When I think of the Waverly Diner on 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, I am moved by romantic nostalgia. By that I only mean that when I think of the Waverly I feel, in some way, what it was like to be young and in the rush of the conversation. The conversation was everything. It flowed all around us, in the subways and the streets, in the diners and the high-rise apartments, and if you could master it, it could take you anywhere. You could still smoke inside of diners back then and sometimes we spent whole days around an ashtray and a plate of disco fries, getting refills on the coffee. I’m not saying all the arguments were good, but sometimes it was thrilling.
Perhaps that’s a uniquely New York thing, to place so much faith in talking. But it once felt very American, too; the diner-booth yapper animated by argument, one version of the big city fast talker who reflected an aspect of the national character right there alongside the taciturn cowboy, the trapper frontiersman, and the Puritan. American because, if you could think it and you could argue it, then maybe you could be it, too. It was at least possible. And it was democratic in the best sense. You could talk to anyone, butt into any stranger’s conversation, as long as you had something interesting to say.
I don’t know how to argue in America anymore, or whether it’s even worth it. For someone like me, that is a real tragedy and so I would like to understand how this new reality came about.
