Moving to Jersey
Carl Gladish
I am sprawled across the couch in my tidy Vancouver apartment, enjoying the warm indoor air after a wet morning bike ride and glancing through the window at a gray sky as familiar as a parent’s voice. I am excited because I see all the tangled strands of my life in Vancouver becoming clear and defined, as though I have already begun moving toward New York and the strands, tied to Vancouver, are being pulled though my hands, unknotting as they race through my fingers. There are so many strands. Big strands: my job, my family and my friends. Little strands: the wet streets and seagull cries, the yoga room on Homer, the plastic button I push to buzz at my aunt’s apartment, the clunk of the metal joint as I ride over the crest of Burrard Bridge.
Reading about New York City on Wikipedia I get the same pleasure as when I study the orderly lines of an atlas. Hipsters live in Williamsburg; Midtown is business and shopping; Greenwich Village is for lovely gay people. However, as I browse through apartment rental ads apprehension competes with the pleasure of discovery and I already feel a tightening in my shoulder muscles. Seeing the rents in this price-stratified city intensifies the apartment-hunting process into a soul-wracking ordeal. Who am I, really? What is my place? I imagine the city as a huge spinning sorting machine that flings people far from the churning center unless they clutch at its insides. The premonitory stress has me already thinking about living across the river in Jersey City. In fact, I am pleased with my sagacity in leaping over the grasping I deserve everything let’s live in Manhattan stage or the enlightened Brooklyn is so authentic stage. That is the usual progression of newcomers, I imagine, before their weary wisdom leads them to Jersey City. It’s actually quite convenient, they tell their friends. Their apologies are even a little smug. These clear-sighted veterans and I, we have stopped our ears to the siren song of New York City proper.
Or have I? Once in NYC, my preconceptions fade.
In our short-term sub-let on the Upper West Side, my wife Tara and I quickly learn some lessons. We immediately realize some parts of the city are simply out of our price range. No amount of foolery with credit cards will allow us to live in the West Village. I’d be kidding myself to even consider looking in the East Village for a place Tara and I could afford on a graduate student’s stipend.
Our choice of quarters, in the end, is decided by apartment-panic and the fateful flickering of bits on a craigslist computer in San Francisco. After finding the ad online, briefly seeing the place and then writing a breathtakingly large check to the landlord, we settle into a small apartment on busy Fourth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Time passes. We get used to the din of traffic and subway trains outside our window. We get to know the owners of the Mexican restaurant down the block. We enjoy Prospect Park, but rarely. On the 4th of July, after almost a year in the apartment, we realize we can go out on the roof and discover a spectacular view of Manhattan underneath the fireworks. Even so, it is time to move again. We have found the apartment too expensive and the landlord loathsome.
We still can't afford Manhattan. In any case, in the year past Manhattan has proven to be a mental gauntlet. A simple stroll down the street, with so much of significance to absorb, imposes an exhausting burden: it is too much to decode. I walk down streets in TriBeCa lined with jolie laide warehouse dwellings and it looks a lot like Yaletown, in Vancouver. All the buildings look like they were sketched by an architect in the 90’s while he was watching Friends on TV. In Yaletown's case, I think that is actually true and I wouldn’t hesitate to dismiss such meager stuff with a bit of such contemptuous theorizing. However, in New York I'm not so confident and my glib theories don't feel right. Then there are the tastefully restored townhouses I walk by on my way to NYU in the mornings. They, too, defeat me. I can see they are not just eco-chic houses for the wealthy creative class (which would be simple enough to understand) but I can't decide what they really are. When a new residential development in Vancouver calls itself Brownstone I can think of it as a bloodless symbol made just real enough for someone to move in. Walking down 9th Street in Manhattan, I can see clearly that these actual brownstone townhouses have not just condensed out of the semiosphere, but they all look like they have been fixed up to be multi-million dollar approximations of their own cultural idealization. I get confused. My mind flails and I feel like the young man in Escher's print who is looking at a painting which depicts a town in which there is an art gallery in which that same young man is gazing on a painting ... there is no way to get a foothold for interpretation.
