Winter Options

On the frigid Friday when we're boycotting everything... striking, protesting... I went out, and New York City somehow always seems to be business-as-usual.  While I remember distinctly the sense of empowerment I felt demonstrating as a teenager in the 60's-- like part of an army of compassionate humanity, today I feel snubbed and overlooked.  Even the weather is daunting. Victims of the cold here receiving little sympathy; they are anonymous and powerless. The wounded martyrs of ICE demonstrations are filling news platforms, and yet the bodies here-- mostly homeless, some nameless... have suffered from another kind of ice... and their narratives maybe quietly heroic. Two men I discovered Tuesday in a doorway-- one a migrant terrified to check into a shelter or warming center. Hours later, shivering in my apartment, I fretted about these men; they were not young. Reluctantly I called 311 and they promised no names would be asked.  But promises in this country in 2026 seem to be threadbare things.

Most of my friends are staying inside in this polar vortex; for those with draughty old apartments and insufficient heat, sometimes a reality check outside in the form of a brisk walk kickstarts our internal thermostat. But I find many of the shut-ins more nostalgic than ever-- binging on the 'Manhattan before 1990' sites and vintage city photos.  For the second time last night I watched I Am Twenty-- an extraordinarily poignant Russian film from 1964 with a story behind it.  But the art museum scene-- the poetry, the conversations-- brought me into the usual nostalgia and longing for a time when these deep discussions among friends were daily occurrences.  Also-- the old version of Moscow is on display and fantastically interesting.  

I am no longer sure who anyone is, in this time when even my friends have enhanced their face, have altered their lives to depend on mobile phone platforms and award-show culture.  I also watched-- again,  the Louis Malle 'Place de la République' in which he interviews regular blue-collar type people on the streets of Paris.  This is the version I recall from my first trip there in the early 1970's... and somehow each person he questions seems to have a very candid answer.  The fact that they are 'who they are' seems now a treasured state of being.  A certain intimacy radiates from just the stark honesty with which they face a microphone and camera.  It is disturbing that I don't feel this connection in casual conversation today-- in interviews and televised dialogues.  The obvious make-up and hair aside, everything seems scripted and manipulated-- calculated, prepared, and 'filtered'. 

Several of my neighbors have gone on small holidays and returned tanned and unprepared for this unusual cold spell.  They have also avoided disturbing politics and daily discouraging takeaways on the diminished value of democracy in America.  But these people have money-- they have options.  There is no option for the two men trying to sleep in the Lexington Avenue door-niche Tuesday night. 

When I was a teenager, my Aunt Rita had a little shop.  They sold John Meyer of Norwich clothing-- sort of preppy but decent quality wear for suburban men and women.  Casual clothing-- practical things.  Of course all these brands have been reinvented in the digital age, but back then I was something of a hippie, and... well, the clothes were not for me.  I did make wool curtains for the store fitting rooms and then made myself a warm winter skirt from the extra.  I sat on a vintage stool at a counter after school and folded things, hand-wrote tickets and promotional postcards.  I loved it there. In January, they had a shipment of what they called Cruise-wear-- suddenly summer clothing-- bathing suits and cover-ups, T-shirts and khaki shorts.. golf-wear.  My aunt had to explain this to me... it was a thing.. and I suppose even the concurrent shop window display gave people a break, a sense of hope in midwinter 1960's when snow was plentiful and the cold was consistent and predictable.

The saleswomen were all friends of my aunt-- one especially remains in my heart-- a tall, elegant Jackie Kennedy type with a lovely speaking voice and innate elegance.  We became sort of intimate. Her husband, I remember, was this tall photographer.  He was so handsome-- and a little rough.  He both adored her and had that macho edge one puts on because in his heart he knew he'd married 'up'.  I saw him with other women in the city.  This was common then; no one spoke of it.  Later she suffered from breast cancer... and he left her.  When the shop closed, we lost touch and I went away to college. In the end I heard she'd remarried to a man who spoiled her-- took her on exotic voyages before her premature death.  I am surely older than she would have been. Today I miss her-- her patient explanation of 'cruisewear' to a girl whose small world did not encompass weather-driven vacation choices. She touched my life in such a gentle way and I hope she is warm.

I miss these people who knew exactly who they were; the people of the Place de la République are here among us somewhere in the city-- delivering things, slicing meat in a bodega... making pizza maybe... but they are rare.  My aging friends are a little fearful and insecure... they begin to walk with hesitancy and they mistrust, with good reason, the institutions which were designed to protect us. Everything is inappropriately invasive and these people who seem to live in old photos and memoirs-- well, they call me, narrating their disappointments-- maybe looking for sympathy, not always aware of this.  

