Following up on the personal story that began last month in “A Hollywood Ending: Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career,” here’s my take on whether we can ever truly go home again.
When I left my apartment of two decades in Los Angeles last spring, I knew it was the last time I’d ever see the place. I’d never really experienced that particular manner of finality before—walking away from a longtime home with full knowledge I would never again cast eyes upon it—because when I moved to L.A. from the Bronx in 2001, it was implicit I’d have ample occasion to return. My mother was here, after all, so it was still “Carlin homebase,” so to speak.
And, to be sure, I loved coming back for Christmas, and other sporadic occasions, to reconnect with the old hometown. It was and remains the only place in the world where I can strut down the avenue like Tony Manero on 86th Street in Bensonhurst, both master of all I survey yet somehow, simultaneously and incongruously, just another townie. I love that sensation—of belonging to a place so completely and so comfortably. When I walk down the streets of New York, I am home. And if that’s the standard for what home feels like, nothing else has ever come close—even L.A. after all that time.
After my screenwriting career abruptly ended in 2014, I spent the next several years nursing a quixotic fantasy in which I made my escape from L.A. both on a moment’s notice and without a backwards glance. Sleep tight, ya morons! Only trouble is, that’s like imagining yourself racing heroically into burning building to rescue someone trapped inside: It’s an easy scenario to envision when it’s purely hypothetical, unlikely to ever be put to the test.
But over the winter of 2021, from the point at which my wife and I initiated the purchase of our new apartment in the Bronx through the day we left California for good, I had a lot of time to say the long goodbye to L.A.—to come to terms with the idea that I actually was leaving. And throughout that six-month period, I couldn’t get Sean Penn’s elegiac soliloquy from State of Grace out of my head.
State of Grace is an obscure crime thriller from 1990 about the Irish-American street gangs that once ruled Hell’s Kitchen, New York. (The director, Phil Joanou, has made the entire film available on Vimeo free of charge and in high definition.) In it, Penn plays a character named Terry Noonan who grew up in the Kitchen and spent his youth running with the Westies, but who absconded, suddenly and unceremoniously, around age twenty. He told neither his best friend, Jackie (Gary Oldman), nor his girlfriend, Kathleen (Robin Wright); he just disappeared like a thief in the night, his whereabouts unknown.
The story opens with Terry returning to the Kitchen after a decade-long absence, picking up where he left off with Jackie and Kathleen and the Westies. This being a mob movie, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say it ends tragically for just about every character, Terry included. “I thought some things,” Terry wistfully confesses to Kathleen in a scene preceding the movie’s blood-soaked climax. “That I could come back.” He goes on to explain his reasons for coming home, and how he assumed everything would be when he got there, once he’d reintegrated himself in the old neighborhood. He’d pictured it all so perfectly…
But it was only an idea. Had nothin’ to do with the truth, it’s just… a fuckin’ idea, like… you believe in angels, or the saints, or that there’s such a thing as a state of grace. And you believe it. But it’s got nothin’ to do with reality. It’s just an idea. I mean, you got your ideas and you got reality. They’re all… they’re all fucked up.
From State of Grace, written by Dennis McIntyre (with uncredited contributions from David Rabe)
Now, I don’t imagine it’ll surprise you to learn I was not involved with the criminal underworld when I lived in New York, nor did I slip away unannounced in the middle of the night without providing a forwarding address. Nonetheless, Terry’s lamentation played on a loop in my mind’s ear throughout that winter:
I thought some things… that I could come back.
State of Grace is about a guy who learns the hard way you can’t simply come home after all that time away and expect to just pick up where you left off; it’s a cautionary tale about what we expect versus how things actually are. Faced with the prospect of finally going home for good, I wondered: Is that even possible? Or was Thomas Wolfe right? Had I been carrying around a romantic notion of a happy homecoming that had nothing to do with reality?
That proposition weighed heavily on me given that it wasn’t a hypothetical in this instance. Just as my misadventures in Hollywood had taught me to appreciate the vast gulf between expectation and reality, I was about to get what I’d (thought I’d) wanted for so long: a one-way ticket home. I’d left New York two decades earlier in pursuit of prizes I never quite achieved, and I couldn’t help but question if I was coming back for comforts that were no longer there?
The only thing to do, it seemed, was to prepare myself—by tempering my assumptions. “You don’t know what to expect,” I self-counseled, “so don’t get disappointed if some things have changed while you’ve been away. Just embrace it, and if you can’t do that, then at least accept it.”
State of Grace, after all, is a tragedy about a bunch of guys—the thugs who ruled Manhattan’s westside in the ’70s and ’80s, until they were chased out by federal prosecutors and, worse still, entitled yuppies—who absolutely cannot accept their way of life is ending. They can’t adapt. So, I told myself, “Don’t be like those miserable bastards. Learn something from them, if you can.”
Growing up in New York had been the adventure of a lifetime. My friends and I would traverse the rooftops, which were all unlocked in those days, for a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood, or, for more practical reasons, to access our apartments via fire escape on the not-infrequent occasions we’d forgotten our housekeys.
Equally curious about what was under the streets, we’d explore the secret subbasements and fallout shelters beneath the city’s prewar buildings, and venture into unfinished condominium developments left to rot and ruin after the market crash of the late ’80s, where we on one occasion found ourselves surrounded, from the plywood floors all the way up to the rafters, by a gaze of hissing raccoons indisputably displeased with our intrusion.
