My City, My "Kids"

This is the essay (with some additional tweaking) that had my friend tell me that my writing needs to be longer and seen outside of facebook.

I wrote this last year when I was mulling over the fact that the 1995 film, ‘Kids’ was going to turn 20. I usually write what haunts me, freaks me out, and tugs at me one way or another.  And it’s usually best for me to jot things down as soon as possible and plow through those “shitty first drafts”. That’s okay. Polishing comes later. So does feedback. And new perspectives. And spell check. All those come with time. The important thing I think, is to get your angst-y rant down on paper somehow (or canvas, or song, whatever art medium works for you). It doesn’t just have to live in your head. It can be a ‘thing’ that reaches others. I can tell you that the more I write, the less I am haunted.

Here is my take on ‘Kids’ getting up there in years- and how it relates to me.

My City, My ‘Kids’

My city, my real city, is Manhattan.  I'm referring to it as "Manhattan" and not "the city" or mention any particular neighborhood because... well, it's the overall love of the borough I'm trying to convey here. It's where I was born and slightly raised before we moved to Queens. We moved when I was still a baby in 1977 because in the 60’s my mother’s father rented out a 3 level apartment house in Elmhurst and also because one day as my father was having a smoke out on his Manhattan fire escape, he looked down and noticed a couple of little boys beating up on another little boy out in the street.

“You better leave me alone or I’ll tell my mother on you!” the poor boy defended.

“Your mother? I’ll FUCK your mother!” one of the other boys mercilessly shot back with a laugh.

He either said that or, “I fucked your mother!” Either way, it was a “motherfucking” issue and it disgusted my dad enough to consider moving us to his in-laws in Elmhurst, borderline Maspeth, where balconies/terraces replaced the fire escapes. As if kids weren’t as bad in the outer boroughs and three level apartment houses. Out of all the boroughs I’ve ever spent time in, whether living in Brooklyn, visiting family in the Bronx, staying with family on the Upper West Side, or staying with boyfriends and friends in Brooklyn and the Bronx, it was in Elmhurst borderline Maspeth, Queens where a man had captured me from behind one night, shoved me into his car in order to continue assaulting me, and flung me back out into someone's driveway, only a block away from home. So much for chasing security. Have stupid, not so nice things ever happen to me in Manhattan? Sure. But the worst, most violent, frightening event that ever took place in my life happened in that nice little Queens neighborhood.

I prayed to get accepted to LaGuardia High School of Music, Art, and the Performing Arts, to get out of Queens and back into Manhattan, even if just as a student. My prayers were granted most likely because I got down on my knees in my bedroom floor one night pleading, looking up at my 2nd floor ceiling, imagining an open minded, merciful God to hear me out. To me, Manhattan was club music with MTV's Downtown Julie Brown at the Palladium.

And cool club kids, not Queens Center Mall gals with 80's teased hair and New Kids on the Block pins on their acid wash denim jackets and school bags. 

Even the more bad-ass Guns-N-Roses iron patches were too provincial for my taste. Or too whitewashed. My dad once emphasized to me that New York will always be the center of the world. Since then, I've felt a kind of worldly privilege walking on those glittery midtown sidewalks, especially by myself, as if I were touching great Hollywood monuments and where Life trembled and happened.

The film ‘Kids’ is actually 20 yrs old next year. I had just turned 18 when it came out so I was about 2- 3 years older than the Kids. And I think it technically took place in the summer of '94 or '93 so I might have been even closer to them in age than that. As degenerate and neglected as the ‘kids’ are in this film, as dreadful as the story unfolds, as exploitative as I think the director was, particularly in the blunt tutorial scene and the little 8 year old's getting high, what makes me feel at home or nostalgic about that film, is its authenticity. The people involved in this movie were not Hollywood transplants working in a fake studio with New York accent lessons from their voice coaches, this was the real deal. Okay so Leo Fitzpatrick's from Jersey, and Chlöe Sevigny is from Connecticut, but still.

But I slammed it back then at the Children’s Express interview, a syndicated newspaper that often held roundtable youth discussions. I was so up and arms about its negative representations of NY teens "today". A few days later, a reporter from a British newspaper called my house to discuss my opinions more. I paced around, in and out of the rooms in Queens and told him that the fight scene in Washington Square Park was in a way realistic even if it did blow out of proportion. I said that in subways especially, accidentally bumping into someone can potentially cause a hot blooded, riled up response, that escalated violence from an innocent bump was not exactly unheard of. The interviewer chuckled in disbelief. If I had the chance to do that conversation over, I would also try to convey my initial feelings after seeing a movie so raw but so unmistakably “Manhattan” and "now”. That afterwards, taking my long walk back home, crossing the 59th Street/Queensboro bridge, I took in the air, that skyline, those skyscrapers. I passed a painter halfway into the bridge working on his skyline landscape and with such inner confidence told him how nice his painting was coming along. He thanked me and I said you’re welcome as I continued walking. The side effects from watching ‘Kids’ aside from aching over the sad horror of the characters and plot, included an eerie sense of connection to my city that day.

And there in the front is Rosario Dawson, Lower East Side/East Village, born and raised :)