When Zohran Mamdani won the primary, I wanted to mimic them white kids on social media and be like "We are so back!"
But New York is far from back. A bacon-egg-and-cheese is $7. An Uber to Greenpoint is the cost of a Sag Harbor staycation. Round-the-way champion New York Liberty games cost more than my ConEd bill in the heatwave. Feels like pure f***-flation.
I'm as cramped as I ever was in a three-floor apartment because it's too hot and expensive to go out. But it's also too hot and expensive to cool to the median temp I need to pace about the house. Regardless of Do The Right Thing humidity, and watching steam rise off the brownstone steps, I am considering what it will cost me to hope.
It's not like every era promises a young, Brown, Muslim, advocate for immigrants who is an immigrant himself. Plus, he went to Bronx Science. Plus, his parents are the ideal pairing of vaunted filmmaker and principled scholar. He is the billy woods of city politics. The Earl Sweatshirt of the public good.
I can't help my time-worn reservations, though. Few due to Mamdani himself. He's my ideal kind of civil servant in that he's dogged, committed to a grassroots, Bust Open the Johnny Pump campaign.
And I dunno. I could be projecting but New York can be too grisly for the sheltered. Too morbid for the sensitive.
Mamdani's idealism is perfect for me and my ilk of strivers. But he has yet to be swallowed by the certain drudgery of cruel crimes, corrupt cops, fire deaths. I don't even watch local news because it wrecks my view of the city I grew up in. That 6 o'clock broadcast after an NBA game or Wimbledon can be nerve-shattering. Until an e-bike exploded across the street from me, igniting an entire house overnight and killing three generations of a family, I hadn't thought of the news for years. I work hard to stay numb.
I know this because I have turned off my nerves to crazy people.
That's not true.
I thought I'd turned off my nerves to the mentally ill because I ignore them so much it grates my senses into fine grounds and only destroys me in extreme events. I see the woman at the corner of St. John's and Eastern Parkway when I open my door around 8 a.m. who hallucinates routinely. She's there, lopsided wig and everything. Usually, she's in the road, gesturing to her inner council, but does call out to passersby like me. Often vocal and angry, she's still no worry. She's very thin, which suggests the interplay of drugs and psychosis. I know the signs because my girlfriend works at one of the major hospitals in the in-patient psych ward.
"A lot of times it's a chicken and egg thing with patients who have a history of substances and mental distress," she said to me once. We were talking about a nameless man whose family had come to pick him up without replacement shoes. Patients need footwear because many enter the hospital like my wigged-out neighbor, in a random array of garments. Some mismatched. Some missing. Like shoes. Others flit in and out of jails and hospitals, like a Danny Hoch callback, having their laces seized. They're at risk for self-harm.
I notice how she describes the patients now because every story is this mix of incurable and funny. There was the writer and lawyer who published an acclaimed memoir but got into fights at the bodega. "I'm gonna file a complaint about how you treat patients. And don't think I'm blind to the fact that it's because I'm white," he'd repeat. The social workers and nurses are Caribbean women who've worked down to the bone. Their patients might attack or spit on them. They get too tired to keep going and dissociate. The behavioral health specialists lash out at the patients too. There's a madhouse vibe that sounds terrifying in the retelling.
That's an intimate New York I now can't un-know. I tell her to be careful about the stories. Not to protect the anonymity of the patients — she does that already. But to protect me, the rosy, soft boy who wants to write all the time, who averts the gaze of train passengers sleeping in their scum. To protect the sanctity of New York utopia that's never existed in reality but emerges at Shakespeare in the Park. Or watching the volleyball games at Forest Hills. This is the speech-written New York Mamdani allowed me to lavish in and fool myself with.
A while ago, Mamdani's sound-bite-perfect smile flashed in a video about — and this is how you know he's started to feel himself — making a campaign video. The outtake compilation is of New Yorkers stopping him for pictures before he can record.
It's cute but reminded me of a dinner party conversation with some friends.
"I like him but New York doesn't need another celebrity mayor," she said. "We need a behind-the-scenes type, a guy billionaires hate to see coming."
"But they do hate him. They're shitting themselves at his popularity."
"That's the problem. He's popular, not feared. No one wants to say it but he'll do anything to be liked. What happens when he starts to lose that?"
I paused because I didn't want to kill my own mood. She was right.
We are in dire times. Every freedom except the right to make money is under attack. The city is at a breaking point because people are starving. The food pantry lines are the longest I've ever seen. I can't count how many crazy people I ignore anymore. They're draped on me like the layers of sweats they wear. They follow me with grocery carts and sweat beads. I need to believe there's a hero who can deliver on what they need.
But the only hero I have is the one I'm dreaming up.