Tales of Two Cities

Genres: Anthologies

Synopsis

Thirty major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided New York
 
In a city where the top one percent earns more than a half-million dollars per year while twenty-five thousand children are homeless, public discourse about our entrenched and worsening wealth gap has never been more sorely needed. This remarkable anthology is the literary world’s response, with leading lights including Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, and Lydia Davis bearing witness to the experience of ordinary New Yorkers in extraordinarily unequal circumstances. Through fiction and reportage, these writers convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side by side with people of starkly different means. They shed light on the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city’s tunnels; the stresses that gentrification can bring to neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment block; the shenanigans of seriously alienated night-shift paralegals; the trials of a housing defendant standing up for tenants’ rights; and the humanity that survives in the midst of a deeply divided city. Tales of Two Cities is a brilliant, moving, and ultimately galvanizing clarion call for a city—and a nation—in crisis.

Release date: September 8, 2015

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

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First published in the United States of America by OR Books 2014

Published in Penguin Books 2015

Copyright © 2014 by the various authors

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ISBN 978-0-698-40830-2

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction • JOHN FREEMAN

Due North • GARNETTE CADOGAN

Options • DINAW MENGESTU

Every Night a Little Death • PATRICK RYAN

Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets • ZADIE SMITH

Near The Edge Of Darkness • COLUM MCCANN

The Children Suicides • MARIA VENEGAS

Partially Vacated • DW GIBSON

Four More Years • JONATHAN DEE

So Where Are We? • LAWRENCE JOSEPH

Round Trip • AKHIL SHARMA

Aliens of Extraordinary Ability • TAIYE SELASI

The Baffled Courtier: Lorenzo Da Ponte in America • EDMUND WHITE

Quid Pro Quo, Just As Easy As That • JEANNE THORNTON

Introduction • DAVE EGGERS

Park Slope Livin’ • CHAASADAHYAH JACKSON

One, Maybe Two Minutes from Fire • TÉA OBREHT

Service/Nonservice: How Bartenders See New Yorkers • ROSIE SCHAAP

A Block Divided Against Itself • SARAH JAFFE

Starting Out • JUNOT DIAZ

Engine • BILL CHENG

The Sixth Borough • JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable. • MICHAEL SALU

First Avenue & Second Street • HANNAH TINTI

Zapata Boulevard • VALERIA LUISELLI

Home • TIM FREEMAN

Introduction to Small Fates 1912 • TEJU COLE

Small Fates 1912 • TEJU COLE

Seeking • VICTOR LAVALLE

If the 1 Percent Stifles New York’s Creative Talent, I’m Out of Here • DAVID BYRNE

Traveling from Brooklyn • LYDIA DAVIS

Walt Whitman on Further Lane • MARK DOTY

Contributors

Acknowledgments

This book is for my brother Tim, who lives in both cities.

Introduction

JOHN FREEMAN

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I bought an apartment in Manhattan with an inheritance passed to me from my grandmother, who was the daughter of a former attorney for Standard Oil. She outlived three husbands and managed her money well, and in one fell swoop from beyond the grave hoisted me out of one social class and into another.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, my younger brother was living in a homeless shelter.

He was not far away—less than a mile. It was the second or third shelter he’d been in after moving to the city. It’s awkward enough, in most instances, to talk about money, but doubly so when it involves family. So let me just briefly say that my brother had not been left out of his inheritance; he just had no immediate access to it due to the fact that he has a mental illness. He has dealt with this illness bravely and takes precautions to manage his condition. One of the first things he did after moving to New York was check in at a hospital and use his Medicaid card to get his prescriptions.

Still, it was a very bad idea for him to move to the city. From afar, the decision felt like a car crash you watch in slow motion. We’d warned and pleaded, even begged him not to move to New York, my brother, father, and I did. My father told horror stories from when we lived here in the 1970s. I talked about how hard it could be just to sleep on some nights, with the heat, the noise, the city’s constant pulsing. My older brother talked to him about how difficult it was to find work, something my younger brother knew because he had been applying for jobs for over a year. Counselor, technological writer, librarian’s assistant, anything to do with words that paid better than minimum wage. He held a BA and had been published in newspapers.