When we were strapped for cash, we’d post flyers on windshields and slip them under apartment doors for the pizzeria by the subway terminal on Broadway, or we’d set up camp in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria in Midtown, attired as Boy Scouts, and sell Hershey Bars for “charity”—a designation that, to borrow Obi-Wan Kenobi’s dubious rationalization, was true… from a certain point of view.
Later, I went to college on the Upper East Side where I started seeing a student from Queens, and I recall with such fondness the romantic dates we had in that neighborhood, and down in Greenwich Village, and out in Forest Hills, a part of the city that was new to me at the time. When I think that we get one brief shot in life to be young and in love, how lucky I was to experience that in New York.
Hell, my first job when I was sixteen was working in the shipping room of a cosmetics company down in the Flatiron District, and my college girlfriend, whom I later married, was working directly across the street during that exact same period. I mean, what are the chances we didn’t run into each other on some occasion in the deli right there on Fifth Avenue? It’s fun to think we probably crossed paths and didn’t even realize it. New York is both that big and that small.
There’s hardly a street in Gotham that doesn’t evoke some memory for me, nowhere more than my new/old neighborhood in the Bronx. I regard everything here now with an altogether different set of eyes, though. The first time I lived here, it was by fate, not choice; I loved this world, but it was, in fairness, the only world I knew. Later, when I’d return from California to visit, I seldom had time for much more than a memory lane best-of circuit; I was a glorified tourist, rushing to cram in all the city’s otherwise out-of-reach pleasures before I had to head back once again to the Land of Sunshine and Strip Malls.
Now I’m here as a homeowner, a taxpayer, a registered voter. Someone here to stay. When the young lady behind the counter at the dog-grooming boutique, entering my contact information into her database, casually asked if I was new to the neighborhood, all I could think to say was, “In a way.”
Every morning, I go running along the very same blocks where my schoolmates and I would play city-scaled games of hide-and-seek through lots and alleys and step-streets. I pass the once-abandoned condominiums and townhouses into which we used to venture, long since completed and occupied, and I think how the current tenants can’t possibly have any idea that scores of freaky raccoons used to live in their overpriced homes.
I’ll whisk right by the NYPL branch where I was issued my first library card, where I used to devour Encyclopedia Brown novels as though they contained the mysteries of the universe, where I’d Xerox my grinning face like Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success, and where I would often go to do my homework after school rather than return to the apartment where my father was surely drunk and would otherwise hold me hostage to piss in my ear about one stale grievance or another.
I jog past my old grammar school and junior high, which occupy two adjacent blocks on either side of 236th Street—a fairly modest parcel of real estate as my eyes now appraise it, yet during the nine formative years I spent there, it seemed a vast, sprawling city unto itself. All the fights and friendships and schoolboy crushes the campus hosted exist now only in my memory… though many have been known to atavistically manifest in my fiction from time to time, in some form or another.
Such are the secrets this neighborhood and I share exclusive knowledge of, all the little events that took place here—few of them, admittedly, exceptional or newsworthy—that only the two of us still remember, or even knew about in the first place. They serve as fleeting, often pleasant reminders to me of all that’s happened since.
Other changes around the neighborhood are more outwardly apparent. Prewar private houses have come down and modern apartment complexes have been, with increasing frequency, squeezed into their narrow lots. The corner candy store where I bought my comics in the ’80s is still around, though you won’t find comics there anymore; the comic-book specialty shop where I spent half my time and all my money in the ’90s is gone, however.
That’s probably for the best. The neighborhood comic shop was a carefree space to discuss and learn about pop culture, tacitly and blessedly apolitical. To think that ephemeral experience would be there waiting even if the store itself were still in business is precisely the kind of folly Thomas Wolfe warned against, and the kind Terry Noonan, who thought some things, never managed to take into consideration until it was too late. Terry had changed in the intervening years, after all, so why did he assume his old friends and old haunts would be preserved in amber?
My longstanding acquaintances have changed considerably, and some have been easier to reconnect with emotionally than others. A few are almost unrecognizable—one extraordinarily sweet, gregarious guy is now a suspicious misanthrope, profanely and sanctimoniously critical of anyone who doesn’t hold his views or subscribe to his conspiracy theories—while others have become intensified permutations of who they always were, as the less-flattering attributes of their personalities, innocuous enough back in the day (or so it seemed), have since grown cancerously into their dominant characteristics.
There are quite a few “everyday heroes” like them around these parts, I can’t help but observe—that is, guys who consider themselves the sole champions of common sense in a community full of idiots, a community that would be appreciably better off if only their judgment weren’t questioned or their actions thwarted by those of inferior hearts and minds. Their calcified cynicism does not find a sympathetic ear with me.
Look, I was certainly prepared to no longer have much in common experientially with some of my old friends and acquaintances—one of my favorite episodes of Frasier deals with that very subject—but it never once occurred to me we might no longer share the same values. That, I admit, I took for granted. I wasn’t prepared for the dark night of the soul I experienced last summer when struck with the unshakable realization that some old friends might not be—and may in fact never have been—the people I’d believed them to be. Had they changed at some point? Or had I willfully deluded myself about them all this time? I’m still wrestling with those questions. But not, alas, the question of whether we are ethically compatible. That’s a hard no. A painfully hard no.
