FROM APPLES TO ORANGES TO GRANDE SKIM MILK EXTRA-FOAMY LATTES

I’ve always hated New York City, that poisonous configuration on the other, inferior coast. It’s a ghastly, decaying city, the subject of late-night monologues and front page stories detailing unspeakable atrocities. The Big Bad Apple is continuing evidence that cities are becoming obsolete. Watching New York struggle and succumb has been a sort of national media performance art piece, a slow-motion conceptual choreography of chaos and entropy. But it’s had nothing to do with me.

My hometown is the other, the Enormous Rotting Orange, curse of the Pacific. Imagine how surprised I was when we moved to our university enclave in the Allegheny Mountains of western New York state, and everyone greeted us by saying, “So, you’re the new faculty from New York City.”

“No. Of course not,” I responded. “We’re from Los Angeles.” I realized that there is no term for those who have left Los Angeles. New Yorkers have a status that lasts forever, no matter how long they’ve been away. New Yorkers carry their history with them in their accent, like an audio stain. So do Southerners, for that matter, and Bostonians. But there’s no identifiable verbal characteristic for the former Angeleno. So why are we mistaken for New Yorkers? What could we share with them? Our nervous agitation, for one thing. We talk too fast for this rural world. We express our needs as if someone was poised at our back, about to remove a concealed weapon and discharge it into our flesh. We ask for bread at the market and expect an argument--we’ll have to assert ourselves, entice them into selling it to us. We have an alarming sense of time and immediacy. If we are five minutes behind, that might mean entering the freeway during rush-hour commute, spending three hours in agony, dodging death and being late for our children’s soccer practice or orthodontist. And we’ll miss our tennis game completely. We are scheduled into the next century. We anticipate trouble wherever we go, detours, earthquakes, muggings, cancellations. We have tics and ulcers. We have back pain and migraines. We’ve been overworked for decades. In short, we’re the urban wounded, and in this region, they translate that into three words: New York City. We have a strange squint, too. It’s from wearing sunglasses every day for 25 years. It wasn’t the sun, I try to explain. It was the glare reflecting off the stucco, a harsh, garish yellow that seemed to have glass shards and heartbreak in it. There was a quality in that light that made me think of melanoma and needing to protect my face. “So, you’re the new folks from New York,” the box boy offered. “No. We’re from Los Angeles.” I try to defend myself while preparing for the buying ritual: watching my grocery bags, bodily guarding them while concurrently proving that I match my ID, that my checks and credit cards aren’t stolen and I’m not on the wanted list of any governmental organization.

I’ve never been asked for my identification in Allegany County. But I’m still regularly mistaken for a New Yorker. It’s that delirious postmodern way we have about us, that overstimulated stagger. There’s also that narcissistic, ego-enhancing dialogue that masquerades for conversation in Los Angeles. For instance, when people ask how you are in Los Angeles, you answer with your current aggrandizement. You update your rsum. “I just optioned another screenplay. We’re going to Hawaii.” In the Allegheny Mountains, when they ask how you are, the answer is “Fine.” A variation is, “Looks like the storm’s passing.” Unsolicited personal information about career and new acquisitions is not only unacceptable, it’s incomprehensible. I’m trying not to be mistaken for a New Yorker and I’m also trying to get a caff latte tall, with foamy nonfat milk. I’m trying to do this simultaneously. It’s a stretch, but I’m committed to meeting life’s challenges.

I order a nonfat latte in Cleveland. I’m thinking about New York and Los Angeles, the Big Bad Apple and the Enormous Rotting Orange. These two miserable fruit metaphors don’t seem to be making a graceful transition into the next century. Perhaps cities as sweets may be too literal for the millennium. The new cities, like Seattle and Atlanta, don’t have edible symbols. They are like configurations in cyberspace. They recognize that they are nodes on a network, not the main ports of primary trade routes. They deal in information, not actual cargoes. They’re conceptual. You can’t hold them in your hand and eat them. In Cleveland, where I’m trying to get a latte and not be mistaken for a New Yorker, I’m given a cola glass with espresso in the bottom and a paper carton of milk.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I ask.

I feel agitated. It’s the commute coming on. I’m starting to run behind. My daughter’s piano lesson. The theater tickets. I’ve got 110 miles of zigzagging through the combat zone in the next three hours. That’s if nothing goes wrong, no landslides, no pileups, and I’m beginning to get that tic above my left eyebrow. I am in Cleveland, holding a paper pint of milk.

“See that microwave?” The man indicates an appliance with his hand. “Put it in for two minutes.”

“But the milk won’t be steamed.” I point out. I am speaking slowly, reasonably.