Perhaps I am guilty, too. In this culture where one does not 'see' oneself, I am surely afflicted.  To protect from the diagnosis, I avoid mirrors, avoid too much effort to change my appearance.  Inside I am pretty much the same, although I miss the alacrity and candor with which I once greeted people and embraced their intimacy.  I'm a little guarded and not sure these 'others' know themselves.  They think they do, but not in the way these French working people on the street knew exactly where they were going and why. 

We do change.  My son has changed me profoundly.  I am now a football fan-- a sports fan.  One osmotically absorbs the passions of one's loved ones.  And he will not know that I switch off the pro-bowl game to catch a rare cameo of Tarkovsky who has sadly left this world... or Yevtushenko, reading his poetry in 1962 Moscow... to screen-- one more time-- the world as it was when I was barely ten years old,  when I Am Twenty would have been beyond my understanding and certainly not something my parents would have taken me to see.  Fortunately, like most things of the heart, one does not have to exchange one thing to allow for another. Unlike the two men on Lexington, we have options-- maybe not economic but emotional and intellectual ones.  May we put them to better use.  

Women and Men

Heat in New York City-- the extreme unrelenting kind (not to downplay the life-threatening aspect) is a palpable adventure.  For those of us toughing it out without air conditioning, it feels like a matrix-- a kind of intangible airless box.  I can't help being reminded of the 1977 July blackout, when my neighborhood was not only without power for days, but without water. Yes, there was looting and some violence, but for the young, it was a kind of party... restaurants and bars at first giving away the contents of their refrigerators and freezers, drinking and partying in the streets.  By day three, it got old; the city stank of garbage and sewage.  At one point I hopped on a city bus which had its own little air conditioning system and rode all the way uptown.  I was living with a guitar player who continued to do acoustic gigs in clubs by candlelight with people drinking warm beer and soda from cans. It stretched time. 

I'm sweating through Joseph McElroy's Women and Men.. another of those challenging post-modern difficult mammoth novels. It's so large the contemporary reprinting was structurally unsound and retracted. Supposedly there's a two-volume version, but I'm coping with the original 1980's printing.  Difficult to carry around-- larger than my Organic Chemistry textbook all those years ago--  and nearly as dense.  It's also a quintessentially New York novel, written for the most part in the 1970's.  It occurs as I make my way that I'm going to be the last reading generation who will understand the context of these characters and their behaviors.  We read Shakespeare and older authors and there is a glossary at the back to explain words and expressions, but it occurs that in a few more decades, even the geography here-- the recent vintage urban references-- will require footnotes. 

I wonder too, if people in the future will have a reading list, the way many of our pop icons had their own set of icons-- many of whom were relatively well-read and versed.  Why is it that I feel compelled to read, as though I must continue some kind of literary itinerary with its occasional roadside distractions and off-ramps, unpaved paths and mountainous obstacles? As though someone will go hungry because I overlooked some huge tome, or my destiny will not play out as pre-planned?

As recreation, I picked up a Library of America book of stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson.  I love these volumes for their scrupulous attention to original manuscripts, for their notes and explanations-- biographical insights.  I trust them, in a world where printing errors and typos abound, translations fail authors. Admittedly, I had never heard of this Woolson who is described as perhaps the acknowledged second-best woman writer of the 19th century.  Complete oversight.  So they are chaste little tales which at first bored me, but now I am compulsively going through the entire chronology.  They are narrative and informed with setting and geography-- with characters and religion and informed with a kind of old-fashioned social and moral sense which is comforting and rewarding. Real stories... adventures... people... with air and atmosphere.  A slight wind.  Sea-storms, swamps, Italian hills... old churches and clergymen and orphaned seamstresses... mysteries.

As opposed to Women and Men which has the density and realism of a solid polyhedron.  The details and characters-- the tangents and the interwoven relationships-- the non-narrative difficulty.  It is a kind of five-dimensional novel and one must stay present with each page.  I remember reading Pynchon in the 70's; it was a revelation and a challenge. Decades later I'm not sure I'm quite up to a weighty literary task; at page 500, I'm not even halfway through... but I will keep going. 

Two nights ago I rewatched the 1970's version of The Great Gatsby.  It felt stale and dated; the dialogue was flat-- the  characters were silly and the ironies awkward.  Even the Fitzgerald text felt clichéd.  Am I jaded?  Not sure. I am much more apt to appreciate the outdated language of the Woolson stories. 

I spend hours each day scrolling through gallery exhibitions and auction lots.  One sees scads of old-world academic painters-- people who gave their entire life to the study of landscape or still life or portraits, for little reward.  They looked and observed and self-critiqued and produced; they starved. And here are these millionaire contemporary artists with their rolexes and several residences... bringing home the proverbial bacon.  Others work so hard to become financial and critical failures. To be rewarded for simply being oneself is the supreme prize.  Many of these people are locked in their perhaps non-air-conditioned rooms, struggling to give birth to yet another creation, maybe unseen.  This haunts me.. how to find these people who have no instagram or outlet... but their own brand of greatness. 

