I have no business cents because I have no business sense.
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I am a New Yorker who has had the opportunity to live and work in Northern California every summer. I have even had the opportunity to live in San Francisco and Oakland full-time for five years in the early ‘00s.
The time I have spent in California has clearly illustrated the many important differences between the life on the East Coast and the West Coast, and more specifically, the differences between life in New York City and California at large.
No, I am not talking about obvious differences such as the weather, landscape, business culture or social attitudes. I am talking about something that, on the outset may appear trivial, but in truth says more about a civilized culture than just about anything else: The Egg on a Roll.
The egg on a roll is a New York City staple. It can be found in just about any deli, diner, or bodega from the Bronx to Staten Island. It is made immediately to order on a well-seasoned grill behind the counter. The egg can be scrambled or fried and can be the lone ingredient, or it can be combined with cheese, bacon, ham, or all three, with or without salt and pepper, and all placed between the halves of a lightly buttered, toasted, Kaiser roll.
The price of the New York City Egg on a Roll varies, but is always cheap, and depends on whether you get a plain egg on a roll, an egg on a roll with cheese, an egg on a roll with bacon, or an egg on a roll with cheese and bacon or ham. The stripped down version consisting of just an egg, with no cheese, on a roll, will run you $1.00 while the version with an egg, cheese, and bacon or ham, will run you about $2.50. There is the rare occasion when some individuals, most likely in Brooklyn or the Bronx, may actually order an egg on a roll with cheese, bacon, AND ham, but I believe such people are usually teenagers with no impulse control, or construction contractors who are just showing off in front of the other guys.
It is important to note that the egg on a roll sandwich is usually made from one egg, but can be requested to include two eggs for about 50 cents more. In either case, the appropriate amount of cheese, bacon or ham will be combined in just the right amounts to perfectly compliment the number of eggs used.
It is my theory that the New York City Egg on a Roll sandwich is very much responsible for the city’s vaunted and envied economic success, because workers can have an egg on a roll cooked up in about three minutes, have it wrapped to go, and it can be eaten with one hand while hustling down the street or in a crowded rush hour subway car, thus giving the hard working people of New York City a delicious, mobile, high protein breakfast, which no doubt allows these workers to get to work either fully fed and ready to work with no time lost. If not eaten during the commute, the Egg on a Roll may be ordered into the office, it’s compact scrumptiousness allowing workers to eat it at their desks while working, without much fuss, thus increasing their productivity. An egg on a roll is like having a full breakfast without having to slow down even for a minute, or having to take your attention off your work, as you eat it. Granted, some arrogant individuals may, have, in the past, abused the handy convenience and compactness of the egg on a roll by eating it, not while being productive, but instead while engaging in non work related activities, such as in the 1950’s when I’m sure you could find more than one boss eating an egg on a roll while schtupping his secretary. Although I would guess he could schtup his secretary, eat an egg on a roll, and take an important call from a client. Even if the secretary herself was eating an egg on a roll during the schtupping she would be able to still answer phones, and perhaps, type a letter, and thus productivity could still be maintained.
To someone who has never had one, the New York Style Egg on a Roll sandwich is a sort of simple yet delectable culinary creation that is not easy and straightforward to duplicate. As we shall see.
Firstly, let us establish that the pre-formed, microwaved egg sandwiches you get from chain fast food restaurants such as the McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, or the Dunkin Donuts egg on a bagel or egg on flatbread oddities are NOT even comparable to a New York Egg on a Roll. To suggest such would betray an individual as being crazy, ignorant, or both, so don’t do it.
That said, my guess is that many people, in many parts of the country are ingesting such hideous chain restaurant egg sandwiches and by no fault of their own, think they are acceptable. They simply have not experienced a proper, egg on a roll, and can’t be blamed for that.
I expected more of California, however. California is well known for it’s diverse cuisine which it draws from the best of the culinary arts from all over the world. When I made the decision to spend some time living and working in The San Francisco Bay Area, I assumed the culinary professionals there would be capable of making a decent Egg on a Roll sandwich. To me this is similar to other assumptions one makes about a civilized society, such as that it has a subway system and street vendors you can buy socks and gloves from.
When I first arrived for my stay in California, I tried to create as much comfort for myself as I could in that strange and exotic place by attempting to recreate, or find, as many familiar New York style bits and pieces that I could fit into my routine. It was logical to start with breakfast, since it would be, chronologically, one of the first activities of my first day there.
