Everybody's New York Novel

A Tale of a New Yorker in New York

Everyone loves a New York novel, and so we thought we might try our hand at publishing one. The assignment was given to Eris, who has never been to New York City, but feels like writing a novel about it can’t be so hard so long as one takes cues from other New York novels. We even tried to go for that “American spelling” quirk the yankees love so much. Below is an excerpt.

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You know how the East Village is. It almost isn’t worth describing in words, as I could never possibly capture what it’s like to be there, like you and I have been, reader. Though I suppose there’s a chance you haven’t, and for those of you who haven’t I generally presume that every day of your lives is spent in agony at not living in New York City, but nevertheless you know the city like the back of your hand. Every detail of New York that is drip-fed to you throughout our New-York-saturated culture is a detail you savour, as you work tirelessly to construct your New York mind palace which you retreat to and explore when your mundane non-New-York life reaches its bland daily nadir, and so, in a sense, you have nevertheless still been there, if only in your mind. Let me simply say this: the East Village was East Villaging that morning, and let’s leave it at that.

I watched from my loft apartment window with disgust the Midwesterners in Ohio State hoodies clogging up the sidewalks. This place simply wasn’t what it used to be, back when I moved here in 2022. I thought deeply about the soul-destroying effects of gentrification. I sipped with solemn gravity from my mug, which contained a new coffee I was trying out, in which every bean was individually blessed by a Tibetan monk and then roasted over a single candle. It was fine. My thoughts turned to what I ought to do with my day. I’d earlier received an email to let me know that the rustic bedbugs I’d ordered would be delayed and so I no longer had to sit around and wait for the delivery.

I was employed as a receiver of a trust fund, which had flexible enough hours that I could take the rest of the day off if I so chose, so I opted to go to the West Village for a break from it all. To Eighth Street. Haha, you guys know what that means, I don’t have to explain that to you. Lemme just say I was making way over to Ninth afterwards. I took a cab to the subway station and took the Z line to the South Village, where I waited around until I witnessed a mob shooting. I then took the R up to my favourite bodega, the Fillmore East, ate a delicious bodega sandwich (best in the city, real New Yorkers know). I watched as an NYPD officer took a ten-year-old black boy and violently frisked him against a brick wall as the little boy cried. It reminded me of how my ex-girlfriend Lydia treated me during our last breakup, perhaps our final one. How she’d shaken me down for my feelings. How she’d beaten me upside the head with her baton of criticism. How I fell limp to the ground in my resignation. How she had carefully planted the gun and crack rock of doubt on my unconscious, possibly dead body. I turned to Spike Lee, who has standing next to me and filming the police interaction on his phone.

“Pretty great stuff, right?” he asked. But not even racialized violence could cheer me up these days.

Lydia was the daughter of Michael Bloomberg and a second, secret, richer New York Jew. She was a conceptual artist who took photos of her vagina and then smeared them in period blood. Or at least she had tried doing that, but started to get grossed out by the process, so she now just used red paint and figured it got the point across. And the photos were actually of other women’s vaginas because she was ultimately too self-conscious to present her own. She lived on Forty-Second and Fifth, but weekended in the Chelsea Hotel. I used to look out her window at the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and missing World Trade Center and think: this is my city, New York. I love it like a woman. And this is my woman, Lydia, and I love her like a city.

Like many New Yorkers I am resigned to live in this hell that I also believe is the coolest city on Earth, perhaps the only city on Earth at all. However, as I strutted down Thirty-Three and a Third Street (you know what that’s like, am I right?), I questioned whether I was even really living miserably, like you dream about when you dream of moving to New York, or whether I was just sort of living comfortably. I sighed. New York used to be cooler, back when everybody was poor and they had CBGBs and every shitty apartment had a future saint of poetry, art, or punk rock living in it, and there was a dead body somebody left in a park in East Village that nobody got rid of for multiple days.¹ I wished I could have friends like Basquiat and Keith Haring, and then have them die.

I went to Big Joe’s Stupid Fucking Pizza Place and got a piece of pizza. The best slice in all of NYC. Some people will tell you that honor actually belongs to Large Moe’s Italian Retard Pizzeria, but real New Yorkers know what’s up, and that place is just for tourists. It always amazes me that in New York City you can go into a spot like Big Joe’s and get a big slice, a 7up, fries, a gyro, a bodega sandwich, some krav kalash, an eight ball of coke, and some fent for just thirty cents. I took a cab across the street to my apartment and e-transferred my landlord ten thousand dollars. I was in the process of writing a novel about New York. I felt that there was so much to capture about New York life that had never been captured before. Like what it’s like to be in the North-East Village, look down Fibonacci Sequence Avenue, and have that feeling. You know the one. The one you get when you look to that spot, the one right next to David Berkowitz Square. Everybody knows that feeling.

