New Yorkers were. It was true, I learned that night, that if you tried to
stop them on the street, a lot of them kept on walking, shaking their
heads; those who did stop didn't look at you at first. They gazed off down
the block, their faces closed. But as soon as they realized you weren't
trying to hustle them or panhandle money, they warmed right up. They
looked you in the eye and gave you detailed instructions about how, to
get to the Empire State Building, you went up nine blocks and made a
right and cut across two blocks and so on. They even drew you maps.
New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly. Later, Lori and
I took a subway down to Greenwich Village and walked over to the
Evangeline, a women's hostel where she had been living. That first night
I woke up at three a.m. and saw the sky all lit up a bright orange. I
wondered if there was a big fire somewhere, but in the morning Lori told
me that the orange glow came from the air pollution refracting the light
off the streets and buildings. The night sky here, she said, always had
that color. What it meant was that in New York, you could never see the
stars. But Venus wasn't a star. I wondered if I'd be able to see it.
The very next day, I landed a job at a hamburger joint on Fourteenth
Street. After taxes and social security, I'd be taking home over eighty
dollars a week. I had spent a lot of time imagining what New York would
be like, but the one thing that had never occurred to me was that the
opportunities would come so easily. Aside from having to wear those
embarrassing red-and-yellow uniforms with matching floppy hats, I
loved the job. The lunch and dinner rushes were always exciting, with
the lines backing up at the counter, the cashiers shouting orders over the
microphones, the grill guys shoveling hamburgers through the flame-
broiling conveyer belt, everyone running from the fixings counter to the
drinks station to the infrared fries warmer, staying on top of the orders,
the manager jumping in to help whenever a crisis cropped up. We got 20
percent off on our meals, and for the first few weeks there, I had a
cheeseburger and a chocolate milk shake every day for lunch. In the
middle of the summer, Lori found us an apartment in a neighborhood we