Luc Sante: Writer, Historian

My family immigrated to the United States when I was a child. Actually, because my parents weren’t sure they liked the place, we left and came back a few times before fate took over, so that I came to America at the ages of 4, 5, 8, and 9. We settled in New Jersey.

I first saw New York City on Halloween, 1959, and I was dazzled and shocked. Everywhere were kids running through the streets in costume - we didn’t have Halloween in Europe, so I didn’t know what was going on - and the theaters of 42nd Street were covered in gigantic, garishly colored blow-ups of stills from the movies, which in those days were monster pictures and westerns. My mother made me avert my eyes nevertheless, which naturally had the effect of making me want to run away and live in Times Square.

At fourteen I got a scholarship to high school in Manhattan. I commuted there every day, two hours each way, becoming increasingly interested in the city and decreasingly in my classes. I was finally given the boot halfway through junior year, but not before I had resolved to make New York my home as soon as I could. At eighteen I moved there to go to college, and the rest is history.

In high school I envied the kids from Manhattan - it was a carnival, while the other boroughs looked drab, not so different from New Jersey. A lot of those kids seemed much more worldly than I was; one of them was even an emancipated minor, with his own apartment on the Lower East Side (rent: $36 a month) and a job in a record store. I studied them closely and learned how to not show surprise at anything, how to walk into liquor stores and plunk my money down for a pint of fortified wine (I was 15 or so, but the drinking age was still 18 then) without betraying nervousness. I walked down every street, searching out the old, forgotten things as well as the new, flashy ones.

I got a part-time job stuffing envelopes for a big travel agency on Fifth Avenue and then dragging the mail bags to the Grand Central post office, and I was as proud as if I had been awarded the key to the city. But what really made me a New Yorker was learning the arcana. I knew all kinds of alternative subway routes, knew how to shoplift from the big stores (much easier before video cameras came in), knew how to roll a joint in public without being seen. Most importantly, I kept a mental list of toilets in every neighborhood that I could use without being harassed. You couldn’t buy that sort of information.