New York Is a Hellhole

The coming and going of the 9/11 anniversary revived the campaign of tyranny that's under way in my family: the drive to convince me to leave New York. I've been having this battle with both of my parents, but my father in particular, since I was 15. That was when the whole gang trekked to Manhattan for a long weekend, family vacation-style, 14 years ago.

My mom, dad, younger sister Mandy and I stayed in a midtown hotel, visited the Met and hung out with my wacky aunt who lived on the Upper West Side. I felt as if I'd opened my eyes for the first time after growing up in sensible Toronto. But my parents and I were watching two completely different movies. In Times Square, which was much seedier then, my dad saw visions of his worst nightmares come true: prostitutes, sex shows, transvestites, pickpockets and beggars, three-card monte, ranting lunatics, traffic and garbage, and in every shadow a lurking mugger with a weapon. Perhaps it reminded him of India, which he'd fled 25 years before. He made the four of us walk single-file along the edge of the sidewalk, away from dangerous alleys.

I found the street theater fascinating. I'd never seen people with such a lack of inhibition, coming as I did from a country where jaywalking is a crime against humanity. Here anything seemed possible. I guess all my father could picture was his daughter in a body bag.

The struggle resumed when it came time for college. I said Columbia, he said Smith. I suggested NYU, he countered with Wellesley. Not only did he want me away from the big city, he wanted me away from men. We fought for months, with him insisting I'd end up destitute and wretched in the Lower East Side. We compromised with McGill, in Montreal, a far cry from New York, but much less expensive and still a change of scene from my staid Anglo hometown.

There I began to orchestrate my escape. I came to NYU for summer school, and never went back. In the early 1990s there was more street crime than there is now, and I took pains to conceal it from my hysterical relatives. I was unfortunate witness to a group of thugs beating up a homeless man on lower 5th Ave. A guy rode by on a bike and snatched a woman's purse. There was a shooting, during a deli-robbery, outside the NYU dorm building on W. 10th St. Midway through the hold-up, the Korean store owner pulled out a rifle and blew the guy away.

But what my dad didn't know didn't hurt him. And that included the gigantic cockroaches sharing my E. 12th St. sublet, and the drug dealers who used our stoop as an office.

On more recent visits, Dad and I would stroll down 9th Ave. from my Hell's Kitchen apartment, and he'd grow incensed over the gum stains on the sidewalk, working himself into a frenzy of indignation. "These people are animals," he clamored.

"Where else can you get Ethiopian, Peruvian and Afghan food all on the same block?" I asked. The smells drove him mad; Toronto was so clean. "You get used to it," I said.

Everything about the city struck him as strictly Third World. I didn't disagree, but I wanted to live here anyway. Our every interaction morphed into a lecture; it became the sole basis of our relationship, the only way he could relate. It was impressive, his unwavering commitment to repeating the same phrases over and over, kind of like a dog who won't let go of a stick. The harder you pull, the more firmly the little teeth clamp down. I experimented with coping strategies, becoming enraged (exhausting), tuning it out (impossible) or trying to be reasonable (a waste of time). As I approached 30, the routine was getting old. Part of the problem was that I cared about what he thought in the first place. Perhaps it's the only aspect of my life about which he feels he has anything to say. If I moved away now, I'm not sure what we'd talk about.

The crusade continues. Now I worry too, about bigger issues than the little irritations that constitute life in New York. Each time some bureaucrat issues a new terror alert, the phone rings. The anxiety in my father's voice haunts me; his worst-case imaginings have gotten worse. I can't explain why knowing that I live in a giant bull's-eye doesn't make me want to flee. All I can say during those endless conversations is I'm not ready. Not yet.