And to be incontrovertibly clear: When I speak of values, I’m not talking about politics. Politically, it’s pretty much a given everyone here is, more or less, on the same page. No, I mean the casual manner by which those everyday heroes regard their families, their neighbors, their colleagues, and the community itself with seething, self-righteous contempt. To borrow Ted Lasso’s observation, these fellas think they have everything all figured out, so they judge everything—and they judge everyone. And that’s the kinda shit I can no longer suffer; my time and attention are too valuable to me to be wasted on their toxic asperity.
Not everyone from around here—not nearly!—has changed for the worse, though. One old pal, the guy who saved that pizzeria flyer, has made an applied effort to resist pessimism, though his chosen profession sometimes puts him directly in touch with the worst of humanity, and to practice forgiveness, despite the conspicuous dysfunction of his upbringing. This particular gentleman left the neighborhood years ago for the ’burbs up the Hudson, but joyously entertains the notion of moving back—perhaps when his kids have left for college?—every time he passes through this way to meet me for a beer.
And my friend Spinner from high school, still in the Bronx after all these years, hasn’t lost any of his good humor or generosity; he never lets me pay for drinks, and he volunteers at the local animal shelter exercising the “lifer” dogs—my kinda guy. Spending time in the company of old friends such as these, to say nothing of my mother and my in-laws out in Queens (who are so happy to have us back), reassures me the comforts of home need not be nostalgic—that our shared histories endow our relationships with special depth and intimacy, but that our best days together are right now, and yet to come.
In them, knowing their personal backstories with firsthand familiarity as I do, I see people who’ve been through good times and bad on the road from adolescence to middle age, whose experiences on that headlong journey have taught them what Terry Noonan came to understand—that we’ve got our fanciful ideas about how things will be on one hand and reality on the other, and good luck reconciling the two—but who nonetheless haven’t lost their senses of humor, humility, generosity, or community. They haven’t let disappointment embitter them, and they hold fast to their values as the North Star that guides them ever forward. It seems to me that, either consciously or intuitively or maybe a bit of both, they understand that cynicism and resentment come at too high a price to one’s own soul. They inspire me, each in their own way.
I wonder how I must appear to their eyes, and to the eyes of the many longtime residents around here, now in their 70s and even 80s, who watched me grow up—they opened their front doors when I came around trick-or-treating, and several of them employed me at the local businesses when I was a teenager—and were overjoyed to learn I was coming home for good. Because it isn’t the kid who used to live here who came back. That was a different person, from what seems to me like a different lifetime. My memory has been entrusted with that boy’s experiences, but I don’t regard him as someone I once was so much as a familiar spirit who keeps me company, who reminds me how lucky I’ve been to have had such a full life, and that good things are always possible when you keep proper perspective.
And, to be certain, these past ten months back in the Bronx have supplied no small measure of perspective, some of it, despite how deliberately I’d prepared myself in the leadup to my return, rather sobering. A zillion little things about the neighborhood have changed in the two decades since I’ve been gone, yet it is still, I’m pleased and privileged to confirm, recognizably itself. I’d like to hope the same could be said for me.
Thanks for indulging two straight personal essays. On the subject of boyhood adventures and coming-of-age reflections, next month we’ll study some storytelling lessons from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, George Lucas’ other prequel series, just in time for its thirtieth anniversary.
Thank you for sharing this. You do a great job of bringing your old neighborhood to life. When people say “I ♥ New York”, this is what they mean
Since we’re being personal here…
I was born in Brooklyn, but we moved when I was four. We visited my grandmother there from time to time, but I don’t know the place or the people now. While New York may be interesting to visit, it holds no nostalgia for me
I then lived more than ten years in New Jersey. While I might want to revisit for nostalgia, I have no desire to live there
A small city about 50 miles south of Boston… That’s home
Hey, thanks, Dell! Thanks for saying that!
When I was exercising this morning, right around the time this offering had been prescheduled to post, a bunch of other childhood adventures sprung to mind that would’ve been fun to include — I don’t know why they didn’t occur to me before that moment — but then I thought, Probably for the best. This would’ve been a 10,000-word post otherwise! One fun memory I recalled was crashing the parties at a nearby college campus: We were like eleven years old, hanging out with all these college-age students, and they’d grill us hamburgers and give us soda, etc. And there was a video arcade on the campus, with old-school cabinet games, where we’d spend hours. Fun, fun times.
Brooklyn’s a great borough, for sure. My godmother lived in Brooklyn, but other than going down to visit her on occasion when I was very young, I didn’t spend much time there as a kid. I’m way the hell up at the northern end of the Bronx, and Brooklyn might as well be the other side of the planet! (Only Staten Island is less convenient! Haha!) Later, in college, opportunities to get down to Brooklyn and Staten Island presented themselves, because CUNY drew students from all five boroughs, and I made friends from those parts of the city. One member of my grade-school gang moved to Brooklyn in his 30s and still lives there now, so I’ve had many more occasions to get down that way. Love Brooklyn.
It’s gotten very expensive in the last decade, though, owed to gentrification and whatnot. I see that same thing happening now in the South Bronx. One screenwriter friend of mine, who grew up in a very affluent part of New Jersey, recently moved from Chelsea to the South Bronx — right by the “Joker Stairs,” he said! And all I could think was, “Holy shit… if you had seen that neighborhood back in the day!” As a kid I was told to steer clear of that area; now I couldn’t even afford to live there! As I understand it, the Bronx is heavily featured in Joker, but I just can’t with that movie.
