Meet Me In The Bathroom

By: Lizzy Goodman

Genre: Oral History Encapsulating A Moment In New York That Feels Recent But Has Just Enough Distance To Be Granted Some Degree Of Perspective

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I don’t think I have a complicated relationship with New York. 

There isn’t really much about it that I believe is overhyped. If anything, I think most people go to (or even live in) New York and don’t appreciate its ability to cultivate and condense different forms of  liveliness and culture into accessible places. Attribute that to the way we’re all slowly being conditioned to, generally, not go anywhere what we’re not familiar with is, to a certain type of person, very scary, and to another type of person, intensely inconvenient. 

My wife lived in New York City for 11 years, including all of her twenties, which unless you’re someone whose parents send you money for rent or something like that, is its own type of learning experience. But she was more or less there for the music and the particular journey that music took in that city from history to stubborn survival. Watching her navigate the city with a mix of muscle memory and pulsing intrigue is its own kind of art, at least through my eyes. 

My issues with glamorizing New York City in the way I just did - or the way Meet Me In The Bathroom does - is not that it’s an incorrect or embellished framing. It has more to do with my frustration with a refusal to treat any other place like it has the ingredients for the same kind of magic. Those other places not only do have those ingredients, but produce that magic constantly. 

When I was in my early and mid-twenties and determined to become a professional writer, I was often told (by people who had more opinions than any sort of knowledge) that I could go to New York, which is where people go to do that sort of thing (*the complete and utter decline of journalism and media over the decade-plus since then is a totally different essay and something I’m not really going to address here for the sake of brevity). Beyond a general awareness that I was barely making things work financially with the cost of living in Texas, I was also actually committed to telling stories in Texas. Things happen here -- things intensely specific to the region and intensely influential to the rest of the country -- and if those other journalistic outlets in those other places wanted to read about them, maybe they could have me write for them, was my reasoning. 

The other week, I was on a podcast. I get asked to go on podcasts every so often. That is not what I would call a badge of honor. You don’t want your kid to say “My dad goes on a lot of podcasts” at Career Day. Anyway, in this particular instance, the host, a friend of mine, quickly introduced me and said something like, “He’s a great writer, especially when it comes to covering Texas shit.” I imagine that most people try to half listen to an introduction of themselves because it’s at least a little bit awkward, but I did catch that one, and I will say, that actually does feel like a badge of honor. Because all these years later, maybe I earned that. 

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My dad is retired now, but he was one of the most respected contemporary art curators in the United States. By the time he called it quits, he’d worked with or curated shows for just about every important post-war artist you can imagine, and most of the big New York museums had featured a show by him. He didn't come from money or any background that would lead to all this. He just appreciated artists and their process and tried to bring that to people. 

I bring him up because it is nearly impossible to accomplish what he did without living in New York, but he managed it. The majority of his biggest shows were done at the The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. He had a museum and board that supported his vision, and he was willing to fight against any cliches or preconceived notions of the the city to bring great art to people (including the ones he had of Fort Worth before the museum recruited him and including the ones that were true and warranted). Before Fort Worth, he worked at museums in Buffalo, New York, Sarasota, Florida and Berkley, California. All of which are places where magic can happen with art if you cultivate the ingredients. 

The stories of New York’s art scene (the punk scene, the jazz scene, the beatniks, the birth of hip hop, so, so, much more) are every bit as real as they are advertised. But sometimes using it as the pedestal for artistic projects is less romanticism and more of an excuse. 

Reading about any artistic scene after the fact is a cushy thing to do. But to experience it is inherently uncomfortable. That’s a part of why it exists, to find solace and catharsis outside of a comfort zone. It can only exist if people are willing to go through that.

Going to do that, wherever you are, is always worth it, because it’s bigger than you. There is sometimes an intense feeling of belonging. But sometimes feeling uncomfortable is all you get, and it’s important that you know that you aren't doing anything incorrectly just because you feel that way. You are contributing. 

It takes a lot to get to what turned into Meet Me In The Bathroom. We don’t all get to be Julian Casablancas, and that really isn’t the point. A scene is a beautiful thing to live through for a moment or a month or a couple years. And if you get that experience, you get to think about it for the rest of your life and hold on to all the fun turns life can take, grateful you got a couple turns of your own. 

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

-The Line of Fire (I think probably the best piece of sports journalism written last decade)

-Why isn’t this song a hit?

-The Year of Zohran

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