My tastes were different, though I was no musician. I went for punk, mostly. Plug-and-play music, the scruffier and angstier the better. Prince’s music was about the only thing Flip and I could agree on. But somehow, as friends, we clicked.

My friendship with Flip had started in upstate New York where life was slow and attitudes were conservative. If you were a kid with any sort of ambition or dream for yourself then it was a place you knew you had to get out of as soon as possible. While Flip always prepped his thick brown hair and checked his look before making a move – even if we were just going to the Price Chopper to buy cigarettes – I was a perpetual slob in jeans, sneakers, T-shirts, and distressingly thinning black hair. Flip wanted to make it as a musician, which also meant he wanted to be famous and have money and any woman he wanted. He never had a problem attracting women and, though he was self-taught as a piano player, he had a lot of ideas about music. So, after a few years of living in Albany and not finding any good reason to stay, he figured he was ready. He made his move with a couple of friends to New York City.

I had nothing – no money, no ambition, no desire. I didn’t burn and seethe. I just imploded and drank too much. Further aspects of my larger problem. I knew I had to get out of Albany but didn’t know how. About a year after Flip moved, I wound up in New York accidentally, like a package mailed to the wrong address.

Once we reconnected in the city of dreams, Flip was always trying to put a fire under me, to get me excited about something. I think my directionless, lazy, time-wasting ways – which had survived the move completely intact – pissed him off and worried him. Here I was in New York City and what was I doing? Reading in the park. Reading in bars. Reading at home. I was still the same naked mole rat, sniffing and shuffling my way through a series of dumpy underground tunnels when mere inches away was nirvana.

What I could never explain to Flip, though I had tried, was that reading was a form of writing to me, a substitute for the writing I was eventually going to get down to doing myself. What I couldn’t explain to myself was that reading was not only an escape from the writing I wasn’t doing, it was also part of a larger delusion I had which was this: by immersing myself in a book, I was somehow slowing down time. And each new book I picked up carried with it a guarantee that there would be time in my future to sit and read it.

“At some point, you’re going to have to get really selfish if you want to do anything with your life,” Flip would say.

And I’d always tell him, “I know. It’s cool. You do what you need to do. I can take care of myself.”

I was waiting. I wanted to see him become famous and have all of his women because, in my life, I’d never seen anyone do anything before. I wanted to know it was possible that someone could get what they wanted – even if I thought what they wanted was dumb – before I stepped out and tried it myself. He was my test case, my surrogate, and I was his loyal audience. We used each other, but neither one of us was aware of that.

We were having a coffee and a cigarette one yawning Saturday afternoon when Flip said he wanted to check in on Shane, another musician friend I’d met a few times before, to see if he’d made a decision about playing in a band with him. Flip was anxious to snag him before anyone else did.

Shane had lived in the East Village since the mid ’70s. (“You have no idea,” was all he would say about that era.) He’d played with glam New York Dolls-types of bands that went nowhere. He’d played in rock bands that went nowhere. He’d played in a couple of quick, three-chord punk bands that went nowhere. He had opened for some big bands. He had a reputation. Somewhere in the midst of almost making it, he’d become a junkie, but he’d eventually managed to pull himself out. By the time I first met him in 1985, he’d been clean for six years.

Being in his mid-thirties, Shane seemed old to the early-twenties me. That he didn’t drink or do drugs of any kind made him seem even older. Like the other junkies in my neighborhood, Shane looked bloodless, his skull shrink-wrapped in a thin tissue of near-gray flesh, his mouth a mobile fissure outlined with weirdly purple lips. Yet, unlike the other junkies, his eyes shone like bright green suns surrounded by whites as bright as chalk. He also didn’t have the zero-body-fat, pure-muscle physique of a junkie. Shane, in fact, was a little paunchy, and wore his shirts untucked to disguise that fact. He was irreversibly healthy now.

And it was this healthiness, and the fact that he had no visible style or edge beyond another version of the same black leather jacket that everybody else had, that made me wonder what Flip was after in Shane.

We walked to his building on Second Avenue and hauled it upstairs.

Aside from a few guitars sitting out in stands, a twin bed, and a couple of bookshelves he’d taken in off the street, Shane’s place was empty. It echoed when you walked through it. The walls were rag-painted a buzzing sea green, and the windowsills, doors, and molding were the high-gloss black of fingernail polish. Shane liked to burn a brand of incense that always smelled like soap to me. He said it calmed him.

