After the ’08 meltdown, the city was pulled together, just like 9/11, against clear and present dangers: Wall St, Sandy, Dubya… There was rage. But my drug-fueled brain-fog saw the fury subsiding in slow motion. ‘Occupy’ fizzled before shaping into the anti-Tea party, Obama’s transparency platform bounced on NSA’s one-way mirror, much like the sun on the new glass condos that kept popping up all over Manhattan. I did a line and by the time I was sober half the stores on Bleecker went either corporate or vacant. Money and labor commodification across finance, high tech, and real estate propelled New York into a new Gotham: hospitals converted to pied-à-terres, and the homeless in my hood quadrupled. We got back to Tama Janowitz 1980s, only this time black Lamborghinis (when not parked by the fireplace inside apartments’ playrooms) screeched down Seventh Avenue confusing traffic with a Batman movie promotion, a Google robot demo, and the NYPD homeless-Flickr-stalking squad. Walking by 432 Park, I had my first skyscraper dizzy rush. I looked up, all the way up—my friends buzzing “Murdoch bought a real estate website for a billion dollars” sounding trivia, nothing spectacular or suspicious about it—“and? next?” Finally post-recession-inequality had given birth to my embarrassing fetish of social darkness.

Ioannis Pappos, Elliman Magazine

I moved to New York to get away from the sun. The places I spent my summers in rural Greece were so bare, I felt that there was nowhere to hide. No shades, no preface, no margin for error or the slightest digression, just the sun’s reflection on the Aegean scrutinizing me. At grad school, in California, my Stanford frisbee days were full of longings for bleak winters. I wanted to vanish into indifferent, dark worlds; Blade Runner’s noir and Varda’s Vagabond road trip. I couldn’t stop obsessing over outsiders: Phoenix, Depp, Cobain, at the time, defined antihero-cool. Palo Alto suffocated me. I talked my roommates into San Francisco trips in search of underground bars. Right where Columbus turned into Montgomery and old bank buildings swallowed traffic within their gorge, I would get a rush. “This is my favorite part of town,” I mumbled once. “Man, you’ll love New York,” my roommate said.

This fixation of disappearing into urban abyss finally brought me to Manhattan. But after 9/11, which shook the city to its core, people didn’t run and hide. Terror anxiety kept uniting them. ‘I am not afraid’ was the sticker. ‘Chin up’. ‘Man up and take the subway’. I could not spot any every-man-for-himself anarchy or vulnerability. We were all about sharing. Oversharing; social media, HBO, tipsy brunches with nasal-upspeaking ‘the real size of a man?’ I landed into a silly New York and I was taking it all in. I kept my white-collar gig and started writing frantically. As reality transcended fiction, I had a manuscript for a novel on the absurd pre-meltdown ’00s.

HOTEL LIVING: The lights dimmed as a picture of the High Line was projected onto the fifteen-foot screen of the Wall Street ballroom.

“I have powers of subpoena, and if you don’t quiet down I’ll cite you,” Eliot Spitzer said from the podium. The eight hundred attendees of the Friends of the High Line 2006 Benefit laughed. “For me, it is part of what makes Manhattan, Manhattan,” said the video narrator, identified as “actor, NYC resident,” and people applauded.

Andrea leaned forward at the Command-sponsored table. “He’s at the central table in front,” she whispered to no one in particular, and the ends of her hair dipped into her risotto. A couple of Junior Associates stretched to catch a look of the movie star.

“Gawel didn’t make it?” I asked Andrea, relaxed.

She kept looking at the screen, enchanted. Rotating pictures of west Chelsea mixed with quotes from activists, actors, and politicians identified as “High Line supporters.”

“You’re almost on what I call a flying carpet. It’s a completely different vantage point.”

“It’s up in the clouds.”
“A demiparadise.”
“It really works for everybody. Because this is, in fact, going to be one of the coolest places to live in all of Manhattan.”

“I didn’t invite Analysts,” Andrea bothered to answer me at the end of the slide show. Then footage from a public hearing I had attended during one of my New York weekends, back in 2003, played. It showed an artist sobbing, explaining to Erik’s community board that the High Line was the first thing she looked at when she woke up in the morning. In the video’s background I made out Erik, with a microphone, facilitating the hearing.

Then I spotted Paul, sitting pretty at the table to my left. When we locked stares he motioned to the screen—where Erik was still visible—and threw a piece of bread my way, which I caught before it hit Andrea.

“I hope you do realize that we are here for a number of reasons,” she said with a what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing face.

