When I lived in New York, wandering without purpose in the daytime, drinking in pubs that were open before lunch, before breakfast, I would often go into bookstores and buy more books than I had the intention or time to read. I thought of myself as a New Yorker and had to have the many books that proved it. Well, some of them, anyway. Luc Sante's Low Life was one of these. She is now Lucy Sante, but the copy that I have was purchased with her birth name on the cover. Her deadname. I saw this book on front tables of bookstores everywhere in the city. It was highly recommended and regarded, yet for some reason I never read it while I lived there. It is probably for the best. I would have given manic sermons to my friends on its importance, and the necessity for everyone to likewise devour it in hysterical late night moments of their own, dark binges of literacy.
I was unstable when I lived in New York. It's why I lived there.
I finished reading it tonight in Sonoma, CA and I am still spinning with it, not knowing what to say, wanting to write something intelligent, knowing that I can not match what I've just read. The afterword of the book describes people like myself who move there to become a part of the city, to merge their story with it in some misguided hope to steal or share some of its sheen and glow, to tumble in its squalor. It is where people go who feel too big for where they're from, too much meant for more. Without ever saying any of this in the text of the book, without accusing me directly, I could feel it come over me as I read. People who lived there a hundred years before me, lives lost in time, whose heroes had names that were also unknown and unrecognized by me, came and did the same, with wildly different results. Death, being the unanimous uniter.
P.T. Barnum. Etc.
It was at times a challenge to even believe what I was reading. It all felt nearly impossible. McGurk's Suicide Hall, as one example. More famously: the Draft Riots.
There were a series of police departments who fought for supremacy and for territory. The Municipal becoming the Metropolitan, then the Metropolitan going to war with the as yet unnamed one that was sanctioned by the city, and who wore uniforms. The winners were what became the NYPD. The losers, the Metropolitan Police, who refused to concede loss or victory but were determined to stand their ground, were surrounded by the National Guard, who threatened to burn the building down with hundreds of them in it. They surrendered instead of committing a mass group suicide. It is unclear who gave the Metropolitan Police their authority. Much like the fire stations of that time, they were closer to gangs than actual social or municipal services. They operated within territories and brutalized any challengers or dissenters. Once the NYPD was formed their mandate became much more clear: beat the poor and guard the wealthy, but keep them apart at all times. Though gentlemen could of course visit any of the 3500 registered whorehouses as they chose. There were at least as many that were unregistered.
The same was true for bars. The Bowery was a focal point to which the author kept returning. Its history is stranger and filled with more pathos, violence, and entertainment than can hardly now be believed. How could any city evade its own history as well as New York, I wondered. I kept revisiting the familiar streets that I knew from living there, populated with desperation and misery a century before I walked them. The whorehouses, many of them, became opium dens, the drug trade has nearly been a constant.
Even the Christians who lived there seemed feverishly deranged with impulses and ideals. The movements to reform vacillating with debauched periods where vice reigned and crushed its opponents. It is a tale so nearly unbelievable that only the specificity of fact can provide the needed credence.
Well, it is late and I am crazed with all that I never knew.
It's time to succumb.
"Night is forgotten and endlessly repeated; it is glorious and it sits next door to death." - Sante
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