I imagine them during these oppressive nights-- the ones by candlelight in older times; the heat even in the Gatsby movie was accurately palpable.  Pre-air-conditioned summers, as the older among us recall them.  My mother took us to Belle Harbor (I thought she was a woman) to cool off in the ocean. When my father earned a little more, we went to Cape Cod or summer camp.  Meanwhile my mother read us 'cold' stories like Jack London or The Little Match Girl and ran our little wrists under cool faucets. The days were long and the nights often sleepless and longer. 

This summer will be marked by the imprint of Women and Men-- slipping back into a 1970's city I remember well.  By the time McElroy published this long novel, it was already perhaps outdated.  It was described as ambitious, difficult, perhaps brilliant... the subject does not strike me as much as the urban whole, the layered complicated synchronicitous and unfathomable, while personally a kind of nostalgia he did not intend engages me. It's a relief that none of the characters have quite seeped into my heart, which leaves space for the Woolson tales to enchant me a little more these hot nights.  

Poor Woolson, I've learned, was something of a literary spinster.  She worshipped Henry James and managed a complicated friendship with him, although James never quite acknowledged her talent. At 53 she suicided-- did not make it to the twentieth century. Perhaps I should reconsider and recall this as the summer of Constance. 

The Waitress Said 'Come See Me'

My friends spend altogether too much time reminiscing.  It seemed okay during the pandemic, when we'd call one another and just float time like a newspaper boat in a pond; but now it seems to waste precious moments we could be putting to use-- to age us.

Occasionally my son likes to see old photos of the Manhattan he recalls.  He's still young, so it's not as depressing when we share memories. He thinks he recalls subway tokens-- and I go on about the price of things on old menus and window-displays.  I remember when bus fare was increased to 35 cents.  You needed to come up with that extra dime to throw in the till.  

My first real post-college job was a gallery on 69th Street off Madison.  Every morning I'd buy a coffee and a buttered roll for exactly 35 cents.  I began to walk... to use my bus fare for breakfast. Inside at work we'd all sit and gab about the night before-- the 70's were exciting times in the city-- music, new restaurants... everyone seemed to know where everyone was.  The art shows that changed monthly-- we could cover most of them in a week on our lunch hour-- Castelli, Schoelkopf, Wildenstein, Knoedler, Martha Jackson.

I came back to New York post-college, to pursue a career in art restoration.  I'd worked hard to qualify for an exclusive dual-doctorate program affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum.  Just acceptance here was like an award.  I managed to score a house-sitting gig on the upper east side that first fall... I'd walk across 79th Street mornings and I'd pass this diner-- the kind you saw everywhere in those days, that no longer exist.  I'd look in and see the waitress in her pink dress and her white apron going from table to table with the glass coffeepot, refilling the cups of mostly businessmen with open newspapers and an egg-plate pushed to the side. I'd stare in at this waitress with her hair in a French knot, her efficient white shoes and her white-stockinged legs, like a nurse.  

Meanwhile my brain was memorizing images from 17th-century paintings, and Cathedral details from the Medieval Architecture course.  I was deciphering formulae for the sciences of pigment analysis, X-ray spectroscopy and varnish-removal-- examining textiles and canvas weaves-- identifying geographic provenance from materials... distinguishing forgeries and re-paints from the authentic object.  This fascinated me.  

But more and more I thought about the waitress.  I'd stop behind a telephone pole and watch her through the glass-- her every move and her signature gestures.  I began to envy her, as though my then-boyfriend was her admirer.  Her life-- it was so simple.  I was so broke-- picking up extra jobs, baby-sitting at night, living on cheap supermarket past-sell-date items... walking, borrowing books.  But the waitress--- her apron pocket full of change, she could break-- fix herself an egg-salad sandwich on rye toast (whisky down), smoke a few cigarettes with her coffee, read one of the tabloids a customer had left.  And then she could go home where I imagined she had a neat little studio, maybe a cat-- a plant, curtains.  She could do her nails and watch TV all night-- or meet someone for a drink.  

The academic soup of my life began to sour.  All that work-- four more years after eight intensive undergraduate semesters where I grew and learned and produced.  I couldn't quite imagine myself at the end of the road, applying for a museum position-- spending a decade on a single Rembrandt painting-- analyzing, cleaning, in-painting, repairing.  Who was I, I wondered, with this calling, to examine paintings, to fix things as though I were a doctor-- things that were dead, things that maybe were better off left alone, as they were?  

On the other hand, the waitress served people-- lonely men with bored wives who no longer fixed their breakfast-- single bachelors whose newspaper time before work was the best part of the day-- where for less than a dollar they'd be served exactly what they ordered-- eggs over easy or sunnyside-up, with buttered toast and that wonderful bottomless cup of coffee that washed it down. A quarter for the waitress who provided exactly what they needed.  

