Letter From America
Wall Street wildness and New York bohemia have been cowed by Metoo
‘Personalities with big laughs and fearless opinions abounded – until recently’
It’s New York, 5.30pm, and my friend of some 20 years orders yet another gin and tonic before he starts on the previous one.
We’re meeting at a sort of Irish pub in the East Village. He keeps trying to stammer out a story. I’m concerned because I know he – father of two, solidly married – rarely drinks these days. He’s remembering a love affair from around the time I met him, in his mid-twenties, when the city seemed like a frontier town of unfettered romantic coupling.
They used to drink a lot, the two of them, he says, and walk around town, singing David Bowie songs, and fall into bed semi-conscious. They’d wake up destroyed and head over to their Wall Street jobs.
Who knows what happened during the in-between hours? He doesn’t. It’s a blur. By lunchtime, they’d be calling each other chuckling. It ended after a year in the normal way, with tears and recriminations. They both found other partners, several times over. She went into publishing and is now a Metoo activist. He’s genuinely terrified because there’s talk of a Metoo article in the works about Wall Street and ubiquitous rumours of probing phone calls to ‘sources’.
It may have nothing to do with him. There are other more publicly conspicuous figures higher up the ladder at the same investment bank. But he has made sinful amounts of money over the years and presents a juicy target. Now he feels suddenly ultra-vulnerable and genuinely unnerved. Those others above him feel even more so, he says.
As I watch him sweat and swear sotto voce, I too am unnerved. Is he telling me the full truth? What should I do if he gets monstered and becomes a pariah like many others? I suppress an ignoble thought: he’s an old friend but not a particularly close one.
This guy used to be a wide open, noisy character, something of a legend in his office life, loudly barracking people around him, joshing women for too-tight skirts and men for too-eloquent ties – an epitome of Wall Street where forceful personalities with big laughs and fearless opinions abounded – until very recently. It seems like another age.
This was the year that saw the end of that whole historical phase, the era of wild parties, big experiences and risk everything for the moment. Now it’s the morning after. Perhaps it should be, considering the decades-long casualty list from addictions, overdoses, HIV and family bust-ups. We’ve swung over to an era of what Schopenhauer called ‘individuation’: actions and utterances going back decades are picked over, analysed and scrutinised.
Throughout the city, in all professions, at parties and restaurants, the mood has changed and everywhere the grand corporate cowboys have muted their manner. They all have something to fear, having plied a bruising path to success with a little too much relish and colour.
At the very least, they have spent years making tasteless jokes at or within earshot of women employees. Some have done much worse and not just at holiday parties. As such, they deserve retribution.
But the inquisition’s scattershot damage, its pitiless Chekist lack of due process, the conflating of small offences with large, and its elephantine memory have spread a police-state blanket of gloomy self-consciousness everywhere.
The palpable outcome is that New York’s confidence – its ageless sui generis culture – has paled; perhaps the country’s with it. In my early years here, either side of 1990, Wall Street hatched all the best off-colour jokes and churned them out daily. From there they spread city-wide and out to the world. Meanwhile, New York’s bohemian quarter offered a fertile, Dionysian, magical realist world: the globally renowned downtown where life was experimental and its artists, poets and musicians highly libertarian.
The arts community today is in the vanguard as enforcers of the new grimness. My first girlfriend was a typical denizen – an exotic dancer/intellectual/ budding writer. She lived for big moments, intense fun and reckless flirtations. The New York of that time accommodated it and forgave it. She ultimately became a senior figure at a well-known university.
In my first job here, I worked as a low-paid intern at the Village Voice, the mouthpiece of bohemia. One slow day, the office empty, Jack Kerouac’s first wife, Edie, came walking in – on an impulse, she said. He was long dead but she wanted our opinion on the memoir she was writing.
I hid my bafflement. We chatted. A sinewy, denim-clad veteran of the Beat era, she had married him to get him out of jail, and then worked on the docks to subsidise his writing. She embodied the indomitable adventure of America. She had no regrets; she didn’t measure her life as success or failure but as pure experience, like one of her many horizonchasing car journeys from East Coast to West with Kerouac.
‘We spent every day trying to move on from who we were the day before,’ she told me.
That America – her America of new beginnings, self-invention and reinvention that bred boundless optimism and risk-taking – is vanishing.