I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [27]
I grab a cab and head to the Upper West Side, to the apartment of my close friends Willie and Jenny. The Upper West Side has become one of the grand bastions of child-raising on the entire island of Manhattan. People who don’t live here believe it’s impossible to raise rational, well-adjusted, non-Satanic children in New York City. That somehow this place is a world filled with pederasts, pornographers, exhibitionists, drug addicts, drunks, hookers, and pimps. Bingo! Of course it is. And so is every small town in America. The fact is, they are a very small part of the eight million people who live in the city I call home—some of whom, I admit, are very odd. And while there are all sorts of criminal types here, we also have a lot of policemen—more than 35,000, in fact. So the people who think you can’t safely raise a normal kid here don’t know what they’re talking about. These are the same people who think it’s the greatest city on earth, and that it’s a nice place to visit, but they wouldn’t want to live here. They are crybabies.
Besides, who the fuck determined the ideal place to raise a child anyway? Having a lawn isn’t a requirement. It might be nice, I admit—I loved being raised in suburban Maryland—but look at what happened to me. An expanse of well-manicured lawn didn’t make me the sane individual who writes this deathless prose that you’re reading right now. And a lawn certainly doesn’t assure a safe environment. Where better for a poisonous snake to lie in wait for you? And, for God’s sake, if we believe the newspaper headlines or the bloviating talking heads on TV, the suburbs are a heavenly green play-ground for sexual predators.
In my opinion, you can raise children anywhere. ANYWHERE! Don’t believe me? Then flip through the pages of a National Geographic. Billions—BILLIONS!—of parents raise their children all over the world, in places where there are lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!) and there’s nary a lawn chair or Water Weasel in sight. They raise children in boats floating on water. They even raise children in Los Angeles, the only place where you can hear the sound of the void—because there is no fucking “there” there. (Gertrude Stein said that about Oakland. She’d agree with me on this if she were alive today.) So they aren’t even raising them in a place, for crying out loud. Children are raised in circuses and in trailer parks. They are even raised in caves. And we in this country have the balls to claim that New York is no place to raise a child. BULLSHIT!
I know that at times parents living in New York must feel like they’re raising their kids in an insane asylum, and you find yourself sometimes having to explain things to kids that even you don’t understand—“Mommy, why is that man peeing on the sidewalk?” “He’s watering it because he thinks it’s grass?” or “He’s telling the city it needs more public bathrooms.” But day to day, life is no weirder here than anywhere else. For God’s sake, this whole country is an insane asylum at times.
Trust me, we have no problem raising children. We do have a hell of a time educating them, but that’s another book, one that I haven’t the time or the patience to write. To put it simply, we want to give our children a great education, but we don’t want to pay for it. We adults are the problem. We raise children, we just don’t raise them to be adults. I don’t know what we are, but most of us sure aren’t adults. We never quite make it to fully formed adulthood. We are “childults” or “adulren,” if you will.
For example, shouldn’t an adult know how to find the place on the wall to hammer in a nail if you want to hang a picture, maybe the Christmas painting your little Tiffany painted of eight Santas pulling a sleigh