My other work is as a composer and Midtown is ground zero for all things musical. On 48th Street you can peruse the saxophones at International. In Sam Ash, you might catch a washout corporate rocker playing a fancy overpriced guitar, plucking his favorite Van Halen licks for his buddies during lunch. But I was searching for paper-musical staff paper. As a composer, I have a special relationship with paper and size matters. The dimension of staff paper helps frame the composition within my mind. And special paper is hard to find. But I got a tip that the place to go for music paper was on 52nd St. at a place called Aztec.

I found the store only a few blocks from the office. It was located at 333. W. 52nd St. The building is off-white with an eroding stone façade. There is no doorman. The elevator is very small allowing only three passengers per trip. Located on the eighth floor, the office is camouflaged by battleship gray doors and walls with only a small black sign to identify the name of the business – Associated Music Copy Service. I entered the small office that contained a large front counter. Behind the counter there were many pre-cubicles with old fluorescent lights at each desk. The walls we faded pink pegboard. There was not a computer in sight. Associated didn’t even have cash register and all transactions are written up on hand slips. There were small stacks of staff paper on the one table in the office. This space served as the showroom for a specialty music paper division called Aztec Music Papers. I had found my paradise.

Associated Music Copy Service used to do a bustling business for composers in New York. In the pre-Finale days (Finale is the software most composers use today for finishing their scores and creating parts for the musicians), Associated employed a dozen or so professional copyist that churned out music parts for every imaginable demand a composer might have. Associated is located in close proximity to Manhattan’s theatres, radio stations, television shows and studios. Whether it was a rush job for the night’s opening show or commercial jingle parts for a big band, Associated and its scribes produced. Radio drama or chamber music parts, whatever you needed, Associated could do the job. It was good honest work. But certainly times have changed.

I found the exact the paper I needed at Aztec. If I was writing quartet music, they had special quartet paper. When I was working on orchestral works, Aztec provided the perfect papers. The staff was always extremely courteous and never hesitated to show me something special on a whim. At Aztec, they had a sense about the emotional needs of composers concerning the paper selection for their next ‘masterpiece’. I bought some of the best piano staff paper I have ever owned at Aztec. I still use it. Sparingly.

Often times returning to the office after these visits I would fall silently into a trance nostalgia dream. With new score paper tucked neatly under my arm and wearing my thrift store suits to my pretend job, I would imagine myself returning to the set to begin work on a new soundtrack for a TV series circa 1972. It would be a crime show set in New York, I would use lots of oboes and violas for mood settings. Perhaps the theme music would be a snappy, jazzy number with lots of syncopation and major chords for that feel-good TV vibe I know so well. Sometimes I would imagine myself in 1952 returning with Bernard Herrman’s latest cue sheets or perhaps string quartet parts for an avant guard string quartet I was rehearsing at Carnegie Hall. It only takes three blocks to get lost in a dream. But 666 was always waiting and lunch was over. I think everyone in Midtown after lunch on a hot Thursday July afternoon has had a variation of this dream

I hadn’t made it to Aztec in awhile since I started working downtown. But buying staff paper is always a great stimulation to create. Whether you use it now or later you will always use your paper. You never know when you will need some 60-stave orchestra paper! When I began to write this story I wanted to get the address correct so I called information to get the number. I dialed it thinking I could innocently ask the cross streets and hear the voice of the sweet woman that runs the shop. I got the sweet woman’s voice, but not like I expected. With the clicking sound of a number that has been disconnected I got a recording directing me to a website for my music paper needs. The familiar voice trailed off at the end of the message, sad, a little cracked, ” The New York office of Aztec Music Papers is no longer open for business”. I hung up the phone and realized that a small but delightful part of New York City had vanished. Farewell Aztec, farewell.

I used to play music from my third-hand turntable very loud. I listen to music while I compose music, words, whatever work needs to be done. I actually listen to music all the time. Sometimes the basement is satisfied when I’m only listening to say, Mozart String Quintets (the ones with the extra viola), but I listen to all six of them in a row! I figure immersion is the best teacher. The basement people, painters and one particularly nasty no-nothing sculptor (I think he has a studio to impress chicks or something) really began to hate me last year. They would send psychic’ fuck yous’ to me when I walked to the communal toilet in the middle of the dank hallway.

