Erotic City

Having lived in New York for a while, it takes a lot to impress me, wow me. It's one of the problems of aging I guess, that you can only have so many first moments, that soon enough you will have experienced this before or that before or something really close to it, and you lose that wide-eyed wonder that can happen when you first encounter something. When I first moved to this city, I was wowed by most of those clubs and bars I went to, me new to the city and never having experienced anything like those places. Having gone out so many nights for years and years now, I have become dulled to nightlife's capacity to make one feel lucky to be there, someone lucky to be here, someone so fucking glad to be alive, that somehow for an evening, you made it past the gates and landed in some cool alternate universe with amazing lighting, great sound, and beautiful people.

Last night, I went to the Shade: Shame party out in some massive warehouse in the wilds of Bushwick. I had originally said that I was not going, that I hate paying covers, let alone a $25 cover. After drinking all day on the Christopher Street Piers with Nik though, who was going, and after getting a call from another friend encouraging me to go, I didn't want the party to end, and said okay.

I am so happy I did. Even approaching it, I started to get that giddy expectation that I was going to something really cool. We had to cross a footbridge elevated over some railroad tracks to get there. It added to the allure that this party was cultivating, that of some rave in a secret warehouse that you had to get directions to the day of. I paused on the footbridge, standing over these railroad tracks running between these factories in this part of Bushwick I had never been in, looking toward the city, Freedom Tower aglow and towering over that line of buildings I trace in moments when I imagine home.

My mouth dropped again when I walked through the door and was confronted with insanely amazing lighting in this amazingly huge space. The sound was fantastic, insides-jiggling, no mater where in this warehouse you were. I was blown away in a way I haven't been in years. Pondering the logistics of it all, all the insane planning that had to go into this one night to make it work, and for it to work so well, to be so amazing, the cover didn't seem like a big deal at all. It felt so good to be wowed, to feel be at an awesome party with all these amazing people, everyone dancing, everyone loose.

I was a bit high, a bit drunk, and kept chasing poppers most of the night. I saw a lot of faces I hadn't expected to see. Everyone was in a great mood and it was so nice to encounter people in such a setting.

There was a moment late in the night when Prince's "Erotic City" was played in the midst of this otherwise very dance-heavy dj set. I was the happiest person in the world at that moment. I danced and danced and felt loose, unconstrained by whatever things normally constrains one from dancing how their body, not their mind, is telling them to move. It felt so fucking good.

I walked home over the Metropolitan Ave bridge over Newtown Creek, the second bridge I stood on that evening, admiring this view over this industrial body of water, factories the main thing around, Pumps strip club a block or so ahead, last call customers hanging out front, car headlights moving down the roadway, neon signs, and the smallest little trace of daylight starting to announce itself.

The Smashing Pumpkins - "Thirty-three"

About two weeks, I quit my job in hospitality. It ended a chapter of my life that had run for too long, boring its readers, boring its writer, a section that dragged on and on, unable to conclude its rambling prose. It was five years of my life. Five years ago, I was unemployed, some party-loving twentysomething who did enough odd jobs here and there to barely make ends meet. Based on a friend's anecdote about how much the S- Hotel was going to pay, I decided to apply there, knowing very little about hospitality, but liking the sound of making what sounded like a lot of money at the time. It was a strange interview experience and my lack of knowledge about hospitality paired with my life of partying all the time made me what they were seeking out, some idea of cool to help represent their hotel in its opening rather than people with any actual discernible skills relevant to working in a hotel. And because I worked with other people who just wanted to party and have fun, it was a beautiful place to work for a particular moment in my life. I had a lot of fun and time blurred, and soon enough, a couple years had passed and somehow, without me ever intending to, I was working in hospitality.

I moved to the N- Hotel a couple years ago, wanting to do something different, seeing perhaps more opportunity to grow with a hotel, wanting a change of that hectic pace that for a while I had found so exhilarating, wanting something a bit more adult, sedate. 

Somewhere in these five years, I turned 30. That was a big moment of self-evaluation for me. I became really aware of where my life was headed, that all this time had already passed and it would be so much easier for time to keep passing and me to soon enough be a grumpy hotel manager in my forties, in my fifties, grumpy because it was a job I had never set out to do, because there were dreams of other things, because I would have felt that there were skills unused.

