Legal Alien: A Countdown

Who voluntarily gives back their Green Card? I did. I moved to New York to fulfill a lifelong dream—and crashed hard into a reality that had very little in common with my expectations. An excerpt from my book Legal Alien: New York and Back, marking the 250th anniversary of the United States.

< BACK TO THE BOOK | DEUTSCHE FASSUNG >

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: A SWAN SONG

When I returned to New York for a few weeks after a full eight-month absence, my boarding pass featured a mysterious little code that promptly earned me VIP treatment: I was escorted into a separate line and patted down from head to toe during the secondary security check, just to make sure I hadn’t accidentally worn an explosive vest under my T-shirt.

“Didn’t anyone tell you?” the border patrol agent wanted to know. He wore the punitive glare of a schoolmaster hitting his stride when he knows he’s in the right. “Eight months,” he said with deep gravity, “is a long time.” According to bureaucratic logic, your life has to center on the United States if you want to keep your Green Card. His blue eyes flashed with superior glee as he waved my card in the air as if trying to exorcise its demons: “You might be losing this!”

America’s greatest flaw is that it
fails to be Europe, a design defect
with no immediate fix.

Of course, I could have confessed that I needed an extended timeout in Berlin, where life was just so much lighter than here. I could have explained to him that I felt like a stranger in this country. Day after day, I had weighed the pros and cons of both continents, juggling the arguments like hot coals. As it turned out, there is a vast difference between paying New York City a fleeting visit and actually living there. I wanted no other city but New York—yet I couldn’t stay in New York. America’s greatest flaw is that it fails to be Europe, a design defect with no immediate fix.

I kept these musings to myself, of course. After delivering his sermon, the gatekeeper let me pass, though he couldn’t resist one final shake of his head. What he didn’t know: at six o’clock that morning, after a sleepless night leading up to my flight, I had already made my decision. It hadn’t materialized out of thin air; it had been brewing for a very long time.

BORROWED TIME

The shimmering humidity of the day still hangs in the air. I’ve been pounding the pavement in Midtown since sunrise. Exhausted, I sit down on a wooden bench in a small pocket park, a green oasis stranded amid scrap metal, trash, and the faint bouquet of urine. Twilight is falling as I hear the watery hiss of a lawn sprinkler and trace with my eyes the wild vines climbing up the black-painted fire escapes.

I am grateful for every stray breeze that loses its way in here. How strange it is to have no real destination. I step onto the long shadows of the people walking toward me. Over at the oval-shaped Union Square, thousands of visitors are milling about, a kaleidoscopic melting pot where idlers from all walks of life lounge on the steps. To cool off, I had just popped into the sprawling organic grocery store, which boasted shameless prices that made you look twice and then quickly shove your hands deep back into your pockets. The checkout lines seemed to back up for miles in front of thirteen registers.

In the produce section, a gray-haired woman hooked a sustainably grown pear and took a hearty bite. Her threadbare clothes suggested she wasn’t exactly a card-carrying member of the high-end demographic. “They’re really good,” she noted with raised eyebrows when our eyes met.

Since I didn’t look like a loss-prevention officer, a conversation blossomed while she kept chewing and reached for the grapes. Because she couldn’t actually afford the place, she was simply eating her fill right then and there. She peeled a mandarin orange and chased it with two organic apricots. For dessert, she joined the line with a single, tiny chocolate bar.

With George Washington’s equestrian statue at my back, I sip my Grande Americano, a double espresso in a paper cup, generously diluted with water, tasting exactly how it looks: like hot cardboard. Right next door, the Greenmarket stretches out, where farmers hawk their produce at preposterous prices. On the edge of the square stands a dark building whose facade features the art installation Metronome. The fifteen digits on the giant display flicker forward and backward faster than the eye can track, a restless bookkeeping of the hours and seconds since and until midnight. For me, it’s the countdown of my remaining time in the city.

