Like a lot of people in the last decade or so, I recently moved from New York to Los Angeles. I was part of a (not so) great migration. Williamsburg to Los Feliz, Queens to Tarzana, Bed Stuy to Cheviot Hills.
The conventional wisdom became that New York was a vise that was squeezing the life out of us, and somewhere to the West, there was a freer, sunnier place with an open-heart chakra where you could drink turmeric lattes outside in February and still act kind of aloof and superior like you could in the city. It was like the spell was broken and everyone kind of looked around and said, “Wait, we actually don’t have to live like this.”
They were making TV in Los Angeles, after all, and TV had become our national treasure. They had cool restaurants, and cool restaurants were our lingua franca. And in L.A., you could also live like an actual human being, which in New York, we figured was something only billionaires did. After we started moving to L.A., being narcissistic New Yorkers, we began talking about it, writing about it in national magazines, seeding ourselves in “trend pieces” until the rest of the country probably wanted to poke their eyes out. I didn’t really see myself as part of that whole thing. We moved mostly because my wife got a different job. And then a couple of months ago, New York got sick, and I had to admit I was part of it. I abandoned New York.
One of the weird side effects of this pandemic is that I’m checking in with everyone I ever knew, and everyone I ever knew is checking in with me, and naturally in these conversations, people tend to ask me, “What is L.A. like these days? What’s the scene on the ground? Under quarantine?” And the only real answer I have is “How would I know what L.A. is like?”
I don’t go anywhere. I don’t see anyone. I can tell you that in my neighborhood in central-west L.A., the streets are empty, and the grass grows silently, and there are signs painted by children that say “we send you our love” and teddy bears stuffed in windows that frighten my kids and make them think either a kid died or one is going to be killed by a teddy bear.
On Thursdays, all the gardeners show up to trim stuff, and every morning, the singer from the Mamas and the Papas who lives across the street in a pink Spanish mission-style bungalow comes outside to retrieve her newspaper in a bathrobe. Michelle Phillips — in Google Image searches, she’s astonishingly beautiful in a 1970s way that suggests that Joni Mitchell is perpetually just out of frame. If you’re wondering how Michelle Phillips is doing, all I can report is: not dead. There are many not-dead white people in my neighborhood, walking the streets in yoga pants and iPhone accessories and face masks. We cross the street when we see each other in a choreography that has recently gotten more difficult as more and more people have emerged from their homes.
I don’t know what L.A. is like because I’m shut in my house. But the truth is that even in the best of times I didn’t know what L.A. was like. To me, L.A. is unknowable and doesn’t seem that interested in being known. It isn’t even really a place the way New York is a place. In New York, regardless of where your apartment is, where you really live is New York. In L.A., regardless of what part of town you’re in, where you really live is your house.
It’d be ridiculous to say that I miss New York right now. New York is, according to everyone, dying. I’ve read countless obituaries to its plays and subways and commercial real estate businesses and restaurants and way of life, not to mention countless obituaries of its citizens. On a conscious level, I feel lucky I moved. My wife and I will be sitting on the couch guzzling wine and watching the Jamie Lee Curtis Halloween sequel, and I’ll say to her, “God, God, thank God we don’t live there anymore.” But I can’t say I don’t miss New York. Or how about this: I do miss it even though I’m glad I’m not there. When I’m watching CNN and I see all these New York cityscapes in all the shades of spring light that I realize I know so well (dusk, late March; dawn, early April; etc.), I can almost viscerally remember what it feels like to be there, and it makes me sad. The way an astronaut misses Earth even if he happens to have launched himself into space because his home planet was dying of a plague.
In New York, regardless of where your apartment is, where you really live is New York. In L.A., regardless of what part of town you’re in, where you really live is your house.
When I moved there in the late ’90s, I instantly fell in love with New York in a way that I had never and will never fall in love again (with a piece of geography). It was basically the central relationship of my life for a long time. Me and New York would go out and get drunk and talk about books and act like we were more sophisticated than we were and pretend we had never lived in the suburbs of Cleveland and be like, “God, I can’t believe I got lucky enough to find you.” I never really fell out of love with New York. It was more like a marriage where you’re still in love, but you just can’t get along anymore and you’re going to kill each other if you don’t go get an apartment. It’s like how it was between Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story. And now, in the midst of this thing, it feels like I found out that my ex-wife got cancer. I mean, if Scarlett Johansson got cancer, you know Adam Driver would be sitting at her bedside laughing and crying and talking shit and ordering takeout. I want to sit near its hospital bed and be like, “Hey, New York, remember when we chased the one-armed rat in my Upper West Side apartment 20 years ago? Remember when we walked across all the bridges? Remember when we went to a party at George Plimpton’s house, and we were broke but still bought overpriced drinks at the Odeon and went back to our hovels and slept it off and forgot there was any other place in the world?” But instead, New York is dying alone, intubated in a negative-pressure room, FaceTiming its friends who moved to L.A. or took off for the Hamptons.
