Survivors

“Claire, I don’t wanna keep reading,” says Delilah, her face crumpled as she clutches Monique’s paper in her hands.  Delilah, a dreamy, sensitive ninth grader, is still a mystery to me.  I ask her why she can’t keep going.

“It’s so sad,” she says.  Monique is grinning, leaning back in her seat, polishing off a bag of Doritos.  I look to see her reaction.  Nothing but the grin.

The paper in question is a chapter in Monique’s memoir – the prequel to the one she volunteered to workshop with the class last week, in which she bitterly regrets the abortion she had when she was 13.  This one, written in response to students’ questions, is about how she ended up in foster care.  It is well-written, with an intuitive sense of pacing and rhythm.  Monique is one of my favorites: bold, sweet, intelligent.  Also: reckless, aggressive, moody, and a gang member, though we don’t know how deep her involvement is.  To her credit, she hasn’t exhibited any of the dark, turbulent meltdowns of last year, when she received two 90-day suspensions for fighting.

“Delilah,” I begin gently.  “Monique was brave enough to write it all down.  All you have to do is read it.  She survived it.”  Monique is taking it in stride, scanning Delilah’s paper, a story about her dog.

I look down the row and realize Delilah is surrounded by survivors: on her other side is Hector, dutifully copying his epic seven-page chapter onto loose leaf, double-spaced.  Hector’s mother (named Hydra, for real) and father have eight children between them and don’t have custody of a single one.  His blue card in the office states that they are not allowed near him; he’s been in foster care since elementary school.

Across from him is Annette, who is living in a shelter with her mother and younger siblings; in her memoir, she wonders “what it would be like to be white, because I’d be happy all the time.”

Rayanna, a couple seats down from Annette, has been living in a shelter for two years with her mother, sister, and niece.  She pulls in straight A’s.

Next to her is Sharise, who called me in tears over Yom Kippur because her mother was beating her up and threatening her with a baseball bat.  They still warily live together, but an ACS worker makes regular, unscheduled visits.

Behind them is Andre, who is being raised by his grandmother while his mother remains in Guyana.  The grandmother told me wearily over the phone that she received nothing from his parents toward the care of Andre and his sister.

DeeDee is missing for the third day in a row; she and her mother just moved into a shelter, too.  Her mother hasn’t been working since the diabetes swelled up her feet.  DeeDee reveals in her memoir that her father is in jail.

Tanesha also writes about her father being in jail; in her memoir, she angrily relates the story of sitting on the kitchen floor when she was little, writing him a letter, asking her grandmother how to spell “jail.”

Maria’s father is in jail, too; her memoir is about how the men and boys in her life have betrayed or otherwise disappointed her.

Shané, another turnaround like Monique, is living with her mother again after a stint in Georgia with her father.  She describes her father as “abusive”; her mother, who wears fake eyelashes and sucked her teeth at our secretary once, regularly locks Shané out of the house.  “My mother never hits me,” Shané clarified the other day, but living with her is clearly taking its toll.  She hasn’t been home in four days.

Zara’s memoir is about the pain her family causes her.

Nina writes a lot about her father, who just kicked her out of the house again.

Nicole writes over and over about how her father humiliated her mother when she was little, locking her out, leaving her on the porch of their house in Haiti, naked, for the neighbors to laugh at.

I was under the impression that Raymond, a talented writer whose written English is more technically perfect than almost anyone else in the class except Hector, lived with his mother.  But I read in his first chapter about spending the weekend at his “foster father’s house,” so he might be another one of those sleeper cases, a smart, charming kid you suddenly discover is in foster care or a shelter when you least expect it.

Basically, Delilah was surrounded.

Silent Sustained Reading

I.

Eight-fifty-five.  Tawia jams the hulking, ancient window closed and shuts out the gray brick cold.  Heat levitates from the furnace, and Tawia, tall and jumpy, leans against it, sucking on a BlowPop, shrugging her hood off and gazing outside, the tattered copy of Game Over II: It’s All in the Game closed, for now, on her desk.

