AMITY

A large reason I wanted to move to New York City so badly when I was seventeen and eighteen and nineteen was because of a misheard lyric. I fell in love with Elliott Smith because I was into Jack Johnson. I listened to Brushfire Fairytales for at least one year straight. My brother was with me in the car once and then again a year later and I was still listening to it. He said something like, “You’re still listening to this crap?” as we turned up the driveway to our house. “I think you should listen to Elliott Smith,” he said, gently.

We went into the house and he let me borrow his copy of XO. I loved it and would write down his words in my journals. Amity maybe wasn’t my most loved track on the album but it always stood out to me. It had an air of intensity and I was tickled by the word “Amity” and I liked how New York City was mentioned. I believed the song went like this for the first few lines:

Amity amity amity amity amity amity amity amity caught stars in her arms

Hello hello can you be happy in New York City amity walking like a lucky charm

I’m a neon sign and I stay open all the time…so let’s go, go go go go

I’m not sure if I was only hearing what I wanted to, (like Lisa Loeb) but I heard the “can you” pronounced like: “cue.” Like when we slur. “Mom, cue get me a popsicle?”

It pushed me onward. Could I be happy in New York City? Could I? I didn’t know. But I wanted to know. Elliott Smith was asking me. I wanted to be like Elliott Smith and write in my journal at the bar Max Fish on the Lower East Side like my brother told me he did before he died. I wanted to be a neon sign that stayed open all the time. I truly thought that to myself when I fantasized about living in New York: I’ll be a neon sign that stays open all the time! I moved to the city a couple years later, some months after my twentieth birthday. Needless to say, my heart was crushed when I looked up the lyrics and saw that I’d been wrong all along. I’d altered the words.

I found that not only could I be happy in New York City, but I could be elated in New York City plus a ton of other feelings I’d never felt before I moved there. I could be anything I wanted to be. At one point, I lived with my best friend. When she moved in, she showed up bearing a pink and white Hello Kitty toaster. It toasted Hello Kitty’s face into the bread but it was hard to master. She also brought Hello Kitty towel. I still have the towel here in my home, four years later, and use it often and I hold it dear to my heart.

The other Elliott Smith song I listened to often in New York was Bled White. It has an urgent energy to it. He sings, “So I wait for the F train,” and I only took the F train a dozen times or so while living in New York, but I never took it without singing that lyric in my mind or even putting it on my iPod while I stood on the platform, trying to maximize the moment, trying to give my life a literal soundtrack.

I’m a color reporter (rose city on the 409)
But the city’s been bled white (white city on the yellow line)
And the doctor orders (drinking ’til he’s trashed is just a waste of time)
He drinks all night to take away this curse
but it makes me feel much worse

Bled white

So I wait for the f-train (white city on the yellow line)
And connect through a friend of mine (white city to a friend of mine)
To a yesterdaydream (yesterday a dream was just a waste of time)
‘Cause I’ll have to be high to track the sunset down
And paint this paling town

Bled white

So here he comes with a blank expression
Especially for me ’cause he knows
I feel the same
‘Cause happy and sad come in quick succession
I’m never going to become
What you became

Don’t you dare disturb me (don’t complicate my piece of mind)
While I’m balancing my past (don’t complicate my piece of mind)
‘Cause you can’t help or hurt me (the anger, being mean was just a waste of time)
Like it already has, it may not seem quite right
But I’m not fucked, not quite

Bled white
Bled white

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