September 17, 1998

Since trying to be a better person, I've taken stock of a lot of bad things about New York that I was ambivalent about before. The amount of badness and sadness in this city is quite amazing.

I've already talked at length about the downtown S&M clubs where suit-and-tie Wall Street men cap off a hard day of making money by having their genitals bound tightly with twine, while leather-clad Dominatrices whack their bare asses with a paddle.

I've told you about the strip bars that the current Mayor is trying to shut down with moderate success. These "gentlemens' clubs" are really places where young, unhappy girls dance in front of middle-aged unhappy suit-and-tie midtown marketing executives while they pull their puds behind the anonymity of a one-way-mirror.

Perhaps I haven't outright said it before, but there are probably more places to buy booze in New York than anywhere in the world. I bet if you drank breakfast, lunch, and dinner in three different bars every day, it would take you ten years to visit every watering hole in Gotham.

The billboards around Manhattan communicate two messages: sex and cynicism. One can't turn their head more than 15 degrees without encountering a giant advertisement featuring a great set of hooters. Either that, or you see some image of young punks sneering at you as if to say "Hey, what are you lookin' at Whitey?! Oh...and buy these jeans!" Often times, the sex and cynicism merge; as in the case of some 50-foot-high foreign chick with big cans and collagen-injected lips snarling at me from high atop Times Square telling me not to wear fur.

The magazine stands or "kiosks" on every corner are filled with porno mags or "fuck books" as we called them back at Fort Riley. Dirty, nasty, crack-addicted, HIV-infected whores saunter up and down 8th Avenue near Port Authority asking if you'd like to have a good time. Dredlock-sprouting young burnouts offer "smoke, smoke" to passers-by near the basketball courts on 6th Ave and 4th.

Rising above them are more billboards advertising legal "smoke, smoke"; ads for Marlboro and Kool, and Virginia Slims. "It's a woman thing."

Shady foreign guys clad in fluorescent orange vests stand on street corners shoving fliers for strip bars in your face. "Come on in and visit our Hug'n'Squeeze Room."

T-Shirt shops in the East Village hang garments in their windows bearing the logos of angry young local bands with names like "Fuck Jesus" and "The Bloody Virgins." Across the street, sitting on dignified old stoops, matted-haired, sunken-eyed kids in worn-out army fatigues pick zits on their greasy faces and hock loogeys into the paths of passers-by.

And those people passing by are often young women with big boobs and tight shirts and short shorts; women that put me in a constant state of lust. Thank God the cold weather is coming soon. By November, those fever-causing curves will be safely hidden beneath big woolen peacoats.

Let's see, what other kind of sinning goes on here. Oh yes, there are still more billboards encouraging folks to go lose money in Atlantic City and, in certain clubs on Christopher Street, there are black and white photos depicting men making each other airtight.

Then there is the sin of greed epitomized by the Wall Street young bucks--26-year-olds driving Audis and BMWs--but embodied by just about every white-collar professional on this island. And there is the sin of neglect when it comes to the thousands of mentally ill homeless folks wandering around, existing pitifully beneath any acceptable human standard.

Shame on us.

But enough preaching. You get the point. To walk around Manhattan is to be constantly bombarded by sex and lust and greed and depravity and drunkenness and cynicism and Godlessness and moral indifference. But you know, that's probably the case everywhere. It's just more concentrated in New York.

What I've painted is not a pretty picture. But there's more. Where there's not outright sin, the balance of Manhattan (except for Central Park) is made up of vast expanses of non-descript, uninspiring, concrete desolation. You've got to look hard to find beauty in New York.

And that's--I guess--why I stay. This place forces one to find the good, when, on the surface everything looks bad. New York is one big test. In the face of all this--for lack of a better word--"evil", one must constantly evaluate where one stands. Does one give into temptation or does one foreswear it? With so many people exercising so many vices packed so tightly together on this tiny island, a strange focus of thought has developed inside of me. New York has upped the tempo and plumbed the depths of my thought. It strains every value and tests every weakness in my character. I am constantly reevaluating; constantly reconsidering; constantly failing; constantly restarting.

One can walk down pretty much any street, and, in a New York minute, be faced with all of life's possibilities: wealth; poverty; fame; obscurity; madness; piousness; arrogance; humility. It is all there all the time. Constantly. Constantly. Constantly. You can't stop thinking in New York. It won't let you. And that, is what makes this place special. You get better. You get worse. You stay. You quit. But you change. There's no escaping it.

New York is boot camp for the soul. You find out what you're made of pretty quickly.

And that's all I've got to say about New York,

Broadway Jim Jenkins