Can This Be New York?

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By Will Leitch


It is difficult to describe to friends and family in Mattoon, Illinois, the small town where I grew up, the way human interaction is in New York City, where I have lived for two years. I end up falling back on a New York axiom: No Eye Contact. That sounds scary, like everyone's always a hairsbreadth away from mugging you, a dire warning to tourists that plays into their worst fears about the city. But that's not it. You just don't make eye contact with people in New York City because you don't have time. You're busy, you're moving, you're preoccupied, you've gotta be somewhere, doggone it. Eye contact implies human connection, and when you're late for work and you're trying to make it to Times Square by 9 a.m. with 100 other stressed commuters packed into a sardine box called a subway train, human connections are an unnecessary expenditure of time and energy. You don't make eye contact because there are eight million people packed into a microscopic land mass and, frankly, that's just too many eyes.
It's certainly jarring when you first experience this culture of chosen isolation, particularly when you've come from a small town, where a friendly nature is as much a part of the landscape as Mattoon's Peterson Park. But you get used to it, and eventually the routine of grabbing a newspaper, staring dispassionately at Yankees box scores, and speaking to no one becomes the preferred way of order. In my two years in New York City, I have not once had a conversation with a stranger on a train, and none have tried to provoke one. People leave each other well enough alone. It might not be homey and comfortable, but, then again, I've never really considered New York my home. That place in my heart has always been reserved for Mattoon.

Until a couple of months ago. In the last two months alone, I've had a rich woman coated in fake fur ask me if I thought Hillary Clinton was prettier than Jacqueline Kennedy (answer: lord no), a Dominican woman solicit my opinion on Mark McGwire's retirement (sad to see him go, but .187 just isn't going to cut it), and a city worker, noticing my Illinois drivers license, wonder aloud whether New York's pizza is better than Chicago's. Neither my hometown's Villa Pizza stands triumphant. The first time this happened, I went about my business, giving bland, boring answers in a hope to end the conversation promptly, befuddled by the lack of protocol. The second time, I played along a bit more, and by the third time, we had an honest-to-God conversation. Right there on the subway. Unheard of. The common thread: All three people looked at me, softly, yearning, as if desperate for some sort of human interaction. Eager to have someone to talk to. As if the notion had just occurred to them that, heck, there are eight million people in this city. Maybe we've been missing something being so removed. Maybe we're just happy this person is alive.

As we've heard so often from so many people, September 11 changed everything forever, and clearly nowhere more than New York. Obviously, the grief and fear is overwhelming (a friend who works on Wall Street and was a football field away when the first tower collapsed finds himself jumping when a door slams), but more than anything, it's the silence that strikes you. When my parents first visited, they remarked how the city sounded like a concerto of car horns. Not anymore. No longer do you hear someone screaming out their car window at poor drivers. No one screams racism when a policeman walks across the street. No one fights in the street or scowls when you've crossed some invisible line into "their neighborhood." Heck, I haven't seen an extended middle finger in months.

In their stead, you witness some astonishing sights. A homeless man stopping to salute a fire truck as it passes by. A punk rock girl asking the bartender to turn down the music because President Bush is speaking. Rundown liquor stores with American flags in the window, selling "We Shall Overcome" T-shirts. But what's most amazing is how people talk to one another. No one is white, or black, or rich, or poor. Not anymore. We are simply New Yorkers, dealing with all this horror and death and grief together. We have banded together. For once, the city of New York has realized that there is indeed strength in numbers.

On Sept. 11, I left my job way up on 97th Street, far from the terror in Lower Manhattan to be with my aforementioned friend, who was covered in ash and soot and fright. It's a long walk downtown, about an hour, and what I saw would warm the heart of even the most hardened New York hater. Every shop was wide open, offering free water and shelter. Televisions were wheeled onto the street as complete strangers watched, holding each other and weeping. One storefront owner opened up his telephones for anyone trying to find a lost loved one. Or anyone who just needed to talk. Everyone dropped what they were doing, and thinking, and fearing, and just did what they could to help in anyway they could.

It feels different. It feels warmer. It feels like it is mine. It feels like, well it feels like Mattoon.

It feels like home.


Will Leitch is a writer for the Silicon Alley Reporter in New York City