Reelin’ in the Years
If anyone finds 30 years lying around anywhere, could you please return them to me?
In 1989 I finished college and moved to New York to work in publishing. I stayed there until 1995. Since then, I’ve been back to the city two or three times for very brief visits, the last one in 2014 when I went to receive the Jim Duggins Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation, an honor for which I was enormously thankful, but which also made me feel a little old.
I feel even older now. Last week I returned to New York for the annual Mystery Writers of America board meeting. Not only can I not believe someone put me on the board of a major writing organization, I can’t believe how much time has passed since my last time wandering around my old stomping grounds.
It’s impossible in such a situation to not compare Then to Now. After seeing a friend for lunch, we walked by my first apartment, at 45 Carmine Street in Greenwich Village. I inherited the place from a friend-of-a-friend, who let me take it over in exchange for keeping her answering machine there so that if her mother ever called, she wouldn’t know that her 40-year-old daughter had finally moved in with her girlfriend of 15 years. I paid $500 a month for the studio apartment.
I looked it up—it goes for $3,500 a month now. The building itself has been completely renovated. The Chinese restaurant next door, which supplied the bulk of my diet for the years I lived there, is now an upscale vegan place. The record stores and magazine stands have been replaced by gelato vendors and yoga studios. The streets are crowded with French bulldogs and strollers.
I moved into that apartment the summer before I turned 21. I hadn’t yet published a magazine article, let alone a book. I used to walk to A Different Light bookstore on Hudson Street and look at all the queer books, never thinking that someday mine would be for sale there too. I’d yet to venture into my first gay bar or go home with my first man. Everything was new.
Now I’m 80-something books into a writing career. Married. And at the hour when most people are heading to bars, I’m usually in bed asleep.
One night during the trip, I went with my friends Greg and Donna to see Hadestown on Broadway. Sitting there, I thought back to my first time at a show, which also happened to be my first real date with another man. I took him to a revival of Gypsy, then starring Tyne Daly, at the suggestion of my boss, a gay man who I affectionately thought of as “an old theater queen.” At the time he told me to take my date to see Gypsy, Frank was actually two years younger than I am now.
Frank is gone now, as are many of the people I knew back then. But many of my friends from those days still live in New York. I was able to see a few of them—some of whom I haven’t seen in person since leaving the city—and in those moments it felt like no time at all had passed.
But it has. Even as New York has become cleaner, renovated, perhaps overly sanitized, I’ve gotten older, greyer, slower. The hotel I stayed at was in Times Square and walking through there while going to and from the subway was the starkest reminder of how we’ve both changed. When I moved there, the lights in Times Square came from porn theater marquees. Now, they come from the M&M store. Then, solicitations came from hustlers. Now, they come from people dressed as Spiderman and Hello Kitty, offering photo ops. Back then, we dropped tokens into the subway turnstiles. This time, I waved my phone at a screen and $2.75 was magically sucked out of my bank account.
While I mostly enjoyed the new New York, I missed the old one. Then, one night our dinner reservation at a trendy ramen place went awry. Scrambling for an alternative, I remembered the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, which was just around the corner. When I lived in the city, it was a favorite “secret” place, one not many people seemed to know about. Housed in the basement of the Ukrainian National Home community center, it felt like going to dinner in your baba’s kitchen. The food was rustic, the service leisurely, the atmosphere delightful.
I had no idea if it would be the same now and am happy to report that it was. Passing through the doors, it felt like going back in time to 1989. Nothing had changed, including the woman who greeted us at the door. For two hours, it felt like being home again. At one point I looked over at a table where some young people were sitting. They were about the age I was when I lived in New York. They looked happy. I wondered where they saw themselves 30 years from now, or if they even thought that far ahead. And when they looked over at us, I wondered what they saw. Their futures? A group of old people? People who were once like them?
I don’t miss living in New York. It was hard, expensive, a constant struggle. I was happy to come home to our sleepy village, my husband, our dogs. But I’m thankful for the time I had there—both Then and Now. ▼
Michael Thomas Ford is a much-published Lambda Literary award-winning author. Visit Michael at michaelthomasford.com.