One Man's Quarter is Another Man's Candy

For their final paper, quite a few of my students are choosing to investigate romantic longing and how it manifests in this term's assigned texts. At the same time, I'm getting around to writing creative non-fiction about my six years living in New York City.

A 2000 article by Jayeeta Bagchi in the Social Scientist entitled "Looking For Reality in Romance" posits that trashy novels still maintain a toe-hold in this world:

The hero/heroine of the romance is not transferred to a fictitious land. The attempt is to delimit their spatio-temporal experience to the history and geography of our daily existence, though the time and space used is always mystified myth and is never authentic. The trick is to turn even our familiar locales into exotic spots through extraordinary situations.

My girlfriends and I forced elegance onto the dilapidated. We moved through sleepless crowded boroughs, sugar-coating troubles, sentimentalizing the unsanitary, writing off low pay and a schizophrenic downstairs neighbor as a necessary part of "The Dream." Most of all, we exoticized men.

The trick is to turn even our familiar locales into exotic spots through extraordinary situations. I was Cinderella attending the same open bar, but a bar of my own invention, and therefore new. I was searching for myself and giddy with the euphoria of being desired, of first being found by others. Prince Street and Prince Charming were one in the same, love and locale inextricably twined. I was both driven and lethargic: I worked hard at worshiping mundane vistas, mundane men. Even my poetry was full of hyperbole.

Time and space in New York City is a mystified myth. As a New Yorker, I never wore a watch, but always raced the clock. I would stand on the subway platform and feel a certain wind-swept relief when the train came that I was finally going somewhere. Then the waiting began all over again.

New York City is comprised of millions of romantics simultaneously creating their own fantastical landscapes; the city itself is gritty, visceral, real. Wonderful. Once, on the subway, I watched a mentally retarded man pick up a quarter from the ground and roll it around in his mouth. His teeth flashed silver. At the next stop, before he got off, he returned the quarter to where he found it. A businessman boarded the car, saw the coin, and smiling, pocketed it. Another man's private space and time.



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