New York City is once again the center of the United States. I say once again, but really it’s always the center. It’s always been the true capital: if not the seat of government, then the seat of culture, money, the capital of Capital. It’s always been this way. In fact, New York is the true avant-garde of the country: it gets everything first. And it’s as if the city contains a karmic paradox where, for the price of its centrality to the nation (and to our imaginations), it must suffer first the psychopaths, the opportunists, the terrorists, and now the virus.
In American literature, this leads to a kind of provincialism. Writers like Paul Auster or Jonathan Lethem can set novel after novel within the five boroughs and still be considered tackling a universal subject, while someone like Willa Cather or Faulkner or Welty or Jim Harrison are considered regional writers. New York is not a region. It is the region.
Despite these relatively rural gripes even my black box of a heart was warmed by the appearance of the USNS Comfort ship plowing into New York harbor last week. I had read that it was headed that way, but I had no idea what it looked like. I didn’t know it would be white — like a giant metal robo-nurse. My heart swelled at the prospect that perhaps our techno-militaristic stockpile will somehow save us. If we could only breathe through bombs.
Sometimes it’s beneficial to live in the sticks, relatively speaking. When the social distancing procedures came down, I thought glumly that these measures wouldn’t be that difficult to enact in my own life. Outside the three individuals in my immediate family and the three individuals in my office, I have to go out of my way to incorporate other people into my daily existence. I have to make plans. Any time except for a worldwide contagion this would be a recipe for depression, but now strangely it’s just slightly helpful.
New York is the dream of rednecks everywhere, according to Saul Bellow. I too once wanted to go there. I applied to its MFA programs but never made it. The very next fall, 9/11 happened, and I breathed a (guilty, shameful) sigh of relief for continuing to ostracize myself down south — to be once again in a place where nothing ever happened. I have been to New York a couple of times, purely as a tourist, and I was amazed at how big it was, the sheer magnitude of people. Not to overplay my country mouse hand, but it’s overwhelmingly larger than my current life. All large northern cities are, but New York exponentially so. The universe of individual consciousness located within just one tall apartment building. Redneck leans head out of cab window, mouth open in wonder like a dog.
Earlier this year — before all this — I was on a gig where I played “New York, New York” for the first time. I should have played it years ago, but somehow this was my first. One strange twist of fate was that the bass player on the gig was an older friend, and when I was a young whippersnapper, I used to hang out at another one of his straight-ahead gigs, and I would sneak up behind him and shout out a request for “New York, New York,” and without looking up to see who was heckling, he would say, “100 bucks or no dice.” Here in the land of “Margaritaville” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” one had to have some distant threshold of pride. But now we are playing it.
When preparing, I was struck by how angry Sinatra sounds as he’s singing it. There’s contempt in his voice, bitterness. Surely that predates our own bitterness at playing the tune. Though, to be honest, I wasn’t bitter playing it. I was just glad I got through it without embarrassing myself or steering the band astray as I chopped out rhythm guitar. To be bitter, to really resent “New York, New York,” or NY, NY, one has to experience it more. One has to live it. Perhaps that’s what Sinatra was projecting in his recorded performance of the tune, both an admission of the city’s dominance over him (the implied narrator of the song), and also the song’s eventual dominance over him (the legendary performer), and its dominance ultimately over the culture. Have a city and a song ever so perfectly embodied one another? I don’t know. It’s a hell of a lot heavier than Kansas City.