket, I realize why so many rockstars die at 27. This is the year where all the currents of yourself break against the shore.
In the cold of myself, I become the cold stranger. I curl with envy like an ingrown toenail. I self-destruct my Facebook. I pen manifestos about the emptiness behind everything that everyone does in New York City, never once thinking it was because I felt left out. Looking into the hole in the wall of what I left behind, I fall into it instead of filling it. Every day, I get more used to telling people I’m looking for a table for one. I stop wondering what people think of me, because they aren’t thinking of me.
When you have no history, you have no face.
You are only someone else’s moments.
When I leave for Las Vegas for a work trip, the apartment catches fire. The front of the building is painted black. Our clothes are soaked from the fire truck’s violent but effective hosing. From my bedroom, I watch the shapes of all my costumes sit in the frosty April morning, waiting for the sun.
I have a breakdown.
I have another breakdown.
It’s too cold to go outside.
I’m frozen in Brooklyn.
2. The Extrovert.
The L train shudders in front of her. More people in their twenties emerge, foaming between the doors in expensive jackets, all fleece and cushions and wooden jewelry and bright color tattoos. Karen swims manages to grapple hold of a passing lumberjack (or what appears to be a lumberjack) and is whisked into the train, smashed among the twentysomethings.
She jerks backwards as the train starts, catching her reflection in the smears of the subway window. Always, she notices the crow’s feet, like she’s exhausted from seeing the world. Not crows’ feet. Talons. Slender profile, blond hair with only a few strands of gray. She can still touch her toes. But on the L train she is a grandmother, decaying from the radioactive rush hour of youth. The knife-sharp eyes of the twentysomethings cut into each other: groomed werewolves and young men with shoulderbags, a flock of girls talking about a Netflix series while their eyes slide as shiny as gems across the possible futures as the train lurches down the tunnel. Invisibility is not a superpower, she thinks, but an inevitability. A curious curse.
-Eclipse in Lunar City (2016), Blaise Lucey
In the summer of 2015, I move from the old hotel in Carroll Gardens to a sublet in East Williamsburg. I quit my job. I get a new one. I’m single for the first time in five years. I have no friends or family for hundreds of miles.