Something needed to happen, some change. Jacob broke up with me and that further inspired these thoughts about what to do with my life. The happiness I had from being with him distracted me from the world and what I was doing (or, really, what I was not doing). With the source of this distracting happiness gone, I saw things I hadn't in a while. The rose colored glasses were gone, smashed on the street. I saw that I was some person doing a shit job I didn't really care about and which often brought out the worst in me, a defensive sassy, over-it queeniness, just a general crabbiness. 

This could not continue. At one of Nick and Diego's house parties, I met a copywriter and talked to her about her job, intrigued by it, wanting to know more, it sounding just like what I should be doing, that it would be the best way to monetize the skills that I know have, that I am good at, skills that I would like to put to use as much as possible, even in some commercial capacity, writing copy for brands, selling the world stuff it probably doesn't need. She recommended that I look into portfolio schools as a way to build my book so I could get a job.

And so last summer, I started going to portfolio school in the evenings after work. For the past year I have been running on empty, getting maybe four hours of sleep most nights, working during the day at the hotel, going to school at night so hopefully I could someday not work in a hotel, and taking long subway rides seemingly all the time.

The hotel job ended about two weeks ago. My last day of class was about a week ago. Also a week ago, another birthday passed. Time is marching on and on, and I am scampering up behind its fast legs, trying my best to keep pace. I started interning a week ago at a big ad agency doing copywriting. The hope, the prayer really, is that by the end of the summer, I can convert this internship into a job. 

I am making my bed every morning before I leave my house from now on. Today was the second day I did so. I am finding myself really into the World Cup. I am really emotional these days and just want to hug everyone in a way that will convey my joy, my love, to these people. I am trying to be an adult. I am trying to remember to be good, to be nice, to be the human I want to be. I am trying to keep front of my mind always the knowledge that I am in charge of what I do, of where I go.

there is graffiti on a blank billboard near the BQE saying "Know Gods Just Work"

At the courthouse downtown, I spent forty-five minutes in a security line just to get into the building. I was there to see my friend get his citizenship and was really excited for him. The line was making me very angry. For a moment, I had forgotten some of the worst aspects of this country - the exercising of power just cause, the security theater set up everywhere now post-9/11, the maze of bureaucratic bullshit that you are totally powerless against. It was worse than any airport security line I have ever been in, and this just to go to a citizenship ceremony. It made me so angry that these people who were about to receive their citizenship and their families, this really meaningful day for everyone here, everyone all dressed up, that they were corralled tightly into this maze of a line, guards yelling at everyone to tighten up the line, move in closer, turn off your phones, take off your belts. A lot of unnecessary yelling. And, of course, no one challenges this treatment because everyone just wants to be able to get into the courthouse. These guards know this and act like total fucking assholes because of it. 

Forty-five minutes after standing in the line, this line that they made a really pregnant lady and a man on crutches wait in, this line that the lady in front of me had a panic attack in and had to step out of line to sit down on the floor, I finally made it into the courthouse. My rage at the bullshit that is power in the US subsided once I saw my friend and sat with him and another friend in this massive room. It was a beautiful moment to witness and the presiding judge actually gave a really sweet speech about his own immigration story that made me really emotional.

There is a lot to love. I want to be here. I love this country. I want it to be everything it can be though and I don't know how to make that happen. I don't think anyone does. How do we step back from this security state we live in so that we don't spend 45 minutes in lines getting berated by guards, made to feel like elementary school children lining up for some fire drill? 

After the new citizens were sworn in, the entire crowd said the Pledge of Allegiance, and I don't think it had ever sounded as sweet as it did in the room. That closing phrase of "with liberty and justice for all" lingered and floated around the room, an ideal that sounded so perfect, all we could ever hope for, what this land is supposed to represent. We grasped up at the phrase, bits of a blown dandelion, trying to hold on to it. The sun was shining brightly outside the room's windows.

I bought some hair bleach after and spent hours trying to take the color out of my hair, to make it as white as possible. The result is still a bronzy yellow. 

