The New York Phase

When I was twenty and in my second week of living in Manhattan for the summer, a cab driver told me that lots of young people have a “New York Phase,” but very few people have the privilege of being true New Yorkers. “You wanna know how I could tell you’re not from here?” he asked. I could see the bristled ends of his mustache lift up in the rearview mirror.

I had a couple of guesses: first that I was overwhelmingly, Southern-ly polite wherever I went; I had a compulsion to apologize to every single person I bumped into on the sidewalk, which made visiting Times Square a nightmare. Second, as a pseudo-hippie suburbanite raised in Austin and going to college in San Antonio, I had come nowhere near to figuring out the clean, tailored, yet somehow still feminine dress code so closely related to New York professionals, or even professional New Yorkers. I spent nearly an hour each morning before I left for my publishing internship tucking and untucking my only Anne Taylor shirt into my blush pink slacks, and I was still limping from my first day on the job when I thought I could escape unscathed from wearing scalloped high heels on my commute all the way from my closet-sized apartment on First Street to the office on Seventeenth. I spent my first lunch break crying to an Old Navy employee while she brought me sandals in my size and tissues to wipe off the vomit on my feet, because I had ditched the heels and walked barefoot down the sidewalk. As if my first day working in Manhattan was a failed one-night stand.

In the cab, I scratched at the three layers of extra-tough band aids on the back of my heel with the tip of my sneaker and asked the driver how he knew.

“Because you asked me if I’d take you to First,” he said. “You shoulda told me.” He explained that, legally, he was required to take me wherever I asked him to—within the boroughs, of course—once I was in the cab. He laughed at the way I stood penitently at the driver’s side window and asked if he wouldn’t mind taking me to One West Street. “Just jump in next time, Sweetheart,” he said. “You’re lucky you got my cab.”

I’ve noticed men say shit like that a lot, and it’s always sounded vaguely threatening to me. Later on when I visited Portugal with two of my best girlfriends, our male Uber drivers would insist on the same thing. “Other men don’t like to see girls without a man,” they said. “You’re lucky you got me this time.” Almost every driver seemed to think we were lucky to have them. They wanted us to be keenly aware of how lucky we were to be in their presence, these men who were not going to hurt us, but who could. Just saying, you know? They could.

Not that it’s ever so black and white. The New York cab driver laughing at me made my face burn with righteous humiliation, but I also felt parented—endeared in a useful sort of way. I wanted to thank him and deflate his ego at the same time. The advice was helpful, but why did it seem like conversations in New York always had to boil down to how very un-New York I was? Why couldn’t we talk about movies, or food, or just sit in amicable silence? Why did it have to come down to this glaring deficit that I couldn’t possibly shake in the three short months I’d be living there?

Of course now, three years removed from living there, I know that much of New York has the same mentality as that cab driver: “You’re lucky you got me. You’re lucky you’re here.” New York is the big man at the wheel; somehow threatening and comforting all at once. Always in control. Always moving somewhere. Maybe he’ll take you with him, if you’re real nice about it and don’t mess up the back seat.

But I heard about luck the most when I was just starting out with my internship at the literary agency. I found out from my fellow interns that I was a very uncommon case as far as new hires went. One intern was going to Yale, but her parents had nice property in Jersey. Another was the CEO’s niece, and although she wasn’t really interested in the publishing industry, she thought it’d be cool to “give it a try.” The only guy intern was going to school in the South at Duke but he was actually from London, where his parents had connections in the industry already. Compared to them, I was just some nobody from a small school in San Antonio. I had two years of experience editing for a small but acclaimed national magazine at that point, but I had absolutely no connections outside of the South, or even South Texas. I got the job because I called the agency’s head of hiring back in January to introduce myself and ask when applications were going to open. She told me they weren’t going to be open until April, but she herself went to college in Texas and wanted to give me an interview. Out of the thirty or so hiring managers I cold called, she was the only one to give me a chance.

