It was a very New York evening. The kind that would never happen in London. My friend Shelly's friend Jon was in town for CMJ (some music festival who's origins are lost in the mists of time, or at least consigned to college publishing ancient history). And Jon wanted to take some people out to dinner, or rather his boss Michael did, a man who already runs one influential music festival, in Austin, and is busy starting another, in Toronto, just for good measure.
So Jon called Shelly and she suggested Bond St, a hip place like Nobu, but more so. It was cold and we were late, but when we got there it was warm and like every place in New York there was an efficient coat check, so no problem. They took as up a floor or two, how many was hard to tell - New York being a tall thin straight up and down city, at least on Manhattan, restaurants regularly cover several floors. They seated all ten of us at a large round table. Shelly and I, and a lovely guy called Sam, who looked like the drummer from Interpol, and Jon, charming and laid back and deceptively on the case, and Michael himself, and his nephew, and an amazing, formidable promoter lady who's name I forget who was just stopping in between show cases and another musician and a lovely girl who designs packaging for Bobbi Brown. Opposite me was a very very snow white bleached blond girl. She was introduced to us as, well, let's call her Amanda and she seemed to purse her lips and pout sulkily at the presence of several other girls at the table. She could have been English, but it was hard to tell - her voice sometimes reminded me of the distinctive accent of someone I went to university with, but sometimes it slid all the way across the Atlantic. If she was English, she seemed like she'd been here a very long time. I mentioned this to Jon later and he said that it didn't sound like I meant this in a good way. I didn't.
Food came, and suddenly sushi began to make sense - melt in the mouth slabs of sweet salmon and cod and tuna and eel. Several rounds of it, piled high on ice sculptures. Then there was seared red snapper and the most incredible beef. Then soup and noodles, which really nearly finished us off.
It turned out that Sam who looked like the drummer from Interpol looked that way because he was the drummer from Interpol. We discussed Bloc Party and their miserable 18 year old guitarist who already has the cares the of the world on his shoulders when he should be having the time of this life. The perils of succeeding too young - you peak too early when you don't know what it means, without having worked and dreamed for it and too often you are doomed to a long lifetime sliding gently down the other side back to obscurity, regretting and longing for what was. Michael in contrast, seemed like a guy to whom success had come agreeably late - he presided generously and avuncularly over his table - he seemed to be having a great time, someone who is enjoying his career's glorious Indian Summer, without taking it too seriously.
And then there was Amanda, who at first glance was beautiful but seemed ravaged somehow, and who had slightly too long a pause between each sentence, like a computer which could fall foul to a permanent fatal error at any moment. She spent a lot of time on her cell phone, and it became clear, as did her Englishness, that this was because she was trying to get hold of her coke dealer, or perhaps any dealer. Through desert and coffee she campaigned to get the whole party to move to the Mercer (`Oh, let's all go to the Merrrrrrceeeeeeer') if only because she had established that one of them was there.
How did she get here? Teetering on a knife edge between faded glamour and bitterness, her grasp on dinner conversation faint but pursuing of the threads. I image that her mind might well have drug worn holes in it, like cheese. Later Jon told me that her `story is kind of tragic' She was the lead singer in a moderately successful 1980s band, and arrived in New York in her early 20s, more young and beautiful than talented, to have a brief moment as the toast of the town. And here she has been ever since drinking and snorting her way through a few revival and solo albums that went nowhere.
After Amanda there was Toby Young - his How to Loose Friends and Alienate People is a memoir that chronicles his self inflicted downfall in New York during the late 1990s, mainly by being drunk and inappropriate and ultimately, quite rude at work and play during his tenure at Vanity Fair. They have recently been joined by Tom Sykes (brother of Plum, of US Vogue) another alcoholic who's excesses only really took hold when he moved to New York. They are all examples of the phenomena so finely drawn twenty years ago by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities as Peter Fallow - the pisshead English guy.
How is it that this extraordinary city, that extends such a warm welcome to us, becomes such a repository for fucked up English people? People like Amanda don't exist in London, or not in the same way, invited out as an amusing, eccentric side show at dinner or a party.
My own theory is the Anglo / Yank attitude to alcohol split is the start of the problem. Curiously for a city that invented the cocktail, New Yorkers aren't really drinkers and all English people drink like fishes in comparison. This fact is exaggerated further by the reality that when most of us go there it is usually for a long weekend or week of partying, where our already heavy drinking habits reach some kind of zenith in the swiftly -serviced glamour of New York bars.
To a New Yorker, or perhaps an American, if you regularly wake up with a hangover you, `have a problem with alcohol', ergo you are an alcoholic. A lot of people are in AA, a lot of the time. We English, a nation of social alcoholics if ever there was one, tend to consider that you only have a `problem with alcohol' if you are drinking hard spirits daily, drinking alone, having a regular drink before breakfast, or all three. It is probably fair to say that in the American definition pretty much all English people visiting New York have a problem with alcohol.
The side effect of this is that any English person in New York has already crossed the line New Yorkers draw with alcohol and excess. Once over the line, you're off and running. Whereas in London someone might eventually have taken Amanda aside and pointed out gently that she is ill, embarrassing, old and unwell. Or (please god) would have told Toby Young that he's being a bit of a cock and its time to tone it down a touch, on Manhattan these creatures have no such reality checks.
So if you are running from your substance abuse, and / or the demons which drive that, as an English person, New York is the perfect place to live. So you can exist there, as Amanda has, for two decades or more, clinging onto slow fading vestiges of previous success, now invited out as the amusing pissed English girl at parties.
