DONAL LYNCH
‘I still look back on it with a morbid fondness, like Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom’
Ihave always been terrorised by the idea of missing out. In my mind there have always been several divergent fates and several parallel-universe versions of me having substantially more fun. That FOMO paranoia, really, was why I moved to Manhattan at 27 without a job, a clue, or knowing a single person there. It seemed to me to be the centre of the known universe, the one place I could be sure that nothing better was happening elsewhere.
I would finally be able to relax and wallow in the present, I told myself, and the fantasy iterations of me — the one who sensibly continued with law; the one who realised a deposit for a house wouldn’t save itself — could instead stew in jealousy. And everyone assured me that I’d fit right in, in New York. In the words of the song, they promised me Broadway was waiting for me.
It wasn’t. The first shock to my system was the living situation. A decade of Sex and the City had led me to believe that freelance journalists lived in massive apartments in Greenwich Village and began every paragraph with, “I got to thinking...” for $4 a word.
In fact, a closer television template would have been
Ralph Wiggum in The Simpsons when he announced: “I sleep in a drawer.”
I lived in a tiny former tenement apartment in the
East Village where the shower was in the kitchen and rats’ arses hung out of rubbish bags on the railings outside as they gorged themselves on the contents. The interior of the apartment was too squalid even for the rats — I subscribed to fellow East Village resident Quentin Crisp’s edict that cleaning is pointless because after four years, a room can’t get any dirtier.
My neighbours included a one-eyed woman called
Hot Dog (so named because she had thrown someone’s dog onto a huge bonfire in Tompkins Square Park during the East Village riots of the 1990s); a mosaic artist who expected payment in cocaine rather than cash, and a priest who’d once been involved in one of the biggest heists in America.
To me, it all seemed fantastically Bohemian; thousands of miles, literally and figuratively, from the Dublin suburb where I had grown up. I felt like I was finally home.
I worked in television, booking guests who had usually undergone some terrible yet newsworthy trauma to appear on a magazine-style news programme. The producer I worked with described it as being akin to making a sausage: “Nobody wants to know exactly what went into it, but they all eat it up.” I wrote articles. But mainly I lotus-ate, working just enough to pay the gargantuan rent, and deferring thoughts of growing up.
I made lasting friendships and had a terrible relationship — I actually inspired him to return to heterosexuality (he eventually married a woman) — which I doggedly persevered with. I was inspired by the words of another friend, who described his own resignation to a dysfunctional long-term relationship: “Sometimes you are so far over the bridge that it seems longer to turn back than to keep going.” When I look back at photos of the time, I am astounded by how young I was, but at the time I already felt too old to change.
When I moved to Manhattan, I thought you could never be unhappy there because of the endless possibilities of such a big city. But after a while, your world shrinks to a few blocks and a few people. Each immigrant remakes their own small town there.
Still, to come home would have been to admit defeat. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, I preferred to reign in hell than serve in heaven. I could have made everything much easier on myself if I had just got married but I didn’t think I could fake being in love to immigration officials, never mind my actual boyfriend. That left pretending to the US State Department that I was indispensable to America, which my Better Call Saul lawyer assured me was a lock. It wasn’t, and my bad luck came not in single spies but in battalions.
On the July day my Green Card application stalled, I also suffered a dramatic back injury lifting furniture, which left me in so much pain I could hardly turn the pages of the letter telling me I’d have to stay in visa limbo. America’s hospital system is designed for the very rich and I had no insurance. I could have stayed on illegally in the long term, as many do, but, for once, realism took hold. After three-and-a-half years, my Manhattan adventure was over. I came back to Dublin to lick my wounds and suckle on the teat of socialised medicine.
At the time, it seemed like a tragedy. I went into mourning. The novelist Joseph O’Neill says that anyone who lives in Manhattan is condemned to live the rest of their lives with “a taint of aftermath” and I carried this as I tried to make the best of life at home in Dublin.
Almost a decade on, I wonder what would have happened if bad luck had not intervened on that sweltering summer day. Manhattan is a town where young people climb over each other to get better jobs and better dates. It’s really not a place to grow older in. If I’d stayed, I’d never have met my partner, the first man I really loved. I’d never have seen my nephew and niece grow up.
And yet, as bad as things were in New York, as precarious and overextended as my life was, that three-and-a-half years had the vividness of a second adolescence: I still look back on it with a morbid fondness, like Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom. I’m due to take a trip back this year for the first time in many years, but I need to steel myself for it. There’s a part of me that always mourns every time I see the place. “Leaving New York, never easy,” Michael Stipe sang. “But I saw the light fading out.”