The Day I Became A Real New Yorker
In the most New York way imaginable.
When I was twenty years old, I quit my job as a tv news reporter in Anchorage, Alaska, and bought a one-way ticket to New York City. I was obsessed with Manhattan and fantasized about the day I’d finally be rich enough or old enough to move there, whatever came first. I grew up on a gold mine outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, where winters were long, cold, and dark, and summers were worse than winters because the sun never went down. I hate the sun, and I’ll throw a party when it implodes one day. I’ll shake my fist in the air while saying, “That’s what you get for giving me such bad insomnia as a child.” I’m more of a moon person anyways.
I didn’t know anyone or anything when I moved to Manhattan. Everything I knew about the City I learned from Reading Rainbow, Weekend Update, or the movie Splash. But by the end of my first year, I was basically the Mayor. I knew the best deli for a sausage egg and cheese breakfast roll, I could recite all the subway stops and transfers with my eyes closed, and I could steal a cab in the rain from a Wall Street bro. I had friends and enemies scattered throughout the five boroughs.
There’s always a debate on what makes you a real New Yorker. Some people say you must live there for ten years; others say it’s when you get run over by a Super Shuttle. I agree with both…