None of that mattered in the end. He couldn’t get a job, and felt he couldn’t stay where he was—Utica—so he got on a train to New York and checked himself into a shelter. He had almost no belongings. He’d given them away or sold them. He brought a suitcase, a laptop he slept with so it wouldn’t be stolen, and a pay-as-you-go cell phone. These are luxuries in many parts of the world, but I assure you they were the thin string holding my brother’s life together by giving him a tenuous connection to the outside world, not to the one right around him. He kept us abreast of his movements by Facebook: which shelter he’d been kicked out of for fighting or calling people names, where he’d slept—the Staten Island Ferry, a bathroom at a bus station in Albany. Eventually, he wound up at this final shelter, and it was, to some degree, a last resort, where he lived for a while and joined their job-training program.

All the time that my brother was homeless, I never invited him over to where I lived or let him into my apartment. I love my brother. He can be sweet and very funny; he is gentle and kind to older people. Even when he made less than $10,000 a year, he spent hours each week tutoring and teaching people English. He is one of the most intelligent people I know, and every time I see him I am reminded how lucky I am to have him as a brother. I am also reminded how lucky I am that I was born, for reasons I cannot fathom, with a slightly different gene structure, one that means that I thrive under the same stress that makes his life impossible. It is not fair, but long ago I decided I would not spend my time trying to ameliorate the difference in our fortunes by fighting battles I knew are not winnable, among them trying to sort out his accommodation. I have had the experience of sharing a home with my brother and have arrived at the conclusion that it is better for us to live apart. During this time my girlfriend and I were contemplating conjoining our two adjacent apartments, and my feelings of guilt did not trump my resolve to avoid putting the relationship with my partner at risk from the strain of taking him in. I had seen the stress it had caused my parents. I knew my brother would be aware of the problems he was creating, and that it would be bad for him, too. At least that’s what I told myself.

So we communicated by Facebook and traded e-mails and once or twice met for lunch at a diner, where he arrived looking hollow and yet more alive than I had seen him in years. I almost didn’t recognize him. He had been walking everywhere and the food in the shelter was so bad, he’d lost forty pounds. He didn’t look sad anymore, but more like the brother I grew up with in California who was handsome and had girlfriends, a golden boy. He had much more energy now, too, as a result of being more fit, and deployed it wrangling the city’s social services bureaucracy. He had applied for a low-income housing program, and sent out resumes to jobs at the library. In the meantime, he was working up in Harlem, handing out free newspapers at the entrance to a subway. I realized in talking to him that to give him a lifeline to my house would have been a mistake; as hard as it was, he wanted to prove to us, and most important, to himself, that he could do this on his own. Still, I felt compelled to give him a few hundred dollars and he walked back into his life.

I couldn’t have predicted it then, but he succeeded. My brother got out of the shelter. He was accepted into the housing program, found an apartment, and, for a while, achieved his dream. He was living in New York, on his own. At first, he loved his new life. But as time went by, with his benefits package constantly under threat, he became increasingly tired of the strain of the city—the way it makes everything difficult, doubly so if you need help from it. Eventually he moved back to Utica and then on to Dallas, where he seems truly happy now. It’s warm, he has a car and things to do. He can live with a degree of peace and a lack of stress, and even if he has become a Republican, I still love him. I often like his photographs on Facebook.