With my yellow hair, I left my house last night, quote a bit stoned, and walked up to Spritzenhaus where it was a classmate's birthday. I made a mental note to do this more often, to walk around North Brooklyn at night while stoned. It was such a beautiful experience and I had some great thoughts. It was the best walk I had had in forever. I had forgotten one of the best benefits about warm(ish) weather, how you can get more thinking done in it, because a half hour walk outside at night isn't a big deal, isn't something that you want to take a cab through, or hurry through, huddled up in your jacket. Instead, you can walk at whatever pace matches your own mood, take in the scenes, and try to recall what used to be where this block of massive condos is now on the side of McCarren Park, that you know these weren't here when you first moved to this neighborhood eleven years ago, and that you can't recall exactly what they used to be, that your memory is fading, that even the memory of that New York is fading away. It gets harder and harder to hold on to old street maps, to remember what used to be in each of these places, each of these new fancy restaurants and bars along the stretch of Graham Avenue nearing the BQE. But then you see R Bar, a bar you had forgotten about it. It is still there. There are still some older regulars perched on barstools there. For a brief moment a decade or so ago, the bar had held gay underwear parties, and you used to be really cheap and all about any sort of free drinks, and so would go and strip down to your underwear for the free drink promised to people in their underwear. You were there with Matt, you think, back in those days, so far gone. There is a dead pigeon underneath the BQE that you almost step on. There always seem to be dead pigeons underneath the BQE.

I got to Spritzenhaus. I didn't have my classmate's number to text him and see where he was in this packed beer garden. I did one awkward circle around the bar, too stoned for any setting other than a crowded bar setting, not this everyone sitting at their tables with friends thing. Analogies to the cafeteria on the first day of school here. I couldn't see him and felt too weird and so left. I walked back home, tracing more memories, taking in the beautiful night clouds that were visible last night, passing the nail salon called Cutie Calls, there this entire time I have been in New York, entertaining me this whole time with its name, me talking back to the sign, saying, "Oh, really? I wish, but sadly he is not calling."

memorial

Finally, summer has arrived. I sat on a beach yesterday, Jacob Riis Beach, and dipped my legs into the Atlantic Ocean. The water was still freezing cold, too cold for me to go all the way in, but the weather was warm. The sun was shining. I was on a beach drinking vodka drinks surrounded by friends. I smoked a lot of weed and the day took on a glorious haze that the best summer beach days will take on.

Various tabloid covers were screaming about Virgin Rampages and Homocidal Virgins. I passed these papers in subway kiosks, in a bodega where I bought chips, in a bodega where I bought a Straw-ber-ita. Whatever that is. It tastes like the syrup from a Shirley Temple.

It was cool and refreshing and it is what I was drinking while I was on the subway platform at Broad Channel waiting for the A train. It was what I was drinking when I got a ticket for an open container.

I didn't want the day to end. I spilled out of the subway into Metropolitan. I drank beer and talked to various people and at some point, my desire for food, led me down Grand Street, toward my burrito spot.

I lay in bed eating a pulled pork burrito. I lay in bed still covered in sunscreen and sand, too tired to shower it off. I thought of skin and human beings and boys I wanted to have sex with, boys I have had sex with. I wanted to be on the sand again under the sun next to the ocean. I wanted that clarity brought on by that haze, everything eliminated from your scope of concern except for the things on that beach. These days are here now, these days of summer that are why I live in New York, that make all those cold and miserable months worth it. It is for this release, this sense of freedom.

Elton John's "Mellow"

We were lying side by side jerking off. I had my head pressed against the top of his chest. The had recently set outside his window behind some clouds, the sky now a deep shade of blue, something approaching black. There were deep shadows that ran down his chest, the outline of his pecs, of his abs, clearer than normal in this lighting. It was a beautiful sight. Every now and then I would cast my eyes out the window to take in the sight of the sky. There were lingering storm clouds, majestic looking things against an evening sky. His beautiful body, the beautiful sky, and back and forth, back and forth, hands stroking his cock or mine.

The skyline was familiar, a comforting thing to see. This guy lives two blocks from where I used to live on Meserole Street. I recognized the buildings out his window, saw the spires of that one church, the clouds forming some spectacular shapes behind it.

I had been lying in my bed earlier in the day, tired after having drank a bottle of rose with Diego in our backyard, had been napping, looking at various things on my phone, Scruff among them.

There was a message from this guy. I immediately perked up from my sleepiness and messaged him back. I didn't think I was going to hear from this guy anymore, had given on him. This is the guy that I hooked up with on 4/20 and who I had thought was so cute and sexy. I was a stoned mess that day and so the sex wasn't that great, and I had assumed that's why he never really responded to my messages to him afterwards.