Shane had told us that the stuff he used to have had either been stolen and he never had the money to replace it, or he’d sold it to buy drugs. Once he got clean, he said, he realized that most of the stuff he owned had been garbage to begin with. Crap that a consumer culture wanted you to think was your reward for giving your life away to your job. Heroin, which he’d thought would lead him to some deeper, soulful reservoir of feeling and lift his talent to another level, nearly killed him. But getting clean helped him admit to himself that the only thing that might get him to that musical oasis was discipline and hard work. There could be no other way. He played every day, he said, every day.

After the usual heys and what’s ups (no handshakes – Shane didn’t like to shake hands with anyone if he didn’t have to), I asked Shane if it was okay if I looked at his books.

“Sure,” he said. “Just be careful you don’t get burned.” He held my look for a beat to see if I understood him, and then turned back to Flip.

Aside from some pocket paperback, sci-fi stuff – all of it arranged alphabetically and pushed flush to the very edge of the shelf – Shane read Western philosophy, from Socrates to Nietzsche to Sartre, and Eastern spirituality, from Vedic and Hindu texts that I barely recognized to the Hare Krishna books that its freaky disciples would thrust at anyone who looked at them. I’d only just started moving in these sorts of directions myself – part of some idea I had then that maybe philosophy or religion could help me figure out what to do with my life – so I was happy to quit trying to act cool, and disappear into my usual withdrawn state.

The religion and philosophy books were in rough shape: blown-out, battered, the spines nearly unreadable from the deep cracks running through them. Shane had wrestled with these things and they’d fought back. I saw that he had the same Vintage paperback copy of The Gay Science that I had, and pulled it out.

As I sat on the floor pondering all those Nietzschean exclamation points, Shane came over and asked what I was looking at. I held the cover up to him and he took the book from my hand, keeping it open to the page I’d been reading, a page the book had automatically fallen open to.

“I told you to be careful,” he said, and began to read the same page.

The last thing I’d read had been this:

“The strongest ideas and passions brought before those who are not capable of ideas and passions but only of intoxication! And here they are employed as a means to produce intoxication! Theater and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? – It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.”

The lines were underlined in red felt-tip pen.

A long, quiet minute passed while Flip and I watched Shane read. I looked over at Flip and he made an annoyed face.

“Yeah, that’s it, man,” Shane said, handing the book back to me. “People don’t get it, only the artists. Everyone else is like some sick junkie, looking for a distraction from reality, which nobody wants to deal with because nobody knows how. They aren’t up to it.”

I nodded, knowing he wouldn’t listen to anything I might have to say, and turned back to the book.

Flip and Shane resumed their conversation but the mood was off now.

Things stood this way – Flip was acting like he had an offer that Shane should seriously consider (with the implicit suggestion that it might be the best he could expect for someone of his age), while Shane seemed to be insulted by Flip’s condescension, seeing him as just another kid with too much attitude in a neighborhood lousy with them.

A deeper problem that hadn’t come up yet was the fact that Flip and Alex, the other guy in this band-to-be, hadn’t really written any songs. Though they had one that had a “killer” guitar part and a chorus of:
Get Busy
Get Busy
Get Busy
Get Def

Flip had told me about this fragment a number of times. I was embarrassed for him but never said a word.

At least he’s doing something, I thought.

Bored, Flip walked over to one of Shane’s guitars, picked it up, and hit one of the few chords he knew. Flip had been trying to teach himself how to play guitar because it made for a cooler profile on stage; definitely cooler than keyboards.

Shane’s eyes went wide the moment Flip grabbed his guitar. He reached out to stop him, started to make some kind of sound but shut himself off and shoved his hand in his pocket instead. Flip, not seeing this at all, attempted to tune the strings but – Shane being Shane – they were already tuned.

Flip hit another chord a little less successfully than the first.

“So, what do you think?” he said. “We’re gonna start rehearsing tomorrow. You wanna come by?”

The cigarette artfully dangling from the corner of Flip’s mouth was curling smoke into his eyes so he stuck it, like he’d seen other guitar players do, on the end of one of the guitar’s trimmed strings.

Shane lurched forward, plucked the cigarette off the string with his precise daddy-longlegs fingers, and threw it on the floor. He pulled the guitar from Flip’s hands and stomped to a case lying on the floor by his bed.

Flip laughed out an offended, “Whoa!”

Shane was on his knees with the guitar flat across his thighs, his back turned slightly as if he were shielding it from us. He was breathing deeply and running a cotton cloth up and down the strings.