I haven’t resolved how I feel about his time in New York. I don’t think I ever will, because the juxtaposition of our fates and fortunes is simply too much to assimilate. Too unequal. During the time he was here I rarely woke up later than 6:00 a.m. I was working for a British magazine and often had to travel to London for long periods. I was living there half-time, on and off airplanes on a monthly, sometimes weekly, basis and it messed up my internal clock. Meanwhile, he was living four blocks away in a shelter. On some mornings when I was in the city, I stood by the window of my apartment, drinking my first coffee while watching the dawn light up the walls surrounding the car park across the street. On some of those mornings he must have passed my building on his way from the shelter to the 1 train uptown to hand out newspapers, but he didn’t ring our doorbell. Did he even look up to see if I was there, worrying about him, wondering if he’d been kicked out his shelter after another fight? I asked him once why he never stopped by after he left the shelter and had an apartment of his own. He said, “It was cold, and I didn’t want to be late for work.”

 • • • 

I TELL this story now because we need to change the way we talk about inequality. The reasons it exists are as complex as the reasons why my brother wound up in a shelter. Inequality is not an issue of us and them, the rich and the poor. You often see these same so-called divisions within one family, like mine. I have an instinct here to apologize for making this point, to add a caveat that my experience of witnessing my brother’s homelessness was not nearly as hard as it was for him to live it, while I’m sure there are people who have suffered far more than both of us. All this is true, I suppose, but it leads us into a cul-de-sac. To rank suffering creates a false hierarchy of pain, as if there were a way to compare and weigh grief with, say, physical discomfort, or career frustrations, or hopelessness. It allows us, to some degree, to say that some forms of suffering are OK while others are not.

City life is defined by proximity, and when people around city dwellers suffer, it creates stresses on everyone. Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected in part because his narrative of New York as a “Tale of Two Cities” struck a chord with people living in the city. He has called it “the central issue of our time.” New Yorkers related to his frustration and passion, his dream that the city could do much better. They were also, it’s fair to say, galvanized by the sense he conveyed in his campaign that the gap between the rich and poor, the haves and have-nots, has grown so wide as to make New York City untenable. The city’s narrative—of it being a special place, a city of dreams—shreds in the face of reality: the city’s income disparity is as big as it has ever been.

Some figures are necessary here in case you have not been following the news. Nearly half of New York is living near poverty, and in the last two decades the income disparity in the city has returned to what it was just before the Great Depression. The top 1 percent of New York earners saw their median income grow from $452,000 to $717,000 between 1990 and 2010. Meanwhile, the lowest 10 percent of New Yorkers saw a much smaller percentage growth, from just $8,500 in 1990 to $9,500 in 2010. The concentration of wealth in that period has also been remarkably skewed toward the very rich. In 1990, the top 10 percent of households earned 31 percent of the income made in New York; by 2010 that number had increased to 37 percent. And the very rich make up a large proportion of that group: in 2009, the top 1 percent earned more than a third of the city’s income. It is very clear. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

And the middle class, as it has been in the U.S. for some time, is progressively vanishing. Just prior to de Blasio’s election, James Surowiecki wrote a prescient column for the New Yorker outlining why this has happened. The city is highly dependent on the finance industry to create revenue—the top 1 percent pay a staggering 43 percent of the income tax—and yet that same industry is driving income inequality. Meantime, the kinds of jobs that bolster the middle class—manufacturing, for example—have vanished. Between 2001 and 2011 the city lost 51 percent of its manufacturing jobs. The cost of doing business in New York City, Surowiecki pointed out, is simply too expensive, and factories, workshops, and shipyards have gone elsewhere.

These numbers reflect an extreme version of what is happening in many U.S. cities, as people move back to urban areas from the suburbs, driving up urban home prices and rents. New York City has experienced that trend in an exaggerated way. New Yorkers who are not in the top 10 percent have seen just modest growth in their income, but they have faced catastrophic rent increases. Between 2002 and 2012, the median rent has risen 75 percent. Rent in New York City is now three times the national average. As a result, nearly one-third of New Yorkers pay more than 50 percent of their annual income in rent. Forget about not being able to afford to own; many New Yorkers cannot afford to rent. The New York City borough that spends the highest percentage on rent—the Bronx, where the typical household spends 66 percent of its income to rent a three-bedroom home—is also its poorest. Incidentally, this is where my brother lived once he got an apartment.