Two messages were exchanged, a how's it going, a I want to touch your body, before he asked me to come over. I threw on some clothes and rushed over to his house. We smoked some weed at his apartment and then took off our clothes and had really fun sex against his window as the sky did incredible things.

After we wiped ourselves off with tissues and put on some clothes, he offered me a cookie sandwich that he had made. I stood in his kitchen eating this massive thing even though I don't really like eating sweets, did so just because it was something he had made, something he had offered, and as it was more reason to hang out with him and chat some more.

And I wish it wasn't true about not wanting things, not desiring things - that it's when you want something, want someone, that you are not going to get it, that only once you have forgotten about your desire for a thing does that thing come your way.

I walked home from his house, enjoying the dark sky, knowing that I had seen it shift to this current color over the past hour or so, knowing that things change but not that much and that if you keep your eyes on the thing, the changes are subtle, slow, that the transition makes sense.

"You Are Your Mother's Child" - Conor Oberst

I was punched in the back in the fourth grade by this classmate, someone I think back of as some budding serial killer. I am pretty sure his name was Jeffrey. He was from a military family, from Alaska I think. This may have been third grade, maybe fifth. The teacher was out of the room. I don't remember what I did to make this guy angry. I remember him raising his fist high and slamming it against my back. It hurt so bad. I smiled at Jeffery in response. I wanted to cry. I smiled, fighting back tears, not wanting this person to see, not wanting any of my classmates to see, how much I hurt, how much this person had been able to affect me. He hit me again and I smiled again, a crazy fuck you smile, my eyes watering with tears that were no longer doing such a good job of hiding. The teacher came in soon after and we resumed class, she having no clue about this psychotic scene that just took place, two emotionally distant kids trying to hurt each other while a class of children looked on. He punched me and I smiled as way of saying: that's nothing, you're weak, wanting to hurt his sense of pride.

He was gone in a year or so, family relocated to another military base, where he would be the new, out of place kid in some other classroom, probably again resorting to violence to deal with his situation.

I sometimes like to attribute, on days when I am prone to meandering, nostalgic thoughts, my poor posture to this moment, that ever since that moment, there was always some fear in the back of my mind, however small, that someone was going to come up behind me and punch me in the back. As a result, I tell myself in these thoughts, I crouched inward, a defense mechanism, hunched shoulders, back turned in, always braced for a punch that I still fear coming some 25 years later.

I have been made more aware of my posture lately because I injured some muscles in my shoulder a month or so ago while lifting weights at the gym. I went to a doctor, who prescribed me physical therapy to help heal it. In these two physical therapy sessions I have been to, they have explained to me that my injury was probably due to my posture. They explained it in ways that I don't entirely understand, but which seem to make a lot of sense. I knew I had bad posture, but wasn't aware that it was so bad that it could cause me physical problems. They have given me various posture exercises to do at home, which seem really easy, but because of my poor posture, are actually really difficult. I wish I could take this physical therapist I saw today around with me everywhere for her to tell my how to stand and where my shoulders should be.

I am trying to take as much advantage of this physical therapy as possible right now as my health insurance will probably be ending soon. A couple days ago, I turned in my two week notice to my job. My days in hospitality are quite literally numbered now. I can't believe it's almost here, that it's going to happen. I think for a little while there, I had thought I might be working in hospitality for life, it having already been five years or so. I am so excited to see what it is like to wake up two weeks from now and not think about what various disasters await you at a hotel full of rich, needy people, to not think about such petty things even when off from work in the evening. I wonder where all that mental space devoted  to that will soon go. I am so excited to find out.

I had a burrito tonight.  I have one just about every night these days.

we lived for music

"She has her solitary meal, as spartan an athlete's before a race (some say to avoid occlusion of the drugs she plans to take), as they scream drunkenly. And then, just as the Polish barbers who stand all evening by the stoop are turning back to go upstairs to bed, she slips out of her hovel - for the queen lives among ruins; she lives only to dance - and is astride the night, on the street, that ecstatic river that flows through New York City as definitely as the Adriatic washes through Venice, down into the dim, hot subway, where she checks the men's room. An old man sits morosely on the toilet above a puddle of soggy toilet paper, looking up as she peeks in, waiting himself for love. The subway comes; she hurries to the room in which she has agreed to dance this night. Some of the dancers are on drugs and enter the discotheque with the radiant faces of the Magi coming to the Christ Child; others, who are not, enter with a bored expression, as if this is the last thing they want to do tonight. In half an hour they are indistinguishable, sweat-stained, ecstatic, lost. For the fact was drugs were not neccesary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn't care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone."

