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By Root 1214 0

the Baptist minister nearest me, then called me to say he was waiting for my visit. “The Big Apple” campaign and the slogan “I Love New York” (with the icon of a heart standing in for the word love) were invented to take the curse off the city. The opposite was true. No one loved New York except us, the gay and artsy misfits from the Midwest. Native New Yorkers hated their own city and were saving up to move to California. Corporate officers who were transferred to New York demanded hardship allowances and barricaded themselves in expensive suburbs such as Greenwich, Connecticut, and forbade their children to go into the city. Sometimes at the chemical company I met pink-collar workers from Staten Island who took the subway and the ferry back and forth to work. They were extruded from the subway directly into the building and had never dared to wander the Manhattan streets around them. Columbia students were advised never to walk south of 110th Street, and of course never above 125th into Harlem. Schoolchildren from the other boroughs were brought in virtually under guard in buses to the Metropolitan Museum, quickly herded through the vast collections, then driven straight back home to the Five Towns on Long Island. Darryl Pinckney, the great black novelist and critic, describes how when he walked down the street, in order to reassure a lone white woman just ahead of him that he wasn’t going to rape or rob her, he would brandish his copy of Heidegger, but to no avail. She still looked back, panicked, and almost ran.

Perversely, we were proud to be New Yorkers, but not Americans. Nevertheless, we expected disaster. Our sleep was filled with doom scenarios. Shots rang out in the neighborhood somewhere. Traffic lights blinked out of sync with each other. Old people on chromium walkers were mugged. Jules Feiffer started a play with a New Yorker undoing six locks to get into her apartment; when she comes onstage, her grocery bag is leaking milk everywhere, riddled by bullets. I wrote a play about a hermaphrodite living in an apartment building where everyone in it was tragic and messed up; it was my vision of New York. Just a block away from me was Central Park, but even I was afraid to go into the Rambles to cruise, ever since a body had been found at the foot of the Gothic weather station behind the stage where Shakespeare in the Park was performed. Audiences watched these great, gory, eloquent plays as if they were battle reports: “That Lady Macbeth? Isn’t she that wigged-out chick in 9B? The one who killed her sleepover and then started getting funny and ate him and had to have her ass hauled off to Bellevue?”

We knew nothing about the boroughs or the dense population on the closer half of Long Island—which is 118 miles long. To us they were these Jews and Poles and Ukrainians and Italians and Irish who had humorous substandard accents and who chewed gum and sprayed their hair and wore ankle bracelets. The movie Saturday Night Fever symbolized the immense distance between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Now every other apartment on Manhattan is inhabited by a corporate lawyer or private banker, and many of them are young and gay and date our friends, but back then we didn’t know any people from Wall Street nor did we want to. New York, the New York we knew south of Fourteenth Street, was loud and leaking—the manholes were leaking steam, the fire hydrants were illegally spraying water in which naked neighborhood kids were dancing, the ambulance and fire-wagon sirens were shrieking around the clock, people’s bodies were leaking blood and sperm and the emergency rooms and backrooms were packed, the apartment windows were thrown open to expel the excessive hot air generated by uncontrollable central heating—and the city was hemorrhaging money. And people’s milk cartons had been shot through and were leaking.

We talked seriously about New York’s declaring its independence from the rest of the United States. If Americans didn’t want us, we didn’t want them. We’d sacrificed comfort, safety, and respectability to live here, and we wanted