"New York Lobsters"

I was just in New York City for a week and I saw first hand evidence of my grand theory that New Yorkers are like the creatures that live on the bottom of the ocean, under billions of gallons of salt water. Like their marine counterparts-- the crab, the lobster, the skate, and the flounder-- the New Yorker is shaped and hardened by the pressure constantly exerted upon him or her. And this makes the New Yorker ferocious and nearly indestructible, and frightening to the softer, weaker species that come from lighter, more hospitable waters.

In New York, the pressure comes from all different directions. The densely packed sidewalks, streets and subways writhe and crawl like the most robust Amazonian ant colony. The super-charged buzz of human activity creates an electromagnetic hum that starts at dawn and lasts several hours past midnight. Physical superlatives reign over everyone all the time. Miles-long corridors of the world's tallest, most serious-looking buildings make dramatic urban valleys of a scale so huge that the mightiest humans feel like mice. And there are the social superlatives-- the hundreds of thousands of the world's most ambitious, adventure-seeking people who've poured into the City in search of their own page in the holy New York story-- like orthodox Moslems on Hajj-- except their Mecca is Merril Lynch, CBGB's, the Guggenheim Museum, Restaurant Alain Ducasse or Caroline's Comedy Club.

On the ocean floor, the perpetual pressure makes the crustacean and the bottom-dwelling fish crusty and scaly on the outside, but also resilient, tough and cunning-- armed with powerful jaws and claws with which to tear apart its adversaries or squeeze them into submission. Similarly, the New Yorker has a thick, callused exterior and appears to be hard-boiled beyond a pleasant attractiveness- but it more than makes up for this by being incredibly hearty, sinewy, and strangely charming, capable of all sorts of amazing feats.

The New Yorker can lift itself up to plateaus of success many times it's own apparent level of resources just through sheer determination and will power. It can build dwellings, businesses, events, social epicenters and happenings in an extremely complex, hostile and difficult environment, ingenuously reusing found discarded objects, like unused buildings and undesirable neighborhoods. And the New Yorker's antennae are highly tuned and super-humanly receptive, able to communicate with all other species while simultaneously gathering data necessary for life support, like acceptable places to eat and drink, changes in subway service and which blocks to avoid for fear of getting hassled or stabbed.

When a person asks you to compare New York to other cities, you can say things like "If New York City is major league baseball, then Chicago is badminton, Los Angeles is beanbag toss and Boston is shuffleboard", or "New York is like bungee-jumping off a moving jet, while San Francisco is like taking a snooze on a golf cart.", or "New York is like a punch in the face from a steroid-enraged, body-building, Satanic biker, whereas your hometown is like a gentle foot massage." But none of these analogies can really explain the visceral, concrete sensation in full color and three dimensions of actually being there.

When I meet someone who's never been to New York City, especially if they are in any of the following demographic groups-- Jews, Italian or Irish Americans with a sense of their ethnicity, writers, artists, hustlers, serious musicians, comics, world travelers, neurotics, actors, natural born businessmen, entrepreneurs or raconteurs-- I feel that I am speaking to someone who has never connected with their natural homeland and never plugged into the core energy source of their kind. To visit New York for any amount of time is to see that the statement "Describe for me New York" is comparable to the statement: "Describe for me the Earth", which may some day be asked by one human being of another on an extraterrestrial space colony. If New York is the archetypal city, all other urban areas are but a weak, diluted form of the original-- pale, blurred copies of the crisp, high-contrast original.

The New Yorker is also subject to a force of assimilation unlike anywhere else in America. The city is a giant mixing bowl where a constant stream of humanity from an insane array of racial, ethnic and geographical types pours in from the edges-- usually the outer boroughs first-- and then swirls and cross-pollinates on both a year-to-year and generation-to-generation basis. The most dramatic and theatrical mixing happens in Manhattan-- the spinning propeller at the center of the anthropological frappe-- where distinctly different human flavors combine irreversibly through close contact and social friction, and all become something new and better than the sum of the individual ingredients. Whatever their prefix-- Chinese, Polish, Greek, etc.-- once they get some of the accent, the attitude and the primal street wisdom-- they all take on that legendary suffix, "New Yorker".

The cab drivers-- whether rumpled, blue-eyed Russians, slightly imperious turbaned Sikhs or coolly mysterious central Africans, all have after only a few years the wizened vibe of the seasoned urban voyager-- unflappable, yet not without decency or moral judgment. And able to supernaturally absorb the entire street grid within a few months of their arrival. Last year, I had a driver from a former Soviet Republic. He cranked NPR and chattily volunteered the results of his informal poll of passengers regarding the U.S. war on Iraq. While I didn't agree with his obvious strong slant against the U.S. campaign, I appreciated the fact that in New York a thickly accented immigrant from somewhere between the Second And A Half and Third World had a working brain and an opinion and could probably have sold term papers to students at the New School for Social Research, if not columns to The Nation magazine.