My boyfriend at the time was a guitar player.  He worked clubs late hours; I tried to be there, but my class schedule was demanding and a sleep-deprived mind was noticeably inefficient.  On weekends I'd hang out late; after gigs we'd go eat at a diner.  The waitresses flirted with the musicians... at 4 AM it was mostly bands, bartenders... a few drunk party-goers... but the waitresses were like 'home' to these guys. They welcomed them, brought them food, ashtrays, coffee refills.  One in particular was so beautiful... she slipped my boyfriend a note with her phone number.  I found it in his pocket.  She made silver jewelry in her spare time. She looked like Dylan's Susan... the perfect Greenwich Village silhouette.  Downtown girls could wear jeans with their white shirts... they looked good. They were mostly kind to me, except one who had actually slept with my boyfriend.  I tried not to be jealous.

It wasn't exactly the person, it was the simple symmetry of their life. They served, they laughed and talked, they smoked during breaks, they went home with full pockets.  They shared shifts and gossip. They slept all day and woke up to work, like the musicians.  How many songwriters have written odes to them, how many poets-- me included? 

Waitressing doesn't seem to have the romance it did in those days-- when it was like a template for something.  My morning trips past the diner haunted me beyond what was rational; I took a leave from graduate school, and never really regretted.  When I started playing bass in bands, I referred to my gallery job as my 'waitress' gig.  It enabled me to do what I needed to do at night where my life seemed to make sense.

Years later, as a young mother, I spent early mornings with the baby in a local diner, lingering over the breakfast special and looking wistfully at the passing cars. There was a career-waitress there who sat with me during breaks-- she had the deep voice of a chain-smoker and the hard 'r's of a New York accent. Cawfee, she said, and entered soprano-range when she cooed over my son.  I loved her; I trusted her even though she had terrible boyfriends who stole from her and abused her.  She didn't even make it to middle age; she got a brain tumor and suffered.  All those people she served and cared for, smiled at and nicknamed... they disappeared like a pack of cigarettes.  Her drug-addict boyfriend kept her rent-controlled studio for a time.  I saw him pan-handling one afternoon and choked back the urge to smack him.

There should be, among the city statues and landmarks, a waitress figure-- a woman with her hair in a ponytail, or a net-- an apron, a pad and pencil... a menu.  The real symbol of diner-lore, of the city... the person we've sung about and chatted up, the one who changed my life even though I never even spoke to her... who showed me maybe not the path to what I was to become, but the reality of what I was not.

Don't Cry for Me, Minnesota

When I first arrived in New York, I dated a printmaker.  Not an artist, but a master printer who worked at a fantastic place where Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol made things.  It was hard work-- physical and artistic.  He was from Minnesota; I met him at a dinner. In those days there were these funky 'salons'-- people from Pratt or Parsons or Cooper Union-- they'd gather on weekend nights in small apartments-- walk-ups, or lofts which were under-occupied and commercially zoned.  Music generally came from a portable stereo-- or some people had guitars... but mostly it was artists, all dressed like paraders in thrift-shop wear, eating on boxes and cushions, smoking pot, drinking cheap alcohol.  They rarely shared work at these dinners-- it was about conversation and ideas. Some of them were to become famous... we all knew every single gallery show and the more promising among students stood out. It was like a mixer-- all this talent in a room, with smoke and quiet ambition and melting of ego. No photographs-- only the ones tacked on walls for inspiration.

Anyway, the Printer was out of place here.  He was shy, with his blonde ponytail-- half Irish, half Scandinavian.  He was sober and serious.  We went on a date or two; he had trouble speaking to me... he lived, fortunately, in a fantastic huge loft on the Bowery... which in those days was super affordable and of course he was well paid for his skill.  When I visited the studio to witness his work, I was overcome.  His technique was precise and masterly... the artists trusted and respected him enormously.  He spoke little and executed with brilliance. No, he had absolutely no ambition to create his own; still, he was a kind of maker. I was swept.  

The prints were pulled from these enormous presses of different varieties... laid out and then stacked when dry-- sometimes they were hand colored by the artist, but mostly they were piled up, waiting for the artist to sign, which they did, beginning with the one on top, so the last one pulled would often be numbered one of whatever.  Irony.  Of course they were virtually identical, but people are often seduced by the number '1', while the printer knows the last is first. 

Going through an old drawer of keepsakes last night, I found a handmade 'book'.  It was this lovely card from the shy printer, inviting me to come out with him.  Each page offered a different activity, with these charming illustrations and collages... like a children's book he'd created because it was so difficult for him to look me in the eye, or even touch me.  Last night, maybe 45 years later, it touched me. The smell of the paper and the inks in that studio, the phantom colors embedded in his rough hands... his sweater-- I remembered he insisted I wear it one damp early morning walking me home from one of those all-night soirees. It had a scent.  