So everyone was right: I was lucky. Very lucky indeed. This, of course, not even mentioning that there was a significant lack of racial diversity in the office, especially compared to the environment I was used to in San Antonio. And there was nobody in the office whose parents’ income was below six figures a year. In that way I was lucky, too; lucky to be born white and to parents who could afford to pay for my apartment for three months. Not that I said anything about that at the time. I was too busy feeling lucky to be there, too busy trying not to be an outsider. One day, I was quietly pulled aside by one of the head agents and asked that I not use the word “y’all” around the clients. She told me, so kindly, that it didn’t give the right impression.

Just like I briefly wore black ultra-skinny jeans and picked up the electric guitar for a grungy boy I dated in high school, I changed myself for New York. I traded out floral pants and flowy sweaters for white tailored shirts and black blazers. I quietly dropped “y’all” from my vocabulary and tried to mimic the cool confidence with which my coworkers seemed to speak. I tried my best to get pushy, with mixed results. On one hand, I successfully got into two rooftop bars in the Upper West Side and one karaoke bar in K-Town with my twenty-one-and-up roommates by proudly presenting my real, under aged driver’s license to the bouncers at the door with a coquettish smile. On the other hand, I clearly remember one day in the middle of July when I was pushing an unruly grocery cart full of advance book copies from the office to the UPS store five blocks away, and a lady refused to get out of my way in the crosswalk. She walked straight at me in a crowd, knowing full well that I couldn’t steer for shit, and started to come to a stop in front of me, expecting me to lift the cart up and go around her. I kept pushing forward, forcing her to jump out of the way in the second before impact.

“I have the cart!” I barked.

For just a few minutes, I felt that I had finally made it. At last, I had won my way into New York.

Except that night, I called my mom on the phone just to tell her how bad I felt about the whole thing. In tears, I asked her if she still thought I was a nice person.

This isn’t to say that New York offered me nothing in return. Even though it was selfish, even though it was arrogant, even though I was never enough for it, I felt drunk on its love. I shared a tiny one-bedroom apartment with three other women and one box AC unit to sustain us all, so I spent most of my time exploring outside. I took day trips to the Guggenheim and the public library, and spent hours examining books in the Strand, or taking in the vibrant chalk art and flowers on the strange green and concrete moonscape that was the Highline. I went to SoHo frequently with a roommate who was interning for Goldman Sachs just to ogle the beautiful things she bought and the crosswalks painted rainbow for the month of June. I bought a Keith Haring shirt from the Uniqlo on Fifth and relished the feeling of walking down the street with a shopping bag in hand as if it were my God-given right to be there.

Still, my favorite place by far was just outside my front door. Our complex was steps from Battery Park, so I would take a journal out with me and sit on one of the benches by the harbor, watching as everywhere around me life buzzed and glowed. Fishermen in blue overalls poked fun at one another as they cast their lines into the Hudson, occasionally reeling in a striped bass and dropping it in the ice chests by their feet. Their fishing poles pointed straight out toward the Statue of Liberty, a barely distinguishable green buoy bobbing and shimmering in the exhaust put off by the ferries that constantly ran back and forth from the port to Ellis Island.

All around me, children circled their parents and screamed with delight at the sight of the Sea Glass carousel behind me, the built-in, playable piano in the ground on my right, or a cartoon-character-shaped popsicle from the ice cream stand to my left. Occasionally, a magician or a street dancer would occupy the courtyard in the center of the park, and tired adults and raucous children alike would stop to take in the action unfolding in front of them. Every ten minutes or so, the Ellis Island ferry would pull back in to port with a celebratory honk of its fog horn, making all the tourists in the park jump and look around in embarrassment. In New York, all I had to do was step outside to be a part of something alive and ticking, a grandfather clock with a beating heart. At twenty years old, having never lived anywhere farther than two hours from home, every moment was exhilarating, every place a sensory banquet. It felt like flying.

