Fuckboys, Freelancers, and Finance Bros. I Love the East Village.

My movie moment was interrupted by four large rats beelining it towards a half eaten pizza crust. Which reminded me of the fact that I was still very much downtown. New York or nowhere right? 

At the beginning of the year I made it a goal to stop pretending like I didn’t grow up in the East Village. Over the past few years, what was once gratitude for the neighborhood that shaped me, turned into a constant non-stop complaining about how much it’s changed. I’d routinely moan and groan about some new coffee shop, transplants, or the price of a bodega sandwich. 

A barking dog. Not being able to smoke in the community garden, people talking to me at Trader Joe’s, people not talking to me at Trader Joe’s. Like clockwork every time I stepped outside of my house there was something to talk shit about.

The root of it had nothing to do with the neighborhood at all, just the detachment I felt from the community in general. In real time I was trying to understand what it meant to belong and not just exist somewhere. The cynicism masked the desperate loneliness I felt, as I observed how my home was rapidly changing, while I was still trying to figure out my place inside of it. Watching as people who had freshly moved were able to assimilate and have more of a life than I had. 

Clinging to the past, complaining, was really a placeholder for the fact that I felt I no longer fit in. I didn’t feel cool enough. Wasn’t rich enough. Not well connected enough for the Dimes Square crowd. Too jaded for the Avenue A transplants and the NYU grads. 

But the thing is, on the other hand, I am, without a doubt, a walking Lower East Side and East Village cliche. 

I’m a self-proclaimed almost novelist who writes essays at a coffee shop on Grand Street. I walk around with a camera and develop 35-millimeter film in Chinatown. I get my coffee the mornings I have some extra cash to spend, at Ninth Street Espresso. I claim it's because the coffee is strong, but I just want to pretend I’m above the Starbucks on St. Marks. I too have a plethora of baguette bags and a busted leather jacket. I’ve been shopping at L Train Vintage since it was No Relation. If you saw me at Studio 151, no you didn’t.

All that shit I talk about people who live downtown, is just to hide the fact that I’m the typical neighborhood pseudo art girl. 

Anyway, after I slipped and fell walking back home from getting my latte, I stopped for a second on the side of my building to figure out my umbrella situation.  

“Coming in?”

 It was my neighbor D. 

She was smoking a cigarette in her vestibule. I had nothing going on, and obliged. I hadn’t gone over in a while.

D,  an older woman in her late sixties, had been in New York since the eighties. She had watched me grow up ever since my parents and  I moved to the neighborhood when I was four. I grew up around her two sons. The past few years since I moved back to New York after college, we’d often convene on the stoop outside to talk about life, death, work, everything in between. 

D knows  pretty much everyone from the top of the block to the very end of the avenue. She always says hello, always has a story. She’s the neighborhood itself. 

Inside the house, she made me another cup of coffee and asked if I wanted to hit a bowl. 

I said no. The last time I smoked weed was at a strip club a few years ago and I hallucinated a cartoon chicken talking to me mid lap dance. I had a backwood in my mouth the size of a gondola, and a handful of singles just sitting there watching this damn chicken talk to me. I was clapping and throwing money trying to pretend I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. A fucking talking cartoon chicken.  

I decided I was done with weed after that. 

Strip clubs too. 

Preparing some snacks, she then offered me a glass of blackberry brandy. I contemplated telling her I was thinking about going to AA, but I accepted. Sobriety could wait like it always had. 

“When I was living uptown, some friends and I, these crazy artists, would go to Central Park when it was blizzarding with a bottle of this stuff and make snowmen. We’d use the color of the brandy as the lips.” 

I was no brandy connoisseur, just honestly trying to get drunk, but it tasted pretty good too.  

“So have you spoken to M?” 

My ex, who I’d brought to Thanksgiving at D’s house a few years ago. 

“No, but I did find out from Instagram that he was cheating on me for a few years,” I laughed,  "Two full blown relationships.”

 Saying that out loud was sort of liberating. 