The horror film Wolfen from 1981, with Albert Finney and Edward James Olmos, shot in the South Bronx during the whole “Bronx Is Burning” era, and it’s really fascinating to see what the area looked like before it was rebuilt and gentrified. Sweet Christ! And there’s an early scene in State of Grace that also shot in one of those bombed-out, rubble-strewn South Bronx lots, so you can see a bit of the Bronx That Was in that film, too. New Jack City (1991) also features some interesting parts of the Bronx, including the Grand Concourse.
The underrated 1995 crime thriller Kiss of Death with David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, and Nicolas Cage makes fabulous use of many locations in Queens. That movie came out right around the time my wife and I first started dating — right when I was exploring Queens for the first time, really — so it’s like a photo album of the area in the 1990s for me.
The original Coming to America (I’ve never seen the sequel) also makes great use of Queens and Brooklyn locations. In fact, when my wife was in junior high, she was horrified to see that her Wendy’s had become “some cheap McDonald’s knockoff called McDowell’s,” only to realize later it had only been redressed for a movie!
Spike Lee’s movies, including Do the Right Thing and Clockers, make excellent use of Brooklyn locations, as do Moonstruck and Smoke. Brooklyn is a ridiculously photogenic borough!
New Jersey I know very well, as most of my extended family lives there. My mother grew up in Queens and my father in Manhattan, but they were the only members of their respective families that stayed in New York and raised kids here; all their siblings and cousins moved out in the 1960s to the suburbs of Jersey, Long Island, and a few up to the Hudson Valley. Another great crime thriller from the ’90s is James Mangold’s Cop Land, and that movie shot on location across the GW in Fort Lee and Edgewater. Great film — and fun to look at!
You know, the thing about New York — and this is particularly true of people who grew up here — is that everyone has a distinct impression of the Way It Was, or the Way It Used to Be, and while I can certainly relate to the sentiment, it is a fallacy to think New York has ever been static. That it used to be this way, or that way. It’s always been in flux, always been fluid. The thing it was for each of us as New Yorkers, when we were at our most impressionable, wasn’t a fixed state but merely a moment that got fixed in our memory. That’s all. I think the closing shot of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York encapsulates this notion very effectively. When people say, “New York back in the day was X, Y, or Z,” that may very well be true, but that’s only what it was that day. New York is always changing.
Being the committed anti-nostalgist that I am, perhaps in some respects I was well-equipped to return to New York after having spent my entire adult life in Los Angeles. Though I have many fond memories of the city — some of which I shared above — I’d disabused myself of any romantic notions about the place. I genuinely didn’t want to come back to New York as It Was, but rather New York as It Is. So, in some respects, I get the best of all worlds: a sense of both familiarity and discovery. I think that’s lovely, and will likely provide new experiences and insights to inform my writing for years to come…
Hey, thanks for sharing a little bit more about yourself, bud! I certainly love New England, too! A very good friend of mine lives in Boston, and Boston was actually the first place my wife and I ever went together on vacation back when we were in college! I haven’t been there since ’97, but I’m hoping that might change as soon as this summer…
Wherever you call home, Dell, I hope it’s a place of happiness, security, and comfort to you. That’s what it oughtta be for us all.
I love your descriptions of growing up in New York, Sean. Completely different than my upbringing in the woods, but then similar in the sense of adventure. I guess kids find that everywhere. I’m glad you returned with the perspective that you wouldn’t be stepping back in time. It forstalls disappointment but also makes room for new discoveries. And I can understand that the changes in relationships are perhaps the most disconcerting. Twenty years is a lot of time and lives can certainly take some interesting trajectories, including yours. Happy Exploring!
Thank you, Diana.
Yes, I think children have a way of finding opportunities for adventure wherever they are. My father came of age in Upper Manhattan during the Depression, and was full of great tales of his childhood exploits, from the time he and his friends skipped school to go out to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, to running errands for Meyer Lansky (who later paid Dad’s college tuition). Listening to my dad recount his boyhood adventures, I recall explicitly thinking that I wanted to have great stories like that of my own to tell one day, so there’s no question that my sense of adventure, already innately acute, was inspired and encouraged by him, something I wrote about in “Age of Innocence.”
As for your second comment: As I said to dellstories above, having preemptively disabused myself of as much romantic nostalgia for New York as humanly possible, I’ve thereby allowed the experience of returning home to offer me the best of both worlds — that is, a sense of familiarity and discovery. I view this as the start of a whole new adventure! That’s why I wrote these last two essays, really — to mark the end of one chapter of my life and the beginning of the next.
Thanks for coming by to wish me will, Diana! Much appreciated!
I discussed this very same thing in a comment (https://www.seanpcarlin.com/the-lost-boys/#comment-6837)
>I grew up in a suburb community that was barely older than I was. You’d think there was no magic, no mystery there. But there was
Every time some family moved away, by the next day that house was haunted. Never mind that we’d seen that house built a few years ago. Never mind that we’d been inside three days ago. We were scared to go near it. Then a new family would move in, and we’d forget that it had ever been haunted
A small copse of trees was a thick forest. You could get lost in there for days, weeks or forever, assuming you didn’t get eaten by bears or wolves. Unless you actually walked ten feet in any direction, and you’d be back on a suburb street. And closest animals we had to bears or wolves were raccoons and the family dog
Imagination can thrive almost anywhere
I agree, and I love that about kids everywhere. I hope as adults we can retain some of that adventurousness, or at least fake it until we make it. 🙂
Well said, the both of you! Thank you, Dell, for reminding me of that comment. Sometimes I forget how many great conversations have been recorded here on the blog over the years. In many of those dialogues, in fact, you’ll find the germs of ideas that I later developed into their own full-length dissertations, like next month’s planned blog post on Young Indiana Jones, which expounds on a comment first expressed in an exchange you and I had on “Maybe It’s Time.” I really value everyone’s input — I can’t say that enough — because it always compels me to think more deeply about these subjects. Everyone who comments is, in their way, a co-author of this ongoing, real-time project. Thank you all.
