Desperately Fleeing Sushi

When I moved to New York in 1979, I had the misfortune to find a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side. Inexpensive. Quiet. On an elegantly brownstoned street close to Riverside Park and a few blocks from Zabar's. Rents had not yet made the quantum leap of the coming decade, but living space was already hard to find. Friends assured me of my beginner's luck.

The only problem was that I had come to Manhattan in hopes of becoming a punk, lured by the poetry of urban squalor that I heard in the music of Patti Smith and glimpsed in photos of a new race of beings cloned from the ruins of metropolis. After a decade of enforced mellowness, these evocations of jagged reality had jolted me into wakefulness. I wanted to be part of this new attitude, and New York seemed to be its epitome.

But my idyllic surroundings provided little fodder for dark romance. No glowering tenements. No alleyways of ecstatic risk. No sidewalk garbage rotting with the stench of the 20th Century. Just newly co-oped buildings with well-wrapped trash bags, presided over by a block association that saw grime as a call to renovation, not art. Sweatsuits clothed the Naked City, its mean streets pounded into submission by joggers' feet.

I began to head downtown every night. In abandoned warehouses and gutted storefronts I found oases where the Future was being constructed. Black-clad figures who had rejected everything created the sights and sounds of an alternate universe, drawing screeching chalk across the prison walls of convention. The gratifications of everyday life meant nothing to them, for they had discovered how to rearrange the present to produce the New. I watched them, imbibed their spirit. But I was a dilettante of their future; the subway awaited to drag me back to life as it had always been lived.

I grew adept in the art of uptown survival, inventing a system of checks and balances to counter the influence of my neighbors. The "ham-hashbrown-overeasy" cry of a surly Greek waiter on upper Broadway could wipe out the memory of the mimosa-hungry masses lined up for Sunday brunch. Cafe con leche at a Cuban-Chinese counter relieved the horror of Zabars bags bulging with decaffeinated blends. I learned to exist in the hollows of upward mobility, searching out those experiences too stubborn or delirious to be swept up in the cheerful consumerism that renovated the facades and sanded the floors of my neighborhood. I told no one. It was my unspeakable secret, the price I paid to reappear downtown, a self-respecting nihilist.

Eventually, I met others like myself, trapped by fate and three-year leases in our outpost of shame. We devised elaborate theories of why the 'Scene" was about to move uptown. Just a little while, we said to ourselves, sitting in coffee shops shadowed by sushi bars and Perrier emporiums, and the epicenter would shift. But we were wrong. Columbus Avenue kept getting longer and the rents kept going up. The salad bars spilled over onto Broadway, and our neighbors installed Jacuzzis. We accepted our lot stoically -- our punishment for living with one foot in the past -- for there was always the subway ride downtown and the future.

I don't remember when I first noticed the change, only that the downtown streets I nightly prowled were coming remarkably to resemble the ones from which I was descending. I followed the Scene's forced march east, over the edge of the known world, beyond Avenue A. Being artists, the others did not look back. Being less sure, I did, and found that where the avant-garde had been, real estate now was. The portals of the New had become floor-to-ceiling windows, behind which lurked tax attorneys, frozen margaritas and The Gap; the whereabouts I'd fled had become my destination.

Now Columbus Avenue stretches the length of Manhattan. The future I longed to be part of has passed, and the past which entrapped me has become an unrelenting present. I came to New York to join the avant-garde, and, while seeking it, stumbled into the city that was to come. Today, all Manhattanites live between the condos and health clubs, uncertain of their identity in a world of pale neon and cold pasta. Considering their rents, I'm glad to be paying so little for my share.