A refugee from another reality...

I did not take this photo, but it is sadly accurate...

As the days pass in my new life, more and more of the strange things I see around me are blending into some semblance of predictable normality. Now seeing the same homeless woman on the subway telling her same sad story and crying at the same part (10 shows daily, 12 on weekends) is a welcomed piece of familiarity, rather than a mere annoyance (although I think it's odd she chooses the same line and the same stops each day). Hearing loud music in Spanish blaring out of my neighbor's window each afternoon, overpowering the sounds of the arguments proceeding in the kitchen seems quaint and picturesque. Getting harassed by school children as I walk to the train is starting to bother me a little less. These, and many other things are now becoming pieces of my life, however; there are some things that will take much more time to adjust to...

There are times when I feel like I came from another planet, and I think all the people around me get the same idea. Although I've visited New York on numerous occasions before moving here and feel somewhat familiar with the city, there are certain things one doesn't do as a visitor, such as buy groceries and day to day necessities. I am used to giant glistening white cathedrals to consumer products, filled with more items than anyone could ever need or want and overly-friendly employees offering assistance at every turn. In these beautiful monuments to domestic bliss, everything is clearly labeled in wide aisles containing products that seem to leap right off the shelf into your giant shopping cart. You can get everything you need in these mega-stores from bananas to toilet paper to postage stamps. Establishments in New York do not resemble this model in the least.

One of the main differences between shopping here and other parts of the United States is that there is no such thing as a "one stop shop" for anything. In my neighborhood there are at least 8 markets within a 2 block radius of my building, and they all provide different products. If you just want something easy like apples or soda, you go to one of the little deli markets. If you want things like toothpaste or light bulbs you go to the Duane Reede drug store. If you need envelopes or stamps, you go to the stationary store. If you want a bread, cereal, canned beans, etc..., there is this horrible place called the Met Foodmarket that I have grown to despise.

Unlike the Utopian grocery store model I described before, the Met Foodmarket seems intentionally designed to induce seizures or at least a severe anxiety attack. As soon as you enter, you're greeted by the smell of sticky floors and old shrimp. In the labyrinth of aisles, too narrow for more than one person to fit through at a time, much less a shopping cart, you feel like you're walking through a game board from chutes and ladders. For some reason, there are 4 different sections for chips scattered about the tiny store, but nowhere to find paper towels. You'll find things like tea next to the sausages, tampons next to the pickles and bread next to the popsicles. If you'd like to ask for help from one of the vest-clad employees, they will probably just run over your foot with a cart and then wander away muttering non-English curses about you under their breath.

It's not necessarily the shock of what is here, but it's the expectation of something quite different that will take time to subside. I feel like a refugee from another reality, just sort of floating about like flotsam in the rising tide of this place. I'm sure one day, the Met Foodmarket will also seem familiar, and perhaps even charming, but I believe it's a good benchmark that I have a long way to go before I can don the title of "New Yorker."

My New York apartment...

My bedroom window.

One often can fantasize about fabulous New York apartments when reading magazines, watching movies and unrealistic TV shows (actually filmed in LA), and have a completely skewed view of the spaces New Yorkers actually inhabit. Reading such examples of journalistic excellence like People magazine, Vogue or Cosmopolitan, one could assume that Manhattan is full of nothing but gorgeous little "pied à terre" units on cobblestone streets with bright red doors and flowers adorning ivy-covered window boxes. As this is true for a select group of the glamorous few (and I can vouch from personal experience that these "humble little flats" actually do exist), I will reserve my nastiest judgments for other much more bold misinterpretations of the truth. In any case, for the majority of New York living situations, I am here to set the record straight...

I live in an area of Manhattan called Morningside Heights, which is just really a nice way of saying "nearly Harlem." I'm right next to the Columbia University campus, General Grant's tomb, and The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (a.k.a "the Rabbi factory). It's a quaint little neighborhood with rolling hills, tree-filled parks and loud angry people. My building, like most others on my street, boasts a lovely red brick façade with a green canvas awning, brass light fixtures and a toothless bald man who always seems to be out on the front steps during all the sunny hours of the day. Once inside, one immediately notices the five flights of rather narrow stairs leading up to my apartment (conveniently located on the fifth floor) with no elevator in sight. Upon entrance of my humble abode, one also may notice the apparent lack of air conditioning the building (built sometime in the first decades of the twentieth century) has to offer. Luckily, we do have such amenities as beautifully high ceilings, hardwood floors and paper-thin walls, through which anything and everything can be heard. For a small fortune each month, I am able to live high above 123rd street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, looking out over the world below and reveling in my newly obtained New-York-ness.

I call a small hexagonal bedroom home. It's not much, but it's a peaceful place of my own in the middle of the chaos and the violent force of the city. On one of the diagonal walls of this room, I was lucky enough to find a small cupboard, which is merely an insinuation of what a closet should be, but it holds the few worldly possessions I now obtain, and quite comfortably so. On the opposite diagonal wall, I have been furnished with a rather tall window that looks directly into the building next-door. The line of sight from my bed is directly into the stairwell of the neighboring edifice, through which I can see a myriad of comical things. I have woken up in the middle of the night to scenes of fumbling men chasing suitcases down the landings. I am lulled to sleep each night by the funny little sounds coming from the open windows all around me (hoping to release some of the early summer heat), many of which are voices in no familiar tongue I can distinguish. I have never felt so small or insignificant in my whole life, but there is something charming and quite humbling about such a feeling.