I found at the local shopping area, a strip of restaurants, and walked into the first one that appeared to be serving breakfast. It was sort of an upscale looking diner with café tables and small potted palm trees out front. There was no counter (I was to learn that lunch counters are not as common in California as they are in the East) so I asked the girl at the cash register if I could place an order for an Egg on a Roll to go. She looked at me with a bewildered frown, asked me to repeat my order, and then told me to wait a moment, and then disappeared behind the door that led into the kitchen. I then heard what sounded like a muffled but spirited discussion coming from behind the kitchen door, a loud clattering and crash of pans and cooking utensils, and then a few minutes later, the cook comes out and asks, “You want what? An egg? On a what?”
“A roll”. I answered. “An egg on a roll.”
“A roll? What do you mean, by a roll? I don’t have a roll. I have whole wheat, white, and sour dough, and I can toast it for you.” he said while squinting at me, as if sizing me up for a brawl.
I chose whole wheat and asked him if he could also put cheese on it.
“Cheese?” He really sounded annoyed now. “You mean mixed in with the egg…or melted on top?”
“Melted on top will be fine.” Now I was getting annoyed as well.
“ What kind of cheese do you want? All I got is swiss, cheddar, and colby jack.”
It now was taking longer just to order an egg on a roll in California than it would have taken to order, pay for, and eat an egg on a roll in New York.
I said that I would take cheddar cheese, and he turned and went back into the kitchen with a look of disgust on his face, as if I was the most difficult customer he had ever encountered. Twenty minutes later—I’m not kidding here—TWENTY minutes later, a waitress came out of the kitchen holding an enormous styrofoam container. She placed it on the counter in front of me. I thought that there must be some sort of mistake, because an egg on a roll is usually just wrapped in some paper and the whole thing could easily fit in one hand, but this Styrofoam container was HUGE and had to be carried with two hands by the waitress.
The waitress then fake smiled at me and rung up my check on the cash register, “That’ll be $9.50.”
The voice in my head, which for some reason, at this moment, had a Brooklyn accent, was screamimg, “$9.50??!! For a freakin’ EGG on a ROLL? With a slice of CHEESE? What the FUCK?!”
I opened the container to make absolutely certain there was not some sort of mistake, such as the cook misunderstanding and making me an egg, cheese, and lobster tail on a roll.
And While there was no lobster tail in this egg on a roll, what I did see when I opened the container struck me as quite odd.
There in the corner of the enormous container was a sandwich made from a very grainy looking, coarse, whole wheat toast with a thick layer of melted cheese on it—kind of like a grilled cheese sandwich. There was a fried egg slipped in the grilled cheese sandwich, and the whole rest of the container was filled with two large slices of avocado, and a pile of fruit salad on a bed of lettuce.
Aside from the exorbitant price, you are probably thinking that it doesn’t sound bad. In fact, you may be thinking, “Grilled Cheese? Avocado? Fruit salad? That actually sounds pretty good!”
If you are thinking that, and if I was sitting next to right now, I would have to slap you across the face and demand you leave my presence, immediately. An Egg on a Roll is supposed to be a utilitarian delicacy, not some sort of fruit accompanied hippy breakfast experience. There are some things that do not go together under certain circumstances. For example, you would not wear a cardigan to a work on a construction site, you would not listen to “The Sound of Music” soundtrack for work out music, and you do not eat fruit with your Egg on a Roll sandwich that has been ordered TO GO during the morning commute. And, fruit or not, you DO NOT charge almost ten dollars for an EGG. On a ROLL.
An Egg on a Roll is supposed to be quick, and cheap, and simple, and good. That is IT!
After this awful experience, and as I spent more time in California, I stubbornly tried again and again to order an Egg on a Roll at various cafes, coffee shops, and restaurants from San Jose to Santa Cruz and from San Francisco to San Rafael, and it was always a struggle to describe it to the cook who didn’t even have such a thing on the menu, or a struggle to pay for what must have been to them, the patient creation of a customized breakfast for that damn pushy New Yorker with odd tastes. Which was funny, because if I wanted a sourdough breakfast fajita with sprouts—well…THAT would have been normal to these Cali cooks.
Even, when I would find an old style coffee shop, in a place like the Sunset district of San Francisco, or in Downtown Oakland, and even if the cook was willing to have me micromanage the creation of the Egg on a Roll with me barking instructions from my side of the counter—and even if I would find myself with a reasonable, edible, facsimile of the New York Egg on a Roll—even if it’s taste was so damn close it warranted acceptability, especially under these combat conditions—it would still take 20 minutes and cost eight bucks.