My doorman told me last week that Low had cancelled their dates. Mimi Parker the singer and fulcrum of this band was ill and dying.  I remember so well their first album-- I played it over and over, went to an early concert where the breathtaking restraint of the music silenced the audience like nothing I'd experienced.  It was a small-ish club-- Brownie's?  I can't recall... but it was riveting and we went home without speaking.  I had a young boyfriend then-- it was romantic and the 90's in New York now seem so innocently grungy and real.  Night after night we'd put the cd on and it would provide the soundtrack to long hours of some kind of passion.  The music embedded in us-- it created a sort of Cathedral vibe, in my old converted-factory place with the sleep-loft.  Especially for musicians, whatever is on the turntable affects us-- paints a landscape. 

I'm sure thousands and millions of Low fans are mourning the loss of Mimi.  She was the epitome of unpretentious-- her voice true and crystalline-- soft and strong at the same time.  Minimal.  A worker and  musical angel. You'd trust her.  Apparently as a person she was the same.  Her life was perfect although she was a Mormon, but maybe that was part of her solidity.  At the funeral service in Duluth, everyone received a profiterole... and a recipe card. The message here to me-- is go on, be light and make something.  Each family also got a piece of her hand-sewn marriage quilt.  I'm sure the music was amazing... and by request, Tim Rutili performed his exquisite composition: 'All my friends are weeds and rain/All my friends are half-gone birds/Are magnets, all my friends are words/All my friends are funeral singers.'  

All my friends are funeral singers.  It seems not just cruel but wrong that a Mimi Parker is taken-- as though her number came up on the top of the pile, like a mistake.  Nothing is a mistake, Tyrone on 114th Street in Harlem announced last night.  There are regrets, there are omissions... there are secrets and lies, missteps and accidents.  But no mistakes. 

Tim's song is especially haunting for me as it goes on to say, at the end, 'All my friends are keeping time/ All my friends have just quit trying.'  If that is not a mistake, then it must be a kind of sin.  You may take time off to be a mother-- to love someone, to care for someone-- to fight a war, embrace some random person in an elevator.. but you must not drop your own narrative.  You must go on singing-- while you work, while you print-- in the back of your head... to accompany silently a Low melody or a lullaby, or the traffic noise. And at this point-- yes, to sadly recognize that we are all indeed funeral singers. 

Twinning

The other night I watched a movie called The Hot Rock with Robert Redford and George Segal and a slew of other vintage actors some of whom are no longer with us.  What held my attention most of all were the getaway scenes-- the driving, the reels of 70's New York City through the car windows-- the storefronts and bank names long deceased-- the PanAm building, the concrete corridors as they had been in the years I grew up.  There was a solidity to New York.  Even the skyscrapers were part of an architectural profile-- they stood out, they raised the skyline, but they were part and parcel.  They spoke 'city'.

In one or two scenes you could see the World Trade towers--- they were maybe not quite complete when the film came out... but this was downtown-- the world of finance and headquarters-- it was like a little island of its own, downtown... they were a symbol of future, of Internationalism.  

I remember so well the building of the Towers.  I'm old enough at this point to even remember the Verrazano bridge construction... but the Towers-- we criticized them, we dissed them... and by the time I finished college they were a fixture.  It was their version of New York that welcomed me after my months in Italy and again after graduation, when I came 'home'. On the bicentennial I celebrated them, not far from the tall ships, and walked from the Seaport to Battery Park, all the way up to Harlem. Just now I remembered I was with a Hungarian professor of philosophy-- an odd date-- but I felt a little patriotic and urban-savvy.  

Most of my 1970's city existence took place on lower floors--- study buildings, libraries, museums, my little ground-level studio, the subways and buses, rock clubs.  I worked in a gallery and was given an office of fairy-tale proportion in a grand townhouse with high ceilings and an arched window that looked out on other historic brownstones and mansions.  I felt like a princess.

In those days we did international business with Letters of Credit-- ancient banking instruments that insured payment upon evidence of shipping a painting or sculpture.  Many of the relevant institutions were headquartered in the Towers-- the shipping company, the financial offices.  I'd take the C train downtown to Cortlandt Street, into the cavernous lobby with a mall's worth of shops, before we had malls in Manhattan. There was a B. Dalton bookstore where I'd browse, a cafe where I'd grab a salad and coffee, and then upstairs to do my banking... into the elevators which clogged my ears. The shipping company was a seedy counter and desks with paperwork... but the bank... it was like a soundproofed heaven-- the window view spectacular.  I was young enough to be allowed to linger... another world there... the quiet, the altitude was like an amusement park thrill.  Like a holiday.  Give me your young and your ambitious... you can work here, we embrace you.

