Urban Speak

Reading Vivian Gornick’s, The Odd Woman and the City,  I am returned to my first twenty-one years riding the New York subways and wearing out soles and heels on those teeming sidewalks. The author becomes an incarnation of Walt Whitman as she also hears America singing and plays it back to us. At least the America of the city across the East River from Whitman’s Brooklyn, a century later.

She meanders the length of Manhattan, with ears at the ready, engaging strangers or sometimes just overhearing the yells and curses along with moments of soliloquies and soulful exchanges. Urbane voices mingled with urban, hard edge street yawp. Moxie was earned on the street with Trash often the second language.

Get out of my face, and, fuck off, one minute, Bless you, dearie, the next. There is a certain music in the asphalt jungle. A rhapsody in the choir of six million bodies surviving until tomorrow and a choreography in the public space.

I’m not sure which subway Gornick took down from the Bronx. Mine was the E or F train which went east to Queens, the borough roughly north of Brooklyn. Ours was a nearly suburban area in many parts leading to Long Island. We called Manhattan, the City. It was as if one borough was a crowded elevator and the other an escalator with each person assigned a separate square.

All the five boroughs could be broken down into neighborhoods marked by candy stores and ethnicity. Mine was a chunk of Forest Hills apart from the WASPY area of restrictive covenants. Two or three apartment buildings provided enough kids for a commune. We lived on the sidewalks and streets with chalk in one pocket and a skate key in the other. The common tongue was banter.

I had two jobs in the City, both of short duration. I was either twelve or thirteen delivering women’s hats, made by a neighbor, and picking up orders for fabric in midtown. I believed I was invisible but got an introduction to the rhythms of speech in the garment district workplaces. I came with a list to pick up: velvet , satin or felt. This was the no-nonsense world of commerce, fast, coarse and cutting. Welcome to the hurry-up where life is lived out loud and cuts to the chase.

The second job came seven years later. I worked in the pharmacy attached to a well-known hotel on Madison Ave. My innocence had no place in this setting. Lying, cheating and stealing were the acceptable terms of doing business. Without going into the method of fleecing, highway robbery was the order of the day. It was a crude initiation into my chosen profession as practiced in the chain of upscale hotel pharmacies. I’m afraid the language is lost to me. My sense is that the white-collar crime was conducted with a casual suavity. I returned to college that fall semester a made man as Tony Soprano would have said though I might have been a candidate for a witness protection program. What happened in Manhattan stayed in Manhattan; didn't make it to Queens.

Ms. Gornick’s memoir is far more than a register of how New Yorkers speak. She has great insights into friendship, feminism and the zigs and zags of relationship. The pulse of the city takes on a universal dimension in her writing. Over time her daily walking tour of the city left her with the wonder of being alive, an astonishment which lifts off the pages.