COMMON MORTALS Kinship in New York City.

STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE NEW YORK CITY, CHRISTOPHER KLIMOVSKI FINDS HIS WAY FORWARD VIA AN UNDERGROUND NETWORK OF FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS.

Over a disco brunch in the Lower East Side with my friend Matheson, I recounted a particularly difficult moment in my assistantship at an emerging fashion magazine. He sipped on his blood orange mimosa and mused, “Living in New York City is like being with an abusive boyfriend who everyone loves and who can help you get where you’re going. You just have to put up with the beatings.” Was he right? Absolutely.

In the time I’ve been here, I’ve been told by a homeless man that I have “death in my aura”. An elderly Asian has spat on my knee in the subway and a grown man in a diaper once demanded milk from me as I scurried past him to get to a warehouse party in Bed Stuy. Not to mention the 16 hour work days, the difficulty of forging an entirely new friendship group and email after email of rejection from potential and current employers.

My name is Chris. I’m a 25-year-old Melbourner who took the plunge and moved to New York City to pursue my journalistic dreams in what people have colourfully called my “quarter-life crisis”. Most people come here to see their name in lights. I came to see mine in print. Having finished my college degree majoring in Law, I decided that I’d take the time to give my dreams a go rather than follow the ‘responsible’ path and work 9 to 5 just to stay alive, as Beyoncé put it.

In saying this, I faced a challenge from the start. Just as you would imagine, this city is teeming with creative types. These creatives either know heavy hitters within the industry, or alternatively know nobody and rely purely on the connections they make beneath the social substrata in order to stay afloat. The latter are what I deem the “common mortals”.

Common mortal code works as follows: A barista (common mortal 1) will give free coffee to the 20-something who works at the local bodega (CM 2) who will go on to give the barista cheap or free cigarettes, milk, bread, etc. The barista would also have served the door person of a nightclub (CM 3) and receives free entry when they want to dance. The door person knows the bartenders who give them and their worthiest friends (CM ∞) free drinks. And so on and so forth. Basically it is an interconnecting web of everyday assistance created not out of symbiotic business needs but sheer spontaneity fueled by kindness and repeated with reciprocity.

It is essential to be a part of this support system when one lives in a city where it is an expectation that you work multiple jobs, none of which pay enough to keep you there. When I first got to the city, in order to determine whether I could be classified as a common mortal, I mentally went through the checklist. I had the low paying retail job under my belt, an assistantship at an emerging men’s fashion magazine (unpaid) all the while submitting work I had completed in my spare moments to differing publications (on a freelance basis). Overworked? Check. Poverty? Check.

I was geographically isolated enough to qualify for eligibility. You see, all neighbourhoods in the borough of Brooklyn have slowly but surely begun the (shudder to use the phrase) gentrification process. Hipster bars, clubs and eateries with names like Pies And Thighs are popping up everywhere. All except for mine. I live in Bushwick. Not “They’re shooting an episode of Girls here!” Bushwick but “They shot several girls here” Bushwick. Geographic isolation? Check.

All I needed was a friend to show me how the city operates when you look beyond what a nouveau-New Yorker sees. This is where social media saved me. On my fifth day in New York, I attended a party called Iconic at the Monster, a notorious West Village institution. The night’s host was Bronx-born DJ Joey LaBeija, who specialises in “scary

I took in a deep breath of the sweet, garbage-esque aroma thinking, how fucking lucky am I?

and sexy emotional stripper music”. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the basement lighting before I made out that Joey was, in fact, a mutual appreciator of my Instagram photos. I approached him to query whether this was the case and was greeted with a giant hug of recognition. I thought to myself that maybe this new chum with neon blue hair would be able to help me traverse the daunting realms of New York City nightlife. However, I wondered whether Joey could be considered a mere common mortal based on his apparent musical talent and success. Maybe those who achieve New York nirvana only do so by accumulating so many connections that help them, and vice-versa?

We stood on the balmy streets of the West Village verbal vomiting whatever first crossed our minds, with little-to-no filter. During our gab, we both realised we were out of cigarettes, to which Joey mentioned he knew of a bodega around the corner. He approached the shop owner, addressed him as “Papi”, asked for five holding up his fingers and the bodega owner gave him five loose cigarettes for basically nothing, lighting the one Joey put into his mouth. In a plume of smoke, Joey exited the bodega in a New York rush. I offered the bodega owner an “hasta luego”, and stepped back out onto 7th Ave South. I took in a deep breath of the sweet, garbage-esque aroma of my new home thinking, how fucking lucky am I to have met a friend who has the keys to this city?

Since that fateful day, a month passed and the entire city began to make more sense. I came to understand how the bohemian, scruffy surfer managed to barely work but be out ever y night at New York hotspots without removing t he Velcro-laden wallet f rom his pocket. The more I hung around newly-made New Yorker compadres, t he more common mortal practices I managed to pick up and subconsciously implement i nto my daily routine.

Every two weeks I would hit up Mohammed at the corner store with a respectful “AsSalaam-Alaikum!” and ask for six, which I’d take to the local laundromat and share a cigarette with Marta while she’d update me on how the father of her children had done wrong by her yet again. From there, I would catch the train to SoHo and go to Saturday Surf NYC (one of the only establishments in this city that pride itself on coffee to Aussie standards). I would talk to Mitch about the date he had the other night over a black coffee drip and a cigarette I had given to him and then head off to offer the same hospitality to others at my workplace within this unspoken community.

I began caring about the lives of the strangers who surrounded me – the people who truly made this city tick. Everybody in New York City has come here with a purpose, whether it be realistic or a pipe-dream. I’m blessed to be a common mortal in this city, I reflect, as I’m given a free toasty by my new friend Klara at the Vegan café where she works double shifts.

Friends back home ask me on repeated occasions how my New York experience compares to that of Carrie Bradshaw or that of Hannah Horvath, to which I simply reply, “different”. I’m not surrounded by self-entitled, how-the-fuck-do-you-manage-to-live-in-a-two-bedroom-apartment-in-Williamsburg-when-you-don’t-even-work trust fund brats, but after encountering those types, I’ve realised I would never want to be. It wouldn’t be my New York experience if I didn’t have a Matheson, a Mohammed, a Marta, a Joey, a Mitch, a Klara and all the other common mortals of this truly stunning city.

At the end of the day, when the hustle and bustle has given my tired ass a Chris Brown special, I’m fucking proud to say that I am one of them.

more: Find the author on Twitter @KhrisWarhol.