In the back, Faith is being good now.  She has her mother’s exact face.  Ever since parent-teacher conferences last week, Faith has been a different, much-quieter student, her saucy, self-righteous attitude barely detectable.  She gets beseeching when she wants a bathroom pass, i.e., a pass to meet up with Chantrice and confer, or exchange iPods, or whatever, in the hallway, but she usually hurries back, covering her laughter, seeing my glowering eyes and mouthing, “Sorry.”

Dominique is hunched over a pulpy romance novel, silent.  She didn’t use to speak at all.  We didn’t know her first language was French for months; we just knew she was from Ghana.  Now that she’s a street lit bookworm, she talks all the time, but not during Silent Sustained Reading.

Tawia is also from Ghana, but has stubbornly taken on the worst of American girl fuck-you-ness, no-attention-span squawking, iPods and junk food and vicious gossip and wanting to be a model.  We suspect she has ADHD, but initiating testing for that kind of thing is tricky.

Next to Dominique, Denise the Whiner is silent, too, once she stops chirping to Dominique.  She’s easy, goes quiet with one of my glaring, wordless looks.

Janae, sinewy and beautiful, with a high, regal forehead, slips in late again, gliding like the air itself.  She’s there five minutes before I even notice, reading Crank, a novel in verse about, uh, I guess, crank.  She says it’s good and wants to know if I have the sequel (Smack?  Glass?).

Dora is engulfed in another Sharon Flake novel, her iPod blaring Usher louder than the crossing guard yelling her conversation three stories below.  When I ask her to turn it down, I have to nudge her, and she looks at me, agog, as if shaken out of a trance.

Missing: Wakeisha, Nazira, the other Anna, Stephony, Sharise, Ruby.  I know they’re in the zone now, even Tawia is back to her book, and Faith is still being good, but it’s a delicate, delicate balance; one loud girl comes in late, makes a beeline for her friend, and our silence is finished.

Nine-ten.  Nazira stalks in, all rolly eyes and shimmying hips, a sandwich dripping from her gloved hand, her face full of guileless, utter surprise to find herself in a room with all these people.  Good morning, Gotham Academy! she thinks.  Say hello to Gorgeous!

“Nazira,” I say with steel in my voice.

“Oh, sorry,” she says with a grin, as though we didn’t reenact this a hundred times a day.  She heads to the back and hugs Faith, dropping shredded lettuce everywhere, good-humored, glad-handing.

“Pick a different seat,” I say in the same voice, not lifting my eyes from my book.

“I won’t talk, I promise,” she says, butter-voiced.

“Nope, pick another seat, Ma,” I say evenly, still reading.

Crazy Wakeisha strolls in, nine-fifteen, and I look to see if this is a collapsed-vortex day, with barely-whispered replies, her head on the desk and no eye contact, or a manic day, all grandstanding and flame-fanning, The Wakeisha Show.

When we heard she was coming back from the hospital, where she’d been since the group home sent her packing in November, you could feel the air suck out of the room.  “Noooo,” Marshall moaned softly.  “Hey, at least it’s not Shatara,” laughed Chase, our aide/hallway enforcer/basketball coach.  We couldn’t decide which was worse: Wakeisha’s crazy or Shatara’s crazy.  Wakeisha’s was deft and manipulative and unpredictable; Shatara’s was predictably constant, but harder to bear, like the tinny whine of a broken loudspeaker.  And Shatara was a loud speaker, a freshly burst steam pipe, a volcano.  (One morning, Garcia gently asked her if she could talk a little quieter, please, because he was trying to grade papers in the office, and she tsunamied him, all waving hands and gyrating neck and wild eyes, screaming, “WHY HE ALL UP IN MY MOUTH?!”  “I don’t even know what that means,” Garcia had whispered to me, palms up.)

