Recently, I was on the opening team at Demo, a café grocery by day and wine bar/restaurant by night on Carmine Street. It has popped off at nights, for good reason. I, however, have found myself there almost exclusively there during daylight hours.
Through the wafting haze of coffee, guests tend to come in with a consistent line concerning proximity. “I live around the corner” they say, or upstairs or just around the block. Then they say, “welcome to the neighborhood.” They are likely welcoming the institution of the restaurant, the company. But somehow, perhaps due to my own ego, it always feels very personal: they are saying welcome to me. My response slips out of my mouth automatically: I grew up around the corner. I actually am from here. I am actually from here I am from here I am from here.
And who cares, really? What an arbitrary thing, bordering on pretension. Who am I explaining myself to? I don’t know. Last time, I wrote a review (ode?) of/to LifeThyme Natural Foods. Since then, I have tried to write other about things but honestly have hated most attempts. Instead, my brain has been interested in memories. I fret about writing about my childhood or adolescence, afraid of the annoyingness of a young person performing oldness. Yet, I have found myself a bit stuck, I think, in West Village looping. I submit.
I come into to the West Village these last few months, most days, for two noble reasons. Work and therapy. I take the A or the C in from Brooklyn, always impatient, resting my eyes on the train. At West Fourth, something in my disposition changes. I kick the ground with my boots, prodding. Same spots, again and again, each still and vibrating. Past Greenwich Avenue, where our apartment was. Is. Down 10th, walking past friends’ parents houses – now everyone is upstate or Brooklyn or somewhere nice and quiet. I go to psychoanalysis on 10th street, too, the same institute at which I studied last year, thinking perhaps I would become an analyst. Maybe one day. Across the street, I can see the brownstone where my Grandma had a practice of her own. Each time I walk past, I peer in.
Around town, the news of uncanny regeneration. Chumley’s has turned into Frog Club. I will not be kissing the chef, thank you very much. A Demo daytime regular, Claud, tells me that our space used to be an luncheonette where he and his mother would eat ham and mustard sandwiches. Old spaces, hallowed and casual. Superiority Burger is in the old Odessa, S&P’s is in its same space but now celeb-owned. The school I went to for K-12 just got a James Turrell. Next month, I will be doing pop-ups in a space named Heaven and Earth. The Dogen quote: In the mundane, nothing is sacred. In sacredness, nothing is mundane.
Out the window, for a moment I think I spot the Twins: identical female twins who lived together in my old building. They were very sweet and seemed to be great friends, once stopping me in the lobby to tell me: “you’re not pretty, you’re beautiful.” That they came to this consensus, together, has probably defined my the base-level of my confidence forever. I think I glimpse them, both in black. Then I realize that I am older than I was, and if they were old when I was young… would I really be seeing them right now?
I have never been interested in the idea of pretending not to be my age, but I am at a funny place where I can notice how the realities of my childhood are not the aesthetic prominence anymore. Even though I am YOUNG (I look it, right? Or mature, but like… healthy?), there are parts of me that are old and those parts feel fiercely protective of memories. Not of how things were, even, but how I remember them. All I am recalling is so long and short ago that there’s some underlying futility – too recent to be a legitimate narrative, too far away for it to still be the right way for the city to look and feel and be.
The most trouble I ever got in was the night before Hurricane Sandy. It was the start of my senior year and I was in a real Outdoors phase. The evening before it really hit, we knew there was going to be a storm very close to the West Side Highway. I have no recollection how, but my (then and now) BFF Heidi and I decided we should chase the storm. We had to! We made the silhouette of a plan as it stared pouring. Early evening, huge raincoats. Balmy, not cold at all, which made everything feel somehow gentle. The streets were close to empty, the way they would be on snow days or holiday weekends early in the morning. On the West Side Highway, the water was rising but seemed to know its limits. The wind flapped about and the light from the pier refracted soft orange, sunset, onto the ink of the water. Everything moving and LOUD. That feeling where you laugh like when you’re on a roller coaster because what is happening! What a thrill! Running back and forth, I didn’t feel scared for one second. Some unruliness that felt mediated, magical. Making my way back home, past the vintage store then the tea shop then the cobbler, up the street where I would go on runs with my Dad, up the small hill next to the bars — mysterious to me — that were mostly shuttered. Maybe one or two with their little lights still on. Ready for consequences, running home panting, totally oblivious of magnitude. Of what was building.
Splashing through the sidewalks where I walk now. What a thing! Chasing a storm.