I lived in America for 10 years. Now I don’t even want to visit

When I moved to New York in 1985, in the first of a couple of stints amounting to 10 years, the city and America itself seemed an amazingly seductive country.

Like young people the world over, I’d been colonised by its culture, from the sitcoms I grew up with (Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, Get Smart) to the old Hollywood movies I’d watched on TV when I’d snuck home from school at midday. I knew and loved every American film star, from Louise Brooks to Mel Brooks.

In the 1980s New York, and the US more generally, was hypnotic.Credit: iStock

I’d immersed myself in American literary classics such as The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, in writers such as Truman Capote and James Baldwin, and devoured contemporary novelists as diverse as John Irving, Kinky Friedman and Sue Grafton.

I didn’t speak with an American accent, as some kids do today, but I often used the words “swell” and “snazzy”.

My first night in New York was spent in the Plaza Hotel, looking out on a Fifth Avenue streetscape that I knew from the sets of Fred and Ginger movies. I felt it was home. That’s how pervasive movies and TV were, and America was the master of it.

In the 1980s in New York, America was its most hypnotic. It was the Warhol era, the era of the big nightclubs, David Lynch, Madonna, The Simpsons, Michael Jackson, IBM personal computers and MTV.

The famous Plaza hotel in New York.

In nightclubs such as Palladium, around the corner from where I lived, there’d be a party every night for some cultural hero, such as novelists Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis. Entry was free if you looked interesting enough. You could often find yourself hobnobbing with Warhol, Keith Haring or the B-52s in the throng.

There was Broadway, Harlem, SoHo, Greenwich Village – places etched into our minds, even if we’d never been there.

But it was also the era of “greed is good”, Ronald Reagan and AIDS. Crime was high.

The dark side was undeniably there, but it was a circus of the ghastly and grotesque, where the ridiculous antics of World Championship Wrestling and poor Jocelyn Wildenstein’s latest cosmetic surgery were mesmerising, surreal and endlessly entertaining.

Donald Trump was in the mix, too, but there were publications such as Spy and Vanity Fair that sent him up mercilessly. New York City, in particular, was smart, sexy, sassy and intellectually and creatively challenging.

For me, the end of the era was the night of September 10, 2001, when the city’s superstars gathered on a Hudson River pier to celebrate designer Marc Jacobs’ latest collection. The walls of the pier were covered in thousands of gardenia blooms. Trump, Monica Lewinsky and Tina Brown all sat near each other, among movie stars such as Hilary Swank, who handed me a bottle of perfume as we filed out.

The next day, everything changed.

I regularly returned to New York and Los Angeles until the pandemic. I haven’t visited since 2019, which is unthinkable to me, the dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker who was broken-hearted to leave after 9/11.

Many of my friends are no longer there. Some have died, others moved to Mexico. One has sold everything and is leaving this week for Europe, never to return. And while I would consider visiting, it would only be to see my much-missed friends, some of whom are in Los Angeles, a city in need of support right now.

We have been under the thrall of America for so long that it’s difficult to yank the focus away. Almost 640,000 Australians visited the US in the last financial year, though that number was well below pre-pandemic levels. I expect that the incumbent president, the thought of becoming collateral damage in a mall shooting, and the tanking Australian dollar are now giving more Australians pause for thought.

As travellers, there are many more fascinating places where we can spend our money. I’d suggest Canada for a start.