When you leave New York City for good, you can’t do it in a quiet way, slinking across the river like a bandit in the night. You are compelled to grab a your blowhorn and let it rip. You grab a guitar and strum a few mournful chords befitting your reluctant farewell. You want the people who are staying to know that they are the fools. They don’t get it. New York has survived centuries of upheaval and crime and garbage, but when Cindy T. from the Upper West Side packs her bags for the suburban paradise of Westchester, it’s over. There is no coming back. There’s certainly no one to take her place.
New York City is a party, and that party is ending. It lasted through crack and crime and covid, but now, closing time is fast approaching. People can read the graffiti on the wall and realize that the city is going the way of Detroit before it.
It’s a Big Apple. At the core of every apple is something mostly inedible. Apples rot, they turn sour, losing the sweetness that made them great, propelled them to stardom. This apple would be lucky to be remade as a sauce. But it’s destined for the cruel indignities of fermentation, a time-honored process known to many great Americans since before there was an America.
Now that I think about it, I could go for some hard cider.
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