-Dancer From the Dance, 115

Elton John - "Amoreena"

It started on Saturday. I was getting my hair cut at a neighborhood barbershop. They started playing Dog Day Afternoon on their television. I didn't immediately recognize the movie even though I had seen it some years ago. I was instantly taken with the opening. There was a beautiful Elton John song playing that I was not familiar with, but which had those qualities that the best Elton John songs have: somehow even though you only half understand the lyrics, you are sent tumbling into some deeply sentimental state, realizing the beauty and comedy in the sadness of this human life. Even though you don't really understand all the lyrics, you can hear it, the meaning, in those piano chords, the moments of restraint and then the clanging build, keys pressed harder and harder, and in Elton John's voice its sad wails sings his subject's name, Amorrena. You can hear what it is he is feeling. You feel it too. It doesn't even matter what he's singing, what the words are, because you know what he's saying. You hear the feeling.

This song happens over shots of a seventies New York City, images of which always stir something inside of me, which show the city I dreamed it to be before moving here, shows the city in some state that seems in some ways better, shows a time now forever lost before air conditioning and cellphones and everyone staying indoors to play on the Internet, before huge impersonal chain stores ate up every single block.

Together, the two of them, the song and those opening shots of seventies New York that it serves as the soundtrack to, sent me far, far off somewhere. I have been there since Saturday. I like wherever it is I ended up. I play the song on repeat again and again throughout the day, wanting this feeling, this sentimentally to continue, still hearing the deep feeling in this song each time, sometimes hearing new aspects to it that I had not heard in the many, many previous listens to it over this past week.



I have been reading Dancer From the Dance this past week also, often doing so while listening to the album this song is from, Tumbleweed Connection, on my headphones as I ride around the city. I listen to this sad song about ardor and distance and read this novel about a gay culture also gone, men struggling with the closet in a way that I think will feel more and more foreign to people just discovering their gayness, that the process they will go through will be so different (thank God!) than what men of these earlier generations went through, and this book will seem so silly and repressed to future generations who may not get what these emotional struggles were about. There is so much shame and self-loathing on just about every page of this novel. I love those subjects though, which is probably why I like these early gay novels so much. My head is swooning reading about these moments, seeing so much of myself in some of these scenes, in some of these actions:

"That night he got out of bed and put on his maroon polo shirt, which everyone said he looked so handsome in, and went downstairs and drove off in his car, where he did not know. He just drove. He drove around that wilderness of gas stations and fast-food franchises that surround Washington as once the armies of the Confederacy had, drove around in that crimson glow of doughnut shops and new-car showrooms, in which all things, cars, faces, bodies, gleam with an otherworldly light, and he kept driving - never admitting what he was about - until he came to Dupont Circle and there he stopped and got out under the green trees and met a man and went into the park and blew him." (73)

As once the armies of the Confederacy had [surrounded Washington] - what a gorgeous and unexpected phrase for describing the suburban fast food places encircling DC.

I sigh at pretty turns of phrase, at scenes of love, at the way Elton John's voice says everything sometimes, at the cute guys on the subway, at this one guy I see on Scruff who I have an insane and probably hopeless crush on. There is so much beauty out there to see and take part in. Just keep playing that song you like. Play it again and again without care if it makes you feel like this, makes you feel more alive.