So Wakeisha wasn’t Shatara.  (Shatara was transferred to another site when we found out she was repeating ninth grade; technically, we weren’t a transfer school, so technically, we couldn’t admit an over-age, under-credited student, even though we had plenty of slightly-less-crazy repeaters of ninth grade.)

“Why are you late?” I say to her softly as Ruby sneaks in, throwing me a sheepish grin, half of a jellied bagel in her mouth.

“I had something I had to do,” she says quickly and sits down, opening up the half-destroyed copy of Let That Be the Reason, pointing at it, nodding, and squeezing her face into a grimaced smile, like, See?  I’m reading, just like I’m supposed to, see?  See?

Today will be a manic day, and I brace for The Wakeisha Show to come, later, in her English class, in the hallways, in the cafeteria.

Oh Dee Bees

Stupidly, I decided to dash back down the block and into the school building to retrieve the Builder’s Bar I’d left in the staff refrigerator, leaving 10 of my ninth and tenth graders at the corner store to wait for me.  We were on our way to Battery Park for our weekly field trip, and the ritual is to stop at the store on the way to grab some food for the journey – apparently, the cafeteria food is inedible.  It is probably illegal to leave your students on the street corner while you retrieve your snacks upstairs, but I did it anyway, sternly eyeing two of my wiliest students: “I.  Will be right.  Back.”

I flew down the street and disappeared into the building.  Striding back toward them not 90 seconds later, I peered into the distance: no chaos, no shouting, no blood…They were standing soberly in front, staring at me.

“Hey, shawty,” I heard someone say.

“This your teacher?” another guy said.

“Hey, y’all, can I come to your school?  Y’all go to that school?  Don’t you wanna talk to me?” the first one continued as my students started walking quickly toward me.  He was tall, loose-limbed, do-ragged, and at least 25 years old.  So was his friend.  They were lustily taking in my female students’ ample curves, the girls scurrying now in the direction of the Jehovah’s Witness lady handing out pamphlets down the block.

I did a quick head count.

“Where’s…?” I said, trailing off, realizing we were missing tiny, quiet Leeah.  I headed for the store’s dim interior, and Loose Limbs and his friend trailed behind, sidestepping in concentric circles around me, presumably trying to discern my figure in my long wool coat.

“Hey, mama, you their teacher?”

“Hey, teacher…Yo, can I be your student?  How I get into that school?”

Leeah finally emerged, with her usual faraway face.  I sighed with relief and turned around to lead the pack toward the subway.  I resisted turning my head and taunting, “Sorry, you have to have been born in the 90s to go here.”

Thrilled and giddy with fear, Tavia eagerly explained that the guys had started by shouting to them across the street; when that didn’t work, they joined them on the sidewalk.

“Ew,” I said, mortified.  “Some guys think they own the whole world.”

“I know!” the girls cried, each one launching into an anecdote about a guy (or two, or three) leering at them, following them, talking dirty, right there in public, no apologies.  It seemed to be one of the costs of living in the neighborhood, of being born a girl, of breathing the air.

“I call ‘em ODBs,” Star said matter-of-factly, placing them into their proper genus with the deftness of a biologist.

“Old dirty bastards?” I said, cracking up.

“Yeah,” she said, laughing.

Flashback

The first semester at Artists and Agitators staggered to the finish line today. I’d had the idea that my plucky memoirists, who’ve written some of the most arresting work I’ve seen in my (short) teaching career, would march in with fresh copies of their final drafts, stapled and ready to share in a sort of “reading gallery.” I told them I’d copy and bind the memoirs into a book, along with their thoughtful written comments.

Sigh.

Nilda rubbed her eyes and squinted at me.

“My what?” she asked.

“Your final draft. Hello? The project we’ve been working on since September? Your MEMOIR?”

“I’m seriously confused right now,” she said, and put her head down next to her bookbag, which belched crumpled sheets of paper. I whirled around and surveyed my students’ faces.