 • • • 

These conditions are not sustainable. Moreover, the gap between what New York says it is—in its myths and pop culture, the images we retain of it when we visit, its literature—and its reality is not sustainable either. I would like it if this anthology could help to close the gap between the haves and have-nots in the city. It can perhaps do so by addressing this second gap, by thinking and dreaming and describing what it is like in New York City today. How does it feel, what does one see, what stories do we tell about ourselves, and how, if at all, has inequality changed the city?

In January 2014 I contacted a number of writers who live or have lived in New York City, who feel it is their home. Thirty of them responded. The anthology you have here is the result of their engagement with this issue, and their responses take many forms. There are memoirs and short stories, a collage, reported pieces, an essay on bartending, an urban travelogue, dispatches from housing court fights, an oral history, a poem, and even a Twitter series that turns headlines from 1912 into a kind of tone poem about violence and the city’s propensity to mulch its own.

Here is the city as it feels today, full of vanished bodegas and ghosts of a more mixed and various past. In Zadie Smith’s short story, an aging drag queen who has managed to hold on to a Chelsea apartment wanders her neighborhood, tripping over shadows of what used to be there. The era of more affordable rents is gone, for now, and some writers show what—besides disposable income—has been lost with it. Hannah Tinti lovingly remembers her first rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East Side, and the gay, mohawked, gun-toting man who was its protector and conscience. Would she have met him without rent control?

Gentrification, often labeled as the scourge of New York when it is merely a symptom of its economic condition, cuts both ways; everyone dreams of moving up, even if it means leaving things behind. Fifteen-year-old Chaasadahyah Jackson, a student at the 826NYC drop-in tutoring center in Brooklyn, chronicles her family’s move from Crown Heights to Park Slope, and describes the assumptions on the part of her friends about her life at the family’s new address. Dave Eggers introduces her essay and sets out why his organization is committed to providing a platform for stories like hers. Sarah Jaffe, meanwhile, travels in the opposite direction, from Park Slope to Crown Heights, where the struggles of tenants to get basic services in their apartments drives her to attend the city’s housing committee hearings about proposed rent hikes in rent-stabilized apartments.

Again and again, pieces in Tales of Two Cities return to themes that cut to the heart of New York City’s problems today, pinpointing where the stress is felt. Housing is a perpetual concern. I showed my brother the draft of this introduction and he responded with an essay of his own, included here, describing his seven agonizing months of being homeless. The threat of nearly losing a home can be nearly as stressful. Jeanne Thornton, in a hilarious and moving memoir, describes clinging to a punishing, over-worked job so she can afford an apartment that a homeless friend has also made his squat. In a heartbreaking oral history, DW Gibson brings to life the voice of a housing defendant, whose job it is to stand up for tenants whose rights are being violated. One of his clients is a woman fighting a landlord who, under the guise of renovation, destroys his tenants’ bathrooms, making their apartments unlivable in order to drive them out. “Who does this to other people?” she asks. “Other human beings?”

Reading these pieces, it’s hard not to feel that what defines the modern city—perhaps any city now—are the challenges it places in front of those struggling to achieve basic rights and dignity. As Dinaw Mengestu points out in his essay about moving to New York in order to find the best level of care for his autistic child, these barriers are more easily surmounted by some than others. The point is reinforced by Maria Venegas in her memoir of working at an after-school program for kids in Brooklyn during an epidemic of suicides by stressed-out schoolchildren. The sacrifices that parents are forced to make, and the difficulty that others find in even imagining them, is brought to life in Taiye Selasi’s story about a Russian man, his daughter, a taxi driver from Asia, and a prostitute.