I finally gave up and tried to acquire a taste for “breakfast wraps” which were everywhere, and apparently the West Coast version of the Egg on a Roll. But as I found about many things on the West Coast, just because something is an alternative to what is traditional, that does not make it better….or even just okay.
Now I am living back in New York. I can go to any number of my local coffee shops and delis in Brooklyn. When I walk in and simply say to the counter man, “An Egg and Cheese on Roll!” The only question he will ask is if I want salt and pepper on it. I will get it wrapped to go in three minutes. And it will cost $1.50. 2 bucks with coffee.
Now, I ask you. What is so freakin’ hard about that?
Yum.
My own experience has been very limited compared to the sorts of individuals who spend, or have spent a great deal of their lives traveling and living and working abroad. I have never served in the military or volunteered for an NGO, and my travel has been limited to Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and to varied places within the United States. All I have to go on regarding how living abroad effects people’s lives is what I observe in friends and family who have done so, and I am sure there are many exceptions to what I have observed.
I do believe that travel is a sort of education. A kind of global university for those who are fortunate enough to enroll, and I myself intended to enroll in that university when I became an adult and left my childhood home in Levittown, Pennsylvania. As I prepared to graduate high school I wished for myself the same as George Bailey did for himself in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” when he said, “I know what I’m going to do for the next year, and the next year, and the year after that…I’m going to shake the dust off of this crummy old town and I’m going to see the world!”
My first step in seeing the world was moving to New York to go to college at an art school called Pratt Institute.
All through college and upon graduation, I still wanted to see the world, but a conflict arose in me was that, at that time, put a crimp in my travel plans. I had another desire in me that was stronger than wanderlust. That desire was to continue ahead and forge a career as an artist. I dreamed of being a film maker, a writer and illustrator and it was my understanding that such aspirations where not to be easily obtained and would require training, focus, and commitment, and it wasn’t necessary to go anywhere else, as I already was living in the place I wanted to build that career: New York City.
Though I took a couple trips to Europe in those early years, and intended to return often, I haven’t returned since my twenties. New York became my universe for many years and I rarely left for pleasure except to visit out of town friends and family for long weekends. I had a job for a while that required me to travel often throughout the United States on business, but I basically became a person who was much more about where he lived than about where he visited. I really believed that I was blessed to be living in, what by my own definition, was the greatest city in the world, and traveling, though still desired, was triaged down to a minimal priority behind my career and life in New York.
I had never really considered living anywhere else, with the exception of Northern California. I had been to California a few times on business, and I had a friend from college who, after graduation, had moved to Half Moon Bay, a small coastal town just south of San Francisco, and she had been pestering me for years to visit her there. When I eventually did visit, she made her best pitch for me moving out there and gave me an incredible tour of San Francisco and the coast. So convincing was she, I quit my very good day job in New York six months later and moved to Half Moon Bay where I then lived, on her living room couch, for seven months unable to find any significant employment, before returning to New York a beaten, and very disappointed man.
Once back in New York, I easily found another day job, and with it the feeling that, though I couldn’t make things work in California, New York always seemed to provide for me and I was meant to return. I had never been jobless very long in New York, and began to view it as the only place that offered guaranteed opportunity.
So, back in New York, with a new found love for the city, and employed with a good day job, I resumed my struggle as an artist.
I had decided at that point that I though I still loved California, I, and the universe, was not yet ready for me to live there. I resolved that I would return to live there someday, perhaps when I was a successful artist and I wouldn’t have to worry about building a life from scratch without any money, connections, or an established career.
Years then passed by, and though consistently employed, my struggling as an artist intensified. As my career stagnated, I began to feel as if I had, back when I was twenty five years old, blinked my eyes, and when I opened them a second later, found myself to be in my mid thirties. Ten years had seemingly passed Instantly. I was now working primarily as a teaching artist in very rough schools in the NYC public school system. I had never wanted to be a teacher. I wondered how that could have happened, as if my life had been directed and manipulated b some unseen force.
My own work as an artist was so far on the back burner I was wondering if I should just turn the stove off all together. It seemed as if I was destined to live the rest of my life, and then die in New York, with nothing more to show for it than what I had arrived with at nineteen years old: unfulfilled hopes and dreams of being a successful artist.
I was tired. Living in New York City can be tough. Living in New York City for years, as a struggling artist can be brutal.