“Who has their final draft today?”

“What’s a draft? You mean, like, the chapters?” asks Ebony, who, like Nilda, has “lost” her glasses and squints like an old lady.

“What’s…?” I sputter. “Wha– Hello? Guys? YOUR MEMOIR? For your MEMOIR CLASS? That I’ve been teaching lo these five months? To you?”

“Don’t even go there, Claire,” says Rayelle, shaking her head. She is about to print her own final draft, nine pages of cutting, merciless brilliance. She is 13, cocky and difficult, miles ahead of everyone.

I deflate for a second, searching for the will to carry on. They’ve been furiously typing their 15-page memoirs–gorgeous stuff–for two weeks, marathon sessions before school, after school, during lunch, pleading with me to let them finish. Last night, nine of them read excerpts in front of an audience at our exhibition, scared, proud, exhilarated. Who were these bewildered urchins before me, their hair sticking out in every direction, drowning in puffy coats, crusty-eyed and sniffly?

Reason #279

“I did it again.”

“What?”

“Spelled ‘receive’ wrong. It’s an epidemic.”

Call a Detective

2003

“Like, just call one? Do they still have detectives?” I picture Humphrey Bogart in a fedora, spinning to face me in a creaky wooden chair. I pull the phone book from a stuck drawer and haul it to the kitchen counter, where we sit on bar stools, intent. “Detective, detective,” I murmur, thumbing the pages, which are thin, like a Bible. There are three entries.

“What do I say?” I press.

“Tell them you’re looking for a missing person,” Janell says.

But my father isn’t missing, I think.

Once I was sure I saw him in California. I was walking to a bar, carrying a bag of take-out Chinese food, when I passed a coffeeshop where an enormous man sat poring over a tiny softbound dictionary. He had a huge head of auburn hair. The sun was setting; third-story fog swirled overhead. I felt haunted, as I usually do in San Francisco; it is the place where my parents were last together. One picture of him survives from my mother’s collection in a mildewing cardboard box: it is orangey, taken in the late 1970s. He’s looking down, as though through a cloud of pot smoke. His red hair snakes out; he has bulgy eyes and a big nose. This man looked like my father more uncannily than any of the hundreds of times I thought I had seen him, on subway platforms, in airports, in line at theme parks.

I passed by twice without going in, my skin crawling. I have to pee when I’m nervous.

Finally I went in. I marched up to him and said, “I’m sorry, but you look like someone I know. Is your name Steve?” He was alarmed, like an agoraphobic out for the first time in years.

“No,” he said.

Some people get hushed, apologetic, when I tell them I never met my father. They get conspiratorial: “We must find him,” whispered my co-worker Irena, a Lithuanian woman nearing retirement. Fatherlessness is common; I want to say it’s almost as common as divorce. Most of the people I knew in school—an expensive, tiny liberal arts college—knew both their parents, who were usually married. But the line cooks I’ve worked with, the postal clerks, the waitresses, the kids at my local high school, nod in agreement.

“Me neither,” says Ben, a cook, when I tell him. He’s dismissive, matter-of-fact, as he chops onions.

“How do you do that without crying?” I ask.

“Just used to it,” he says.

Janell hands me the phone and I dial the first number. It’s nine or 10 o’clock; we assume we’ll get an answering machine in an office. We are shocked when someone picks up.

“Hello?”

“Um,” I stammer, “is this a private detective service?”

“No,” says the person and swiftly hangs up. I check the date on the phone book: it’s three years old. The next number is disconnected. The final number yields another human voice. “I’m calling for a detective,” I say.

“I do investigation work for businesses,” he explains. “Not missing person stuff.”

