Amarula Dreams

My friend L, who lives in Manhattan and only ventures to the outer boroughs for the occasional baseball game, told me recently that her mother had wanted to go to a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but that L had advised against it because she didn't think it was a good idea for her mother to drive into Brooklyn by herself. Her mother lives in New Jersey, by the way, about an hour or so from Manhattan, and is to my knowledge a rational and responsible woman.

I must've looked at L like she was crazy because she said "you think I'm being paranoid, don't you?"

"Well," I said, trying to be diplomatic, "I just don't think of Brooklyn as particularly...dangerous."

"But she's never been there before. What if she gets lost and ends up in the wrong neighborhood?"

We went on like this for a little while, and I ended up letting it go. After all, what if I end up winning the point, and then L's mom has a heart attack and dies on the Manhattan Bridge? It'll be all my fault.

It's funny, though, the perceptions people have of New York. I'm used to it from people outside of the city. I was in South Africa a few years ago, and I had a bit of a fling with a guy who ran an adventure travel business there. The morning after the first night we spent together he got up and got dressed. First boxers, then a T-shirt, then jeans, then a gun. A pistol, relatively small, easily concealed. He took it from the drawer of his nightstand.

"But you’re from New York," he said when he noticed my shock. Like many non-New Yorkers I’ve met, his visions of New York were shaped by movies and television shows of the 1970s and 1980s. Riots and blackouts and burnt-out tenements. He didn’t see the new New York, the post-Giuliani New York, freshly scrubbed and cleaned of all character.

But he had an excuse. He lived in Johannesburg, half the world away. L, on the other hand, lives in...Chelsea.

posted by Anonymous @ 8:14 PM Comments: 0