New York could have been San Francisco. It was almost Portland, and there was a possibility it was going to be Minneapolis. At the time there was also a barely articulated inkling that I should buy a one-way ticket to Asia.

Timing is always everything. When we listen closely to that inner voice that knows us most intimately, we know when the timing is right. After four years living in Guatemala, a year in South America, I moseyed up to those two diverging roads Frost got all poetic about. I had never lived in my home country without being either a student or hanging out in Huggies and ultimately decided it was time to return to a place that both felt like home and somewhere foreign—a departure from the settings of five formative years after college when my gringo-ness was intricate to my identity.

Now, it was back to the gringo-factory.

“I’m not sure,” I said to a friend of a friend who was visiting Minneapolis from New York when she asked me where I was going to move in The United States.
“I was thinking Portland or New York. San Francisco’s on the list too…”

“Come to New York!” she said with decided conviction. “Seriously, you can stay with me as long as you need to. You won’t regret it.”

This was the end of August. The next day I’d be flying back to Guatemala, my first trip back since leaving in May. I’d spent the summer putting 16,000 miles on my brother Tyler’s new car all across highways in The US and Canada, visiting old friends, making new ones, and playing music in bars and street corners, and rediscovering the intimacy we had had as two kids our parents nicknamed Lewis and Clark.

Tyler and I had graduated from a youth of unlimited sidewalks to the newfound freedom of highways. Way back when we filled our days with stuffed animal parties and a joint business selling golf balls we found in gullies to the golfers who had lost them. Once we kidnapped our neighbor’s cats and hid it in our closet. On a family vacation in Michigan we watched from a hilltop as several fire trucks rushed to the scene of the woman’s changing room where a smoke bomb joke escalated being our wildest dread and dreams. We used to explore the city through underground drainage pipes, yelling up “help!” from under the grates to concerned adults our laughter bounced through the tunnels like the light from our flashlights. All of this was conducted in boy scout uniforms.

And our little brother John was always around to fill up our summer pools.

I decided and moved to New York in October, rolling in with a posse of three Serbians and my brother. In three days we needed to get the Serbians back on a plane to Serbia (long story). Then my brother had to get back to work in North Dakota.

After the Serbians left I was supposed to move in with the girl I’d met in Minneapolis. When that fell through I ended up at a hostel, and from there a 68-year old gay nudist couch surfer host in Manhattan. I had thin margins of savings if New York was going to work. I spent those first few days fervently looking for both work and a room to rent. I spent two days striking out on Craigslist. New York was not working out. The first apartment I was supposed to see no one answered the bell or my calls. The second one was a windowless room in a post apocalyptic neighborhood that seemed to scream “Flee!”

Defeated, I watched the sunset of a throw-away day on the M train returning to kind and gregarious, but old and at times off-putting balls of my CS host.

I did not want to spend tomorrow looking for a place to live since I had already set out to do that today and had been determined not to return until I had a place. That inner voice moved me to action. Randomly, I got off the Central Avenue stop on the M line, determined to find a place to live.

My plan was vague, and more than a bit naïve. I decided to walk around the neighborhood, talking to people on the street, in bars and cafés until I found a place to live. This was Bushwick, New York, an up-and-coming neighborhood being gentrified with “hipsters” who denied affiliation with Hypsterdom despite thick rimmed glasses, flannel, vests, beards and elaborate hats.

A block from the stop I walked into a bike shop. A female and male employ were engaged in conversations with customers. I waited for the male employee, not planning on talking to women, since they might be threatened by some random dude walking the streets asking if they knew of anyone who was subletting a room.

The female employee finished her conversation first and addressed me. She thought she recognized me, “Hey,” she said, “how are you doing?”

I told her she had me mistaken, that I had never been in the shop before. I explained to her that I had just moved to New York and was looking for a place to live. She eyed me suspiciously. “I own this shop and live across the street, and as of yesterday I’m renting out a room. But how do I know you are not a serial killer?”

“Well, if I was,” I told her, “I would probably claim I wasn’t, but seriously, I’m not. Never serially killed anyone. I’ve spent half the week striking out on Craiglist, so I thought I’d walk around and make my own luck.”

To prove my disinclination towards serial killing, I gave her the safest calling card I had, an interview with Christiane Amanpour about the malnourished infant center I had opened in Guatemala

I moved in with KT and her one-year-old daughter Kasey the next day. The next two months Bushwick became my neighborhood, New York my home, KT my friend and her daughter someone who would sit with me as we’d sing Old McDonald Had A Farm.

I spent the first three months of this year in Kenya, and on the La Guardia bound plane ride across the Atlantic, it felt like I was returning home—to a place I belonged to and belonged to me.

Three more months in this year, here for the spring and summer and life settled into a day to day that was worth waking up for. Nights playing music with in gardens with talented musicians, sharing tables with poets and painters, clowns and people whose dreams shot up like Manhattan skyscrapers.

Setting out, I had endeavored to try to write words that would encapsulate New York, freeze it and make this glorious galore of city palatable. From where I sit now, New York might just be one of those “had to be there” things.

I might be better off citing a specific example:

What I can do is describe the biggest booty ever seen in Bushwick, Brooklyn and try to find some deeper meaning within it. I saw the booty on the Dekalb and Wycoff bus stop. No offence is meant when I use the term Ghetto Booty, especially not when I an relating to you a Ghetto Booty that came straight out of Plato’s realm of forms where it appeared on Wycoff early one Monday morning in the middle of everybody’s early morning hustle and bustle.

The booty was clad in the tightest polkadotted spandex of the brightest pastel colors that the world ever did see. And it sprinted, it nearly ran itself off, trying to catch a bus. The woman in ownership Sir Mix-a-Lot’s unequivocal affirmation, screamed for the bus to stop and waved a hand as she and it gained speed. She ran and the bus chugged a long, at times it grew further away, but gradually she was running parallel it until finally it slowed down and she jumped aboard.

Everyone on the street broke into a smile, we looked and smiled at each other, and some of us clapped when that against impossible odds bootied on up to the bus.

 

For a moment, that invisible force-field that separated us into separate lives evaporated and we became each other’s compadres. Life here feels a lot like that moment. It seems like everyone is on everyone else’s teams. No one is jealous of others success, because everyone who hears about what your reaching for seems to want to help you grab it.

 

I’m under no illusions that this is New York for everyone. But this has been my New York. The literal vastness of the city and the infinitess of potential means that above all New York can be what you make it to be. Whatever you are looking for, New York has it. You don’t run out of roads, places or people to find and be found by. 

New places give us new facets of our selves. We don’t always know where a road will take us, what roads our shoes will tread or the people who will be seated at our midnight tables. All we can control is whether or not we tread through these roads lightly or roughly and whether or not when it’s time to leave we’re sorry to have to go.

I write these words on a table filled with empty bottle evidence of last night’s festivities when I had one last hurrah with the family of friends here. Tomorrow, it’s back to the airport to fly to North Dakota to see my actual family and then back to Guatemala to see another sort of family.

But I’ve promised my roommate Pepito, that when I come back, I’ll get him a treat and we’ll once again go for a long walk so he can piss on all the trees of Bushwick, a place he can smell for weeks of walks is definitely his home.

Last tuesday I played my last song for a while at The Goodbye Blue Monday, the place I played my first song in New York on a quick stopoff in 2010.