"Why did you choose to live in New York” people often ask me. Especially people who decided to hot-foot it out of the city in recent years. “How do you live in New York” others ask, as though it is some impossible feat. One reason is that, for better or worse (to steal the title of a recent film) here everything happens everywhere all at once. Let me relay one extreme, yet slightly typical, evening in the city.
Last week I finished work late and left the office too late to catch the friends I was meant to see for dinner. If I lived in any other city, I would have had to call it a night. But in New York you can get anything you want any time you want it.
I love that.
So I settled on one of my guilty pleasures and headed to a favorite diner to read a book over a burger and a drink or two. Of course Midtown is crazy at the best of times.
When the sun goes down things get crazier. On this night I began by appreciating the harsh interchanges of city life. A rickshaw went hurtling past with a couple of tourists whooping in the back. Predictably enough, the music system was booming out “New York, New York.”
“If you can make it there, you´ll make it anywhere.”
As the rickshaw blaring this out went past a young Hispanic man came trundling towards me trying to maneuver a massive dumpster.
Another young guy was throwing a great heap of garbage bags into a truck while the rats scurried away. I wondered what these young men thought about the sentiment that had just passed us by, or whether they’d even noticed it. That was enough pondering, I thought, and headed to my diner.
Suddenly I heard sirens coming up behind me. Then more and more. Soon the whole cacophony was all around me. Police, medical, firetrucks. So I had that feeling that I imagine all law-abiding people have, which is that I must have done something wrong, and they’d finally caught up with me. But no.
It soon became clear that something was very wrong indeed. The word “jumper” suddenly started being used. Being naturally curious I started to walk towards the incident. Then I realized I was already too close. The jumper had jumped. The few of us standing in the street started to talk. A middle-aged man was standing in the middle of the avenue looking deathly pale and saying to no one in particular “I did not need to see that.”
I took a couple of steps further forward before the stranger’s advice sunk in. I know from warzones that if you are prepared for a horrific sight then then you can sometimes cope with it. It’s the ones that come out of the blue that stick with you. For that reason, and out of respect for another human being, I stepped back. But we all lingered a while, looking up at the implausibly high building the man had jumped from. It turned out he’d been cut in two on the way down.
I headed on, thinking about what brings a person to that, and needing a strong drink. At the diner I ordered a couple of them and got out my book. An elderly woman came in and took the table next door. She had her meal while staring into her mobile phone and never said a word.
When I left I noticed a sign above the door.
“Every day is a struggle, so we must be kind to one another.”
As I left I smiled at some people lingering outside. Whenever something horrible happens you expect the waters of human kindness to stay open up for a while at least. Certainly not to close over too fast. But here the city runs on, and you can easily be immune or unaware of something happening only a few feet away. The emergency crews were still in the neighboring street. They had locked the place down now, with cordons everywhere. The clean-up operation had begun so the residents of the hotel would be able to go about their evenings again.
The jumper turned out to be a 17-year old aspiring fashion designer who had just broken up with his girlfriend. Noah Legaspi, told his mom he loved her before taking a taxi into Midtown Manhattan and jumping to his death off the roof of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It seems inconceivable to most of us that anyone could do that. Seventeen is nothing.
What do you know at that age? What seems like a huge hurt will be forgotten in a few months or years. And years are nothing. But things feel differently at the center of a person’s life. People can get to places where you cannot reach them. And a city like this is filled with many such people. There is always someone on the up and someone else who is not.
Millions, in fact.
And I’d guess we all swap places more often than we know. New York remains, for better and worse, a center of the world, and so everything is more extreme here. To fail here can seem like failing very badly indeed. And to succeed can feel like succeeding in the entire world. It’s why people still pour into this place by their thousands. By every available route. To pursue a dream.
And in the hope of pushing away the knowledge that every dream comes with a downside too. It’s a high stakes city, this one. Yes, it can be cruel, and heartless, and callous with the individual as it goes about its business. There’s not much we can do about that.
Except to take that piece of diner wisdom: we probably should try to be kinder to each other — where we can — along the way.
