All of a sudden, the city ain’t mine. But I doubt it ever was. New York has forever been equal parts lonely and beautiful to me. You can be lonesome in a crowd or feel like family with millions. Sunset stripes over the trash heap. The runner’s high inhaled at the wasteland near the reservoir stench fills your heart with hope.
I wrestle with the feeling that the illusions I once held, about love and life, were just wayward dreams. When I was in first grade, I went to see Do The Right Thing at the movie theater on Flatbush and 7th Avenue. It’s a Crunch Fitness now and before that it was Urban Outfitters. That was the first time I saw breasts, Rosie Perez’s. My mother covered my eyes at first, and then went back to watching the scene. But I stopped seeing Spike Lee movies in theaters over a decade ago when the trailer for Chi-Raq dropped. I realized he wasn’t a better writer than 35 years ago and it crushed me.
He hadn’t improved and I was old enough to hear rumors from young filmmakers that he was in his own way. Or stubborn about the passage of time.
I’m stubborn about the passage of time, too, as much as I try not to be. There’s four French tourists in the café where I’m writing, for instance. They’re behind a luggage barricade, waiting for an Airbnb check-in time.
So my mind keeps turning over, stuck in an imaginary past.
I’m here to write but stubborn Frenchies tethered to their chargers have crowded my favorite, frequently-empty café. It’s the exact kind of intrusive, benign-seeming gentrification that Lee first alluded to in Do The Right Thing.
There’s a White Bed-Stuy inside of Black Bed-Stuy. A White Clinton Hill swallowing up the Black Fort Greene. That’s already fifteen to 20 years in, depending on where you go.
While I was watching Highest 2 Lowest, longing for Spike’s reintroduction to a New York aesthetic, I could tell he hadn’t been to my version of New York very much. Not for years. Like, I’ll see him at the U.S. Open, sure, or courtside at the Eastern Conference Finals. In some kind of Yankees-Mets-Knicks jester suit, an orange explosion of time lost. Something a stylist vomited after a belated email.
Yet, the best moments of his uneven return were not in the leaden dialogue, or improvised rap battles. They lived inside conflicting visuals of the city pressed up against each other. The LIU campus clashing with Albee Square Mall. Flatbush Avenue Extension horns blasting hollow up to the high rises. A hitmaker CEO snaking into ancient, grungy Hoyt-Schemerhorn to drop off his king’s ransom.
But the through line’s hidden in these juicy bits, instead of overlaid as it should be. Spike seems confused about what New York he belongs to. You can see it in his press junkets, his appearances. He’s half mascot, half social satirist, one surrendering to the other to stay visible. It reminds me of his apex work, Bamboozled, as Hollywood’s claws may have dug in too deep for his skin to show past scars.
There’s an MSNBC interview on Al Sharpton’s PoliticsNation where Lee’s dizzy analysis of present day politics sounds atomized and incoherent like a bad slogan. Yes, we’ve memed Spike to death, but I didn’t realize he was dead inside too.
Lee and Sharpton struggle to pronounce “Zohran Mamdani,” as Boomers would, and blather that incoherence through fraternal lingo.
“We’re in this country. Right now. It’s bananas. This guy trying to take over D.C. And just weaponize these things. He ain’t gonna do that in New York though. The Boogie Down?! Harlem?! Bed-Stuy do or die?”
I cannot tell what he’s talking about, what he hopes to convey, who he might be talking to. He’s a walking New York trope without any of the roiling battles that present-day New Yorkers actually face.
Can you still portray struggle if the extent of your hardship is living up to your first romance? Your first win?
I walked way uptown yesterday and kept remembering first dates. That’s the trouble with New York embracing you like you’re special, like you’re the only one who’s had a first date here.
That’s a seducer’s game, making you the trick. Of course, you’re the first! You’re the prettiest, sweetest, purest first date I ever had!
First, I was at Grand Central thinking about the Dominican sweetheart I dated right after high school, when I was struggling to stay in college. She was at Columbia so I enrolled at City to get my Manhattan education. Leaving Brooklyn seemed like the only way to get culture, I thought. I ended up sleeping in her dorm room twin bed on Friday nights so I didn’t have to travel back to Canarsie when the L train wasn’t running.
We would get drunk and try to forget how rich the other students were, how much they could afford — impromptu pizza nights and jars of lush weed. I’d wake up groggy, her roommate peering from under the covers as I shook off the Jack Daniels haze and pissed quietly into the bowl. I avoided their shower, wiping cold or snot off, and ran for the crosstown bus. Manhattan couldn’t support a Brooklyn son for more than a wild night or two, plus I had little money and they were always going to fancy brunch on Broadway. Her roommate would (discreetly and casually) pay her tab, but if I showed up, it started a stare-down.
“Wait, how much was your egg on brioche? You can pay me back tomorrow if you don’t have cash now.”
I was up at The Cloisters a couple days ago, dodging work. I remember the last time I was there, at 24, when I’d gone for an interview for a job as a park manager. I had one Metrocard fare and a bunch of unpaid tickets from hopping the subway at Rockaway Parkway station, so lord knows how I’d get back home. The man who managed the park, ruddy complexion and grizzled beard, seemed unimpressed that I was in school and had worked mostly in offices. Only in offices. The posh internships my prep school rearing hipped me to made absolutely no difference there. Picking up raccoon shit and rat carcasses didn’t require a French Lit pedigree.
He said he’d let me know. A job paying a couple hundred a week sweeping the park. I was sure I had it in the bag because why would he reject me, of all people? It didn’t need my brains, though, and that’s all I had. My hands looked soft then and they still are now. I walked the 4-hour lonesome stroll home to Brooklyn from the northern tip of Manhattan.
You don’t know New York until you’re invisible here without even a buck for a hot dog or a bodega coffee. Unless you’ve stared longingly through the grocery store window at a rotisserie like a drooling cartoon dog, came up short for a dollar-fifty butter bagel, caught a ticket from the transit cop with the paternal lecture, walked til you busted your Nike soles and leaned the tongue, clung to your debit card at dinner insisting you drank the only club soda on the bill, woke up at the end of line, vodka-soused and throbbing, cursing the stranger sunrise before the bile visited.
We’re in an election year. I’m mad that the only New Yorker taking the stage who’s seen this undead populist, puddle grease version is a Republican vigilante. The winner looks at the city how we all wish we could see it: like another beautiful first date. I wanna be mad but there’s nothing like knowing you can fall in love again.
This post originally appeared on Substack and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Andrew Ricketts' work on Substack.