Still, the city has continued to hold promise, to serve as a beacon to all comers. It depends, as David Byrne points out, on that influx to rejuvenate its creativity. In an essay on one of Mozart’s librettists, who came to New York in the early 1800s, Edmund White reminds us that it was always difficult to immigrate here, especially if the person coming to America wanted to instruct it on a foreign culture. Akhil Sharma’s family moved to the United States from India in the 1970s. In a short essay he writes about how the standard of poverty he grew up with in India meant he would never feel poor in New York City. That barbed gift is what allowed him, decades later, to leave a lucrative job in finance and turn to writing full time, even if it didn’t protect him entirely from the loss of prestige the forfeiture of a large salary entailed.

The tension of moving up, down, sideways, or across—of placing oneself among competing lives and narratives—lends encounters in New York City their peculiar charge, which can sometimes feel like danger. In Lydia Davis’s story, a woman’s train ride into Manhattan is disrupted by an incident in the car behind her. During a snowstorm from the endless winter of 2013, a wealthy couple at the heart of Jonathan Dee’s story comes face to face with the 99 percent in the form of a man who is prepared to capitalize on the guilt and greed of the 1 percent. Colum McCann recalls going down into the tunnels beneath Manhattan to research a novel he was writing. He cautiously befriended a woman who lived down there and discovered, when he tried to help her, the fine line between a gift that requires gratitude and one that takes away dignity.

Such encounters do not need to happen across a large class divide. In Téa Obreht’s story, an Eastern European man lets down his guard during a traffic incident when he meets a man with his own background, and regrets it. Mapping her neighborhood in Harlem, Valeria Luiselli meets migrants who are like her, but different. Michael Salu travels to New York City from London for the first time and finds a place strangely mediated by his exposure to pop culture. Going to house parties, museums, and nightclubs, he realizes that the music he loved and that helped him learn how to be black comes from a place where his blackness means something else entirely.

It is natural in all human life to search for community, but the peculiar mix of New York—of so many people, so many backgrounds, such divergent wealth—means people search even harder, and find themselves looking for it in unexpected places. Rosie Schaap describes how a good bar becomes a community, leveling the economic playing field so long as people there respect service workers. Patrick Ryan remembers his New York job on the graveyard shift at a corporate law firm with misfits, actors, and a would-be survivalist. In his essay, Victor LaValle traces his arc away from church as a boy and then back to it as a man, when he wanted both fellowship and homage to something more.

These communities, however strong, are unstable, and shift as neighborhoods change, people’s fortunes alter, or the pressures of paying bills simply get to be too much. Junot Diaz recalls growing up working-class with friends whose parents struggled to pay the bills. They shared a solidarity in this fate, even when those friends stole from his family. Need can make us do abject things. Bill Cheng remembers the self-loathing and loneliness his own financial struggles provoked. He ended up feeling less like a person, an attitude he sees written on the faces of others now that his own circumstances have changed.

It can feel especially cruel living in New York when broke, since the evidence of wealth is everywhere, as Lawrence Joseph reminds us in his poem about the city a decade after the attacks of 9/11. There’s violence to that wealth, and it has global consequences. It has always been so, as Teju Cole’s series of “little death” tweets exposes, bringing back headlines from the year 1912. It is enough to make one wish that there could be, as Jonathan Safran Foer imagines it, a sixth borough off the coast of Manhattan to house some of us, to give the city room to breathe.

 • • • 

It’s a startling proposition—the idea of imagining a city bigger than what exists in reality, so that it can properly be itself. What would it take to do this? While politicians fight over the scale and carving-up of taxes, minimum wages, affordable housing, and better social provision, writers can join the fray, using their imaginations and experiences to provide a wider take that reinforces the nitty-gritty struggle for fairness in the city. As Garnette Cadogan reveals in his piece, the distance between here and there is not so far, and we’re all impoverished when fairness recedes.

The greatest beacon in this regard was Walt Whitman, who, as Mark Doty notes in his essay, was against riches without being against the rich. Whitman walked the city, cruised its men, surveyed its abject citizens, and honored them all in his poems. He felt that every living soul deserved to be regarded equally. It’s an obvious idea, but so often forgotten.