“You’re not from around here,” he decides.

“No.” I pause. “I’m from Los Angeles.”

He pauses too. “Well. We don’t steam around here.”

I heat up my box of milk. It’s not even 2%. In Cleveland they use whole milk.

I hunt coffee in Tallahassee later, in a winter that reminds me of Hawaii. There’s a humid something in the air as I order a latte, tall, extra foam, in a chic shop bordering a plaza of trees that look like willows, the next generation. Later, I learn they are sycamores covered with Spanish moss.

“You’re not from here,” the waiter observes.

“No,” I admit. And stop. “Where do you think I’m from?”

“New York City,” the man replies. Perhaps he can read the pain on my face because he immediately amends, “Chicago?” And no, they only have normal coffee here, no steaming, no foreign imports.

Why am I surprised to be mistaken for a New Yorker? It’s been obvious for years that L.A. is increasingly like New York. There’s been a deepening of the meanness, a quickening of the pace, an escalation in alienation, bitterness. We came for the citrus and it tastes like metal or chalk. The landscape is deceptive camouflage. Between the fronds, everything has been eroded by violence, both human and natural. The urban edge. It’s like swallowing barbed wire. It’s not a morning commute. It’s a garroting. The sun contains the grit of broken lives. The artists. The immigrants. The sequence of American Dreams that turned unexpectedly bad. There is squalor beneath the foliage. Listen to me. The bird of paradise lies. I drink tea beneath trees of Spanish moss and I realize that New York City and Los Angeles were capitals of the 20th Century. They were about the tangible aspects of commerce. In New York, publishing, finance, words and cargoes of things. In Los Angeles, the images of movies, the sounds of the record industry. Products. Box, ship and sell.

I consider the old cities that offered recognizable products. Chicago and its trains, stockyards and slaughterhouses. The docks of New York and San Pedro, in a world where what mattered still came out of crates. Now there are the new 21st Century cities, like cyberspace web sites, a scrawl in a continuum.

In the meantime, I want a caff latte and I don’t want to be mistaken for a New Yorker. I’m learning to speak slower, softer, wait my turn, stand in line. They’ll get to me, they won’t say no, they won’t shoot me in the face. I’m not locking my car every day anymore, or watching to see if I’m being followed. I stop walking like I expect land mines and sudden, inexplicable amputation.

We stay in Rochester, part way between our town and Toronto. It’s a rust belt brick relic, from when the world moved on trains and the Erie Canal. But it is a city, with a symphony series and museums, streets with designer sofas and antique stores where I feel immediately at peace. In Rochester, they understand that New York is a huge state and I live closer to Pennsylvania or Ohio than I do that Bad Apple.

Near a theater where the Kirov Ballet has recently performed, I see it. The cafe with pseudo-Greek lettering that I, a person from Los Angeles, recognize as being, unmistakably, a latte dispensary. Yes. It says espresso. Inside, punk music, underground newspapers, flyers for local bands and art galleries. This is good. Opera and flute recital schedules. It’s 4 below outside but I’m strangely warm.

I wait my turn in line. There’s no one behind me with a knife. I’m not late for a meeting, a lesson, a plane, a cosmetic appointment. I ease my way to the counter.

“One latte grande, skim milk, extra foamy,” I say.

A girl my teenage daughter’s age, with black lipstick and black fingernails, stares at me. “We don’t talk that Seattle lingo here,” she says.

I take a deep breath. My life flashes in front of me. It’s a red montage. The intersection of I-5 and I-10 on an August afternoon, apocalypse crimson, the air fetid. Breathing it is like an act of deliberate mutation. The glare from the stucco, feeling like a burn.

“Is that where you think I’m from? Seattle?” I can barely speak.

She studies me. I’m wearing my second-life art school uniform of combat boots and jeans with knee holes that I purchased from my daughter. I may have done it, erased the mutilated smog residues, the hibiscus with soiled petals, the walls of graffiti threatening in dozens of languages.

“Yeah. Seattle,” the girl says.

I decipher their menu and order a double cappuccino. I realize how far I’ve come, mistaken for a woman not from New York City or L.A., but Seattle. It’s a triumph.

I drink my cappuccino and consider rain, how I now exude the Northwest, thunder, Nirvana, Nike shoes, Soundgarden, Bill Gates and microchips. I’m getting closer to the millennium. It’s an unprecedented personal evolution. I am edging into cyberspace, the Net, cities without specific logos, cities that are sites, that expect to come and go like all things in the natural order. It’s a symbolic victory. They don’t talk that Seattle lingo here, but they have steamed milk, and I’m finally getting those rancid, razor-laced oranges off my breath.