love story

During Covid what I missed most was the sound of New Yorkers complaining. Sometimes you could still catch it, but I found myself yearning to linger around two people grouching outside more than was allowed, and therefore turned mostly inward. Specifically, I turned to the Brian Lehrer Show, which has been hosting New Yorkers and their complaints for decades, and which I had listened to for the last one, but now felt almost in conversation with. One morning, Brian asked his guests to call in to tell him about books they had been reading while in lockdown, especially ones they had found moving or helpful during the difficult period. Almost no guest who called him followed this instruction. Instead, New Yorkers streamed in to tell him about books they liked in general, books they thought everyone should read, books they had read but not liked at all. And you read this, maybe since March? Brian nudged one guest, who was raving about a novel. No, the guest replied, clearly unsure of why he was asking, No, no. I read this years ago.

I was happier in those calls than I had been in months, so I called Brian Lehrer myself, after sending a few emails, and interviewed him about talking to all these locked up New Yorkers. We talked for the permitted time, and I was beside myself with glee, because this was Brian Lehrer, and he was on the phone with me. He told me about how guests calling in had prompted his team to further investigate stories about hospitals needing supplies or policies being mismanaged, and expressed gratitude that so many people trusted him with their stories. When I asked if he had noticed an uptick in people like me, people using his callers as a substitution for the sounds normally heard next to them in restaurants and grocery stores and movies during the previews and sometimes during the movies too, he laughed and told me he wasn’t sure.

Our call took place right at the end of May, and I never published the piece. Days after we hung up, a new sound emerged in New York, that of chanting, screaming, running, shots that sounded like guns but were actually gas. Suddenly I was very busy and very focused, two things I had not been in months. I was also very tired, because I found out in those weeks that while I was lucky to have a body that could march and run and take a beating, all of these things were very exhausting, and whenever I came home I found that I fell asleep faster than I had ever had before. Once these things were no longer as frequent, I went back to my story, sure that I could transform it into something even better than before, but the publication I had pitched it to had dissolved in those months, and so I just sat with it. Eventually, everyone came back together again, and for this reason I assumed the interview and initial story idea would be obsolete. Now, I could hear voices much closer again. Now, we had even more things to complain about.

What surprised me was that the quality of complaints had fallen. They were less specific. People were menaced by “the train,” but they would barely bother to expand from there. Was it a person breaking some sort of etiquette, or was it a countdown clock showing 7 or 9 minutes until the next train, instead of the accepted 3 or 4? Were there teenagers being rambunctious, and if so were they doing it in a cruel way where you despised them, or an insecure way, so that you felt you should be able to give them a hug? Was the heater on in the C even though it was much too warm, or had every light flickered while you were stuck in a tunnel? I found that no one could really say anymore, or maybe they just weren’t interested. More often than not they seemed bothered to just have to be on the train at all. Freshly cleaned, waiting for us in all of its gleam, the subway was suddenly a place that people who had no business feeling bothered by it felt deeply offended by.

It became clear that the reason they hated the subway was the reason they suddenly hated a lot of New York, which is that they perceived it to be a place for poor people. And this was at the root of almost all of the new, supremely disappointing complaining: poor people had taken over the city. Whether or not this happened because a significant number of New Yorkers who had spent time with only themselves and their families for the last year suddenly realized that other people were less rich than them, or whether something else had happened which has probably been written about at least six hundred times by now - it’s impossible to say. But many people were suddenly convinced that they were surrounded by poor people, and also that they were terrified by this. What began as a phenomenon mostly on Tik Tok and in Soho seemed to spread like wildfire, which did come later, but in this moment the fire was fear, and it reached the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side and Harlem and Park Slope and Bed-Stuy and certainly Clinton Hill, and now suddenly the city was living in very general, very unspecified fear.

Fear is very boring to hear about, because there really isn’t much to say about it. That someone has convinced themselves that everyone had a knife or a disease that they would deploy on anyone walking their way is not something you need to hear about more than a few times. The desire to hear about anything else - a feud with whoever stocks the stone fruit at Key Food, a poet who ruined a dinner party by bringing a banker, the situation happening with that new building down the street which has been building itself for far too long - was palpable. Instead, what we got was acquiescing these fears, affirming them. Specifically, those fears on the subway, for which our mayor and governor raced to find the most wasteful and useless solution. In the end, we got both thousands of cops and the National Guard, two groups which are notoriously useless and unnecessary, and also totally inept in urban environments. Whereas anyone who had listened to a specific, highly detailed complaint about the subway could see that what it needed was more trains which run more frequently and therefore decrease the time spent sitting alone in the station or being on the train itself - neither of which feels particularly perilous but are clearly places where people allow their minds to wander - would work better than whatever it is cops and the National Guard do. But it was the replacement of specific complaints with blanket, stupid fear that pointed Hochul and Adams to these solutions, and considering I don’t think either of them have stepped foot on the subway in years outside of promotional videos, I would assume they believe all that fear very deeply.

