I Will Never See the World Trade Center
by Eric Wittmershaus

The moment I finished college, I told people of my desire to do "the whole New York media thing."

Pay off the student loans. Move to New York. Be a face in the crowd. Punch in, punch out in a city full of rats that chews 'em up, spits 'em out and grinds them beneath its heel. "They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down," Bob Dylan sang on Cynthia Gooding's radio show back before anyone knew who he was. Bob made a name for himself in New York, and I would too, I said.

San Francisco would be my training ground. If I could pay the bills there at the height of the dot-com boom while earning something less than dot-com dollars, certainly New York would welcome me with open arms.

In spite of the bravado, I've never been to New York. No matter, I say to people who ask why I'm determined to move to a city I've never visited. I hadn't been to San Francisco before I took a job and moved there. Why should moving to New York be any different?

My first visit — a fact-finding mission, I've called it — is set for November. New York and Boston in two weeks to hang with old friends and do a bit of scouting. The ticket hasn't been bought, but it soon will be, once airline phones have stopped ringing off the hook and it no longer seems tacky to inquire about a trip that will include flying from the East Coast to the West Coast. I will sleep on couches and visit good friends and conduct mini-interviews on things like rent control, the job market and Manhattan versus Brooklyn.

Then I'll disregard all the information I've gathered and move to New York anyway. I'll be 29 and debt-free. I will live in an apartment with a roommate I met through a friend of a friend and he'll feed my cat when I go out of town. I'll write and revise freelance articles for The New Yorker and The Atlantic and a bunch of little magazines I've never heard of, but most will end up on Flak.

Every day will start with the best bagel I've ever had and a big cup of coffee. Despite writerly pressures, I will not start smoking, but I will make jokes about how breathing New York air is practically the same thing, though New York air doesn't compare to the air in London, where bikers' faces are obscured by air filtration masks.

I will become a militant pedestrian, walking briskly past important-looking people without batting an eye.

One weekend, I'll head out to Ellis Island. I'll visit the Statue of Liberty and pitch myself backward through time to when my paternal grandparents came over on the boat from Germany. What would they have said when they saw her, welcoming immigrants to the city that never sleeps, unofficial capital of America the Beautiful?

I'll take an elevator, looking out over the Manhattan skyline from the Empire State Building, once the tallest building in the world and the subject of a million songs, poems and vending-machine pieces of molded plastic.

I will buy hot dogs from vendors, hail taxicabs driven by men who don't speak English and attend screenings of Jean-Luc Godard films at the Manhattan Film Forum with my Armenian girlfriend.

But I will never see the World Trade Center.

E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at ericw at flakmag dot com.