Tonight the creative juices just weren’t flowing. No matter how many New York street names I looked at on Google Maps, I felt completely uninspired. I tried to go to sleep but I couldn’t sleep all night. I took the cab to the washroom down the hall at least six times. The last time I tipped the cabbie 150% out of the desire to feel a connection to another person through an act of kindness. He simply looked at me Arabically. 9/11 changed everything, I thought. Just like Lydia had changed me. I called up Woody Allen.

“Woody? It’s me, Truman Capote and Fran Liebowitz’s improbable grandson.”

Woody sounded groggy. “Oh, yeah, I remember you, from the tailgate party at George Plimpton’s grave.”

“I need some advice. It’s girl-related.”

Woody yawned. “Just wait until her parents aren’t paying attention.” He hung up.

It was 4 a.m. I decided into get in a cab, which I then had the cabbie drive directly into Monopoly Man Station and then cruised along the J line straight to Dimes Square. Driving out of the station we struck Mike Crumplar, whose unconscious body was immediately tagged by seven consecutive skateboarders coming out of Maria Hernandez Park. I jumped right out of the cab and ran past Greasy Ben’s Fat Fuck Cheese and Sauce Bread (third best slice in the city) and into the Red Scare podcast studio where Lydia was working the night shift as a junior cigarette sommelier, which is what she’d been studying for at NYU.

She looked at me with Zoloft eyes. “What are you doing here?” she asked with a flattened affect.

“I can’t stop thinking about you, Lydia.”

She sighed, pulling from a Parliament, the smoke curling upwards through a conceptual installation piece about the sorry state of New York’s infrastructure that cost the city seven billion dollars. “You don’t even like me,” she said, her voice like the F train screeching to a halt at 2 a.m. with a sobering din.

“Not true,” I said, clutching my chest, “my heart is like a subway rat, and you are like the last slice of pizza from Scaramouche’s Pepperoni Emporium that it’s dragging around.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “The fourth best slice in the city.”

“That’s right,” I said, “and the spot still hasn’t been blown up because Dave Portnoy hasn’t been there yet.”

She took another drag. “You’re pathetic, honestly. Just another New York literary trust fund brat with a subscription to n+1 you don’t read. You’re just looking for a girl with borderline personality disorder that you can write shitty stories about.”

What she said wounded me, but she was right—I hadn’t read the last four issues. I wanted to speak, to defend myself, to tell her about how I was writing the Great New York Novel about how writing the Great New York Novel was impossible because New York itself was already the novel, but all that came out of my mouth was: “do you know if Greasy Ben’s delivers coke after 5 a.m.?”

“I think so.”

“How about we go back to mine and do some coke and you humiliate me for failing to get an erection.”

She took another drag. “Yeah, I guess so.”

We got into a cab. Our cab got into another, larger cab, and we made our way back to my place.

“This city is my girlfriend,” I muttered as I stared in awe at the city’s skyline.

Hearing me, Lydia scoffed. “This city is your mommy.”

Once we were inside I threw on a vinyl copy of William Basinski’s broken radiator noise loops. We cut lines on the previous tenants’ eviction notice that I’d had framed. Lydia ashed in my commemorative Never Forget shot glass.

“Tell me about how much you hate New York, but in a way that proves you love New York more than life itself,” she said.

“I hate New York,” I said breathily, “I hate the NYU students and the finance bros and the Citi Bikes and the scaffolding that never comes down.”

“God, that’s so fucking hot,” she moaned, “say more.”

“I hate the gallery openings and I hate the buskers and I hate the traffic and I hate the air quality and I hate the brunch spots and I hate the $30 cocktails. I hate every restaurant that becomes a Chase Bank, and every Chase Bank that eventually becomes another restaurant. I hate how hot it is and I hate how cold it is. I hate all of it.”

Lydia ripped her shirt off and pounced on me. Suddenly my door kicked open. It was my landlord. “Rent increase!” he shouted, “Venmo me another five thousand dollars!”

RELATED: FURTHER WORK FROM THE DISCORDIA DEPARTMENT OF REGIONAL ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES

1. This is a real anecdote by the way. If I recall correctly I read about it in Please Kill Me. —Eris