EVERYONE WANTS TO BE SOMEBODY

There is a bar on the ninth floor of a hotel on the Bowery where, on any given Thursday, you can watch about forty people wait to be discovered. Nobody is there to be discovered by anyone in particular. The point is the waiting. The point is to be seen waiting, by other people who are waiting, so that later, when something happens to one of you, the rest can say they were there.

I say this with love. I am one of them.

The drinks cost twenty-two dollars, which is roughly what the room would charge you to exist in it if it could. The people who work there are more beautiful than the people who drink there, which is the correct arrangement and one of the last places in the city where the hierarchy is honest.

The thing nobody tells you about ambition is that it is mostly just standing around.

A woman I had met twice told me she was leaving New York. She said it the way people say it, which is like an announcement and a question at the same time. She wanted me to argue. I didn't have it in me that night, so I said, "Where?" and she said, "Somewhere I can afford to fail," and I have been thinking about that sentence for a month.

Because that's the thing. This city does not let you fail quietly. It is too expensive to be mediocre here. You have to be somebody or you have to leave, or you have to become the kind of person who has made peace with the fact that your rent is a subscription to proximity — to other people's somebody-ness — and that the subscription is the whole product.

I don't think that's cynical. I think it might be the most romantic thing about the place. Everyone here is paying to be near everyone else. Nobody would admit that.

The room at 1 AM

By one, the room has sorted itself. The people who came to be seen have been seen and are now bored. The people who came to work — the ones with a list of names in their head — have worked. The rest of us are in the corner by the window, which faces nothing, talking about apartments.

Apartments are the only truly universal subject in New York. Money is vulgar, work is boring, sex is complicated. But everyone has an apartment story, and every apartment story is really a story about what the person was willing to endure to stay.

Someone told me they'd lived for a year in a room with no window because it was four blocks from a bar they liked. I said that was insane. They said, "You don't have to tell me," and looked out at the nothing.

You can't afford it. That's fine. Nobody can. Stay anyway.

What we're doing here

I started this — the thing you're reading, the whole archive — because I got tired of watching nights disappear. You'd have an evening that felt like the center of the world and by Tuesday it was gone: no photographs, or the photographs were bad, or they were good and nobody ever saw them, or they were on a phone that got stolen on the L.

So this is a table. You come in at 5 AM, you empty your pockets onto it, and you leave the pockets emptied for someone else to look through. The receipts, the people, the confessions, the girl who said she was leaving.¹

We're not going to make you famous. Some of you are going to be, and it won't be because of us. But you'll be in here. Numbered. That's a kind of promise.

Footnotes

1. She hasn't left. As of this week she has a new apartment on Henry Street with a window. ↩