I think the trick to being an effective writer of fiction is learning how to think imaginatively as we did so freely and instinctively as children, an impulse that diminishes as we mature (much the same way muscles become less flexible with age), but to also cultivate the specialized skills required to give our daydreams narrative structure and thematic resonance. Right? It’s a tricky dance — sliding effortlessly between the roles of instinctively imaginative make-believer, a formative state most of us lose touch with eventually, and disciplined artist, a rarefied designation relatively few among us ever attain.
I imagine the reason why we love fiction so much is because it gives us the vicarious thrill of make-believe again, that wonderful, “childish” impulse we outgrew somewhere along the way. Good stories remind us of the sublime pleasure of submitting to a fantasy world for a few hours. Such is the reason why being a storyteller is such a privilege. Storytelling is a superpower; it’s as close as human beings come to conjuring magick. To have access to such deep wells of imagination, and yet to also possess the talent/skills to turn those visions into art — into a cohesive, meaningful emotional experience that can touch and affect other people — is a wonderful, amazing thing. A “spirit with a vision,” as Neil Peart once called those who traffic in such creative magick.
That’s something I try to keep in mind on days like today, when I’m running the final few miles of the marathon that is writing a novel, but I’ve “hit the wall,” as they say, and now I need to find those extra reserves of momentum packed away in storage. (To dig deep down, as Blake Snyder calls it.) It’s a great thing to be a storyteller. It’s a great life. It’s worth reminding ourselves of that every so often, especially on the days when doing what we do isn’t particularly easy.
What a great return post, Sean. You touched everything I would have felt. I’m amazed how many of your friends from youth are still there, even if changed. Fingers crossed all works out for you!
Thanks, Jacqui!
Yes, we’ve come home to many familiar faces! As recently as last week, in fact, I ran into yet another old neighbor in the next building over — one I hadn’t seen in well over 20 years! But he remembered me — from when I was yea-high, at that! And even though a fair number of my contemporaries have long since left for other parts of the city, state, and/or country, many of their parents are still here, and I have been explicitly told by those old friends how much reassurance they take from knowing my wife and I are keeping an eye on their folks. Such is the beauty of coming back to a place where you have roots: You don’t have to establish trust with anyone — it’s already implicit.
It feels good to be home, I can tell you that! With last month’s essay and this one, I feel like I’ve said my piece on the issue of my recent life-altering relocation. I’ve “put it to bed,” as it were. It’s been cathartic. And it means the world that you came by to share in that, and to express your best wishes. Thank you.
There is so much chatter about the difficulties NY is having, I’m looking forward to you setting the record straight.
Like anyplace else, Jacqui, New York City certainly has its challenges right now, but I suppose those problems are intensified given its sheer size and singular economic/cultural importance. Instances of crime have risen alarmingly since the start of the pandemic, though our new mayor is a former NYPD captain, so we’ll see what ideas he has. Tourism will return steadily, if that isn’t already underway, but the real economic challenge moving forward is going to be the absence of white-collar workers, many of whom now permanently telecommute, and who, pre-pandemic, supported all those blue-collar jobs in Manhattan: the coffee carts and custodial staffs, etc. What happens to those folks?
These are socioeconomic questions New Yorkers must wrestle with, yes, but, more broadly, they’re existential questions all Americans need to start asking as we emerge from pandemia. What kind of country do we want to be moving forward? What do we owe one another? Can we sustainably continue to be a place in which so few have so much and so many have so little? These are issues Build Back Better, if we can ever get it passed, seeks to (begin to) redress. I am optimistic that the 2020s will be a period of major sociocultural and -political change for the better, but there are many hard questions to consider, and there will be some pain, as there is with all growth. But I absolutely believe this decade will mark the true beginning of the 21st century, and the end of the 20th. And I suspect New York, as it always has been, will be the bellwether of those cultural shifts.
Stay tuned…
You described your nostalgia for the city you left behind vs the reality you’ve discovered so well that I try to imagine it for myself, and can’t. I was raised in the Midwest in a variety of small towns across four different states and though I was happy to grow up there, I was even happier to leave.
On the other hand, if I ever had to leave San Francisco, the city I fell in love with forty-one years ago, I would long to return until my dying day.
Oh, thank you, Dave — thanks for sharing that! That’s the thing about home, you know: It’s a feeling as much as it is a location. You know what home feels like, and, conversely, you know what it doesn’t feel like. It’s like being in love, I suppose — ya know it when ya feel it!