“There’s sauce in your hair,” I said. – HOTEL LIVING

At a tenement building in the West Village. My bed stand was stacked with McGarth and Didion, my iPod with Evanescence and Linkin Park, but the moment I walked out the door I was in marcjacobsland; Democrats on my block hosted twenty-thousand-dollars-a-plate-fundraising-dinners. Light years away from the dystopic fantasy which had brought me to New York, I watched Children of Men insatiably and saved The Scream as my desktop picture. I was becoming a juvenile again, hanging out with the twenty-year-old kids of my neighbors.

HOTEL LIVING: Some nigiri lands in front of me and I’m back to Tatiana. The girls are already off on a “new New York” discussion. How “all these glass condos will bring back Gotham.” They talk about how the “best views look into, not out of, the units,” about bird shit on the glass that will make peeping in on people “like watching old damaged footage.”

“ . . . spiderweb-looking window cracks . . .” “ . . . most interesting suicides . . .” – HOTEL LIVING

When the perfect storm finally hit, it was bloody sweeping. Recession shattered the company I worked for, and my lover dropped me—“that hotel living of yours doesn’t really work in a relationship,” he claimed. Having nothing else better to do was my  rationalization for acting out with the kids around me; they could have been my children for chrissake. I stopped smiling in photos (“sexy frown, like we do”) and lounged with them at the Beatrice Inn to score.

The drugs make me sit back and gawk from a distance New York’s spirit being pulled together again, just like 9/11, against clear and present dangers: Wall Street, Sandy, Dubya… Moral confusion and ambiguity evaporated. There was rage. But my drug-fueled brain-fog saw the fury subsiding in slow motion. ‘Occupy’ fizzled before shaping into the anti-Tea party, Obama’s transparency platform bounced on NSA’s one-way mirror, much like the sun on the new glass condos that kept popping up all over Manhattan. I did a line and by the time I was sober half the stores on Bleecker went either corporate or vacant. Money and labor commodification across finance, high tech, and real estate propelled New York into a new Gotham: hospitals converted to pied-à-terres, and the homeless in my hood quadrupled. We got back to Tama Janowitz 1980s, only this time black Lamborghinis (when not parked by the fireplace inside apartments’ playrooms) screeched down Seventh Avenue confusing traffic with a Batman movie promotion, a Google robot demo, and the NYPD homeless-Flickr-stalking squad. Walking by 432 Park, I had my first skyscraper dizzy rush. I looked up, all the way up—my friends buzzing “Murdoch bought a real estate website for a billion dollars” sounding trivia, nothing spectacular or suspicious about it—“and? next?” Finally post-recession-inequality had given birth to my embarrassing fetish of social darkness.

HOTEL LIVING: “I saw your chickens jump around your Carabo,” I say to God [Tatiana’s godmother.]

“My beauties,” God chants.

“Do you have a rooster too?” I ask.

“Oh, I did. But a coyote killed him, with all my Brahmas. Horrible, horrible!” God jerks her hands away, and through her loose neckties poncho I see her wrinkled breasts. “He didn’t kill my Houdans, because they are black and scary.” She turns to Ray: “We are out of gin.”

“I grew up with a rooster,” I say.

“He was my pasha.”


“Stupid people think chickens aren’t smart,” I coke-talk. Her bloodshot eyes rest on me; God is stoned.

“I only care for the overlooked. Even if it is bad.”


“How bad?” I ask.

“Genocide,” God says.

“She is talking fashion genocide,” Teresa yells from the sofa. “She’s shooting Taliban fighters in Burberry checks.”

“How did you talk the Taliban into Burberrying up?” I ask God.

“I see beauty and art where you don’t,” God says. “I see art in Hello! magazine and in the Taliban. I can show people how to kill brands by association, not by bombing malls.”

“So you are decadent,” I tell God.

“You confuse art with education because you are Greek. Greeks obsess with the peak. I’m interested in maturity. That’s why they call me God.”

I snatch a tequila shot, but God’s not done with me. “Maturity is sexy,” she says. “Post-postmodernism, derivatives . . . they are the new peaks. My husband was a hedge-fund manager; he taught me that. That’s why I’ve made Tatiana so convertible. She knows how to arbitrage through life. Stay still or next when she sees a rise,” God says. “I’d rather reinvent than invent. You know that you’re irrelevant, that you’re extinct, when you follow the trend. And that’s when it gets interesting.”—HOTEL LIVING

So what now?