And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he’d expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. [...] I was confirming Sadik’s estimation of the city’s allure, I suppose; its consequent power to corrupt. With the Wall Street boom, Manhattan was humming, new developments cropping up everywhere; men and women barely out of their twenties already enjoying ridiculous wealth, the fashion merchants fast on their heels. The beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess, all of it dazzled my senses; there seemed no constraints on originality of lifestyles or the manufacture of desire-a more expensive restaurant, a finer suit of clothes, a more exclusive nightspot, a more beautiful woman, a more potent high. Uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation, fearful of falling into old habits, I took on the temperament if not the convictions of a street corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will.
My reaction was more than just an attempt to curb an excessive appetite, though, or a response to sensory overload. Beneath the hum, the motion, I was seeing the steady fracturing of the world taking place. [...] I had no guide that might show me how to join this troubled world, and when I looked for an apartment there, I found Sugar Hill’s elegant brownstones occupied and out of reach, the few decent rental buildings with ten-year-long waiting lists, so that all that remained were the rows and rows of uninhabitable tenements, in front of which young men counted out their rolls of large bills, and winos slouched and stumbled and wept softly to themselves.
I took all this as a personal affront, a mockery of my tender ambitions — although, when I brought up the subject with people who had lived in New York for a while, I was told there was nothing original about my observations. The city was out of control, they said, the polarization a natural phenomenon, like monsoons or continental drift. Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union...