PUSHING YOUR AGENDA

“Are you okay?” A young woman breaks my train of thought. She crosses her legs as she takes a seat on the step next to me. Her round face is heavily made up; her T-shirt glows as green as her eyes. Zoey immediately ropes me into a conversation, as if I had nothing better to do. As it happens, I actually don’t. As if I’d just been waiting for her, I pour my heart out without any preamble.

I launch into a monologue about my love for America in general and New York in particular, a romance spanning several decades. I tell her about the many people who crossed my path: long-suffering fellow illustrators, melancholic set designers, and unsung writers; self-proclaimed artistic geniuses, a painter of dog portraits, the journalists of the émigré newspaper Aufbau (for which I became the first cartoonist since 1934), and relentless contrarians loudly pushing their agendas at parties.

Professionally, the gamble had paid off.
But at what cost?

I describe bitchy editors-in-chief who could spot a European from a mile away, but also the warm-hearted art director of a major daily who, out of the blue, invited me to his family home in Boston. I encountered slick amateur real estate sharks and merengue-blasting neighbors at their most tactless; I met pathological hoarders and indestructible survival artists, and even a cruise ship pianist.

I had seen things that weren’t in any guidebook and learned lessons that no amount of money could buy. Over time, commissions rolled in from newspapers and magazines I wouldn’t have dared dream of before. Professionally, the gamble had paid off. But at what cost?

“That’s some heavy thinking,” Zoey muses, twirling a strand of hair. In her view, though, my doubts put me in excellent company. After all, plenty of New Yorkers spend every day weighing whether the math still adds up. My eyes burn from the city dust. In the brown paper bag next to me, an open bottle of Budweiser Lager sits like an accusation. We share a knish, a greasy pastry stuffed with seasoned mashed potatoes from Yonah Schimmel’s, that I vow never to buy again.

We feel the subway rumbling beneath our feet as I complain about the penchant for pragmatism, which both fascinates me and drives me absolutely crazy. She didn’t deserve this, and yet Zoey patiently sits through my accusations, nodding in all the right places. Venturing these clichéd platitudes to a total stranger was hardly my finest hour. But I couldn’t help it; they just spilled out. For that evening, Zoey was my therapist, listening to my unfiltered psychological state. I learned very little about her, because I forgot to ask.

THE HUMAN TAPESTRY

I let my eyes wander across the frantic, sprawling human tapestry of the crowd. At white plastic tables, chess players wage their wars. A male student in a miniskirt, a shimmering top, and blue hair thoughtfully analyzes the moves; next to him is a man in a safari helmet sporting a handlebar mustache, and an eight-year-old prodigy with his arms crossed behind his back. In a forest of picket signs, activists protest the national debt and climate change, pillorying capitalism.

It’s one thing to make your bed, but another to lie in it. It’s not like I hadn’t been warned: for New Yorkers, it’s practically impossible to afford their own city. I easily blew through three to four times what I paid in Berlin every month, and I never would have believed how little bang you get for your buck in New York.

Zoey shares an “apartment from hell” courtesy of one of the city’s notorious slumlords. With every check he pockets, she says, he laughs all the way to the bank. She rests her head in her hand, and sounds oddly resigned. In New York, shared misery seems to be the glue that binds people together.

Another platitude, I think.
And that unshakable pragmatism.

Suddenly, I am torn all over again. New York was my dream, then a nightmare. And now, here at Union Square with Zoey, I don’t feel resentful anymore. Maybe it’s the beautiful weather? Or maybe it’s her? Go figure!

She can’t make the decision for me. But at least Zoey has a solid piece of advice ready: “You can’t change the past, you can only change the future,” she says as we part ways. Yet another one of those platitudes, I think. And that unshakable pragmatism. But fair enough, she’s right.

Back in Berlin, I wrestled with myself for months. And I took my sweet time. If I had held out just a little longer, I’d probably be an American citizen today.

Instead, a year later, I gave back my Green Card.