But I’m just getting warmed up. I might, on occasion play through a whole cycle of Modern Jazz Quartet recordings to compare versions of the same song over and over again. You know the ear can be trained with repeated listening; it’s called ear training of all things. But the anger really used to build when I got into my Carolina beach music classics or Milton Babbitt. Then the basement people began loving hating me.

When there are problems, the basement people leave me humorless, passive-aggressive notes, ” Can you please not SMOKE in the studio” I am totally resolved to not give a fuck. If they had to sit at a desk looking at small dots against five lines for twelve hours straight, they’d smoke a cigarette every now and again too.

So usually, it’s just the notes. But once when Cowboy Jones, last of the Kudzu Bohemians, blew into town, well it was just all broken camel backs. It was a lovely spring Sunday when Jones and I dropped by my basement studio. Sunday is amateur’s day at the studio, especially for people like the aforementioned sculptor. I knew Jones would dig it – he has his own penchant for subterranean living and cinder block reality.

We got deep into a jug of cheap wine about the size of our heads (which breaks some kind of universal rule), hooting, snorting, talking old time mountain shit, travels – he to Mexico, me to Paris – loves music, words, wine. It was Jones and I again, chillin’ Sunday-style deep in my Brooklyn backyard. Well the party moved back down into the studio. First we listened to some Ventures records – volume goes up – then moved into some Jerry Lee Lewis “Live at the Municipal Auditorium, Birmingham, Alabama 1964″ – volume goes way up – the bottle is sorely empty – finally, ’cause its Sunday – I spin my prized copy of Five Blind Boys of Alabama “Greatest Hits” – FULL VOLUME – “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, sure been good to me.”

That was when the basement people lost it. In tandem, two unruly brush-wielding painters pound on my flimsy door, screaming to turn down the music. Cowboy Jones laughs with his whole body as he slowly pulls a drag off a hand-rolled cigarette. “Fuck ‘em” he said with a grin. It was time for us to move on.

But now I’m moving on too, permanently. More sorting, more old life to ponder, pictures to caress. The sweet smell of dusky papers and books. But they are me, just glad to play my part in it all. I arrived at the studio today with forty-five cents and five empty boxes. The albums are boxed and the stereo is silent now. My last day here in the basement is spent hunting down my Atlanta 1996 Olympic mug full of change – it contains my last bit of old money, past life money.

So I break it down: fifty cents for rancid coffee, my one indulgence, from the freaky corner bodega, one-dollar-fifty cents, subway fair home, a miraculously salvaged new gold dollar plus five dimes, three-dollars in nickels and dimes for an order of Pork Lo Mein, small-size, from the horrific corner Chinese take-out Tang Zee restaurant, mostly a wing-n-fries joint. Total expenditures: five dollars. Now I’m moving. We’re all moving imperceptibly. Internal becomes external inertia. The city is always moving. Focus, focus, must finish packing, moving, packing, labeling. I have to go now, I am the only one working in the basement at this moment at 103 Lexington Avenue in Brooklyn and I’m working on leaving.

The J ferries passengers, mostly working folks, across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan. On the Brooklyn side of the tracks, the J offers a splendid, elevated ride to the LIRR at Metropolitan Center on the outer edge between Brooklyn and Long Island. It is great view of Brooklyn for only a buck and a half. Boarding the subway that night, I instantly knew the Midnight Cowboy had been riding the J train all day.

He was lanky and dirty, like a construction worker with cheap brogan boots. He wore blue jeans covered with clay and tar streaks. Attached to his belt was a leather holster that contained a pair of pruning scissors. His savage mullet was barely contained by the royal blue baseball cap. In his right hand he held a portable brown and white triangular shaped transistor radio. And in his left The Daily News.

The radio was of a certain thrift store quality but interesting in that retro design amour. Cowboy had the radio playing softly when I sat across from him on the train. The warm modulation of AM waves quietly filled the train with halcyon ’70′s memories as we crossed the bridge.