When I first got to Los Angeles and leased a car and drove to the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, I was freaking buoyant. You can park at Trader Joe’s! How did I ever live before? I’d been ground down. You live under a heavier atmosphere in New York, just more pounds per square inch on your shoulders as you carry six bags of groceries in the winter or try to not get killed crossing the street. In New York, no one escapes unscathed. New York is the great scather. Sure, it’s easier to mitigate now than it once was depending on your financial situation since the city’s famously undergone a 40-year process of being systematically cleared of the un-rich, building by building. But it doesn’t matter because you’re still going to be scathed. Pretty much everyone has to take the subway, pretty much everyone has to smell the air in August, pretty much everyone has to get physically intimate with all kinds of people just to leave their apartment. Unless you are suctioned via pneumatic tube from your Park Avenue penthouse into your office suite and then into your helicopter (hello, Rupert Murdoch), New York City is scathing you.
I remember when I got my first apartment without roommates. Late ’90s. A studio on Seventh Street between Avenue A and Avenue B. After my very first night there, I woke up in a fantastic mood thinking, “Wow. I have my own apartment in New York City.” ( Just being able to go back to Cleveland and tell people that I was living in New York was enough to feel like I’d done something with my life.) So after that first night, I walked out in the morning and looked down the block, feeling ownership of even the sunlight that was slanting through the trees and onto this particular block. And then I caught the eye of another man a few doors down, out surveying the street he lives on in the morning sun. We smile at each other, kindred spirits, a community of two. And then I see that he is taking a shit on the stoop. I was being scathed right there. And uptown somewhere, some captain of industry was walking out of his apartment and making eye contact with some other deranged guy who was taking a crap on the stoop next to his building. We’re in this together.
That’s not the way it is in Los Angeles. If you have the means in L.A., you need never be scathed for a moment. Other neighborhoods, even other humans, seem like theoretical propositions. And I realize now that that’s the thing I miss the most about New York City. To be scathed is to rescue your soul.
And that’s the thing about this pandemic. The vast majority of us are still mostly, physically at least, unaffected. Here in my house in Los Angeles, on a sunny afternoon, it’s an act of imagination to remember what’s going on out there. In my neighborhood, no one claps at 7 p.m. At least, I don’t think so. What would the point of clapping out of your window be, anyway? Only one neighbor might hear. What’s the sound of one man clapping in Los Angeles? Only Michelle Phillips would know, and I’m not allowed to ask her.
I’ve had this terrible feeling in the back of my mind for weeks (one of many terrible feelings). I realized recently it’s the feeling of being selfish.
Someday my grandchildren will say, “Grandpa, what did you do for your country during the pandemic?” And I will take their small hands in mine and say, “I adjusted my Instacart order. A lot of people,” I will explain proudly, “couldn’t even get a time slot. But your old man kind of gamed the system; he persevered.” I did not save people’s lives or hold them as they died so they didn’t have to be alone. But I did add and subtract to my cart order every day, often several times a day. I kept a vigilant eye on our stock of Oreos and calculated the spoilage rate of milk and searched for the things you need for aloo gobi. I selected “replacement items” in case the snow peas or tofu or English muffins were unavailable. And that’s kind of all I did.
What we’re asked to do here in L.A., and everywhere really — even New York — is to remain as unscathed as possible. Stay home. Keep to ourselves. We walk around a snow globe of a neighborhood in surgical masks avoiding each other at all costs, ordering our groceries on an app, and making the workers leave them outside our gates: Don’t come near us, don’t touch us, don’t breathe on us. I’ve had this terrible feeling in the back of my mind for weeks (one of many terrible feelings). I realized recently it’s the feeling of being selfish. Everything I’m doing feels like reflexive, unthinking selfishness. Epidemiologically, it’s true that staying apart, staying at home, is an act of public good. But it doesn’t feel like an act of civic duty. It feels like an act of terrified self-preservation.
People say New York is over. No one’s going back to offices again, no one wants to live in giant vertical cities for thousands of dollars per square foot, ride in subways, sit basically on someone else’s lap at “Frozen” the musical. But writing here from L.A., I will say I doubt it. New York isn’t over. It was not very original of me to fall in love with New York. Millions of people fall in love with New York all the time. It might be terrible and disgusting and unlivable, but it also makes you walk around any other city like an asshole saying, “You call that a bagel/financial district/traffic jam/naked cowboy/billionaire oligarch/pricey hamburger/art museum/nightlife/everything?”
It’s like that thing John F. Kennedy said about the moon: People don’t live in New York City because it’s easy; they live there because it’s hard. We thrive on that shit (I used to, anyway). Not all of us, obviously, but a metric fuckton of us. I can tell you because its appeal has never been clearer to me than after moving to Los Angeles, where life is gorgeous and your abs are golden and all the world is a palm frond. We want to be in a fetid pool of humanity shuttled around underground and thinking what we think are important thoughts and having what we believe are important conversations, where we are part of a single deranged organism hell-bent on fine takeout food and stinky nightclubs and seeing people you know all over the place in every crack and crevice and not knowing how to drive. New York didn’t happen by accident. People made New York and kept making New York because they loved it. And as soon as they can get back out into the street without feeling like they’re going to die of a terrible suffocation disease, they’ll go back to doing it. And I salute them.