New York City: event number one

When I moved to New York City I was 17 and I didn’t know what I was doing. To say that I was out of my depths is to insult depths. I brought myself to this city with 200 dollars, thinking it would last me at least a couple months. I couldn’t cook. I had no skills. And what’s worse, I came to the city unclear about why I’d even made the choice to move in the first place. All I knew is that I couldn’t stay in Montana – to stay there would have been death. And I was terrified that I would stay and enter a kind of stasis, a place of things being fine, but not great. I was so scared that the things that were unknown, would remain unknown. So I left. And this required no bravery – in order to be brave one must understand the consequesnce of ones actions. Teenagers leap without knowing how far the ground is. Such is the grace of youth. But I was sensible enough to realize that I was in deep shit soon after my arrival and I got a job in a little theater on the upper west side as a spot light operator. To this day, this was one of my

favorite jobs. Moving to the big city had made me realize how little I knew, and I transformed from the whale of importance I was in my home town, to a minnow darting nervously under the fins of actual leviathan. Having a job where I sat in a dark booth high in the air, isolated from others, able to watch but not be seen was a good set up. I would watch the actors during tech, act, sing, laugh with each other, flirt, indulge little jealousies, little moments of magic where the show was called perfectly, the miricle of theater realized. And sometimes they would look up at the booth when they were bored, put a hand in the air to cover the light and call up. And I would not reply. On lunch or dinner breaks I would wait in my booth until everyone left the theater then climb down slowly, put on my big oversized jacket and sneak out the side door. This methodology worked for months, until one day, stealthily leaving work, I heard someone call my name. And I turned around to see an opera singer I had been lighting all week. “That’s your name right? Jesse?” And I shrugged “Yeah. Hi.” And she was standing with all of her friends, they were all older, 20 or 21, other actors in the show, actors not in the show, a couple musicians, a weed selling skateboader from the west coast. And she asked me what I was doing for lunch. And I said that I didn’t know. And she said that I was coming with them. And I did. Over the next five years Lee taught me how to live in this city. She taught me where to eat for cheap, what neighborhoods were cool, how to sneak into bars, how to know if you could trust someone, how to build a friend group, how to build a family. And I remember wondering what I’d done to deserve being taken care of so well. And when I really think about it, I don’t think that I did deserve it at all. That’s the thing about great kindness – you never really deserve it. And it comes anyway.