Free My First New York by New York Magazine Page A

ruining everyone’s lives, and AIDS was destroying all the fun people. I remember going to see Klaus Nomi in the hospital and we had to wear masks because nobody knew what AIDS was. I remember the cops in the East Village wouldn’t say “Don’t do drugs,” because they knew they had lost that battle; they would say, “Don’t do these certain drugs with these certain pictures on the packaging.” But this was when we needed to have fun the most.
    I came to learn that New York is very appreciative. Yes, I know it is ultimately a city of PR—that they tell you what you want to hear and make you think you need what you do not really need. I know there’s always a million-dollar deal in the works on Monday that has fallen through by Friday. But there is alwaysthe next Monday. London was all jigsaw jungles and roundabouts and confusion. New York’s geography is direct and enabling; it helps people meet and get things done. It’s very hard to get lost. And in fact, it’s very easy to find yourself.

C OLUM M C C ANN
    writer
arrived: 1982
    D runk and sober, high and low, off and on, up and down, lost and found, New York has been my city for fifteen years now. It’s a vast mystery to me, like it is to most New Yorkers, how this ugly lovely town became my lovely ugly town, this gorgeous rubbish heap of a place, this city of the timeless Now, with little of the style of Paris, little of the beauty of Rome, little of thehistory of London, and not even much of the dear dirty dereliction of my hometown, Dublin.
    New York is a fiction of sorts, a construct, a story, into which you can walk at any moment and at any angle, and end up blindsided, turned upside down, changed.
    There are dozens of moments I can recall from the early days when I first got to the city as a naive young Dubliner. I was seventeen years old and visiting for the summer. I ran the Midtown streets as a gopher for Universal Press Syndicate. I rushed for sandwiches, answered phones, delivered parcels. My ears popped in the Time-Life elevators. On a July afternoon I lay down in the middle of the Avenue of the Americas and looked up at the skyscrapers. I laughed as people stepped over and around me. Later I sat in the back of the Lion’s Head pub and dreamed myself into writing days. I bluffed my way into Limelight. On the D train I nursed a cocaine itch back to Brighton Beach, where I rented a cockroached room. It was all a fantastic fever dream: even now the moments collide into each other and my memory is decorated by a series of mirrors flashing light into chambers ofsound and color, graffiti and roar. I left it after a few months, back to Dublin, enchanted and dazzled.
    But I truly fell in love with the city many years later, in the early 1990s, on my second stint, when I wasn’t quite sure if I was meant to be here at all, and it was a quiet moment that did it for me, one of those little glancing shoulder-rubs that New York can deal out at any time of the day, in any season, in any weather, in any place—even on the fiercely unfashionable Upper East Side.
    It had snowed in the city. Two feet of it over the course of the night. It was the sort of snow that made the city temporarily magical, before all the horn-blowing and slush puddles and piles of dog crap crowning the melt.
    A very thin little path had been cleared on Eighty-second Street between Lexington and Third, just wide enough for two able-bodied people to squeeze through. The snow was piled high on either side. A small canyon, really, in the middle of the footpath. On the street—a quiet street at the best of times, if anything can be quiet in New York—the cars were buried under drifts. The telegraph wires sagged. Theunderside of the tree branches appeared like brush-strokes on the air. Nothing moved. The brownstones looked small against so much white. In the distance sounded a siren, but that was all, making the silence more