City Kids

“And I wouldnt raise my child inside the city, anyway
They grow up too savvy and they grow up too fast
And they know about buying shit and they know about sex
And they know about investment banking and also about brokerage firms
And the know about the numbers and they know about the words
And they know about the bottom lines and also about stones
And they know about careers and about the real deals
And they all grow up and become peoples’ people with people skills”
-Regina Spektor

Moving to the city is an experience of both awe and culture shock. Living here, you adopt a ready for anything attitude, or at least a “That’s New York for you” attitude. This is for the times when you become fed up or disgusted with one of the many disturbing things you can see on the street on a daily basis.

Having said this, I wonder about the locals. Specifically, I’m thinking of my old NY housemate Louie, born and raised in the city. He takes everything with the proverbial grain of salt and whenever he ventures out of New York he swears that’s the last time. He used to be a real wild child. He would tell us stories about his teenage years, spent dropping acid and running around the streets of New York. This was also in the 70s, which, if you talk to anyone “in the know” was when the city was bankrupt and full of garbage, crime, and graffiti.

So, even though the city is much cleaner and more crime free, I wonder about the New York youth of today, the children who’ve had it all or seen it all before the age of 5 by living in the naked city.

When I was working my odd job circuit, one of my jobs was a nanny for my 10 year old neighbor. Since she’s under the age of 18, we’ll call her Penelope. She happened to be in a Broadway show with Patrick Stewart. I would pick her up from school, take her to the theater, and in the meantime, we would navigate our way around in the breaks she had between the matinees and the evenings.

We’d have conversations about school, dogs, and the finer points of city living. Once I saw a huge pile of garbage, at least 10 feet tall. I had been living in the city for a while, so had definitely seen my fair share of huge garbage piles. I remarked on this, only to get the kid’s response of “I’ve seen bigger.”

A standout memory that brings together Penelope and my old hat NY roommate Louie would be one that takes place on the subway and includes some angry junkies.

We were riding home after her final show of the day. Surprisingly, at the next stop, my roommate got on in our same car! It proves that NY is smaller than you think. Two stops later, some heroin addicts boarded the train and sat directly across from us. There were 3 of them, two men and a woman. The woman had a small french bulldog. You could tell they were heroin addicts because of the track marks all up and down their arms and the purple hue of their hands. If you’d had any doubts, they were amended when one of the men, the one who wasn’t passing out in a heroin induced coma, shouted to the uninterested train, “Yeah these are track marks!”

Louie and Penelopoe watched them with intense interest. Louie kept murmuring, “It’s like the 1980s all over again.” Penelope looked on in silence. At one point, a child who was with a large family that had just come from the circus (you could tell because of all their light up circus hats and swords) started screaming. It’s regular, it happens. You can rarely get on a train without a screaming kid (or preacher). This did not bode well for the angry junkie, as we referred to him later. He turned around and yelled, “Maybe if your child wasn’t such a malcontent!” The circus people let that remark go. They looked pretty exhausted, and this wasn’t the type of guy you wanted to engage. As soon as we were back home, Penelope could not stop talking about the “Junkies”. “Junkies this and junkies that, a big angry junky yelled at a family! They also had a dog!” She talked about the junkies for weeks.

We would sit in Bryant Park and at her request would play Local/Tourist where she would try to guess who was a local and who was a tourist. She would say things like “BACKPACK AND JEANS, TOURIST!” She could pick them out like a pro.

Penelope was also trained in the art of fair hopping. This is a NY kid thing because many of the children I’ve ridden the subway with do not own metro cards. It’s ok. They know what to do. If they’re small enough, they crawl under the turnstile. Otherwise, they get at the front and you both slide through on the same swipe. It’s like they’ve been trained.

Yesterday, I picked up my boss’ 7 year old son from school. I asked him if he had a metro card and he said no, he just slides under the bar. He asked me how much they were these days. I told him $2.25 and he thought that was a “stupid number.” He then asked why anyone would pay such a stupid price to ride the stinkin’ train? This is timely, as the bankrupt transit authority threatens even more fare hikes and service cuts, as well as discontinuing the student metro card service, which means, these kids will really have to put their fair hopping skills to use.

This kid also knew about my blackberry, as well as rent stabilized apartments, though he was under the impression his dad’s “house bill” was only $180 a month. I told him my rent for Brooklyn, $1339 and he asked me why everyone in my building didn’t move.

Similarly, I recall a conversation between Louie and Penelope, arguing over the price of what to sell his house for. She would say things like, “You’ll never get that kind of price in this neighborhood.” My roommate contended that she was the only person actually qualified to have the conversation with him, as she and he were the only people out of us, her parents, neighbors, and friends, who were actually born in NYC. Maybe he was right.