‘I never made a secret of where I was from, and I was punished for it.’ : Poisoned the Big Apple

Every morning Mel rises grimly, pulls his pants on over his pajamas and heads out to move his rusting old Buick. He notes with relief that the sign saying “car has no radio” remains lodged in the side window. Then he stumbles back to bed.

There are no Draconian parking rules where Mel lives, and, as a matter of fact, Mel has a garage. But Mel is a New Yorker and, despite 17 years in sunny Sherman Oaks, he compulsively shifts his car from one side of the street to the other, day after day, driven in a way that only a New Yorker can be.

Mel (not his real name) cannot let go. He’s one of untold thousands who dwell physically in Southern California but remain stranded psychologically in New York, prisoners of a culture they left far behind.

The subject is a delicate one, of course, and only now are scientists and scholars beginning to address it openly. But research is scant, and in some ways people like Mel are really victims of society’s shortsighted unwillingness to provide even a fraction of the funding necessary to learn more about this tragic and complex disease.

Not all see it as a disease, of course. One band of radical New Yorkers meets furtively in the only basement in Los Angeles to preserve their customs and accents. They take turns breaking into one another’s cars, reminisce about famous landlord-tenant disputes and work with spray paint to keep their spirits up. Facing East, they end each session by reading aloud from the New York Times.

Some even read books, although only by themselves. Occasionally one will dress as a foul-smelling lunatic, slobbering and babbling in derangement at his fellows. But they are New Yorkers. They only ignore him.

They can’t ignore their problem, though. Society won’t let them. The snide jokes, the smiles, the sunshine, all combine to remind these people every waking minute of their lives that they are different.

Mel, at least, knows he needs help. So he’s enrolled at the St. Vitus Clinic for Relocational Disorders in Tarzana, where he takes part in a unique counseling program designed to treat ex-New Yorkers. Wrapped snugly in an astrakhan coat, Mel spoke of his problem at a recent group therapy session at the clinic’s Ventura Boulevard offices.

“It’s better now,” he said quietly, leaning forward in one of the orange plastic chairs scattered around the room. “When I first came out here, it was almost unbearable. I couldn’t stand the freeway reflectors.”

Mel came to St. Vitus after an altercation with a bagger at Vons. The youth smiled, asked if Mel wanted plastic or paper bags and even made small talk. Mel was seized with anger and frustration: He wanted to lash out but, as a New Yorker, he couldn’t be sure whether his target carried a concealed weapon.

St. Vitus combines counseling with aversion therapy. Ex-New Yorkers like Mel are thrust into freezing showers with their clothes on and shown videotapes of the IRT in a room with special fragrance equipment that simulates the aroma of stale urine. Outside, in the parking lot, specially trained staff members mug the weaker patients.

But the St. Vitus approach is not universally accepted, and controversy rages over whether ex-New Yorkers are really sick.

“For years these people have been told there’s something wrong with them, that they can’t adopt children or live in certain neighborhoods, that they had to be furtive about where they were from,” said Philip Dowerman, a Queens native who is now executive director of the Alliance of New Yorkers Who’ve Emigrated Regretfully (ANYWhERe).

A lawyer by training, Dowerman is a former teacher who founded the organization when he was denied a job by a school official known to dislike New Yorkers.

“I never made a secret of where I was from, and I was punished for it,” he recalls bitterly. From his tiny office in Westwood, its walls decorated with subway maps and street scenes, Dowerman works doggedly to combat bias and raise consciousness about New Yorkers.

“We’re really not any different from anybody else,” he insists. “When cut, do we not bleed? All too often, in fact.”

Dowerman and other critics scoff at the St. Vitus program. “We don’t want to be ashamed and we don’t want to be cured,” he says with fervor. “We like being New Yorkers.”

For Mel, however, therapy has made all the difference. He and so many like him feel tormented by their background and want desperately to change, and so when they gather in the dingy little room at St. Vitus, clouded with smoke and crowded with the accents of a faraway metropolis, they relish the chance commune freely, kidding about New Jersey, recalling the names of bridges, comfortable in the knowledge that, together, for today at least, they have conquered the thing they will fight all their lives.