In The Skinny, New York Is A Nuanced Main Character

East River Photo by Harold Goldberg

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New York City itself is a dark, moody character in The Skinny, my new novel. While the city is featured in innumerable books, those stories not exactly like the New York about which I’ve written. That’s the beauty of fiction writing. I had a chance to reveal New York in my own way.
 
I have been chronicling the powerful and the powerless in culture in New York ever since I moved here in the late 1980s. My stories in New York magazine and the Village Voice often featured counter-culture figures: photographers like Ryan Weideman, who sold his photos taken as a taxi driver, and became a well-regarded artist.
 
When I wrote about The Dark Star Crew, a young person poetry collective which performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café for The Village Voice, I chronicled how they taught their audience about racism as well as poetry. Coffeehouses like Sin-é brought the Irish experience to St. Mark’s Place. Almost off-the-grid collectives, like the Gargoyle Mechanique Laboratory on Avenue B, would sometimes have an LSD-fueled (but brilliant) open mic night.
 
Sometimes, these creators broke through to the mainstream. Nuyorican Poet Paul Beatty’s novel "Big Bank Take Little Bank" was a literary brilliance, and he now teaches at Columbia University.
 
Often, they almost broke through. In other words, they had their shots, and those who found them in the East Village were the richer for knowing their art. They all found their niches, but not more without blood, sweat and tears than they should have endured.
 
And sometimes, they died from drug overdoses. Sometimes, they just moved away, sometimes they lost their minds or just stopped making art, never to be heard from again. And sometimes, they were pushed out to the wilds of Brooklyn by landlords increasing rents. Sometimes, they weren’t artists at all. They were working people, immigrants, trying to cobble together part-time jobs to support themselves or their families.
 
It’s hard-working people like these that make The Skinny compelling.
 
But it’s also the places in which they existed in 1990s New York, the bars like Bertha’s Bar, where Stan is lured into working for a wealthy landlord. It’s the strange living conditions of cellar apartments, some of which look like hangouts for the devil himself. 
 
It’s the creepy feeling one gets while standing under The Hanging Tree in Washington Square Park, the deadly allure of the black water estuary in the East River, and the city’s cemeteries at night.
 
I think New York City, of all cities, is the most wonderfully dark setting in which to create a noir mystery, especially for The Skinny.