The first time I felt like uncovering my father, I was 20. I bought a postcard in Vermont on the way back from seeing a friend. I wasn’t sure why I bought it: a close-up of a woman in the 1940s, wearing a pair of cat’s eye glasses, one lens thick with condensation. It was an advertisement for anti-fog lenses. I brought it home and tacked it to my wall, where, a week or so later, it dawned on me how much I looked like this woman. In fact, I had taken a Polaroid that summer of myself in a pair of cat’s eye glasses, with the same expression, staring into the California sun. This woman could be my grandmother, I thought. It seemed sad to me that there might be an old, or dead, woman somewhere, maybe in Massachusetts (my father was born in Boston), who didn’t know she had a 20-year-old granddaughter who looked just like her.

I started having dreams I met him. He and my mother would sit in a labyrinthine, blue-lit banquet hall at odd, stilted parties, not saying anything. In them, he was quiet and unremarkable, and I was relieved I didn’t have to mount some years-long search for someone who hardly seemed to exist.

I had no idea where to begin. I put it off as I finished college, toiled through an internship, and landed my first desk job. What was I going to do, walk into the Hall of Records and find his name? Hall of what records? Do those still exist? Isn’t everything on computers? Aren’t all official phone lines answered by automated recordings telling you everything but what you’re looking for? First, there was no way to prove I was his daughter, and little chance I’d be given access to any record belonging to him. Second, it’s not like the person you’re seeking is actually behind one of these doors, sitting in a file somewhere. I would see his name on a birth certificate, and then what?

The next day at work, I lock myself into a conference room with another phone number. I dial, and a polite male voice answers and says yes, this is a private detective service. I tell him what I’ve got: first, middle, and last name; approximate date of birth; presumed city of birth; an address and an employer from 1979. He tells me a basic search costs $300. What then? I ask. What if nothing turns up? He tells me there’s no guarantee they’ll find anything on the first try; the harder they look, the more it costs.

I don’t have $300. I haven’t paid off the car I bought from a friend; I have $16,000 in student loans. My salary barely covers rent, gas, and groceries. I thank him and hang up.

Reason # 278

“I don’t think a man has ever squeezed more toothpaste out of a tube than I have here, with this one.” –C, as he brushes his teeth

The Silver Polisher

This is for Matthew, per his request: “AND SO I ASK YOU: have you been in the restaurant club?”

Winter 2004 (Philadelphia PA)

“What did you do with that plate?” barks the chef de cuisine. I don’t answer. I am holding the replacement salad in my hands, for the woman on table 87—Jack is asking about the first salad, the mistake. “Did you give it to the waitstaff?” he asks, appalled. The first salad—sliced pear, local, organically grown green apple, and grapes served with slices of St. Nectar, a nutty, semi-firm Gruyere-like goat cheese–is gone; six waiters and assorted buspeople bore down on it like a swarm, every morsel gone in thirty seconds.

I remembered how he had slammed another mistake salad, earlier in the evening—the dressing was supposed to be on the side, an oversight of the waiter who sent the order—down on the stainless steel line and threw it in the trash, glaring at us in warning.

“What?” he spits, “You think I should reward you for your mistakes?”

“Take the fuckin’ salad out!” shouts a chorus of line cooks.

Waiters know they aren’t high on the restaurant food chain. We are mediators, suspended between guest and kitchen; cooks and chefs act as though we were ordering all this food, were personally responsible for requesting dressing on the side, no potatoes but extra Tuscan kale, steaks medium rare-ish, more rare than medium but not exactly rare; customers balk at us when their steak is the wrong temperature, when they think the potatoes are over-salted, when they wonder why the trout is so “moist.” On the dining room floor, we are beatific, sweet-voiced, lilting, accommodating. When we push through the double doors of the kitchen with our feet, carrying armfuls of dirty dishes and empty martini glasses, we enter a jungle where the rules of civility are suspended.

“RUNNER!” shouts the expeditor, calling for someone to take food to the dining room. “I need two lamb and a risotto right now, or I’m dry-fucking you up the ass!” he says to the new young line cook.

