So long to the capital of it all

There was a new pope in Rome, and after the voting that had drawn cardinals from all over the world to choose him, the Americans convened a news conference. The men of the church praised the new pontiff with pious uniformity. But then there was laughter. And it was the New York guy who started it.

“When you’re from the capital of the world,” Cardinal Edward Egan of New York began, and then with excellent comic timing turned to the reporters and seminarians and deadpanned: “You all know where the capital of the world is, dontchya?”

“You mean Washington, don’t you?” retorted Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who heads the archdiocese in the U.S. capital.

Everybody cracked up. Clearly enjoying the momentary relief, Egan patted McCarrick on the shoulder and announced, “That’s the first note of disunity we’ve heard here all week!”

There it was again, on the other side of the Atlantic, no less -- that classic, oversized, New York attitude that stomps around and irritates people from other places. The cardinals’ exchange was even funnier if you knew that McCarrick is a native New Yorker and Egan a convert, a late-in-life New Yorker born in Oak Park, Ill.

Real New Yorkers don’t parade their sense of primacy wherever they go. They just believe in it, unshakably and often unbearably.

On the eve of leaving New York to live in Europe for a couple of years, I’ve been thinking about this city the way you muse about a longtime friend you’ve known and loved but can’t ever completely grasp. After 20 years, in my on-again, off-again relationship with this place, I’m going off again, feeling not quite sated. I still want to know more about my friend with the hulking ego.

This is my final “New York, N.Y.” column, my last weekly postcard from New York to Los Angeles. Most often my mission was to find and portray a new world every week, either because it would be completely foreign or fascinating to Angelenos or because I hoped it resonated with life on the other coast.

The more I wrote about New York, the more I found the topic bottomless. Every day I’d wake up expecting to discover a little bit of the city I’d never seen or heard of, and was amazed at how often I found it, sometimes literally around the corner from my Manhattan apartment, other times at the end of a subway trek to exotic parts of the boroughs.

Just this morning, on one of those New York websites that gets passed around by e-mail every morning, I learned that there’s a tiny hole in the wall in Chelsea that sells only cuff links. Imagine, thousands of them, made of enamel or precious stones, styled “formal” or “snap link.” (It almost makes up for the loss of that store on West 57th Street that sold only umbrellas.) Not that I would ever buy a pair of cuff links. But they’re there if I need them.

That’s what makes this city-that-has-everything the capital of the world to devotees. Yet it’s also a place where they can have a circumscribed life. Accordingly, New Yorkers can be worldly and provincial at the same time. Whether on Manhattan’s Upper East Side or in Queens’ Bayside, there are people who rarely leave their neighborhoods. They know their dry cleaner by name, the owner of the corner deli and his conflicts with his mother-in-law. They know the man wrapped in blankets who sleeps on the steps of the Episcopal church nearby.

They bump into friends, the way you do in a small town, except instead of on Main Street, the chance meetings take place on the steps of the Met or on the Flatbush Avenue subway platform. This notion of New York as an assemblage of villages feels both counterintuitive and cozy. Although we pride ourselves on the way we jumble together on subways and sidewalks, that’s also a bit of hyperbole. People, rich and poor, live in separate niches and eye each other suspiciously, under and above ground. For the most part we live in enclaves that can be defined by a social set or a church group or a block or a baseball league.

It’s essential when you live here to acknowledge the worst of New York or you’re deluded. Yes, the city is unforgiving. It’s mean at times. It can grind you down -- and your bank account.

That’s why people have to hold on to their fantasy of the place, the one they arrived with. Though New York has the substance of 10 cities, people seem to fashion an idea of it, derived from movies and books and previous emigres’ word-of-mouth. Keeping intact that image is key to enduring the city and, if you’re lucky, you can take it with you when you leave.

The 2001 terrorist attacks ravaged not just my sense of safety, but also my romantic notion of this place. I started this column a year after Sept. 11 and knew that my neurotic New York was still not in great shape, stumbling in fact. New Yorkers felt then, and on some level still do, that we’re a bull’s-eye for another day. That vulnerability has become part of the dark side of the city that we choose to ignore day-to-day but that strains our lives, like the filth and the noise and the $150 parking tickets.

In recent weeks, I’ve been running across sights and scenes from old columns. I passed three in quick succession the other day. First, I saw the Rat, one of 100 menacing, inflatable rodents, some as tall as 25 feet, that are strategically placed in front of nonunion construction sites all over the city to harass management.

Then, in Central Park near 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, I saw a gaggle of Chinese immigrants-in-love posing in full wedding regalia, on a rare day off from kitchen work, under the boughs of cherry blossoms. And in the background, stopped at a red light, was a pedicab, a bicycle-powered rickshaw, the latest way New Yorkers are dealing with traffic congestion.

There they all were, oblivious to each other but a harmonic convergence of New York stories. In writing about them, I attempted to tie each to something larger or unique about this city: its union squabbles, immigration history and traffic nightmares.

Why should anyone in Los Angeles care about what makes New York “New York”? It’s because so much of the history of this country has come to rest here (see column on Alexander Hamilton, first U.S. Treasury secretary and quintessential New Yorker) or flowed through this city.

Sometimes, I think if you could boil down the indispensable qualities of the world to one bedrock place, one piece of real estate, it would be this one. Not to take away from Los Angeles or Shanghai or even Paris, where I’m headed. New York might not be the capital of the world -- sorry, Cardinal Egan -- but it just may be its essence.

I know I can leave New York, but New York and what I’ve learned will never leave me. For now, leaving is about acquiring a past. When I return, I will have lived in Paris for two years; like a canny New Yorker, I will have immersed myself in a new culture and observed my own from a distance. But I can never leave forever. There’s still something around the corner I didn’t know was there.