During most of the time I have struggled as an artist in New York, I have had friends, mostly other artists, with whom I have relied on to share my struggle. One of these friends is a former neighbor who used to live across the street from me. He and I would meet on his front stoop many mornings and have coffee and talk about our lives as artists and how we always were having so much difficulty getting the things we wanted in life, whether it was a good relationship with a woman, success with or work, or simply, peace of mind. One time, when our conversation turned to how living in New York affected all these things, and we began speculating whether it was best to stay in New York where there seemed to be the greatest amount of opportunity for artists, or whether it was better to leave New York to a place that may have less opportunity, but a place you felt you would rather live in for all the reasons other than opportunity, such as it being a place of great natural beauty, or that it may provide a life of greater ease and peacefulness. We both pondered the question for a moment, creating a pause in the conversation. He took a sip of coffee and then looked at me as if he had just had an epiphany, and said, “You have to go where you want to build your life”.
My problem at that point was that I was less concerned with choosing a location to build my life than I was salvaging what was left of the rest of my life, and the best way to do that seemed to be to avoid more upheaval. Moving just seemed to be a giant step backwards, or at best, a giant step sideways, and what I wanted was to take a giant step forward.
As time went on, and as things didn’t improve, I wondered what I could do to change my fortunes, change my life, quickly and certainly. I then started to believe that place might, in fact, matter. It HAD to matter. people often say that insanity can be defined as doing exactly the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. At that point, I had been living in New York for the most part of 20 years, and year after year the rersult was the same: struggle. Life outside New York had to be easier, and I began to fantasize about moving back to California, but though I now had much more work experience under my belt, I did not want a replay of my earlier attempt to live there years earlier when I had just replaced one kind of struggle with another.
It was around this time an old friend whom I had worked with in New York years earlier, called me. She was now a Dean at The California College of Arts in Oakland and San Francisco, she knew I had been teaching in New York and wanted to offer me a job teaching cartooning and animation with a summer program the college was offering on the Oakland campus to middle school aged students. It was called the Young Artists Studio Program or “YASP”.
YASP took place in June and August. Though I would be responsible for providing my own airfare, the College would provide a free faculty apartment for me, for the entire summer.
This began a very enjoyable yearly commitment for me. I would teach in the insane new York City schools all winter with it’s crabby teachers, falling apart schools with metal detectors in the entrance, and out of control students, some of whom would yell in class, “I hate drawing! I don’t want to do it! I’m not gonna do it!”, –and then, as if carried by the fresh, breezes warmed by the sunlight of spring, my invitation to teach in California for another summer would arrive in the mail with a contract, that appeared to me, to be printed on magic paper, out of which emerged a gentle invisible hand that, caressed my face when I opened the envelope, like an old, dear friend welcoming me home. Home to the bucolic campus and the sweet, smart, gentle little children of hippies and dotcommers. Kids who wanted to be in my class because they were really interested in cartooning and animation, who would often say, “I love this class! I want to take it again next year!”
And so it went on for a few years. I would get beat up by New York all winter and return to California in the summer, to the Club Med of teaching gigs. Upon arriving in California, I would always feel as if a two hundred pound sack of stress, pinning me to the ground, was removed from on top my chest and I could breath again. I was often given a beautiful sunny apartment across the street from campus, which was much nicer than any apartment I have ever had in New York. I spent the summers hiking in the hills, and along the coast, making new friends who had a different, laid back California perspective. I did yoga, ate the best Mexican and Thai food I ever tasted, and fell in love with the quirky, lovable, City of Oakland, and it’s gorgeous, sophisticated, sister, San Francisco.
This arrangement allowed me to view the nine months I was spending in New York differently. I became a better teacher and I began to understand the New York kids better, and actually appreciate them more. And because I was a better teacher, because I understood my students better, they liked me more.
I was fairly content with my bicoastal life. I was still a poor struggling artist, but felt like I was living like someone with much greater means. I had become so content, that I actually started doing my own work again, keeping cartoon journals in a very disciplined way. A sort of spiritual practice, observing the world around me and writing and drawing cartoons about those observations.
My contentment, however, didn’t prevent me from aging. I was now about to turn forty. A book deal I was offered and had long sought, fell through, and I was lost about how to proceed. I was having troubles in my relationship with a woman I was then living with, and things were about to get much worse. It was September 2001. On the eleventh day of that month, my life, and the life of all New Yorkers changed, suddenly, and dramatically.
I lost all my work on 9/11. There was no freelance work to be had. No teaching work available. The city was paralyzed. Shortly after that, my relationship ended. I was broke, homeless, and living on a friend’s couch.
In January of that year, my friend, the Dean at California College of the Arts called. She had a small apartment in the basement of her home in Oakland. She said she realized things in New York had been difficult, and that she knew I always fantasized about living in California, and that the apartment was mine if I wanted it, and she said that I could stay there rent free until I could get enough work in California.