When I travelled and returned,  the sheer height of them beneath the plane was amazing.  The twin thing-- like sentinels.  Not many pairs of things in New York-- yes, the El Dorado, the NYPL library lions... but here they were-- anchoring the island... shapes of things to come.  We trusted them.  They were fortified and record-shattering. They were permanent future.  Years later we began to gig annually in the plaza.  I took my son; we visited the rooftop and held our breath.  My son had a little camera and photographed the Towers.  A fellow musician waitressed at Windows on the World... I occasionally visited her just to cop a view.  

We all adopted these buildings with great affection once we got over the resistance of their newness.  They were spectacles and spectacular.  They were symbols and they housed all kinds of things and people... I hung art there, sat in on meetings, saw gold and jewels in a vault, ate and drank... and mostly just inhaled the magical vista that both miniaturized and amplified my city.  It was like a spell... an architectural holiday.

For 20 years we have watched over and over the unimaginable horror of September 11th; it is compelling and terrifying.  We mourn, we grieve... all our lives changed on that day.  I have spent many pages listing the personal anguishes, describing what it was like standing beside the smoldering wreckage with small children silenced.  We've written novels, stories, songs... poetry.  The city has moved on; a whole generation of adults do not remember life before 9/11. It seems incredible-- the way someone dies in our life and we think we cannot go on... and then we do. 

No matter how many memorials, how many monuments and museums... there is nothing that does justice to the strange magnificence of what was there.  The way even the toughest of us old fucks-- we grew to love this place, these twins of solidity.  It was a vision-- a city's worth of people there, of activity... of breath.  The sealed-off world of prosperity and future which erupted into war... the people-- they brushed by us, shared elevators... and then vanished in the ash.  We breathed their cremated flesh and bone. Punished like some biblical idol-worshippers and sinners?  I still cannot make sense of it... the message, the lesson.. a foreshadowing of some massive apocalypse... the loss of innocence, of trust... ? We will go on, some of us; we will remember, yes, and we are forever changed.  

Homeward Bound

On the way home last night, I hitched an uptown First Ave bus; it was after midnight-- my card was near-empty but the driver was kind and waved me on.  The ride uptown took nearly ninety minutes.  It seemed every stop was crowded with the down-and-out crowd.  By 34th Street the bus was jammed with passengers-- many of them homeless men and women with oversized carts filled with stuff.  The stench was strong, but the driver patiently rolled out the handicapped ramp and let them all board, mostly without paying.  it occurred to me that they wait for this man-- maybe the beginning of his shift, and they know they can rely on transport, these forgotten untouchables.  Maybe some of them ride all night to stay warm.  A few disputes erupted among cranky territorial passengers, but for the most part people were complacent; many came from the VA hospital, Bellevue… a drunk man kept yelling he needed a hospital… but then he passed out and slept like a baby.  It was a kind of pre-Thanksgiving reality check.

When I was young, I used to visit my friend's grandparents in the same building where I now live.  It was a little far uptown to be fashionable, in those days-- a great old turn-of-the-century prewar with a grand lobby but no doormen or luxury services.  Their space was massive-- lofty-- with skylights and high ceilings, and resembled my imagined version of a successful European artist's studio c. 1900. It stretched from one end of the building to another, with huge windows onto upper Madison Avenue.  Sparsely furnished, there were plenty of loungey sofas and reading chairs with quaint lamps-- tables and ashtrays-- window-seats and desks.  As they were part of an important publishing firm, they entertained writers and intellectuals; there were books everywhere… yards and yards of shelves, and piles and piles of treasured volumes, magazines, journals.  The radiators clanked in winter; in summer, in those pre-air-conditioned years, the top floor was sweltering.  The park was half a block away, and there was often a breeze on the roof, if you climbed up at evening.  It was a source of gossip and rumors-- secrets were exchanged here, a few inappropriate relationships, many drunken dinner debates-- a million cigarettes, deals inked and stories begun.

The sprawling apartment-- undecorated and decorous as it was, felt like the heart of adult New York.  This was what I would be when I grew up and got old--  a host-- a home-conversationalist in a book-lined room alive with  dialogue and energy-- ideas and excitement-- like a sort of club whose membership required no dress-code or mindset, but a passion for literature and art.  But more than anything-- it was a home.  You knew where you were when you were there; you could wander and browse, sit and lose yourself in a poem or look out the window… but you felt 'embraced'.

Thirty-five years later, I bought into their building-- a funky back-door apartment in need of renovation but with the pedigree and bone structure that had become part of my Manhattan dream.   It was cheap and a little dilapidated, but I was a young single Mom and felt so empowered to have bought what would really be my own true home.  My first Thanksgiving was blessed, for so many reasons… but I felt the tradition of that building, even though the publishing family had died long before, and that grand space had been divided into smaller units.  There were neighbors who had grown old in this place that seemed magical to me;  there were senior couples with piles of books and great art and they welcomed me into their homes with the often shabby old chintz curtains and the beautiful but worn Persian rugs; they spoke the cultured and human language of old New York; they had ideas-- they loved music-- they wrote, still read Latin and Greek, many of them… they treated their neighbors with kindness and generosity.

