I leave the restaurant alone, insisting that I can catch a cab home.

I’m a little drunk, just not drunk enough. I think about that man . . . that depressed drunk who asked me to serve him at Ivan’s only a week ago. All he had wanted was a kind of nonprescription morphine and I had denied him. Lander hadn’t, though. Lander gave him the means to further his self-destruction.

I would pay for that form of kindness right now.

I wander around lower Manhattan, glaring at the Manhattanites in their deceptively casual clothes. As if a cotton T-shirt could distract from a two-thousand-dollar purse or a four-thousand-dollar hair weave. As if their excesses were details rather than the main attraction. It didn’t used to be like this. All these chic restaurants and expensive boutiques that offer to sell you a bohemian look for the cost of a car—it’s all relatively new. Once there were warehouses here, and real bohemians, unpublished writers and struggling dancers. There were drug addicts trying to ride their high to an artistic breakthrough. There was a coarseness that reminded people of what New York was really about.

Evolve or die—that’s always what they tell you. Adjustment and assimilation are the mechanisms of survival.

But I wonder as I walk unsteadily through the pedestrians, do we ever really change? Or do we just cover up the parts of ourselves that don’t fit in anymore? Look at these buildings—warehouses converted to lofts. If you look closely you can see what they are underneath the new packaging. The bones of the city are what they’ve always been. New York has dyed her hair and put on a new coat. But she’s still the same city.

I turn down Cortlandt Alley and there it is, the real New York, hiding in the shadows behind the polished storefronts. This alley is different from so many of the others. It spans three blocks and has but one streetlamp for its entire length. Scaffolding that’s older than me lines some of the buildings, but for the most part it’s just bricks and concrete. I run my fingers along the buildings as I walk into the alley’s depths, squinting at the iron shutters bolted to the windows. They’re not there for effect. They were constructed to stop the spread of fires that terrorized the textile factories once housed here. And as I continue to walk, I can also make out artfully rendered graffiti and drunkenly scrawled gang tags. Traces of a forgotten past and a repudiated present can be found scattered throughout this place. I understand it. In so many ways it’s a reflection of me.

I keep walking, moving a little farther from the honking horns and boisterous laughter of the street. I discovered this place when I was thirteen, two years after I had abandoned my mother.