By this time, I had started to get work again in New York, and it looked as if I would be able to claw my way back to reestablishing my life there. I was genuinely torn. Even with all my struggle in New York, even with all the hardship I experienced there, I loved New York. But I also loved the idea of having an adventure, and starting a new life in California.
I liked the idea of moving to a place that was less familiar to me. I had come to know New York so well. Even with all it’s diversity, I felt as if I knew what was to be found around every corner of the city. I felt like I knew every street, every building. I felt like I knew what to expect from the people, the weather, the food, the music, the art. I also felt like I knew exactly what to expect from myself in that environment. Though I wasn’t born there, it had become my home town. I had lived there since I was nineteen years old, and even with it’s immense scale, all it’s millions of moving parts, and it’s frantic beehive quality, and it’s similarity to a giant living, morphing, organism, it no longer held any surprises for me. It’s insanity, it’s diversity with all it’s infinite unpredictability, had become, itself, predictable.
I considered the Dean’s offer. It was a situation where I felt evenly divided. I was not wanting to give up my years of investment in New York, the city I loved, which was now, battered and beaten down, and needing people to keep the faith. But I also felt like an opportunity was being handed to me that I may never get again. A place to live in California rent free, until I got my feet on the ground.
I literally could have flipped a coin. I decided to seek advice from two people. A New Yorker, and a Californian. I called a friend in California, a very spiritual yogini, who used to live in New York and who I had known for may years. Her advice, which she said was paraphrasing some Buddhist concept, went something like this, “When struggling to make a decision, and your feelings are deadlocked, and you are faced with choosing between a course in your life that will mean making a change, or choosing to stay your course, and not making a change, always choose change, because therein lies the greatest opportunity for growth”.
When I asked my New York friend for his advice, the same friend I used to meet for coffee on the front stoop, he just repeated what he had said years before, “Go where you want to build your life”.
I moved to California that April.
(to be continued)
Comments Off on The Here, The Now, The Where, The How. Part 2
There is an unanswered question that has plagued me most of my life. A question that has been asked by many people over the ages, especially artists, and that question is: “Does place matter?”
The gist of the question is this, if you have a choice in where you live, does your geographical location make a difference in your happiness, well being, personal growth, or general destiny, or, like a theater performance which has been brought on the road, will you simply recreate your same basic life in any geographical location, only with a different backdrop and a different cast of characters. The easy answer is yes, where you choose to live does make a difference in your destiny. It seems obvious that living in a different place, with a different landscape, climate, food, politics, attitudes, norms, mores, and local culture, will undoubtedly effect who you are, what opportunities present themselves, how you experience life, and how that experience shapes who you are, and ultimately, the decisions you make, that shape your destiny.
My personal experience and observation, however, does not necessarily support this easy answer. I have known many individuals who have gone off to live in far away cities, and sometimes far off lands only to return home to embark on very traditional lives that appear to be no different than the types of lives they would have chosen to live had they never left, and those who stay in adopted cities or foreign lands, often seem to recreate the same sort of life they would have had if they had stayed at home.
Certainly, going off to live in a different part of this vast country, or choosing to live abroad in a very different land and culture will augment a person’s knowledge and provide them with experience they otherwise would not have acquired, and that knowledge and experience will play a part in the choices that person makes as they live in that place or when and if they eventually return home.
Yet, in the modern world, it is striking how little difference there now is between cities and places that lie thousands of miles apart. Even people who live in modern cities abroad, seem to have lifestyles and experiences that are strikingly similar to the ones they left back home. Even those who go overseas to serve in the military, or to volunteer with the Peace Corps, and who have dramatic experiences that are nothing like anything they ever saw before at home, seem to come back, and have lives that are indistinguishable from those who never left. It is true those experiences abroad might have changed them, profoundly, but those changes are not usually apparent in the very traditional lives in which many seem to embark upon when they return.
To be sure, there are individuals who set off from their home towns, and who are, in fact, transformed by their geography, and the new experiences they have, and set a future path for themselves that one would never expect given where they started. Yet so many come home after being away, or who build lives for themselves in a new place that are exactly what you would have expected from them if they never left.
I wonder about those individuals who are the exceptions. Those who set off into the great unknown, freely traversing the planet, and either who do not return, or who returned profoundly changed. Those who make lives for themselves that are 180 degrees different from the families from whence they came and the experience they had before leaving. I don’t know many people like that.
(to be contunued…)
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