We move to New Jersey, except I don't say New Jersey when people ask. I say across the river so people will not hear the actual word Jerseycoming out of my mouth. But what is wrong with Jersey anyway? Is the stigma unfair to the good people on the west side of the Hudson? After all, we discover a fantastic view of Manhattan from a park near our new apartment. We find a pleasant pizza place on our new neighborhood's main street. Our air-conditioner works and it is quiet at night. The commute to NYU is convenient enough, and the other people on the train are often reassuringly well-dressed. What is the problem?
I am bothered by the ordinariness of it. I don't like the bar on the corner serving Bud and playing the game on TV. I don't like the restaurants in Hoboken where the men wear faux-hawks and the women talk too loudly. I don't like seeing young parents pushing a baby onto the train, him wearing low baggy jeans and her wearing too-tight ones. I don't like seeing the South Asian men riding the bus home from the engineering institute and fretting about the coursework that will get them good jobs. I don't like riding my bike in Jersey, where danger doesn't come with a thrill like it does in Manhattan. In Jersey I would be better off with a car. Jersey feels like the real America otherwise represented by its denizens in Times Square who have come to eat at Applebee's and to have their picture taken in front of all the lights so they will have something to put on Facebook. I suspect back home they fly American flags like the folks in Jersey.
Now, I could forgive Jersey (and perhaps even all of the USA) if it were just a diorama at the Natural History Museum. I might even tear-up a little looking through the glass at the young men frozen forever in their cars (for which they sacrificed their integrity, I imagine, like something in a Bruce Springsteen song). I would be charmed by the painted and motionless Jersey City street scene full of dollar stores that, next to Fifth Avenue in The City, looks like a guileless construction-paper-and-glue elementary school play next to a slick Broadway musical. They even have their own little library, I see through the glass. Sadly, it is not open that day. And there, there is an NYU graduate student wearing earbuds walking home next to the heavily-shuttered store-fronts. Is it just his patronizing classism that makes Jersey seem, though still cheap, no longer the right choice now that he is inside the diorama?
What is next and what do I conclude? I don't quite know. I haven't figured it out. I don't think Jersey is where you figure things out. It's where you struggle to get by and if you are getting by it is where you struggle for more, like a mouse wishing for a bigger cage. It is where a person plays out the script of their life without authoring it. I think we all live our lives in the abstract, our experiences largely scripted by others and mediated by symbols and expectations. I can't even go to happy-hour without looking up Beer on Wikipedia so that I can make sense of the Hefeweizen I drank. Still, I think one can be a person who adds some ingredients to the stew of symbols and desires that define our lives.
I think we will try moving to Manhattan. Does that simply mean paying for a more elaborate fantasy cage in which to live? Maybe. Does it mean developing a taste for the life of The City (sweet and wasteful like the coffee they serve full of sugar, swathed in napkins and placed in a paper bag)? Maybe. I do know that it means more of the gauntlet: more things to make sense of, more people with layers of artificiality to endure and to forgive. Maybe it also means more seeking and more invention; maybe it means trying to learn from other people, finding that some of them are smarter and more talented than me; maybe it means standing in front of Christopher Columbus up at Columbus Circle and realizing that history really happened and is still happening, that life is complex and interesting and challenging and not like the inside of a Wal-Mart or a Prada boutique.
Even if we don't leave Jersey right way, I am delivering my goodbyes right now. Goodbye New Jersey, I wish you well. I wanted to like you, but I never felt I belonged and now I never want to. I will look back on you with relief (that I am no longer there) and sympathy (that you still are). I hope that one day you realize the back wall of your existence is just painted on and that you break out of your glass case. Take a look at some of the other exhibits. The dinosaur bones are really cool.