Big Fun City: Part 1

Part 1/2: Fictional experimentation in first person in which Nick heads back to his old home, a city he moved to in his younger years, and takes it all in. All of it.

I can’t believe I’m back after all these years. As I walk out of my hotel into the sun, a spring morning, a new day, a fresh start, I begin searching with my eyes, ears, and nose for the familiar sensations that defined this place.

This place, Big Fun City, founded many, many years ago, has lived many, many lives. I’m not sure which one I am entering now.

I look around and see people in the street, the usual dog walkers, families with strollers, couples walking hand in hand. It feels like nothing changed. It feels like the old city I knew and loved frozen in time.

But I know that’s a lie.

It was once home. I lived in Big Fun City years before it became a thing that people used on a hashtag, when it was a place where residents didn’t know or care what hashtags were. It was a place where you didn’t ask for Wifi passwords and where coffee was black or with milk, and no other options really existed.

This was the Big Fun City I fell in love with so many years ago.

Now, Big Fun City is the type of city that keeps postcard empires in power, fueling the work of the kitschy magnet guild and bankrolling Big Keychain as tourists stream in steadily like wildebeest across the African Savannah into a river of crocodiles, undulating crowds throwing themselves mindlessly into the murky chasms.

I see them little by little. Young hipster types — it’s always the hipsters — who wear mismatched clothes that may be vintage, or simply designed to look so, walk with electronic cigarettes and water bottles through the streets, dipping in and out of their brandless tote bags for some item or another. As they get closer, I realize they are not so young, with wrinkles around their eyes not unlike my own. I diagnose some with Peter Pan syndrome immediately. Others may catch a case of it in five years or so. They are speaking languages both familiar and foreign to me, but none of them are the dialect of Big Fun City. None of them have achieved proficiency. 

Few have likely tried.

I moved away, nearly ten years, family obligations and work opportunities sending me across the globe. I was once like them, perhaps, but I came to Big Fun City before there were hipsters, before there it made top ten lists, before it was a hashtag. Call me a pioneer — I wouldn’t — but it was just another place to exist, to escape, to be someone new. That was my Big Fun City, a place to collide with others unlike me. As I walk through it now, my city is, well, let’s just say I squint to make sure I am seeing it correctly.

Visitors flock here now not to learn the language, which they never do anyway. They aren’t here for the food, which recent news articles say is “good” and “tasty” as if these descriptions provide any insight. They don’t come for culture, a nebulous concept that covers anything and everything in Big Fun City. They come for one reason: It’s where everyone else is going because it’s cheap. They call it affordable in public, but God knows in private they celebrate the cheapness of it all. 

Many people never go somewhere that is expensive, as luxury thins the herds for the select few to enter a given space. But a destination that is cheap — ahem, affordable — attracts the masses, the floodgates ripping open as people arrive from all cardinal directions to have their inexpensive piece of the pie, regardless of its flavor.

This is the dream that Big Fun City provides people now. The hashtags. The influencers. The news reports. The podcasts. The travel guides. Those damned travel guides. They all point to Big Fun City, consequences be damned. The city has lost control of the narrative as train stations heave and airports fill like Mecca during the Hajj. Big Fun City’s leaders live outside the city. Big Fun City’s leaders count the money happily. Big Fun City will thrive and prosper thanks to this influx. That’s what people thought. That’s why they let it happen.

As I wade through it, I wonder.

Were there this many homeless people before?

Were there this many people approaching me for money before?

Did every corner smell like urine back when I lived in Big Fun City?

As I walk through the streets I think I know well, I look for signs of thriving. Signs of prospering among people who lived here. I see tourist shops by the dozen, lining streets, the golden “Made in China” stickers visible from the windows on products sporting Big Fun City’s name. Kebab shops and fried chicken stores replace old local eaters. I don’t think I ever saw a fried chicken place in Big Fun City when I lived here — locals didn’t crave the stuff. Chinese restaurants appear with a regularity to welcome those seeking a bit of familiarity. Golden arches and green mermaids provide comfort to others, even if they scoff at the idea and never step foot inside. Denizens of Big Fun City enjoy no such comforts when they travel. But they don’t expect it. Most don’t travel at all, lacking the resources, too busy catering to these new masses washing over their landscape.

I start to itch for a bit of the familiarity that Big Fun City once afforded, separate from what it has become. Where is the city I knew?

A group of people ride by on electric scooters, the ones that anyone can rent and ride wherever they want. They clog up sidewalks and terrorize pedestrians, anger bikers, and play chicken with traffic. I wonder how many of these new locals, these implants from around the world, have died on these scooters. I wonder, rather darkly, how many true locals secretly wished they had.

Visitors to Big Fun City want to experience it like the locals, renting pedicabs or riding Segways to see the sites. You know, like the locals do.

Visitors to Big Fun City call it BFC, a nomenclature begun by some new residents who wanted to take ownership of the city. It seemed that only native residents ever spoke the city’s whole name, eliciting eye-rolls from the new owners of the city’s brand. They are the trendsetters. They know better, of course.

Visitors to BFC clamor for a fancy cocktail they saw one online content creator drinking on Instagram, a drink that nobody who grew up in BFC ever heard of before and which they refuse to drink. Now, even the oldest bar in BFC offers the drink on the menu, touting it as “BFC’s Finest Cocktail,” which TikTok users have quickly labeled “The BFCFC.”

Menus sell it as B(FC)². It might be cute if it weren’t so stupid in the first place.

I look for my favorite haunts, a store that sold a type of sweet only made in Big Fun City. Replaced. Another that sold their signature liquor. It sells craft beer from around the world now. And my old tailor where I could get shirts made to fit my admittedly weirdly shaped body has become a Gap.

I am not sure where I am, and only the familiar street signs and the specific stone facades of Big Fun City’s buildings remind me. They may very well be a backlot, a filming location created by a Hollywood studio that somehow I stumbled onto by accident.

Curiosity takes over and I switch on the app — now that I’m single again — and across the grid I see flags from all over the world, languages I don’t know and that I never heard in Big Fun City before. This app used to be a way to learn the local language, to find out about the best places to go from local guys that I might meet, or might not, but it gave me access to its inner workings. A younger me woke up to all sorts of Big Fun City guys after a night out, offering me inexpensive — never cheap — ways to experience this place.

Now, it’s exciting and titillating, even, having a microcosm of global culture right here in BFC. Jesus, it’s rubbing off on me, isn’t it? I’m tempted to engage with them, but most are tourists, or students, looking for a date or two, a night of passion before they head back to whatever smaller, less fun enclave they call home in some distant, sad country that could never boast Big Fun City. I’m forty years old. This isn’t really my scene right now. I swipe around anyway.

I match with someone. His photo is blurry but it’s not about aesthetics as much as finding a connection to this place again. He messages me in my language, not even bothering with formal greetings in the vernacular of Big Fun City.

I acquiesce. 

We decide to meet up in an hour for coffee. I’m not sure I’ll follow through with it, too torn about my return to this city to want to seek connection.

But I’ll try.

I love this city, and I want to remember why.

Big Fun City: Part 2