I do not think that you can really complain about something well unless you know it well, and it seems obvious that what happened to call this influx of bad complaints into being was that people simply stopped knowing what was actually going on around them. I think they also stopped caring too, and this, again, could be traced by the surprising number of things there turn out to be about only yourself and your own world and the things you yourself have done and thought about, when you have enough time to sit and go through them.

Staying more focused on yourself than the world around you is a terrible way to find out what’s wrong with the world around you. It also backfired in a peculiar way, which is that old people, who had generally lived long and full lives, having had decent incomes and better scenarios, had a lot to sit back and think about, whereas young people did not. Thus young people began to scramble to make memories and other things to think about as quickly as possible, declaring this and that summer and this and that theory and this and that type of girl, or even boy. A bizarre attempt to create nostalgia - or, a perfect and flawless time to look back on with joy and calm - out of no memories at all, to have already lived a life in a span of nothing. It was natural for young people to look to Boomers here¹, in terms of trying to be happy. The pandemic made it very clear that anyone without money and a standard, American family would be completely fucked from now until the final collapse, so there was no reason to look at any other generation, all of which are both poor and scattered, family-wise. But it did not necessarily work, or really work at all. These are not real lives that are being churned out on videos, and the people behind them appear to be too scared to do anything not explicitly laid out as the Thing To Do.

For this reason I was not surprised that the biggest break in this sad imitation came from students, those who had probably left their own form of whatever turning into your parents was in their hometown. Having been one myself, I am biased about students in New York, and I trust people who did not go to school here much less than people who did. But it is also true that even in the many cases where these students themselves came from New York, what they were usually signing up to do in school was to defeat this desire for nostalgia, either by studying the past as it actually was, or the present in some form. In other words, they were occupying the traditional role of students in times of fascism, wherein by the very fact of their education they threaten it. America, which is finally coming into its own as a real, grown fascist state, has always hated education, but now that hatred seethes. And with good reason: who in this country has stepped up more, and with so much more to lose, than those students fighting for Palestinian liberation, for true freedom and equality, for a defeat of what this country has turned out to be?

In New York, we are not supposed to be like the rest of America. In fact, we are supposed to be its opposite. Everything that is rotten about it - racism, anti-intellectualism, fear - we are supposed to despise. But lately when I talk this way I realize I’m becoming my own worst enemy, which if it hasn’t been obvious to readers by now I’ll say explicitly: the enemy is nostalgia, that blanking of one’s own mind, the eternal way that the average person who doesn’t consider themselves to be fascist finds themselves complying with it anyway. To lose all handle on what is happening now, on what one should do now, in favor of remembering how one acted then, this is how we end up with leaders who should have retired a decade ago giving in entirely to Trump, without even so much as a fight. When Chuck Schumer says the way he thinks he can fight is to hand over everything to the president and Musk, he is living in a fantasy in which the way he fought at his best, whenever he actually succeeded, which frankly I can barely remember, can work again. He is refusing to see what is happening around him because he is unprepared for it. It is easier, on him, to live this way.

To be clear, this is not a question of youth versus age. Yesterday, while being driven to jail after occupying the lobby in Trump Tower, half of the van was filled with women in their seventies and eighties, all of whom had been arrested countless times, and had only wisdom and encouragement to share. These are people who are old and are still with us, are still able to see clearly what is happening around them. They can see clearly what the fight for a free Palestine means, what happens to this country when Mahmoud Khalil is abducted and our leaders allow it, what those leaders are doing with concepts we thought we understand like free speech and anti-semitism, what it means when things are changed. I know countless people in their twenties and thirties who are far more removed from reality than these women are. I know people who were born when their grandchildren were who are more nostalgic for these women’s youth than they could ever be.

We will not win now unless we can see clearly what is wrong now. We do not have leadership that is willing to look. We have another chance right now, if we love New York, to get it. We can elect a mayor who can really complain, can really see what’s going on, can really get into the face of the Trump administration and fight for us. Because I do love New York, much more than I love America, and probably much more than I should love any place at all, I plan to spend the next few months working to get Zohran Mamdani elected as mayor. I am doing this as a broken promise to myself. After the catastrophe that was the Biden to Harris 2024 campaign, I swore I would never work for a candidate again. In fact, I said, I wouldn’t work on electoral politics at all. But that was six months ago. And this is today.

1. As it happens, I was very familiar with the concept of young people mimicking old people, because I grew up in Alabama, and this was simply how people in my high school lived. They knew that their parents had power, and they knew that other people did not, so they acted like their parents. Very often people get this backwards, specifically with fraternities, and assume that the white moneyed dads of the South are acting like college boys, but it’s the other way around. The boys are acting like their dads.