This book is meant to be a home for that task of imagining a larger city. If all books are temples of a sort, my hope is that this one has a broad arching roof under which we can find shelter and comfort. As galvanizing as thinking of New York as a tale of two cities has been, the fact of the matter, made clear in this anthology, is that New York is many cities. Inequality makes it harder for them to live side by side with a shared purpose.

It felt fitting, then, that the book should be a benefit for an organization that embodies just that creed. Many of the writers herein have appeared at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, a downtown arts space and bookstore that is one hub among a larger network of thrift stores and bookshops that raise money to provide housing, job training, and advocacy to homeless New Yorkers, especially those with HIV and AIDS. They have been among the hardest hit populations in the city during the period of spectacular wealth creation that has led us to where we are now, and Housing Works has fought ferociously on their behalf.

Any time you want to see proof that the solutions to New York as a tale of two cities are not ones of practicality, but imagination, just visit the Housing Works store at 126 Crosby Street. It is a huge, open loft space with spiral staircases, catwalks, a bustling café, and forty thousand books for sale, all of which were donated—many, certainly, by people very much on the “other side” of the divide from those who receive Housing Works benefits. That doesn’t matter. The books are given to the store with an optimistic idea of what a city represents: the idea that we can all live together. The task of doing this requires watching out for everyone’s well-being: it requires imagination, observation, and generosity, something we all struggle with—I know I have in my own life, with my brother, let alone walking down the block to buy a coffee while someone is sleeping on the street. It is that struggle, I would like to think, that defines us—that its outcome is not predetermined, that we can do better, and that the city can, too. Here in these pages are thirty writers showing what that struggle feels like now.

—John Freeman
NYC, July 2014

Due North

GARNETTE CADOGAN

“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked, [Michel de Certeau] wrote. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities.”

—Rebecca Solnit

I’m an island boy and wear that designation with pride, and so I decided that, despite New Yorkers’ cautions to the contrary, I would not live in their city as some worker bee too busy to make contact with passersby. Strangers might stamp me as crazy, but I planned to talk to them. They would be my skeleton key to the city.

I came to the city—which, for me, meant all five boroughs (yes, even Staten Island)—after Hurricane Katrina flicked me north. And I intended to immerse myself in its rich, colorful cultural life by spending a lot of time walking; after all, that’s how I got to know the vibrant streets of Kingston, where I grew up, and New Orleans, where I spent almost a decade. “You can tour the world at the cost of a monthly subway pass,” I once heard a New Yorker boast. Indeed, tour I would, but this meant getting off at stations almost at random and walking, lots of walking and talking, to observe, to absorb, to understand.

For the myth of the place, the promise of New York, was that, with a dose of sparkling luck, you could join its throngs and have their fascinating lives broaden and deepen yours. “If you’re bored it’s because you’re on the wrong block,” said my indefatigable friend Maxine, who lived a few blocks from the never-dim (though often-dull) Times Square. I could hop on a train to Jackson Heights in Queens and walk along sidewalks made resplendent by Indians, Bangladeshis, Tibetans, and Nepalis who shop and sell side by side; and, night owl that I am, I could return at 2:00 a.m. for Nepalese food, eating yak while chatting away. This was the city of high social and cultural aspirations and achievements—the “city of opportunity”—where, I was led to believe, cosmopolitanism won the day. I had every intention, then, to join its pageant of walkers.

I arrived in New York in October 2005 and immediately began walking all over the city, exploring for hours at a time. As I traversed its landscape, I discovered a topography of social conditions. Some days, I would linger on 34th Street among the glamorous workers of Midtown Manhattan rushing to and from their high-rise buildings—in swift pursuit of their ambitions, I’d assumed. I’d watch them zigzag around and dart past the enthusiastic tourists filing into the Empire State Building, that colossus rising majestically above as a beacon of hope and symbol of American derring-do.

Then I’d stride northward, eager to explore Whitman’s “Numberless crowded streets, high growths of i