L.A. is a particularly interesting specimen in that regard. With respect to people who relocate there — who come from elsewhere originally, I mean — I found that they typically fall into one of two categories: There are those who come to Southern California and find paradise; they stay for the rest of their lives. Then there are those who come out to try it — a trial basis sort of thing — and discover within a year or two it is not for them. You move to L.A., chances are you’re going to stay for a year or stay for a lifetime — there’s little in between. My wife and I are oddities in that respect: It’s seldom you meet someone who stays for twenty years, squarely into middle age, and then decides to go back to where they came from — particularly if that’s a “harsh” place like New York. (I say “harsh” to mean a number of things, from the winter weather to the neurotic culture to the pace of life to the cost of living. It’s objectively harder livin’ here than it was in L.A., which is why few come back, I imagine… but for all the reasons I made clear in both this post and “A Hollywood Ending,” it was the right call for us.)
I must say, though, that I absolutely love San Francisco! Over the years, my wife and I made many trips to SF (or stops in it on our way up to Mendocino and elsewhere). Spectacular city, with its own vibe and feel — it’s nothing like Los Angeles or New York. I really loved all the time I spent up there, and will very much lament no longer being able to get there on a semiregular basis as we did. Being up in SF, while it didn’t feel like home, nonetheless gave me the pleasure of feeling like I was at least in a true metropolitan area once again.
I hope you never have to leave home, Dave — that SF continues to be the place where you hang your hat and keep your heart forever. And I promise you this: Next time I’m out that way, whenever that is, I’ll let you know in advance! We’ll get a pint at Johnny Foley’s and toast the cities we love!
To reply to the thrust of the essay, going home is indeed a mixed bag. I’m glad for you that you’ve discovered so many positive remnants from your youth. Given the whole rose-colored glasses thing (and as a psych graduate, I can tell you that barring serious tragedy, it’s true that people tend to remember the positive and gloss over the negative), you’re fortunate to have reconnected to so much. And besides, family and a few friends are all any sane person needs.
I loved the detailed descriptions and reminiscences. That’s an escape reminiscent of the detail involved in strolling through Middle-Earth with Treebeard, with the added bonus that they’re true.
So I’m glad that you’re settling in, both physically and mentally. And really, that’s good enough to say that you’ve come home again. : )
Hey, thanks, Cathleen!
Having lived so far away from home for so long was an invaluable life experience that my wife and I would not trade if we could “do it all over again.” Not for a minute. We learned self-reliance, and what it takes to build a life from the ground up. It was also really nice to be so far removed from the everyday dramas that happen within families: the misunderstandings and interpersonal conflicts that are just an inevitable daily reality. We didn’t have to get drawn into that stuff out in L.A., and the novelty of that never wore off. There was definitely a point in our 30s where we couldn’t imagine ever wanting to go back to living amongst family again, with all that entails.
Things do change, though. Midlife changes your perspective. Certainly the collapse of my career opened my mind to coming back. And the pandemic demonstrated in no uncertain terms how unsustainable it was becoming to be so far away from our two remaining parents. Fortunately, I don’t believe we ever got nostalgic to be home. Not really. My wife is a pragmatist and I’m a committed anti-nostalgist, so sentimentality didn’t really factor into the decision. I think it became something we were just ready for, and then the right opportunity presented itself. I will say that having been away for so long, and having demonstrated that she and I are our own family — our own entity, independent from the broader family unit — has made it easier to set boundaries that might not have been established had we never left in the first place, or had we come home from Hollywood after only five or maybe even ten years away.
And I second your observation that family and a few true friends are all one really needs. Part of the reason we chose to come back to this neighborhood is because we knew it would be a welcoming community, one that we’re already rooted in, and that there would be no period of adjustment or appreciable learning curve. We could hit the ground running, as it were. And I think we have. I also think the last year has been easier here than it would’ve been in L.A., during this period in which there has been so much uncertainty re: Are we or are we not out of this pandemic? We spent all of 2020 in complete social isolation, but in 2021, even with the precautions we’ve taken, we’ve been perpetually surrounded by family, friends, and neighbors.
And thank you for the kind words about the detailed reminiscences! You haven’t had a chance to read any of my fiction — no one has (yet) — but it’s very much in the genre of magical realism. Much like Stephen King does — not that I’m comparing myself to the master of horror — I try to create very grounded, recognizable, “realistic” worlds in my stories, and then introduce some speculative element like X-ray glasses or werewolves or what have you that upends the status quo. My creative inclinations aren’t of the high-fantasy variety — I could never write something like The Lord of the Rings or Dune; my mind just doesn’t work in that epic worldbuilding way — but are rather more in line with dark fiction and/or urban fantasy. Hopefully soon I’ll have something ready for publication…
Well, thank you again, Cathleen, for joining me on this two-part journey back home! As I mentioned to Jacqui above, writing about this defining chapter of my life has been cathartic. And it’s allowed me to turn the page on it, at long last. I’m looking forward now to new adventures — both here in New York and in the worlds of my fiction (most of which is set in New York). And I’m eager to explore new themes and share new experiences here on the blog. Thanks for coming along for the joyride!
SPC
Ah, you’re such a beautiful writer, Sean. And what timing here. Just yesterday, I happened to seek out the mansion where my grandmother had once had an apartment. The place was as huge as I remembered, surprisingly, and I drove away happy that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Then suddenly I started having flashbacks to memories of her, and was inexplicably brought to tears while I was driving home. I’m not the same girl, but also not that different from the one who used to dream of living under the sea. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, and I’m so happy you feel like you made the right choice
Oh, gee — thanks for saying that, Suzanne. I’m so pleased the piece resonated with you. And thank you for sharing that anecdote about your grandmother’s apartment.
