My City is Scrabble without Vowels: Goodbye to New York, Part 1

Dear D.,

It’s Friday night and a woman with a heavy covered voice is crooning down from the crooked stage, and someone is chanting in the background, keeping her beat with deep vocals. Her name is Sugar and she’s black, big and black with cornrows, lots of them, and eyes of color café and roots in Harlem and Ghana, and a lover in every South American country, and round hips and large perfect thighs with purple brown stretch marks that she reveals when she’s feeling sexy, when she glides that jean skirt up her leg to show some big black skin and scream “I’m black and I’m proud, I’m morena and I don’t give a shit what you are just listen to me and love what you hear, love what you preach and don’t you give up on your dreams girl, I don’t care the color of your skin.” She’s rich with salsa rhythm constantly keeping her gliding those notes out like a queen, a big black queen, and she lets the loud heavy real sounds drip out of her mouth like nutella or water from a faucet, smooth and so simple and concrete. She’s spitting out phrases like saliva and scatting all over the place, left right and around her curves and up her spine and yours and down your throat. We’re in the corner, clapping and laughing, screaming shaking watching her go go go and we wish we were black, or at least I do, we wish we were ethnic and could sing like that and have people laugh with us and not at us, we wish we could shake our big bosoms and big asses and have everyone call us sexy and not fat, have everyone say we’re beautiful and not just another white girl. We’re the only white ones there and that scared us the first time, made us feel alone and uncomfortable and we thought we couldn’t clap, but now we’re jaded and we don’t care what they think and they don’t care either, here we don’t even think, we don’t know the color of your skin and it doesn’t matter what you are or where you’re from as long as you can get that beat into you and exist with it and for it, and move to that rhythm like you mean it, and when you’re here you do. When we leave the underground club, it’s raining in Harlem, and the streets are glistening with wetness, mimicking our sweaty faces and damp bodies. Everyone’s shouting goodbye and good luck girl and shit man I gotta piss and we’re waving and scatting and you might say we’re acting black but not even a black person can define black, so can you? We’re tired of being racist and going to a white school and shunning Spanglish as unintelligent and we violate our standards and are vulgar and that’s the way the city life is, our city life. We are selfish, we don’t want the whites to come here, we don’t want to lose the black flavor and the Latino taste and the vulgarity and dignity of minorities. We don’t tell them, especially not the tourists who think they want to see real New York but shit in their pants at the mention of 125th street and can’t conceive of a New York that is poor and struggling, that curses and spits and pees on itself when it has to and shares mixed drinks and salsas, Latinos and whites, and dances in the streets.

I wish you would have shared this New York with me. I wish you would have escaped your confines of the Upper East Side and released yourself into the depths of this city. Why can’t we teach each other to live? Now I’m leaving, leaving you and this city, and you haven’t seen my places, seen where I have learned to live, seen where I have become who I am. In the time we have been together you have taught me to fit into your book, your land of Tasti-Delite and Central Park and seventh floor apartments and Duane Reades, your existence of the M86 and gummy bears and 91st and Columbus, please, and step on it, it’s already 8:11. Why is every Friday a Blockbuster night when this city is rolling over in its grave a hundred times a minute while you bask in tasks that occur everywhere, all the time, except for in this city? Why are we suburbanites in the middle of urban bliss? We don’t share the same appreciations. Candlelight vigils on Columbia campus are “boring and such a waste of time” to you, a walk down Columbus is “pointless” and an $8 concert at CBGBs is “bad music, and downtown is too far anyway, let’s just stay here.” I have obliged pretty much every time, and now I am leaving this city, and leaving you, and we will never know what could have been of those long quiet Friday nights. In these last few months let me show you my New York. Let me show you my city that is made up of symbols, thousands of memory-joggers compiled.