Hello from Honey Moon Cafe and Record Shop, in gentrified Ridgewood. Green handmade tiling wraps the counter, a grid of motifs, half horoscope, half tattoo flash lookbook. We pulled a couple of tables together because now we are 90; in the last week, people nearby have overheard the chatter and decided to pull up a chair. That’s the thing about stories: we claim they have a beginning, a middle, an end, but in practice every story gets people thinking of their own beginnings, of their that reminds me of a time when...
Every city has its stories. But New York is the city whose stories we all get told no matter where we grow up. Ghostbusters, Manhattan, Splash, Home Alone 2, Independence Day, Spiderman. And these are just stories that use the city as a setting. There is also the story of the city, graffiti and Wall Street ticker-tape, steam from subways and the perfect pizza slice.
And that silhouette. In a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a friend of a friend said: “if you ask anyone to draw a city, they’ll draw this city.”
People come here to step into the story. Sometimes it takes you by surprise, like: you’re to a bar you see a couple of garish bodega signs that are just so -- yes! This is St Marks Place, from Broad City! (LINK)
Hey, maybe you don’t even need to read these. Go watch Broad City. Go watch Girls. I should.
I don’t know much about Girls, but I know (because it was a big deal at the time) that in the Season 5 finale, protagonist Hannah signs up to The Moth.
The Moth is a real event where people get up on stage and tell a story. It must be five minutes or less. It must be on the theme of the evening. It must be done without notes or script. It must be true. Last May, my fourth week here, I decided to step into the frame. If this seems like a weird thing to do at that time, I can only say it wasn’t weird for me. I was weirdly time-rich: I had a lot of life admin to avoid, but no social commitments to help me avoid it. I could get something together in time. I called Alex, he of the smoke-filled cocktail in Issue 2, and he was game to come watch. The weekend before the event, I left my corporate gilded cage in Downtown Brooklyn, and made for the nearest fourth-wave coffee shop that would have me, Devoción. I got a coffee; I winced at the tip.
I considered the night’s theme: Outnumbered. I considered my memories. I found one.
The Moth flits round a few locations in the city. That night, it settled at Housing Works NYC, a storied charity that’s been fighting homelessness and AIDS in New York since 1994. And they have a truly magical bookshop, totally at odds with the glass and steel of Manhattan around and above it. Good home for stories. We arrived early, but every seat was already full. In the corner, against the shelves, was one of those rolling ladders you see in gothic libraries. Hoping the ladder had its handbrake on, we leant against it.
...man, those ladders are hard to describe, aren’t they? If only I had a way to show y- oh, look. A still from the Season 5 finale of Girls, filmed in the very Housing Works NYC bookstore, with the very ladder, in the very place. You see? Being here, life slips back into fiction. Anyway, this is where we were, on the right.
At The Moth, everyone buys the same audience ticket — but when you arrive, you can fill in the form that says you want to tell a story, and put it in the bag. The host pulls a form out, that person tells their story, then *they* pull the next name. You don’t know when, or even if it’s your time, and then suddenly someone is saying a name that is also your name, how funny that there should be another James Mitchell in this room, but no, coincidence is not what this is. What this is, is your stupid idea chickens coming home to the reality roost. I was up third — so much for the suspense.
That picture, above? That’s exactly what it looked like — though maybe not what I saw. *A sea of faces* is overused but it captures the way that hot stage lighting and the rush of 200 people giving you the same five minutes of their time causes those people to fuse and shift into one human mass. Not a wall of sound but something even scarier; a wall of silence.
A wall of generosity. Terrifying, right? Or is that just me?
Here, briefly, is the Outnumbered story I told.
Four months after I first arrived in London, I decided to move into a nicer house-share, in the other part of town. The Saturday before I was due to move, I had to walk over to that new house to sign the contract, and hand over my deposit: an envelope containing £500 cash that I didn’t really have to spare. On the way over, I chatted to my Mum on the phone — and because I was caught up in that, I didn’t notice the five teenagers follow me round the corner into the quiet streets where I was going to live. They jumped me and, thus Outnumbered, I couldn’t stop them getting away with my phone, with my Mum still on the line. They didn’t get the envelope, thank God. But what they did get away with, for a time, was any optimism I had about London. When I got to my future new place of living, my future landlord’s words of comfort were “Oh yeah, they prey on the weak.” But the people who I was about to live with? They made me pancakes.
People like stories to have a redemption arc, because we want our suffering to be a waystation on our upward growth path. That’s why I put in the pancake thing, as a satisfying end. But as I spoke into the microphone I realised that wasn’t the end of the story; that the story had not ended. That short unfortunate walk to a new house in Brixton had been arcing gently for fourteen years across five further houses in London, across a river, a canal, and an ocean.
On the stage, my voice wavered a little. “I felt so alone after that.”
In the quiet I heard the low buzz of the mic, hooked up to its cheap PA. The sound of people doing something for love.
“But I feel like here, looking at you, it might be different.”
And, having utterly failed to stick the landing because I was too busy mystifying myself, I bowed off the stage. Safe.
Epilogue
☞ I would love to say more about the nine other stories, but they were as varied as human life itself, and I’d be serving them poorly to try and sum any of them up here. All I can do is direct you to The Moth’s own webpage (LINK) . There’s plenty of events in London. The best way to feel how it feels is to go to one yourself. (Perhaps even tell your own story. I will never push anyone into this sort of thing, so let’s just say: if you thought you MIGHT like that sort of thing? And you were looking for a sign? Let this be that.)
☞ That said, honourable mention must go to my friend Alex, who on the night decided that yes, he might have a story that fit the theme “Outnumbered”, and wrote his name on a form. Which somehow I then pulled out of the bag on my turn. He told his tale, truly off the dome, and did incredibly well. Did I mention they score the stories? Americans like to know how good things are, and maybe even which of the things is the *most* good. Now I can’t speak to that. But the stories that touched people best were the ones that felt less like a performance, and more just a told experience.
☞ You’ve noticed by now that these letters are me telling stories, and trying to find a moral in them. If this is a genre, your wider reading must include Supergranular (LINK), by friend of the letter, Thom. In this life, it’s always best to assume that you’ve arrived just in time — and in this case you have, as Supergranular enters its second phase, the shape of which we’ll only discover as it happens. But he has said to me, “I see our newsletters existing in the same cinematic universe,” so consider this paragraph the post-credits sequence where I’m like Thom... you’re back…* and he’s like I’m not back... I never left.
SMASH CUT TO BLACK
END CARD:
That’s me, for now.
Issue 5 will come on the 26th of February.
Until then: may you show someone who you are.
James
from Ridgewood, Queens.