But in New York, even with my journal right there in my lap, I never wrote a single word. I was too busy being amazed, too busy watching it all go down to really be a part of it. There was a reason I was most comfortable in a place as overrun with tourists as Battery Park. I wasn’t what I wanted to be, what I was trying to appear like I was. I wasn’t the blasé local in the park of naive tourists, writing away as the show went on all around me. Not anymore than I was the hot shot new agent on the scene in the publishing world. I was just an intern, kicking at the door clamped down on my foot. I was an audience member, trying desperately to look like I belonged on the stage. I still jumped every time the fog horn blared. 

It was my third week in New York, just a week after the cab driver diagnosed me as a lost cause, when my roommate asked me if I wanted to go with her to the Pride Parade that day. She specified that she was “tragically straight,” but still thought the parade would be fun. I took in her long rainbow skirt and glittery blue eyeshadow and immediately felt daunted. I had colorful clothes, but they were all sitting in a cardboard box in Texas.

“Sure,” I said, “but I don’t think I have anything like that to wear.” It didn’t seem right to show up to Pride without some kind of color on me.

My roommate insisted that I had to have something, even if it wasn’t all the colors of the rainbow. She crossed the living room in four long steps and opened up our shared dresser, which we had moved out of the bedroom in order to make space. She rooted through my half of the top drawer. “A-ha,” she said, and threw me a folded shirt. “Go put that on.”

I unfolded the fabric and stared at the dancing cartoon book with arms and legs on the front. Most of the shirt was black and white, except for an illustration on the cover of the book that depicted a little yellow man breakdancing against a green and pink background. An Illustrated Guide to Breaking. The Keith Haring shirt I bought in SoHo.

I took it into the bathroom and put it on, inspecting myself in the mirror.

I liked the shirt.

I was excited for the parade.

I started to cry.

It wasn’t how I’d envisioned my first Pride going. I thought one day, when I’d left Texas behind for good and had the funds and confidence to be my own woman, I would proudly march into Pride dressed just like my roommate was: rainbow skirt, glitter galore. Maybe even a picket sign, slathered in pink, blue, and purple. Proud Bisexual, it’d say, or something more creative like a fully-realized proud bisexual woman would really say, something witty and in-the-know that would prove how I’d truly taken ownership of my sexuality. I would go to my first Pride Parade looking like someone who belonged there, not like a well-meaning tourist in a Keith Haring t-shirt. Not somebody caught between phases—the New York Phase, the Bisexual Phase—but me.

My publishing internship was the main pull for me when it came to spending the summer in New York, but Gay New York was a big plus. At twenty, I’d only been out to myself for three years, and was not yet out to anyone else aside from a girl I’d kind-of dated at a summer camp in high school and a girl I’d been to the movies with earlier that year in college. Both times, we’d done no more than hold hands and put our heads on each other’s shoulders. Both times, I turned away just before we could kiss. Both times, I asked them to be sworn to secrecy. I was sure telling anyone in Texas would mean the end of my life as I knew it, and in some ways I was probably right. Conservative business owners might have refused to serve me. Friends and family might have turned away. I tried to broach the subject once with my mom after my date at the movies. I found her alone wrapping presents in her bedroom on Christmas Eve.

“Mom?” I asked, trying and failing to curl a ribbon with a pair of scissors.  “How would you feel if I dated a woman?”

My mom laughed and shook her head without lifting her eyes from her wrapping.

“What’s funny about that?” I asked.

She looked up at me for just a second, her smile frozen awkwardly on her face. “You always were the creative one,” she said. “It’s okay to experiment a little in college, you know?”

She couldn’t look me in the eye.

With that being the extent of my gay experiences in Texas, I thought that New York would be a place that I could blossom. I envisioned myself joining some kind of gay community that met in bars in Brooklyn or Harlem. I saw myself getting drunk and finally kissing a woman, maybe even to the cheers of my other queer friends. My dreams of Gay New York were just as exorbitant as my dreams of Professional New York, but somehow they felt more tangible to me. Even if I didn’t meet all of the criteria for a true New Yorker, surely loving people of the same sex was enough to make me count in the LGBTQ+ community. All I had to do was find my people, and I’d finally know what it was to belong.