You know, only an hour ago I went to walk my dog. It’s raining here today, so I just took him back behind the building where we have a wooded area and a dog run. There’s also a playground back there, though it’s been renovated many times over from the steel-and-concrete 1970s deathtrap it was when I was a kid! Anyway, as my dog was off relieving himself, I spied a toy sword that had been recently left in the leaves behind the playground, in this wonderful little copse full of huge glacial boulders, and I suddenly experienced a very acute flashback to playing with my Voltron action figures back there, pretending those rock formations were the cavelike dens from which the mechanical lions used to emerge on the 1980s cartoon series. And just like you did as you drove away from your grandmother’s old place, I became overwhelmed emotionally for a moment. You know? Like I was wormholed into the distant past for an instant, and none of the intervening years had actually happened. Then and now collided.
Such sudden temporal collisions, not to sound like Lieutenant Commander Data, have become somewhat commonplace these past ten months. They can become emotionally taxing, if we let them. But I have learned to see them not as unwelcome reminders of how old I’ve gotten, of how much time has passed, of all the people who are no longer part of my life, but rather as little signs of guiding spirits, or guardian angels, who never let me forget how lucky I have been and continue to be. I recall this concluding passage from Stephen King’s The Body, in which the middle-aged writer reflects on being back in the rural New England backwater where he was raised:
Amen.
Here’s an amusing piece of welcome-home trivia that I think you of all people will appreciate: The doorman here in the building insists on calling me the Fonz, complete with a double-thumbs-up every time I come home, on account of the leather jacket I wear. (It’s this beautiful steerhide café racer my wife bought me when I turned forty, because I think she worried I was becoming old and uncool, and it fields a lot of compliments, so clearly she knew what she was doing.) I am, as you might imagine, simultaneously flattered by the doorman’s homage and somewhat chagrined that he (rightly) considers me old enough to get that reference! But an apt reference nonetheless it is: These are happy days (again), to be sure.
I feel like this has been a recurring theme for both of us of late, Sean, with many threads leading to, from and through. I’ve often compared “going home” to trying to repeat a summer camp experience. Even if the location and the people were somehow able to all align again “next summer,” it’s just not possible for anything to ever be “what it was.” And in trying to somehow make it what it was, we not only frustrate ourselves and add murk to those memories, we prevent ourselves from letting now be all that now could otherwise be.
As you know, I just this weekend released my new book, Alternate Reality: The Better Life You Could Be Living. I hope you won’t mind if I drop an apropos excerpt here, about my first trip to Disney World:
My first ride was “It’s A Small World.” In writing this, I viewed an online video of others going through the ride in more recent years. And I cried. I cried because I still remember so vividly how that ride made me feel as a kid. And it struck me that, while I can enjoy the nostalgia of it, it is impossible for me to ever really enjoy that experience again the way I did the first time, as child-me. Back when I didn’t see veneers and dolls and moving parts and gears. Back when I was being personally welcomed by an entire world of characters who were interacting with me of their own volition, happy that I had come.
And yet, I can still enjoy Disney World: I just can’t enjoy it for what it was, only for what it is, this time.
It’s quite a skill in life—to allow each “now” to be its own thing, unencumbered from expectations, past or present.
It is absolutely a skill that needs to be learned, practiced, and mindfully applied, Erik — more so even with age, I would say. One of the reasons it’s so easy for children to live in the moment is that there are no good ol’ days when you’re that age, no past experiences with which to compare/contrast the present, no then-me proprietarily asserting his memories/impressions of a bygone special occurrence or celebration over the sights and sounds of a contemporary one. I very much meant what I stated in the penultimate paragraph of the post above: that I am learning to regard the then-me who still inhabits the streets of my Bronx neighborhood — and I can’t avoid him, no matter which block I turn down — as a familiar spirit who keeps me company, and who reminds me how lucky I am to still be around. But I don’t aspire to be that kid again — to relive his experiences. That would be impossible, anyway.
I would say the controlling idea of this two-part series — because I consider “A Hollywood Ending” and “You Can’t Go Home Again” to be bookending companion pieces — is the process and complexities of moving on. It’s a theme that admittedly recurs often on my blog — from “Different Stages” to “Through the Looking Glass” to “Maybe It’s Time” to “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″ to “Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — and I think what it demonstrates, in aggregate, is that moving on is not something that’s traditionally come easy for me. It’s a skill I’ve had to cultivate over many, many years, and I don’t think I really had an effective method for letting go of the past until I became a practitioner of minimalism. Minimalism gave me the tools to let go — of material possessions, old hobbies, bad habits, toxic relationships, longstanding grudges, and even nostalgic yearnings. Minimalism isn’t a magic wand — it’s a philosophy-cum-tool that needs to be mindfully applied — but it really helped me “see the light,” as it were. I now evaluate everything in my life on the basis of whether it is worth my continued investment of money, time, and/or attention.
Which goes to the other recurring theme on this blog: Reagan-era nostalgia. Less than a year after launching this ongoing project, I began questioning why so many of the movies Hollywood was churning out were reboots of 1980s IPs. The more I studied the matter, the more convinced I became that our generation, Erik, was using pop culture to live in a 1980s time capsule — that we just wanted to go back to the pre–Digital Age, a desire Hollywood was only too happy to cater to. In my two-part post “In the Multiverse of Madness,” I talked at length about the surprising origins of this generational trait, the ways in which it’s exploited by Hollywood today, and how to recognize those strategies/tactics — the ones that keep us purchasing our childhoods, as if it were a commodity that can be franchised ad infinitum like Star Wars — when we see them at work.
