A Real New Yorker

New Yorkers like to talk about one thing: their apartments.

No, New Yorkers like to talk about two things. Their current apartments, and the list of miserable apartments where they used to live before they moved to the adorable and perfect little apartment where they now quite happily reside, even if that amazing bagel shop on the corner got driven out by a freakin’ Starbucks.

Wait. Three things: current apartments (amazing), old apartments (crap heaps), and who they’ve hired to re-do their apartments (expensive and you have to be on his waiting list for three years, but so worth it. Want to see photos? Hang on, let me pull up the album on my smartphone!).

If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll sometimes get away from the topic of apartments and onto the standard fallback talking point—the moment, if they weren’t a native of the city, that they felt like real, honest-to-God New Yorkers.

For some residents it’s a milestone of time. Living in the city for two years, or a decade. For others, the realization of belonging comes from finding a perfect little restaurant, or that one’s favorite places to shop are sprinkled on New York’s complicated grid of streets. It might be comprehending that one has more friends here than elsewhere. It might be that moment, when traveling, when someone asks where one’s from, and the automatic reply is no longer, Well, I grew up in Akron, but I’ve lived in Queens for the last fifteen years…, but instead a short and snappy, I’m from New York City.

I can’t say I’ve had one of those moments myself. Technically, of course, I’m not a New Yorker. I’m in the suburbs, just over the border in Connecticut. I do live remarkably close to the city, though. (My old Detroit friends don’t really understand how close. Here’s a frame of reference. Drive from Birmingham down Woodward until you reach the Detroit River. That’s how far away Manhattan is from my front doorstep.) Close enough that the traffic reports to which I listen are New York City traffic reports. Close enough that the local news is New York City news. The culture in which I live here is New York culture with all of its quirks and bustle and craziness. The city might be a Emerald City-like shimmering outline of skyscrapers across the Long Island Sound from the shores of the beach down the road from me, but it really is the hub of my new universe.

Well, maybe I have had one of those moments. Our friends Maryann and Kim visited Manhattan a couple of weeks ago, from Michigan. They stayed at a nice hotel near Grand Central. For two days Craig and I commuted into the city to show them around. We did Times Square, and took them on a rainy Circle Line tour so they could see the Statue of Liberty. We restaurant-hopped in Hell’s Kitchen. We went down to the September 11 Memorial, and visited Wall Street and tramped around Little Italy and Chinatown. We let them pick a Broadway show to see, and got cheap seats for them. I taught Maryann how to tell where subway cars were likely to stop and open their doors by identifying concentrations of the mashed-down and blackened remains of spat-out chewing gum along the subway platforms. We had, in short, a fine and educational time.

But there was a moment. We were all sitting on the 6 train, meatballs from Little Italy digesting like rocks in our stomachs. There weren’t many people on our car, so we were all slumped in the benches, glad for the opportunity to sit down. At Bleecker Street, the doors slid open. A few people straggled on. One of them was one of those guys who gets on a subway car, makes a speech, tries to collect money, and moves on. Some of them have sob stories to spill and a tin can to shake in people’s faces. Many of them will sing and accept donations, or play an instrument for quick cash. This guy, however, was one of the ones who had something to sell—I don’t remember what, pencils, or newspapers, or buttons or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. All I knew is that his short oration ended with him proffering whatever it was he was hawking, holding out a cup for money, and asking, “So anybody wanna help out the homeless?”

From all around the rattling car there was dead silence. Except for two simultaneous, sweet, angelic women’s voices, both saying very politely and in flat, Midwestern tones, “No, thank you!”

Startled, I turned my head and looked at my friends, who were smiling at the man as if he merited their sweet (if automatic) civility. The rest of us had turned the guy into an invisible, inaudible cipher. They’d actually listened to him. And I thought to myself, man, am I really a different person now. Because three or four years ago, I might’ve been joining in that chirpy chorus of cherubic No thank yous!, too.

It’s not that New Yorkers are rude, or unkind. One of my favorite memories of last year was having a leisurely, fascinating three-hour conversation with a stranger in Central Park. I keep returning to a certain yarn store on the upper west side because not only was the proprietor incredibly friendly and helpful, but an elderly African-American woman from the neighborhood spent twenty minutes there telling me about her philosophy of knitting. I’ve found it infinitely easier to strike up random conversations with strangers here—in a city with a reputation of uptight and rude residents—than in the midwest.

If New Yorkers come across as walled-off and impersonal at first glance, it’s because they—we—live in a limited space in which everything is tightly compacted together. We stand hip to hip on the trains and pretend not to notice. At restaurants, we’re packed into seats like sardines in tins, wedged elbow to elbow. We don’t have privacy here, not in public venues. We don’t have personal space. What we maintain is the polite illusion that, even though there’s a hipster slurping coffee three inches on one side of us and a pair of Asian NYU students chattering loudly three inches on the other, we can have a frank discussion with a friend about hemorrhoids without us losing our dignity or our neighbors their lunch.

I suspect I fit an in-between kind of profile, when I’m out and about in the city. I seem enough like an insider to know my stuff, yet I must seem approachable and not entirely walled-off. In other words, I am the guy who is constantly asked directions by tourists. I am the man who, upon stepping off his train and into the great atrium of Grand Central, will be surrounded by a self-guided Russian tour group askink easiest vay to Ompire State Buildink. I’m the man who, at any subway stop, will be approached by two cute out-of-town chicks to consult which train they should transfer to get to Prospect Park. I’m that guy who will be stopped mid-stride at Seventh Avenue and 48th Street by a family of middle Americans who want to know if I can direct them to Times Square. (At least that one was easy. “Um, see all those video displays and that big crowd of people a block away?”)

I’m pretty sure that the part of me that says Lookit, a real New Yawker! to these people is my brisk pace and my total and remorseless willingness to march in front of tourists attempting to take photos of their honeybears from 25 feet away. (This is New York, people. We don’t have 25 feet to spare you, better Instagram moment or not.) It’s that quality that makes out-of-towners clear a path for me on a busy street, rather than making me step aside. I look like I know where I’m going. I look like I have a place to go. I usually do. Sometimes, though, I’m just looking for a public restroom.

And the approachability thing, I’m pretty sure, is just that I’m the sole semi-local walking down the street and crossing intersections who isn’t fixated on his phone, texting like a madperson.

I’ve given directions for all the major landmarks. Every skyscraper. The Cloisters. The Brooklyn Bridge. Major department stores. The other day, I’d pushed through a subway turnstile and turned to see Craig giving me a shrug clearly intended to convey, Oh, shoot, I don’t have as much money on my MetroCard as I thought, hang on while I add some. During the minute, tops, that I was at a standstill, I gave directions to one confused woman to the Metro North ticket booths in Grand Central, and to Columbus Circle for a post-cougar/pre-retirement home panther wearing an expensive designer dress and a pair of ratty Birkenstocks. So far, I’m happy to say, I’ve never been stumped.

Except once. I was walking somewhere on Fifth Avenue last month when a couple loomed up out of nowhere and asked me how to get to Staten Island. I thought about it. And I thought about it some more. At last I just peered at them, shook my head, and asked plaintively and with a pained expression, “Why?”

Come to think, that’s a moment in which I could’ve considered myself a real New Yorker.