In those years the old building had a single employee: a superintendent who'd been born here… he was in his 60's, had raised his family in the ground floor rear unit.  He painted, polished brass, cleaned the old marble.  The rest of us chipped in and tended the garden, had lobby parties-- we were a true cooperative in the old sense-- a group of tenants who all cherished our home, who seemed to agree that our space and privacy were sacred.  Our individual priorities included maintaining a low public profile, modest monthly fees, a non-pretentious simplicity of style.  The architecture spoke for itself-- a quiet, old elegance, without luxury.  They welcomed me-- financially limited as I was, because they knew I was happy to be part of this lifestyle.

It took years to fill what seemed like a massive space to me-- to furnish it with my books, the art I've collected over the years, the finds and objects, the old furniture I've gathered at random auctions… It is quite full now-- my instruments, the things I love… I have quite everything I ever longed for as a young woman… and yet I am no longer content and secure the way I was twenty years ago.  In the early 90's, I helped a senior woman in my building-- Jane, was her name-- to pack up her spartan belongings.  Regretfully, she told me she had intended to die in this apartment, but her very modest pension from years of brilliant editorial work no longer covered rising maintenance costs.  I recognized so many of the wonderful books we carefully piled into these boxes like relics from a life well-lived and no longer valued.  The economy had changed,  New York had undergone a massive progressive facelift; the Wall Street culture had created a greed-bubble that has not just priced most of us out of the market, but has altered the rank-and-file New York City human profile.

While Jane was forced to move in with her son somewhere out of state, I find myself living on $3 a day most weeks--- having given up all luxuries including the subway, some days, in favor of walking, rice-based meals… my entire annual clothing allowance is less than some people spend on lunch.  Haircuts… movies… vacations… a day at the beach… have been so long left behind… but these days I dare not buy myself even a coffee.  Until last night's ride, I have been plagued with my annual Thanksgiving dinner anxiety-- putting on a brave face while calculating how I will pull together the meal on a skeletal budget, how it will set me back.  But turning the key into my place-- like a souvenir-shop of my life, a three-dimensional photo-album of memories-- I realized I was 'home' and the idea of these people on the bus having nowhere to 'let down' just seemed tragic and inhuman.

In recent years young bankers and hedge-fund managers have recognized my old building as the potential cash cow they envisioned. These families renovate, destroy, combine, disregard… and then sell. They have way more space than anyone requires; they are rarely home and they have no observable sentimental possessions or books. They have architects and designers, and mostly photoshoot-ready but soulless apartments.  The ghosts of former tenants and the spirits in old walls and floors sigh and creak at night.  The old radiators still bang, although they will manage to eradicate these eventually.  They have forced doormen and lobby improvements-- fancy elevators. They have usurped the great old roof with their equipment and air systems. Even as the smallest shareholder,  monthly costs nearly exceed my very humble income as a musician/poet.  My slender spending habits have become emaciated.  And tonight, as I listen to the soft roar that is New York City seep through my leaky windows, I wonder if these people feel 'home'.  As in home-less.

There is some George Segal movie on from the 70's and this is New York, the way I remember it… before clothing advertised things.. when even rich people's apartments were comfortable and slightly messy and filled with things... when hair was not perfect and women had wrinkles and the buildings looked habitable and a little dirty.  I realize I am of a dying or defeated generation here-- hanging in, holding on to what I know and love-- my building, my old guitars… sentiment...

Things change-- I know this, and not all change is bad. But this Wall Street generation changed the rules for many of us who thought we had secured some kind of tranquility for our older age.  Our trusted annuities and medical plans have been up-ended, our modest pensions have been diminished and decent healthcare is precarious and prohibitive.  I naively bought shares in a wonderful institution, only to find myself a tiny minimized partner in a corporation with an agenda of money and attitudes and little regard for human values and the great cultural mesh upon which this city was founded.

I will be home for Thanksgiving, and I will try to forge onward and resist what feels like a tidal insult to everything I am.  My neighbors will never share a bus ride like the First Ave. M15 at 2 AM; they don't want to see or smell this kind of thing, and they seem to enjoy the demolition of old walls as much as they enjoy their indulgent vacations.  They will grow old, too-- not as gracefully as this building has, and maybe one day they will discover nostalgia or homesickness-- that nothing is ever as precious as that which has been lost.   By then I'll be sharing a cigarette with the old ghosts on the stairs while, God willing, someone might be enjoying a home-cooked turkey in what will always be the old rooms with the book-lined walls.

