NYC Revisited
Cinema and basketball, memory and hope
The Knicks won and, suddenly, I’m back in NYC.
“You’re staying down there? No way!”, this guy says when I tell him I’m renting a place on East 3rd Street with Avenue B. Actually, it happened more than once, but I don’t remember all the faces mouthing that question. I see it like a scene in a musical movie: in the reception hall of our film-school at Union Square three guys more or less my age (early twenties, that is) slide Fred-Astairely into a group and sing: “Down there? No way! That area is insalubrious, infamous… dangerous!”
This was 96 and, sure, the Lower East Village was a very different place, but I never felt anything like danger. There were a lot of Mexican immigrants living there and some other Spanish-speaking nationalities from the Americas and that scared some of the folk, I guess. That part of the city was much poorer than it is now. It was not postcardable at all. I think the word gentrification didn’t even exist. There was garbage on the streets; impressive cockroaches lounged in my bathtub; you could glimpse rats so big they looked somewhat fantastical; and there was a lot of drug trafficking out in the open. But I never had any problems. Except for that one day.
This tall, action-man type Colombian guy — who wore sleeveless shirts to show off his muscles — would come to my ground apartment door once a week and collect the rent. It was very much like in a movie. (It felt like I was learning cinema inside a film.) One day I go to the cash machine and the stupid thing answers back: no. Apparently, I had spent all of my parents’ allowance, and this young man’s dream — being in NYC with some dollars to spend — turned into a nightmare. It’s not a metaphor: that night, after I eventually fell asleep, exhausted from my day-long odyssey through film-making theoretical principles and practical obstacles, I had this kind of abstract, cartoonish nightmare where I got beaten by the giant superman from Colombia. Perhaps “beaten” makes it look a bit too realistic. It was more like in those Popeye animations where a punch makes the victim fly into the ceiling, you know?
In the next day’s early hours, as I was in my small apartment strategizing, thinking that maybe I should come up with a good story about loosing the money or being robbed or something — because the truth didn’t feel very convincing —, the Colombian guy (sorry, man, I didn’t get your name) showed up at my door. Before I could make a decision about it, the no-money bank machine version slipped out (the truth, that is) and I just stood there subconsciously waiting for one big, ugly South American hook. The Colombian collector looked straight at me, said something like “no worries, next week you pay double”, greeted me goodbye with a formal but not too strong handshake and left. He didn’t even charge me for the delay, can you believe it? I guess we were characters from different movies and our meeting was made possible only through the wondrous cosmic misunderstanding known as NYC. Looks can be misleading, we tend to typecast people, right? This giant, old-school villain was, basically, a gentleman in disguise.
But — yeah, New York City. Those street-basket courts I would pass by everyday, all those very different people I’d meet in one single day, that energy, that spirit! It all came to mind the other day as I was having a conversation with the great Arthur Flowers in a Lisbon recording studio and we somehow got to the issue of memoirs and cities. Also, I’ve watched Mamdani’s inspired Knicks speech: loved the way he found a way to make the team’s achievement a collective prize, a people’s victory. I played basketball in Portugal as a kid and loved NBA players, namely Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, Bird and, of course, Jordan. It was after these very intense three months in New York, though, that I became a Knicks fan. Through the years, this fanhood has taught me a lot, I can tell you, about patience, solidarity and, yes, hope, hope, hope. That’s NYC for me.