If you look at any of the so-called “legacy sequels” of the past few years — The Force Awakens and Halloween Kills and Terminator: Dark Fate and Cobra Kai — what are all of those endeavors if not an attempt to align the original elements and people together from a moment in time with the desperate goal of recapturing the “magic” of that moment? You can’t, though. It’s gone. Just this morning, the Internet is all abuzz over the news that we’ll finally be getting a glimpse of Michael Keaton as Batman in the new Flash trailer. Ugh. You can squeeze Keaton into that rubber Batsuit thirty years later, but it isn’t going to make you feel like the 13-year-old boy who stood in line for hours during the summer of 1989 to see Batman. Ain’t gonna happen. It’s like riding “It’s a Small World” today and hoping to feel eight years old again. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment — and even disillusionment.
Because as I wrote in a recent comment on “Grounded and Elevated,” Erik, when we try to recapture the emotional experiences of youth — through He-Man or Transformers or Batman or what have you — we realize how childish and silly those stories/characters were (terms I don’t use pejoratively, just to be clear), so we make them “edgy and grimdark” to appeal to middle-aged sensibilities. But all that does is attenuate any value those franchises might’ve still had as reminders of our own innocence.
When we cling so tightly to the past — when we want every experience we have today to feel like one from yesteryear — we close ourselves off to brand-new experiences that might’ve themselves one day become cherished memories. And it’s getting harder and harder to move on with a well-oiled nostalgia–industrial complex packaging and selling us our childhoods. The hardest thing to leave behind in life, it seems, is our then-me.
I’m always so grateful to have your voice in the mix, Erik. You move conversations and ideas and friendships forward, and for that I am exceptionally appreciative. And congrats on the new book (which I linked to in your comment above)! Wishing you the best of success with it and I can’t wait to read it for myself! I imagine we’ll have much more to discuss once I have: You address in Alternate Reality (per the background on your blog) how cable news has offered one reality based in fear, much the way I’ve written about the reality Hollywood offers — in posts like “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse” — based on analog-age backward-gazing. You and I definitely seem to be following the same cultural threads to similar conclusions!
Onwards,
SPC
All of this winds up “coming home” for me, because I see people even in my own family who have never moved on from “the best of times” thirty years ago. They post pictures of times with old friends they haven’t seen since high school, while having made no new friends in decades. Some are so nostalgic for a time when their children were little that they are missing having a deep relationship with their grown children in the present. I see the desperate clinging to the past through entertainment in similar vein. It’s all rather Miss Havisham.
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing! But where revisiting moments from the past becomes trying in vain to live there, we stop living right now. That is what I find sad (and what I’ve tried, in my blog and in each of my books, to help people face and break free of).
The world is changing so quickly. You and I, Erik, came of age at a time in which movies were the culturally dominant form of entertainment (not anymore), baseball was America’s pastime (RIP), climate change was a problem to be confronted by our grandchildren’s grandchildren (now the scientists tell us this decade is our last chance to do something about it and preserve civilization as we’ve known it), and there were no smartphones, which meant in order to call a friend you might actually have to speak to their parents first, in order to learn about something you had to consult a librarian, in order to get somewhere you had to know how to read a map (and the inevitability of wrong turns meant you discovered new places!), and social interactions were conducted face-to-face, not text-to-text. All of that is history now.
And as I’ve written about elsewhere, Gen X is uniquely positioned in history, given that we are the last generation that will retain any memory of the analog age. We were born into one world but have had to live our adult lives in a completely different reality — a digital landscape of which we are not natives — and we are deeply uncomfortable, if not actively traumatized, by that.
So, it’s no wonder we reach for the nostalgic comforts of the late-twentieth century with such reliability! I ache for those comforts, too, just to be clear. The problem, then, isn’t really nostalgia — that’s just a feeling, as natural as happiness or anxiety or lust or anger — but rather weaponized nostalgia. And that’s what you and I were just talking about in the comments of “Young Indiana Jones Turns 30″: that Hollywood (and other corporate entities) have figured out how to sell us the comforts of childhood. Our entertainment encourages us to dream not of a better future, but a better past. But all that nostalgic backward-gazing means taking our eye off what’s right in front of us.
And I know it’s not easy to focus on the present and think about the future, certainly in light of all the intractable and unprecedented problems we face as a civilization. I’ve struggled with that challenge myself, as both a climate activist as well as an Xer who himself yearns for the bygone simplicities of life in the analog age. Hell, this blog — this eight-year-old ongoing project — is as much a diary of my own internal battle to let go of the past as it is a plea for others my age to do likewise, if it would benefit them. To wit: This blog was started just as my professional life was collapsing, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to write about that experience until this past January! I had been trying to cathartically purge that episode of my life for the better part of a decade! So, I of all people know the difficulties and complexities of letting go and moving on.
On the subject of 1980s comforts, I keep the lyrics of this old song close to my heart as a reminder that these — the moments happening right now — are the good old days:
I find that it gets harder with each passing year to live in the moment — to not be seduced by nostalgia for “better days” — but it also becomes all the more existentially urgent with each passing year that we try to appreciate right now. As great as the past may’ve been, it doesn’t hold a candle to the breaths we’re taking in this moment.