“A guest wants to know if there’s parsley in the scallop entrée,” says a waiter to the expeditor.

“Why?” he says, intent, rhetorical.

“Because she’s allergic,” the waiter says.

“You should know if it has parsley,” the expeditor says before rattling off a new ticket: “Two lamb, one rib eye med rare, one mahi, three venison, ORDER FIRE!” The waiter waits.

“Is there parsley?” she asks.

“YES! There’s fucking parsley! Fucking WAITERS! Read the menu!” he screams. The entrée is new; the menu only specifies “caraway broth.”

What we say to the expeditor (we’re not allowed to directly engage the cooks on the line) is invariably repeated in sissy voices or turned weirdly sexual as soon as we re-enter the dining room, the world of the living. When we’re in the kitchen, on our narrow landing strip behind pantry, where we make coffee, brew espresso, steam milk, retrieve lemons, and refill butters, six at a time in a space the size of a toilet stall, we hear the cooks over the din. Isaiah has Turret’s syndrome; he fires a blue streak of “fucks” for every third word of his nonstop narrative. Jason, the grill man, tells Puerto Rican jokes. Ray, the Puerto Rican pantry kid, stays quiet. Isaiah tells the crew about the strip club he went to the night before. Casey, the sous chef, calls him a faggot and tells him to shut up.

“Jack,” I say evenly.

“What?” He whirls around.

“What do you recommend for the venison?”

“Medium rare, like everything else,” he snaps.

“Well, you recommend medium for the pork, so I wanted to make sure,” I say.

“Says who? Is that a direct quote?”

“Says management. Since we opened.”

“Management, who’s management?” He pauses. “Get out of my kitchen.”

At night, I walk the twenty blocks home. I give the evening’s highlights to my boyfriend over the phone. He is an architect; he is older than I am and works with grownups. “That’s so condescending,” he says, aghast, when I repeat whatever it was Jack said to me that night. I laugh.

Cooks, in my experience, relish their outlaw status, their lack of employability for anything but this, a line of work requiring air-traffic controller precision, Olympic inexhaustibility, and indifference to extreme heat and the occasional threat of severe bodily harm. As such, they are a rare phylum separate from the average population: sadist, adolescent, foul-mouthed workaholics with an eerie genius for making things you’d want to eat. They are immensely entitled. Their job is absolutely harder than mine. They assume I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I am probably a vegetarian, that I might look good naked, that I am liable to quit at a moment’s notice to pursue performance art or yoga instruction.

They want me to shut the fuck up. They want me to know the intricacies of French, Italian, and Pacific Rim cuisine and their New American “fusions,” to have psychic knowledge of every ingredient in Jason’s free-form broths, and to never, ever ask what’s in gremolata again. If I open my mouth, they hope I say something embarrassing so it can be repeated for the next half-hour, and they can remind me of it when we hit a lull and they have nothing to cook.

Once, in a fit of sincerity, I asked a pantry cook how, exactly, you were supposed to filet a bell pepper. “Ooooh, show me how you cut the bell peppers, Jeffrey!” they squealed for a month.

Reason # 277

C: I hate days like this, because it’s unclear…what shoes to wear.
(Pause.)
C: It’s damp and gross. It’s…foul and fetid. It’s…hang on…I got another one in me…
(Longer pause.)
C: Do you have any stinky shoe spray?
Me: No.
C: I don’t think I can wear these without something to mitigate the stench.

On Top of the World

“Wait’ll you see this place,” J murmured as the elevator rumbled to the top floor. His nine-and-a-half-month-old son gazed at us from his hip. They were visiting from Munich, where J fled after a traumatic year in the Teaching Fellows.