Paul Simon - "Under African Skies"

I was a bit stoned when I arrived at Black Bear Bar last night for the Xanadude party, a bit buzzed on whiskey. I heard a Smiths song and got really excited for this party, was really surprised they were playing the Smiths, as I thought the party was all dance music. Unfortunately, the Smiths song was coming from the party in the main room. Xanadude was happening in the back bar and was indeed straight-up dance music. It was dark, it was crowded, bodies pressed against bodies. Soon after getting there, this one guy started dancing with me. He danced closer and closer. I kept backing away from him, doing a circle around him get on the other side of him, all because I wanted to dance, to feel my limbs move with rhythms. I felt cramped. This guy just wanted to dance close and flirt. The darkness had me wary. I didn't know who I was dealing with. I have terrible night vision. I didn't know if he was cute or what. He would punch me lightly in the stomach every so often in a way that kind of turned me on, the thrill of violence. I escaped a couple times to go to the bathroom. Each time, I could hear another Smiths song coming from the main bar, some Morrissey theme to the night seemingly. I kept thinking I was at the wrong party. Will someone please make a gay Smiths night somewhere, please?

Every time I came back to the party, I would linger in back, taking in the scene, trying to eye friends through the darkness. Somehow in the darkness, this guy kept finding me. I couldn't escape him. He was nice and so I wasn't trying too hard to do so. Also keep in mind that I was stoned and had very little social skills as such to try to extricate myself from this situation. I kept on eyeing people I had crushes on but was unable to pursue them as I had this person dancing against me all night. I saw an acquaintance, a beautiful man who I have a crush on. I decided that it would be a good time to dip out of this scene, that I didn't want my crush to see me grinding dancing against this person all night. I told the dancing guy that I was going to pee and instead left, another Smiths song I loved playing as I walked out.

I got a burrito from the Mexican truck on North 6th Street. There were packs of gays on the march, a Saturday night, people looking good, looking for sex. I had different priorities. I just wanted to go home and lie in bed and eat this burrito and dream about boys. In some ways, I get more pleasure from these imagined encounters with people, of what I might do, than the actual things, me leaving a bar where various crushes were because I was too stoned to shake off this one boy. It was easier to leave.

But let me tell you one thing, I don't regret the decision. If you had tasted that burrito, you would understand.

anniversary

Eleven years ago, I moved to New York, this city I am still living in, that in many ways I feel married to. I have dated some guys while I have lived in this city, been in love with a couple of them, thought I would marry one of them. It didn't last with any of them. I am alone on these streets walking from here to there, alone until I realize that this is my man, this is my love, this is who I am married to.

I used to dream about moving to this city as a child. It seemed cool, exotic, slightly dangerous. It held the promise of everything my suburban upbringing seemed to lack. I imagined some bohemian life of poetry and cocktail glasses clinking all the time and conversation until the early hours. The city is and is not like those fantasies. It is whatever you want it to be, whatever you make of it.

A lot has changed. I have. New York has. Bars I used to like no longer exist. Good friends have moved other places. I sometimes wonder how they did it, how anyone could leave this. And then there are days when I don't wonder that, days when I wonder whether I may soon some day leave all this, the city I love erased more and more each month, bookstores closing left and right, record stores all gone, frozen yogurt places and drugstores on every block multiplying. The diviness that I love requiring more and more seeking.

But you can look at these signs of change, 16 Handles and Duane Reades, and focus on them, get depressed about things, or you can look at the gorgeous limestone and brick buildings that this city is made of. You can look at the beautiful and ugly people that walk up and down these streets, all of them walking with places to go, determined. You can look up from your own circular thoughts and see a man who makes something in you crumple because he is so goddamn sexy. You can wonder where he goes out, where he came from, and where he is headed to. You can wonder this until another person catches your eye, which will happen not too soon after if you are alive to the environment around you, if you are open to this city and what it has to offer. You can see the confidence with which that woman in that nice trenchcoat marches down the street. There is an energy here that I love, that is somehow part of the landscape here.

Last year, unhappy with the direction my life had been taking, I decided to make some changes. I applied to school for advertising, where I am now writing this, from an industrial building on the Dumbo waterfront overlooking the Manhattan Bridge. I got a tattoo on my wrist of this date, 4/24, to always remind me how I felt when I moved here, with what enthusiasm and dreams I had at that point, how hungry I was to take on things. I have gotten that back. You can't be lazy here. Or, you can, and you will be unhappy. But it's about staying hungry. We walk fast for this reason - there is palpable hunger out there in these crowds - it's invigorating, something that gives me charge.

It's amazing to look at the sun shining on the East River below and to follow its shorelines, seeing the outline of lower Manhattan, thinking of all the people who have been here over the centuries, all of them hungry for the promises this city holds.

New York, I love you. I am not going to let you down. I am going to be the man you love.