The meticulous, machine-like Latinos who crank out picture-perfect sushi and sashimi at the East Village hot spot on 11th or the looser, more jocular ones assembling sandwiches at breakneck speed at Katz' Jewish Deli on the Lower East Side epitomize the New York ethos. You are what New York needs you to be. A Puerto Rican who could explain a matzo ball to a Midwesterner or a Honduran who could teach the ancient and highly disciplined art of Japanese food preparation to Westernized natives of Osaka.

On my recent visit, the greatest displays of New York's cultural mixing effect were found in Central Park. A performance artist/musician who calls himself Thoth was doing his thing in the ornate rectangular tunnel near the rowboat pond. The guy was dressed in a plain leather bandoleer-style strap across his chest, a hanging codpiece-type flap covering his crotch, and a long red feather stuck in the top of his bundled Sideshow Bob-style dreadlocks. He also wore simple, open-top shoes that reverberated in the stone tunnel like a bass drum when he stamped his feet, and ankle bands with castanet-like shakers that perfectly replicated the sound of a Casio percussion track. His light brown body-- he described himself in his pamphlet as a mix of about eight different ethnicities, including black and Jewish- was ripped and shredded like that of a ballet dancing gymnast. He danced around like a spiritually possessed whirling dervish doing a Navajo rain ceremony, and played a violin in alternating classical and rowdy avant-garde styles. The picture was completed by his pitch perfect, dead-on operatic alto voice, with which he sung lyrics in a European-sounding language that-- according to his pamphlet-- he made up for the purpose of expressing himself through his self-styled "Operaformance".

This guy was great-- captivating, intense, highly skilled, mystically electric, delightfully freakish-- like so much of New York. But the point is not the healthy-sized throng of tourists who mobbed his performance and threw dollar bills into his coffee can at the break. The point is that native New Yorkers really respect a guy like Thoth. No matter where this guy traveled in the city, local folks would recognize his self-possessed intensity and leave him alone. Cops, construction workers, drug-dealing gang kids, crisply-suited Wall St. moneymen, Hasidic Jews, Black Muslims, Bangladeshi cab drivers, baseball-capped frat guys, gold-chained Staten Islanders and Korean deli clerks will give at least begrudging props to this half-naked, operatic gypsy warrior, because by being so extreme he defines the edge of the spectrum and validates all of them in their own extremeness. New York is a city that simultaneously cultivates no-nonsense realists and freaks and weirdos of all stripes, oftentimes with both things coexisting in the same person.

Perhaps the pinnacle of the New York experience on that sunny weekend afternoon was the park's outdoor freeform roller-skating rink. This was a paved area the size of a small parking lot, with an oval track marked off with paint and a DJ table set up in the middle. Hard-driving, upbeat dance music cranked out of the club-grade speakers and the most energetically happy and cheerfully showing off roller skaters in the world cruised around the loop as if their individualistic roller-disco moves and multi-wheeled kung fu could stop all war, cure the world's major diseases and make the crumbled remains of the World Trade Center reassemble themselves into two shining towers. And sitting there in the scenic, rocky hill overlooking the rink, it was easy to believe that this may be the case.

A tall, shirtless rastaman in balooning, rainbow colored pants did a surprisingly traditional, demure type of rolling dance duet with an athletic looking blonde woman. A sinewy, intense Mediterranean-looking guy with devious shades and taut, veiny skin blasted down the long side of the oval with angular, martial arts types moves, as if he were exorcising his overly hyperactive demons and making up for being confined indoors this past, freezing winter. And a young Asian woman with a graphic designer/office manager vibe carefully twirled and pirouetted around in oddly expanding circles within a quadrant of the rink, narrowly but nonchalantly missing devastating collisions with other, much faster-moving skaters.

If this was Boston, the scene wouldn't be as diverse or integrated and would have a more closed-off, parochial feel, especially if overrun by the locust-plague-like swarm of college students that descend on "The Hub" each Fall. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, this group of extremely self-entitled twentysomethings feed off the city's goodwill and cultural attributes and convert it into a giant meathead frat party. If it was Los Angeles, the most flamboyant, visually arresting and physically impressive of the skaters would have already been snapped up and signed to a TV show, movie, magazine layout, backup dancing gig or infomercial. If it was San Francisco, the scene would be too cloyingly precious, self-consciously political and strangely annoying.

New York City is a totally bizarre, unique, unlikely place. And yet it is at the same time so concretely, distinctly real-- like an inevitable, essential element in the universe-- that it seems familiar and universal to those who go there. It is a primal place where people's memories and dreams live even if they've never been there before. As for me, I'm not one of those super-booster native New Yorkers. I grew up in Boston and I've never even lived in New York. I've thought, especially lately, about what it would be like if I were to move there. Maybe I would really find myself in New York-- the tougher, snappier, no-bull myself. But myself better not be out on the roller skating rink. Because one thing I know for sure-- I can't skate.