New York is a fabled city. It’s written about in song and literature by some of the greats. Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Jay Z, Solnit, Baldwin, and Whitehead to name a few of a list that could go for eternity. But it’s E.B. White’s writing about my infamous city that I believe actually captures in words what it feels like live here.
“New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”
― E.B. White, Here Is New York
This is something often difficult to explain to those who never have experienced it.
I happened to be off my island for a few weeks, having traveled north to Maine for a summer vacation with my family (seemingly like every other writer from New York City on Instagram) when I read Brutalities. Maybe the distance from home and from my former life as a NYC bartender is what made this book, a debut memoir by Margo Steines, not only an inquiry and invitation to exploring violence and self, but rather a spot-on new tale of old New York.
BOOK: Brutalities by Margo Steines
Who Would Like This Book?
Anyone who loves lyrical writing and/or memoir.
Anyone who wants to know what the experience of being a dominatrix is like.
Anyone questioning why humans do the things they do.
Anyone interested in finding the thread between things like power, love, sex, bodies, transactions, and pain.
Anyone who is a a fan of reading books that cut you open to let the feelings out.
Anyone who’s interested in experiencing the guttural vulnerability of an author with the guts to go deep on very difficult and personal experiences and reflections.
Anyone wanting to understand New York.
PLACE: The High Line
I’ve lived in NYC longer than I’ve lived anywhere else and because of that I’ve watched where the land meets the water turn from dumps to destinations and witnessed entire neighborhoods transition from seedy to sought after. New York is a character that develops and shifts. Often, she’s the main character of your story without you ever realizing it. You can pick any corner of New York to sit and see the transitions of years and trends but I’ve found no place better than the High Line. It is a 1.45-mile-long public park owned by the City of New York that now hovers over the old biker bar I used to work at on the corner of 10th and 17th. The greenway was created on an abandoned, southern viaduct section of the New York Central Railroad's West Side Line on the west side of Manhattan. It’s been redesigned as a "living system" drawing from multiple disciplines including landscape architecture, urban design, and ecology. Originating in the Meatpacking District, it runs through Chelsea to 34th Street. It’s an immense success in so many ways and wildly loved by locals and tourists alike. But to me it’s symbolic of the way I know New York. Gritty, cold, and hard below the surface of the day in and day out hum drum. It’s the ideal location to read this book.
PLAYLIST: Moody, Blues, & Female Love
An ode to the trials and tribulations (and delights of love) as told by mostly women. Also love letters and breakup songs with New York. Pre Ryan Adams atonement and post Indigo Girls resurgence. Songs for sex and songs about sex. What is the line between pleasure and pain? Maybe you’ll find your answer in a Chris Isaak verse.
Final Thoughts
Brutalities opens with a warning from the author. She notes that it is a difficult read. And it is. We wander with Margo through her misadventures in New York City as a teenager and later in life in upstate New York. She shares with fraught honesty the pain she was seeking when she was paid to dominate men, when she allowed them to later punch her in the face, when she turned from addictions of substances and turned to addiction to fitness, thus tormenting herself and her body in another less obviously painful way. And yet, as someone who cannot watch violence on television and until recently nearly fainted at the sight of blood, I found myself returning to her pages night after night, lulled into her world through her words. Margo is one of the finest writers. Her voice on the page carries the reader along, rocking us into submission, while she guides us through the underbelly of New York, her youth, and the realities of human complexity.
A long time ago, in a seedier, less-Disney-esque New York I was slinging drinks til 4am in the famed meatpacking district that the High Line now hovers over. When a customer was an asshole I’d get rid of them by telling them about this “really cool place” just a few blocks away. I’d tell them I could get them in to this club but, in truth, it was more like a dungeon. Of course, I didn’t tell them that.
On their nights off the dominatrix’s from that dungeon would come to our dive bar shanty cabaret thanking us for sending them new customers.
“It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.”
― E.B. White, Here Is New York
(Now, go read)