Double New Yorker
I wish the New Yorker magazine treated its subscribers like American Express has chosen to, with a designation on the card that declares “Member Since 1976”. I must admit, I am proud of that designation. And here is the thing, in the forty-five years of my membership, I have never once not paid the AMEX bill in full every month. It used to be that there was no choice to do otherwise, and now, while they are happy to let you accumulate a balance, that discipline has stayed and the first thing I do when I get my monthly bill notice is to set up my payment a few days before it is due. That’s how seriously I take it all, If I can pay by the 15th, I invariably schedule my payment for the 13th. I take most of the payment time they allow (I consider that lag a valuable psychological advantage of AMEX), but I don’t trust the financial mechanics 100% and leave a few days of leeway to insure that I keep my perfect payment record. But back to the New Yorker, I wish they would put on their mailing label some designation that indicates, “Subscriber Since 1985” or whatever. I take my subscription to the New Yorker as seriously as I take my membership with American Express.
When I moved to New York City from Business School in Ithaca in 1976, I had chosen to move to New York rather than to live in other places where I had job offers. It was not a slam-dunk call for me and I had not dead set on NYC. It did help that the woman I planned to marry lived in suburban New York. So, I moved to New York (technically Bayside, Queens, commuting daily into midtown Manhattan for work) and specifically declared that I would live in New York for five years and work as a banker for five years until I decided what I really wanted to do and where I really wanted to live. I didn’t hate New York, but I was also not enamored with it. New York was in the mid-70’s when it was still suffering from the effects of its devastating financial crisis and a degree of decline that made it hard to love. There were garbage strikes, graffiti-adorned subway trains and a degree of grime on the City that gave it what I used to call that “Bladerunner look.”
I married the apple of my eye in 1976 (that would be Mary) and in early 1977 moved into a starter house in the Long Island Suburb of Rockville Centre. I traded in the Queens Express Bus or #7 train for the Long Island Rail Road into Penn Station, but I was still a commuter, pushing my way into Manhattan every morning and trudging home every night. Some may think that a commuter train is an upgrade from an Outerborough Express Bus or subway train, but in the mid-70’s the LIRR was at best a toss-up for the place as the worst commuter pathway into New York. We all (except the Port Washington line) hubbed through Jamaica Station, which was a blessing or a curse, depending on the day. We had a saying, “Ya makka Jamaica, ya makka ya home.” None of this made me love New York City more than I did when I started there. New York was where I worked and was a necessary evil that I endured willingly. In fact, I did so more and more willingly as I started to realize how much more interesting the work at a New York bank was becoming. The commute was just a fact of life. The City was something you managed around with your coming and going from work.
During those early years I had friends from college (most notably Gary & Dale) who wanted to live in Manhattan and relished their apartment in Chelsea (over the famous Barney’s department store on 7th and 17th). Almost all of my young banking colleagues chose to live in Manhattan (in those days mostly on the chic Upper East Side) and partied nightly at the many bars on Second Avenue. They could not understand why I would choose to live in Queens and then Rockville Centre and commute. I explained the Mary angle and once they met her they realized I was playing way out of my league and attributed my craziness to that reality. I was content to not live in the City. But after thirteen years in the suburbs, I moved into New York City after my first divorce. Except for a two-year stint in Toronto, I have lived there ever since. I regained Manhattan just as Manhattan regained its allure. Mayor Rudy Giuliani may have put a knife in NYC crime, but Michael Bloomberg put a polish on the Big Apple over the twelve years of his mayoralty. Those were indeed the golden years in New York and I must say that I grew to love living there. I can’t say how my feelings shifted or when they did so, but I know for certain that they did. As the ad states so boldly, I Love ❤️ New York.
Meanwhile, Kim’s experience with New York was completely different. Ever since her college days at Indiana University as a theater major, she longed for the excuse to move to New York City. She took a ten-year detour to Los Angeles and then finally made the leap in 1989. As a musical theater person by training and inclination, she wanted to try her hand at the Great White Way, so she started auditioning on the side of a decade as a full-time drama teacher at a private girls school. She took jobs in summer stock in Vermont and odd second-string theater gigs when she could get them. Finally in 1998 she decided that she needed to stop teaching and work full-time at giving her theater career a real chance. She took “survival” jobs wherever she could to pay the bills and took a number of national touring show gigs that involved long bus trips and cheap motels, but had the advantage of building a retinue of theater friends along the way. Her love for New York never waned and when we met in 2005, living with me afforded her the opportunity to refocus her career on cabaret singing, which she has done with great vigor over the past years. She now spends more time helping the cabaret community by being on the boards of the Manhattan Association of Cabarets (MAC) and Singnasium than she does actually singing, but with no less enthusiasm for New York. She stays close to the goings on of Broadway, now from the distance of 2,700 miles, not that COVID has allowed for much activity on Broadway. A big part of her heart is still in New York and probably always will be.
So, here we are living permanently out in San Diego County, which is decidedly not New York City. It is neither better nor worse, but different and different in a good way for us at this stage of our lives. We still get the Saturday and Sunday New York Times delivered to the base of our driveway (I read the Times online every weekday morning). And we not only get our weekly New Yorker magazine, the Universe and the Subscription Department of the New Yorker has decided to put an exclamation point on our departure from New York by sending us two copies of the magazine each week. I have tried to fix it to no avail and I have wondered whether there is some strange and meaningful message in that for me, but have just decided that we are simply double New Yorkers in this household and probably will always be.