It's Old but It's Good: The First Thing I Wrote after Moving to New York city

*A four-year-old blog post from an inactive blog.*

In New York City 
in the middle of July 
the air was heavy and wet 
the air was heavy, your body was heavy on mine. 
I will know who you are yet. 
— The Mountain Goats, “Going to Queens”

I’m going to be honest with you. Like many, if not most, people from those lowly hinterlands known as “the rest of America”, my conception of New York City comes almost entirely from movies.Annie Hall, The Godfather, Do the Right Thing, Goodfellas, The French Connection, Ghostbusters … the list goes on and on. I’ve learned of Woody Allen’s Coney Island childhood, Don Corleone’s Little Italy empire, Spike Lee’s kaliedoscopic Bed-Stuy … a lot of icons. But I’ve noticed something: there are movies set in Manhattan (even one named Manhattan), movies set in Brooklyn (Crooklyncomes to mind), movies set in the Bronx (A Bronx Tale, anyone?), even movies set in Staten Island (Saturday Night Fever andWorking Girl, famously) — but there are very few movies set in Queens. I was trying to think of a movie that might give me an image of Queens, and unfortunately for that borough, home of the Mets and the pretty end of the Triborough Bridge, the only one that came to mind was Coming to America:

Semmi: But where in New York can one find a woman with grace, elegance, taste and culture? A woman suitable for a king. 
Prince Akeem & Semmi together: Queens!

The joke being, of course, that they end up in a horrible, desolate project block and all the good women are already dating Eriq la Salle. Suffice it to say, this was not a pretty picture to have in mind about a place. In my mind, Queens was a place where people took advantage of Eddie Murphy’s sweet nature to rip him off and Samuel L Jackson stuck up fast food joints with elaborate weaponry. So when my cousin said, “Wanna come out with me tonight? I’m gonna go meet some friends and have beer in Queens!”, my first thought was, Good God, girl, we’re gonna get killed!

But, in the spirit of doing rather than not doing, with it in mind that real life is in fact never as good nor as bad as in the movies, I shovedComing to America to the back of my mind and we set forth on the subway — with which, by the way, I am already much-improved. When we emerged in Astoria, just on the eastern brink of Queens, abutting the brackish East River, I discovered something: movies are, for the most part, not true. Just as Mekhi Phifer is as yet to attempt to sell me crack in Brooklyn, and Diane Keaton has not yet bowled me over with a white Volkswagen in Manhattan, so, too, was I not forced to defend myself with a mop handle in Queens. Queens is, in point of fact, quite nice. At least the part where I went was. I’m sure there are less-nice parts of Queens, parts I might yet experience, just as I experienced some of the more dire and frightening areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington when I lived in those places. But Astoria? It seems like a pretty good place to raise a passel of poly-ethnic children. That seems to be what most of its denizens are up to, anyway.

We went to a beer garden, which was packed to the gills. Apparently, this has been one of the coldest summers on record here in New York City, with not a single day pushing into the 90s, and the sun had been out, and it was a Saturday night, so pretty much every piker with a day job had flooded into his or her local, and this place seemed to be the local for a lot of folks. There was music (bad — the world does not need another yob in a driving cap playing covers of Dave Matthews Songs), there was food (pretty good, though the pierogi had more in common with ravioli than the real deal), there was beer (the selection of which has much improved since the last time I lived back East), and there was a large collection of people with a great deal to say, including a fiercely libertarian soon-to-be lawyer who is making an amateur study of all the synagogues on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a very friendly hippyish sort who informed me that blue was the “color of purity” (in the context of the fact that I was wearing all blue, as I quite frequently am — don’t know about that purity bit), a fledgling financial analyst who had put together the rather odd (and oddly unpopular) double major of psychology and economics in college … the list goes on.

But all these brilliant minds together, laid low by pitcher upon pitcher of beer, turned out to be just another group of people who liked to play hackey-sack and hang out in the park, gazing across the silken East River to the Manhattan skyline receding away to the south. New York is a city of islands — the only borough that is not on an island is the Bronx — but in Brooklyn it is easy to lose track of that fact, because it is so massive and so massively populated. At the brink of Queens, under the Triborough Bridge, one can get better in touch with the fact that he is disconnected from the mainland, on an island with a few million other like-minded souls, drunkenly staring at the stars.