Looking around D’s house, I wondered if I’d ever be able to bring someone around again. Invite someone into my world. 

“Anyway, we got new neighbors.” I continued. 

“Oh yeah, young kids living in J’s old unit.”

“Yeah. They’re finance bros.” I sighed.  

I’d always see one of them pacing back and forth on the block talking loudly on the phone about work, and another bringing in identical blue suits like the ones he was always wearing from the cleaners. 

 “They used to throw these parties. I’m almost positive they had tons of cocaine, but can’t prove it.”

I shifted a little, nodding my head and tapping the table like some drug investigator on a fresh new case. 

 “I’m gonna be honest, I think I’m the reason the parties stopped.” 

Yes it was true. A summer or so ago, they’d throw these banger parties and girls with names like Tracy and Meg would be yelling on the street. Everyone was drunk and having a good time. I wasn’t invited. The most isolating summer of my life, holed up in my room hearing everyone having fun kind of pushed me overboard. 

 I made a complaint to my mother, who then started talking to the other neighbors, and then I’m pretty sure they told management. The parties died down for a bit, until I started hearing the low rumble of music again last fall. Fucking sue me. So what.

I’m sorry alright. In hindsight, I could have just gone over and introduced myself like a normal human being. Maybe I’ll do that this summer. 

D and I took turns blowing cigarette smoke out of the back door, while shoveling handfuls of what she called ‘virgin’ snow, into our glasses to make brandy flavored snow cones. 

“And the job front, how's that going?” She asked. 

I was always complaining about work, swearing up and down I’d be leaving soon. Which I meant. I was tired of being a glorified freelancer. No. I was tired of being a freelancer in New York. Tired of 1099, of pretending like free time took precedence over money. A lifestyle I once chose, I was no longer sustaining. I was tired of getting rejected from companies. I’d take breaks here and there applying but in truth I always knew that: 

“I definitely have to go corporate.” 

She nodded. 

D worked in radio back in the day. She told me the story of how she visualized her first office job. I didn’t really have the heart to tell her I felt I was too much of a pessimist for the law of attraction techniques. Maybe that was my problem. 

The whole freelancing thing would have been great if I had the money to back it up or the support. The illusion of being cool and making it in the big city only really works if you’re actually making it. Otherwise it becomes a constant game of keeping up with appearances. A sort of energetic Ponzi scheme. Hiding behind the pursuit of something, the identity of a downtown artist. No one wants to admit how terrified we feel of mediocrity, so we stay in pretense instead.  

The truth was I was drowning in debt, and no amount of cool downtown parties, or adjacency to celebrity was going to replace that fact. Drowning in trying to escape the reality that my life was so much different than I’d imagined it would be. 

I was always trying to escape that. I think that’s why the drinking got pretty bad. The reason I never wanted to run into neighbors. Why I kept proclaiming that I’d one day leave the neighborhood altogether. 

Feeling like I was marked with a scarlet letter of sorts, unable to break free from a downtown curse because of everything that had happened to me here growing up. Things that were still happening. Moments and memories that no amount of self righteous neighborhood isolation was going to avoid. 

Maybe my spirit would forever be shackled to Avenue B, and like a ghost I’d haunt the block of Trinity Church, and weave in and out of Tompkins Square. 

Unseen. Unheard. Just bound. 

“You know I’m really sorry your dad died,” D started. “I miss him and B.”  Our old neighbor, B, had died too. 

“I’ve learned to be grateful instead of grieving. All the people in the world and I got to meet B and your dad. How cool is that?” 

I agreed. And here I was, trying to forget. 

It stopped snowing, and by that point D and I had eaten a fair amount of  ‘virgin’ snow, and smoked a fair amount of cigarettes. 

“Come over and say hi.” 

She said, walking me out.  

I figured I probably wouldn’t see her until summer time. 

Heading out the door I started walking to the liquor store, but ultimately decided against it. 

That night I was willing to pretend that three drinks was enough.