There is a certain type of person who carries a radio through New York without headphones. It is an unrequited sharing of taste. Many of those with boom boxes are arbiters of style in their own right, but many are just lonely for their favorite music. I understand the need to carry a portable soundtrack to the city and share with whomever you meet. Usually boom-box carriers have a very determined look on their faces, intent on projecting something of themselves into the city air. But the New Midnight Cowboy was not that type, just lonely, just listening to pass the time.

The J train tugged across the bridge as I tried to get a glimpse of the cowboy’s face. He was utterly still. He held the paper in lieu of a DO NOT DISTURB sign. His motionlessness bothered me, thinking of the man that rode the train for hours before anyone noticed he was dead.

Then, turning, seeing his tanned face I saw a thousand anonymous South Georgia boys tumbling towards me screaming “Help me, save me, put me on a bus headed somewhere warm!” while the flickering of the lights from the cars on the FDR intensified the beautiful Manhattan nightscape. But the train arrived in the Essex Station, suddenly in Manhattan. I shook myself, cleared my eyes and walked off the J leaving the New Midnight Cowboy to his fuzzy AM radio dreams and his never ending ride into the black light of the city’s dawn.

Since Labor Day we had been very busy and the entire office had been arriving very early for work. On Monday 9/10 I worked until 8:00pm. I was in touch with many people in the building that night. But Tuesday was Primary day in New York and I decided to vote, even though I was late leaving for work. Due to confusion at the voting center it took longer than normal.

I arrived in Lower Manhattan at about 8:38. Walking up Dey Street I decided to stop for coffee and walked across Church Street onto the Plaza of the World Trade Center. I called my father on my cell phone and we were talking which kept me from entering the building. I was on a bench right in front of the WTC 1 and turned slowly for no real reason and saw the entire plane hit the tower. I saw the wing extended from the building on the south side and a large explosion. Then smoke. Then everything was frozen, very still, with a perfect New York blue sky framing the backdrop of explosions. I ran when the glass and metal begin to fall from the sky hitting all around me. Only moments before there were many people around on the plaza like myself, but while I ran I saw nothing, no person, no car. I made it back across to Dey Street and into the loading dock of Century 21 building (the TV photos of this building show it to be demolished).

I don’t remember from there when I made it to Broadway (about a half block east). On Broadway people were collapsing and crying. Much of this time is a slow motion blur. I remember a man screaming, “Fuck this, I’ve been to war for this country, not here.” From this position on Broadway I witnessed the first wave of people jumping from WTC 1. It is the most horrible thing I have ever seen. A doctor next to a group I was with fell to his knees, his stethoscope hitting the ground. Everyone seemed frozen and in shock. From there I heard but did not see the second plane hit WTC 2. The sound was of a nuclear bomb. My cell phone read: 9:03AM.

At that point I began running north. I got to East 4th Street completely dazed. On Houston St. I saw the WTC 1′s needle crumble to the ground and heard on blasting radios that both of the towers had fallen. From there I made my way to the Williamsburg Bridge and made my way back home. Tens of thousands of people were walking across the bridge, a surreal exodus no one was quite prepared to cope with.

Now on Thursday afternoon I have made my way back to the city. I have seen co-workers and friends. The company I work for has been extraordinarily courteous and compassionate with helping all of the employees. The relief of seeing faces of others on my floor was a real blessing. I have done very mundane activities like going to the bank, going shopping that seem very important in order to move past the events of Tuesday. So many people were just minutes from the building, everyone trying to reclaim some since of reality by describing how they got out.

I never thought I would work in the World Trade Center. But I enjoyed my work there. Like all artists, I needed the money, but I also made many friends and learned a good deal about other parts of life, other skills that I never knew I possessed.

The views of the harbor were magnificent and inspirational. I remember ending long days by looking out the windows and feeling so very refreshed and glad to be in such a beautiful city like New York.

But that view is gone and so much has changed. Though I have felt such anger and frustration, more that ever in my life, I know I will survive. I made it out alive for a reason.

I always used to sign off my emails with, “Your Man in the Tower”. Though nothing of the tower is still there, there is still the power of thought and doing something to change this world for the better that will float in the air forever. All we need to do is reach up and find it.