The elevator landed with a thud, and he wrestled the apartment door open with one hand, revealing a skylit library with 12-foot ceilings and enormous potted plants. “Whoa,” we breathed, calculating how we would fit our lives into what turned out to be a generous foyer. “It keeps going,” J said as he strode down the hall. In the distance, I saw the kitchen and, across the room, a pool table. We turned left and came to another cavernous expanse, this one with a grand piano on a low stage. A winding staircase led to a bedroom and a home office, and the roof deck. “What do these people do for a living?” I asked. They were the parents of a friend of J’s wife. The husband was an elite computer genius. The wife had Alzheimer’s, and a caretaker lived with them.

“I’ve never seen a water tower this close up,” I whispered as we stepped onto the roof. “It looks like a silo.” We could see the clock tower on the Con Ed building, the Metronome furiously counting up and down, the red neon sign for the W Hotel, the verdant tops of the trees in Union Square Park, and hundreds of lives in Tungsten-lit windows from here to the East River. You could see everything. You could breathe, stretch your arms out, throw your head back. The city’s density was charming from here: perched above the beehive, you couldn’t help admiring its busy, throbbing bustle.

J handed the baby to his wife, and he set to playing with her hair. They told us that in Germany, the government paid them monthly now that they had an infant, and they lived in an enormous apartment in a neighborhood J’s wife, R, described as “the Beverly Hills of Munich.” It would cost “four or five thousand dollars in New York,” they said, but they pay only $1300 (R translated for us from the Euros). “And it’s quiet there,” they told us. “There are actually signs on the recycling bins outside saying don’t recycle after a certain hour ‘because the noise makes your neighbors sick.’ Even the subway to work is silent.”

I’d never seen J so ebullient or satisfied. “He used to come home white as a sheet,” R remembered of his teaching days. He worked in a school not far from mine. One day, he was warned by a student not take his usual route to the subway, “because, you know, ‘bang bang,’ Mr. J,” the kid said. Another time, a 13-year-old showed him his gun when J cut him off at the turnstile. I suppose that could have happened to me—Bed Stuy is just as dangerous as Bushwick, right?—but it didn’t. I heard the principal has lawsuits against him for reckless endangerment, for locking the school doors against students when they were running for their lives. My school was famous for its high test scores, and our principal stood on the corner every day to intimidate the guys who tried to recruit our students into the Bloods.

Up in the sky over Union Square, you think, ‘I could raise 10 kids in a space like this—life would be so easy if it were like this.’ This, in fact, is precisely what you imagined when you were 17 and longed for the city from the shag-carpeted floor of your suburban bedroom. And then you remember, according to the article you just read in the City section, that, since 2001, the price of housing in New York has grown at five times the rate of people’s incomes. You remember that the city’s shrinking middle class is no longer entitled to their piece of the Upper West Side or Harlem or Park Slope or even Fort Greene or Whitestone or Washington Heights, that blue-collar workers and middle-income earners have been leaving the city in droves.

You remember that the days of pulling your immigrant self, your wrong-side-of-the-tracks self, your plucky, ambitious self, up by the bootstraps and saving up to buy a place to raise your kids in, might be over in this town. No one does it these days without ample help from relatives or a job in finance.

C has been muttering the following all week since running across the figures in the Times: “In the investment baking industry, the average weekly salary is $8500. AVERAGE. WEEKLY. Across all other private sector industries, the average weekly salary is $850.”

J and R can plainly see it, and they moved to Munich.

(Which is not the whole story, it never is, but you see what I mean.)

C and I continually commit ourselves to the city. It’s a practice, committing to its many, quick tongues; its generous light behind looming structures; its striving and gaiety and frank appraisal; its street art and brick and cornices and unforgiving shopkeepers. But more and more, I wonder if that’s all outdated pastiche now, and the gleaming new glass condos, the triple mint this and “redefining luxury” that, the trust funded gallery assistants and hired drivers and bottle service and the endless, over-honed catering to the very rich, if the deregulated rents and the big box retailers that ate up the avenues, the near-extinction of local shoe repairmen and stationers, are the future. Do you ever feel like you missed the party, like it all went to shit right before you got there?