My Love is Anything But Posh

My Love is Anything But POSH

I am so tired of hearing posh stories of New York City living: the grapefruit and vodkas, the Upper East Side apartments, the private balconies and in-apartment laundry facilities. If these are things you actually expected, that is your problem right there. I will tell you how to properly enjoy this city:

You graduate from college, check.

You move to New York, check.

You dream about getting an important job in the magazine industry, check.

Perhaps you even dream of seeing the inside of Upper East Side Apartments with private balconies and in-apartment laundry facilities.

Then you interview for thirty or so jobs in your first two weeks, get snided by a pale Upper East Sider with a Gucci purse and a black berry, walking perfectly on her Steve Madden Stilettos, trailed by her three children under the age of five cared for by a Jamaican nanny, wonder how far we really have come from the days of black mammies, get hit on by a toothless man in the bushes, get followed by a man in spandex and a gold chain and finally get told to “juice up that pussy” on your jog to the park.

The job you get is in a warehouse that has been converted into an office, no cubicles, no privacy. There are broken windows, an orchid garden above your head, a Bengal cat that screams like a crying baby. There are droves of cigarette sized blonds, coked up and tattooed, the daughter of a man who makes Swarovski crystal bedazzled butt plugs for a living, trying to make it as unpaid models.

The owner who doubles as a photographer is barking like a dog during the photo shoots.

You get ten and twelve hour days, no over head lighting and the privilege of overhearing marriage disputes between the owner and art advisor\assistant editor who has had no formal training in magazine writing, editing or prior experience in the trade field of intimate apparel.

What kinds of outings come of this, you ask? Cheap beers around the corner at what looks like a hick bar that got dropped down in the midst of midtown west. They have a jute box and a table near the window. A co-worker and I are the only two females. For a mixed sex crowd, there’re five for ten shots at the Continental on Saint Marks. Get shitty and have a tremendous headache, all for ten bucks! And watch for Raiden, the owner, in his straw hat. If you’re feeling high class, there’s a beer place on restaurant row, stuck in the middle of all of the fancy places, with tremendous micro brews on tap. However, the proofs vary. Don’t order your regular four to however many rounds, subbing Three Philosophers for your usual buds and think you’re going to mosey out unnoticed. You may need your neighbors’ tables for support, so best to get to know them early on.

You get benefits after six months, but don’t worry, chances are you won’t make it till then.

How about the neighborhood? Is it kitschy? Well if homeless men jerking each other off under a blanket across from the West Side Highway are kitschy… There is a homeless hierarchy. The black man with the white beard and remaining crooked teeth will tell you. His hand wrapped in dirty cloth, he is proud of his position, and replies when asked about it that he was “feitin’. (With a grin) He also sells weed, which people were known to be sometimes smoking under the canopied walkways that overlooked the Hudson, right across from where the plane would come to land one day, after I had been long gone from that office. My former co-worker would watch it plummet. Probably while getting high.

I attempted to be posh, once I left there. I had stared at the starving editorial staff, who were not models, and murmur “fuck posh New York bullshit starving skinny bitches…” while I worked there, but afterwards, I took a poke at it. That is, every so often. My attempts at being posh consisted of going to a reading series and ordering Lychee Martinis. Everyone seemed to be so damn important. I knew no one. I felt high class. Then the reading series ended. So much for that.

After the magazine, came the stint of waitressing. Then came the cave dwelling. I both lived and worked in a basement in Brooklyn, though they were different basements, they were both located in Brooklyn and both similarly blocked out any light that might be possible to make out through the slush and gray of NYC winter.

I had to reconcile the shabbiness of my professional experiences and what better way than to create an even shabbier, to use a friend’s word fierce, sense of social and emotional existence for myself? That is how the dirty, grungy, raunchy underbelly of New York City became my fucking home.

I drank coffee and listened to live music at The Vox Pop on Cortelyou, after Bloody Marys and the best fucking fries at The Farm on Adderley that morning. I met a Jewish beat boxer from Boston at Cornelia’s Café, watched musicians play their guitars upside down and sing like Janis Joplin at the Sidewalk, drank pitchers at the Beer Gardens in Astoria, wandered to Egyptian Café at 2 AM for the $3 hookahs on Steinway and peed in the park after downing a six pack each with a good friend, listening to the grumbling of hundreds of exhausts from souped up cars and motorcycles, re-locating to drag race. I chain smoked Capri Ultra Lights on the tiny ass balcony of my brief apartment in Kew Gardens, where we stuffed up to ten people at a time, laughed while I cried at Helena D. Lewis’ one woman play at The Nuyorican, lingered under a willow tree that leans over the lazy streets in alphabet city. I danced to drums and bluesy voices at Sound Works where paintings and webbing danced to the bluish lights on the ceilings and walls, moving outside to gulp Pabst Blue Ribbon and burn my fingers on kabobs right off the grill, staring at what looks like a silo. I went to BBQ’s under home made canopies draped in grapes, danced at Bembe in Williamsburg, saxophone and keyboard at Mehanata on Ludlow, and got naked, climbed through a trap door and made out in the rain on a rooftop in Bushwick.

This is the New York you need to visit.

They make damn good pizza and they stay open late. But the New York City I miss is anything but posh.