I am slowly coming to the realization that this is really my life now (I haven't just daydreamed or falsely-willed it into existence). I am no longer in the mountain home I came to know so well. Now I am one of a great many, trying to find my way in a vast world beyond my own comprehension.

From a Tipi to Times Square...

A Real Life Photo of my Childhood (I'm the Baby)

As all stories must have a beginning of some sort, so will this; the story of how I ended up an intentionally unemployed starving artist with two very non-lucrative degrees in a city full of poor idealistic saps just like me. I suppose it all began when my two hippie parents met and decided it would be a great idea to move to the Rocky Mountains to teach wilderness survival...

My name is Forrest Harrison Gerke. I was born one very snowy day in a tiny town nestled at the foot of the San Juan Mountains in Southwestern Colorado, which is about as culturally far away from New York City as one can get without leaving the United States. My parents were bohemians who raised their children living in a Tipi during the summers, wandering through mountains and canyons with groups of weary strangers, teaching them how to live off of the land all around. All of my earliest memories involve being out under the enormous Western skies without any trace of civilization in sight for miles.  I know that most people my age have memories of their families sitting in front of color TV's eating microwavable meals on foldable TV-dinner trays, but my parents were different. My parents had a dream, it's true. Both of them grew up far away from the mountains of Colorado in very suburban settings back east and had every opportunity to lead boring normal lives with steady paychecks, health insurance, retirement planning, etc... Rather than becoming carbon copies of their peers, they moved to the mountains to pursue their dreams of running a wilderness survival school, firing their own pottery from natural clay and raising their family completely on the fringe of "normal" society. Although not every component of their 20 year old idealism was realized, they never stopped trying.

Now, this all sounds quite lovely, and it truly was, but there were some practical matters that perhaps my earth-loving parents had not planned for when taking us on their unique life's journey. While my peers spent their summers playing video games, watching Saturday morning cartoons and drinking sugary soft-drinks, I occupied myself by digging latrines, wading through muddy river beds and identifying edible plants. When I was at home, in my cable-TV-free environment, I spent much of my spare time riding my bike to the library and sitting on the dusty floor of the art history stacks for hours looking at books that were too heavy to carry home in my tiny backpack. The closer I found myself identifying with various dead artists, the further I found myself from relating to the people around me in the tiny little cow town in which I lived (the fact that we had a library at all, much less one with a small art history section, was a complete anomaly/miracle). Rather than sitting around on sunny days burning ants with magnifying glasses as many of my peers did, I would take a backpack full of books and my stuffed bunny (who was cleverly called "Little Forrest") out to a trash heap island in the middle of the irrigation canal conveniently located at the end of my dead-end street, and imagine myself in far off places doing exotic and bizarre sorts of things.

Stranded in the middle of a barren intellectual wasteland, I developed my own methods to amuse myself. I would tie Little Forrest to the handlebars of my bicycle, his long canvas ears flailing about in the wind, and together we would ride off into the adobe hills and pretend we were exploring undiscovered countries (even though they had been clearly discovered by hormonal teenagers who left the traces of their rural fornications behind them, as well as cowboys looking to unload their old junk, but unwilling to drive it to the landfill). Together Little Forrest and I lived out many extravagant adventures, that sadly never actually happened. I knew from the very beginning that I longed for a life dedicated to the pursuit of genuine beauty in the world. At the age of 3, my favorite book was HW Janson's "The History of Art," and by the age of 4 I had decided that I would be an artist one day.

Being a wildly vivacious and eccentric child only lead into an extremely eventful adolescence. As I've spent the years since trying to block out much of that time in my life, I'll skip ahead to college. In college, I finally found my niche. I enjoyed being part of the riff-raff sequestered away in the Visual Arts Building of Colorado State University, pushed to the very furthest corner of the campus. Although college made me realize how unique and strange my childhood had been in many respects, I realized that, as a whole, many clichés about art students are quite true and I had found my people. Earning my undergraduate degrees in Painting and Art history provided me with many of the happiest times I've had to date, but early-post-adolescence only lasts for so long, and before I knew it, 6 years after I had started, I was a college graduate at the height of a recession with no useful skills and absolutely no prospects for a job.

After starving myself to afford a studio space for a while, I realized that the only logical next step would be to really starve myself for an even more expensive and much smaller space in New York in search of my fame and fortune in the art world. So, armed with only my cunning wit, my two art degrees and five thousand dollars in easily depletable savings, I consolidated everything I own into two suitcases and set off into a much bigger and more crowded world, leaving the mountains, big skies and wide open spaces of Colorado far behind me. I don't know what will come of my rather irrational and unscrupulous decision, but this is where my New York story begins...