Except that in reality, Gay New York was no different from the rest of New York. You could step outside and see the Pride flags hanging from the rooftops, the gay bars with bright neon signs over the doors, the crosswalks painted in rainbow stripes outside of stores selling Keith Haring shirts, but to truly be a part of it, it seemed to me then that you had to know somebody. Somebody had to introduce you to their queer friends, invite you into the gay bar. I hadn’t found anybody to do that for me, and in that respect, I was still just some nobody from San Antonio. Even standing in the center of its heart, I had no ownership of the queer community after all. At that point, I’d never even actually kissed another woman. On the streets by Washington Square Park I watched from the sidelines of the parade, painfully aware of my bland, poser t-shirt as the big, beautiful floats of rainbow-clad people passed me by. I wondered what all of the signs about Stonewall meant. I realized I didn’t know anything at all.

My roommate snapped a selfie of us in front of a group of drag queens and posted it to her Instagram. I asked her not to tag me in it. I didn’t want anyone to see it; not the people back home, not the people I knew in New York. I knew I would be embarrassed either way.

Even so, it’s still not as black and white as all that. That day stands out in my memory as one of the best days of that entire summer. Maybe I wasn’t a part of it, but I’d at least made it to see the show. Even on the sidelines I was closer to knowing myself, closer to being the me I wanted to be than I ever was in Texas. I was young. I was at the parade. I was in New York.

Three years after my internship ended, I am now living on the other end of the country entirely, in the Pacific Northwest. It seems to me that my cab driver was right; New York could have been a phase after all. It never quite took me in like I thought it would. Instead, it became just one place on an ever-increasing list of places I used to live. A place I was lucky to live in, certainly, but also just a place. One of many exes, fondly remembered.

In some ways, that idea still stings. It would have been so vindicating to prove that driver wrong—to be back in New York today clicking down the sidewalk in sleek black booties, hailing cabs like a pro. And maybe that will be me, one day. Or something close to it. After all, I did go to the Pride Parade just last year, in San Antonio. I wore a long-sleeved black leotard tucked underneath high-waisted jeans. From the front I looked kind of like I’d always wanted to look when I went out to the bars in New York: Slim. Classy. Muted. But when I lifted my arms, I revealed a draping rainbow cape attached at either wrist, unfolding on each side of me like butterfly wings. My eyelids were painted with blue, purple, and pink glitter. I went to the parade with my boyfriend and I was a little nervous that he would make me look out of place yet again; but people cheered as we walked down the street. They clapped when I spread out my wings and spun around.

That parade was the first and only time I’ve felt so close to the gay community like that. By now I’ve had a couple of actual girlfriends and even introduced one to my mom, to her quiet support. The people close to me in my life know who I am, although I’m still not loud about it. I never joined any queer clubs or went to any gay bars. My extended, very conservative Southern family knows nothing at all about this side of me. There’s no point in telling them, except to create hurt and anger on both sides. I have an intense pride for who I am, but I’ve mostly stayed on the outer fringes of what might be called the “actual” community. In fact, it seems that’s where a lot of my queer friends are. Some of us wear our colors all the time, and some of us just wear our wings to the parade, and our tailored jackets to work. We tell the people we want to tell, and sometimes we don’t bother with the people who don’t deserve to know. Like there’s no rules to break after all. Like New York is just a place, and Queer People are just people.

Maybe one day I’ll go back to New York and be all the things I thought I’d be. Maybe I’ll sit with my journal in Battery Park and actually write something instead of just enjoying the show, or walk into an office with my name on the door and know that I belong. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll stay on the fringes for the rest of my life, no matter where I go, always being too nice to cab drivers, always standing with my foot just barely wedged in the door, feeling lucky and scared and in awe of the world moving on and on around me. Knowing who I am now, it seems likely to me that I’ll never be able to call myself a true New Yorker.

Still, at least I can say I’ve lived in New York.

Contributor

Jennifer Jussel

Jennifer Jussel is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University, where she also teaches undergraduate composition and creative writing. Her work has been featured on Spokane Public Radio, and is also forthcoming from or has been published in The Swamp Magazine, High Noon, the same, The Contemporary, Awakenings, and more.