At night more than ever I sought oblivion. At the time I would have called it freedom.
Pam had a late-summer roof party and I got wasted and went to McDonald’s and got on the bus back uptown, drifted off and woke up at 120th and Adam Clayton Boulevard. Walking back down in the streetlights and the moonlight was like a dream of old New York. Beautiful buildings seemingly intact, preserved not by renovation but by some benign force. Walls bathed in yellow glow. Street life here and there, people on stoops, on the sidewalk in little groups.
Before long the steam pipes hissed and gurgled to signal the changing of the seasons. Alan said he got a deal on a new office space downtown by the river. For some reason we assumed this really meant the end. A skeleton crew to guide the enterprise into a quiet, thrifty failure in a cramped space in a bad part of town. Except it wasn’t a bad part of town when you think about it. The top of Tribeca, on the corner of Greenwich and Canal. In any other city the blocks and blocks of warehouses and secondhand shops would mean you got lost on the wrong side of the tracks. Here it was where movie stars renovated industrial spaces into massive living spaces. The floor above us was the home of a jeweler. I recognized the name of my ophthalmologist on the buzzer in the lobby. He occupied the floor below us with his young family. Our space too was vast. Everyone got a desk by a window. There was a kitchen and a separate room with a mattress on the floor should anyone have a need for one reason or another. Andre set to work repairing ethernet cables and setting up the modem. Almost like we had a purpose.
Each morning I walked west down Canal from the station. Through Chinatown, past the watercolor calligraphers, the shops of knockoffs. The street was intimate; a distinct, self-sustaining community. A woman swept dust out of her store and returned the dustpan and broom to a store a few doors down. Businesses on top of each other and you don’t know what to buy or who to buy it from but hang around a while and someone’ll sell you something. Shops with “electronics” and “audio” in their names appeared to have nothing but fake shoes and bags.
Mostly we hung out and went out for long, drinky lunches, the Argentine place down Greenwich or the Ear Bar most of the time, somewhere else if we got bored. If Alan wasn’t around we’d play guitar and sing. Erupt in mad fits of cursing. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he was around. One day I made a point to remember this time forever, to realize life would never be the same again, so weird and wonderful. It was hard, maybe impossible, to grasp it in the moment. But there’d come a day I’d look back and know.