Night Manager

In the 1970's, New York City was a very different place.  It was dangerous and sleazy; anything could happen.  You'd walk down a side-street at night with a sense of shadows, with your heart beating.  Muggings were common; crime was woven into the fabric and you expected to be threatened.  In a way it was like the dare of the city-- are you tough enough, are your dreams compelling enough to lie down with rabid dogs, spar with the urban devil himself?  There was a certain underlying surf we had to ride out-- a dark fire we were expected to navigate.  The noir permeated our art-- our music and poetry-- our clothes, our choices.

On the other hand, there was a wild freedom in our private sex lives.  We were walking an edge-- trying out things.  There was no internet or linked-in.  You'd meet someone and take a risk.  There were no personal phones-- only a door or a window to crawl out if you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I was young and all-connected.  I was straddling worlds-- downtown, uptown-- the art world and the music underground.  It was thrilling and new.  Every day I'd get introduced into someone's world that rocked my own.  I'd walk into a club at night and hear something new-- see someone trying to change things.  Sometimes you'd exchange ideas; sometimes you exchanged bodies.

One afternoon I was studying at the Figaro on Bleecker Street, and this actor sat down at my table… he wasn't super famous but I recognized him.  He was slightly older… and he was smart; we spoke about theatre and Proust.  We made a date to meet the next night at a west-side bar.  I went to the library that evening and looked him up; he'd written a couple of books, and his publisher was well-known.  Everything in those days ended up in bed, and we had a few nights of passion.  I was dating a guitar player at the same time who came back to town and I wasn't home much to answer calls.  I don't think I even had an answering machine.  Anyway, one day I was getting into a car with the guitar player and the actor passed me… I looked the other way.   He called me a few nights later, sounded drunk and insecure about his sexual performance… it was a stupid conversation and I was 22 or 23 and didn't feel like getting into a whole psychological tunnel…

Two days later, someone broke into my little apartment on the first floor.  It was a vulnerable place and I probably never even drew the curtains when I stayed out all night… but they took everything.  In those days everything fit into a couple of suitcases-- but it was all I had, and when I came home on a Sunday evening to find my window smashed, the mattress stripped and the place ransacked, I was spooked.  The cops assured me it was no Kojak episode but most likely a desperate junkie looking for cash and things to sell for dope.  My guitar player was going on the road; I stayed with a friend at the Chelsea Hotel for a few days while they put in a new window and locks on the door.

At the Chelsea I inhaled the quintessence of 1970's New York.  Sid and Nancy were there; Viva and I shared a cigarette on the stairs.  My friend was working with John Cale; he'd been robbed too and he processed the dare of the city with a certain bitter mistrust.  It was a cool hang, but I needed to face my independence without a support system.  I moved back to my little place, bought new sheets and a cheap little TV, was at last drifting off to sleep with Johnny Carson on the black and white 12-inch… when the phone rang.  I'd been gone for a week and thought it was my guitar player-- whispering… but then I heard the actor's voice, indisputably, asking me if I knew what he was doing… I jumped out of bed in a cold sweat, and ran up the stairwell to the next floor-- banged on a random door.  Some guy answered-- I begged him to let me in… I'm sure he thought I was crazy; thinking back, he had no pants on--  I stuttered something about someone stalking me…  anyway, he went into his bedroom and I curled up on his dirty carpet.  He had a small dog and it had new puppies… I lay there like a dog myself until the sun came up and I had the nerve to go downstairs.

I hadn't thought about this for so many years, but it was maybe the first coming-of-age reality check of the city.  In a way I'd been lucky; no one had really hurt me… and thinking back, it was undoubtedly a total coincidence that the actor phoned at that moment.  I'm sure he had no knowledge that I'd been robbed, that I'd been away… or did he?  It was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe-- a little terrified-- and had thoughts about finding a more secure apartment, about making wiser and less random choices, about becoming part of a couple as opposed to being the wild and free girl.  In a way I changed my vision that night; in a way I accepted there would be a kind of dependence on men in my life.  The end of innocence, which for girls is so often some threat or unmanageable fear which changes us and forces us to make a slightly desperate choice.  It's not 'live free or die', but  'live'.  It's a form of terrorism, but that's another discussion.

Like most things in life, we give up one thing for another; nothing stays the same, no one retains their innocence unless someone else arranges this for us.  Of course life in the city today feels much safer; people have phones for emergencies, everyone's marital and employment status is pretty much general knowledge, as is their age and address, their political affiliations and criminal record-- their net worth.  People sort through hundreds of prospects on dating sites-- they hook up, they regroup, they text and sext and move on.  I seldom walk into a club these days and encounter something that changes my world.  I no longer fall in love and rarely walk the dark streets with a sense of danger and excitement.  I miss those times; I've had a good and a rich life here, but I do miss myself when I was still brave enough or maybe dumb enough to take a nightly walk on the wild side.  When there was a viable and findable wild side.