“Look, man,” he said, “I’m sorry. I just I hate it when other people play my guitars.”

“Yeah,” Flip said. “No shit.”

“It’s just that the strings get dirty so easily and when the strings get dirty the sound dies.” He ran the cloth up and down each string, stopping to examine first the string and then the dirt captured on the cloth after each pass. Then he folded the cloth over to a clean patch and made another pass. “That’s why I keep the action high, too. I like that clean ring. It’s a whole aesthetic, you know, I’m not just fucking around.”

Flip gave me a look that said, Can you believe this guy is explaining music to me?

“It’s harder that way,” he said, “but that’s what I want. It strengthens my hands. Keeps me aware.”

He held his right hand out to Flip like a claw. “Check out my callouses. I play every day for about an hour then I clean the strings and play for another hour. And I just keep going like that.”

Between the explaining and the cleaning, Shane seemed to be talking himself back down. “I wash my hands all the time,” he said softly. “Ten, twenty times a day. Before I play and after. Everything just feels better that way.”

When he was finished, he laid the guitar down in the case, closed it, and slid it under his bed. He knew he’d fucked up the gig with Flip but he seemed relieved about it.

For some reason he turned to me and said, “I’ve done the Dionysian stuff, you know? I’m in a more Apollonian phase. Cleaner, you know? More pure.”

I nodded again.

He looked at me like I was everybody else and said, “Never mind.”

Flip and I left soon after.

I understood something about Shane only later: surviving had ruined him. I would see him a few more times after that. Sometimes his hair was blond, sometimes it was brown. Once it was green. For a year or two he had a girlfriend. Once, when we actually spoke, he told me that he wasn’t playing so much any more. He didn’t give a reason why beyond a secretive shrug. After a while we both stopped saying hello.

I saw Flip last year in a comic book shop, though he didn’t see me. We’d drifted apart and I hadn’t spent time with him in many years. I was surprised to see he had a little girl with him, clutching his pant leg while he walked down an aisle, looking at comics but not picking anything up. He moved slowly, with an adult exhaustion and sorrow that was unfamiliar to me. His daughter looked bored, like she just wanted to go home.

I’d heard Flip was married and was part owner of an art moving company. Now I knew he had a child.

I don’t usually go into comics shops. I’d stopped in because I wasn’t ready to go home yet, to go and sit back down at my desk and write. I was wasting time I had no business wasting. But I needed to believe that I still had time to waste. I still need to believe it.

I held my breath and watched Flip walk by me. Then – and I still haven’t forgiven myself for this – I slipped out and went home.

Damian Van Denburgh is a 2011 fellow in Non-Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has had residencies at the Millay Colony and the MacDowell Colony, and his work has been published in Knee-Jerk and Fourth Genre. His essay, “The Spell of My Father’s Wedding Ring,” ran in the Modern Love column in the New York Times this past February. He works as a freelance writer in New York City.

After that, he was around more, saying “Hello, how are you?” with his shock of platinum-white hair, much more often. He frightened my children while they were in high school—“Is something wrong with him?”—but I told them it was just his way of being polite and friendly, that they should politely return the greeting. It was hard not to, when we met him on the elevator. He lived on fourteen, we lived on ten.

I liked his cheerful ways. I suspected they were meant to cheer himself, but often they ended by cheering me. I felt a kinship with his efforts to put on a good front, to remain cordial and upbeat, to walk briskly down the street alone, even if he didn’t really need to go anywhere. This was especially true in the last six months, when he was no longer supposed to go out alone; when he couldn’t find his way home; when he got lost only a few yard down our block. But he still and always tried to greet me, even though I thought he no longer knew my name—and I saw the lost, desperate look in his wife’s kind blue eyes.

And so, more than ever, I made it a point to address him the minute I got into the elevator and saw him there, uncertain whether to speak to me or not. “Good morning,” I’d say, “I’m so glad to see you.” And a genuine smile would light his eyes, his face, and he would feel himself rise, I think, and he’d pump my hand and say, “Glad to see you, too, how are you today?” And we’d enjoy a few moments of upbeat conversation until we came to the lobby and his wife guided him toward the street.

And then he died.

But—before that, was something else.

One night, he became violent with his wife. It was the first time. She was along with him. It frightened her, and she called the police.

A substantial number of them—I heard eight or ten—showed up at their apartment, not knowing what to expect. They were to take him—well, I don’t know where, but I expect some psychiatric hospital. By the time they arrived, he had settled down. They asked him to come with them, and he was frightened. He didn’t want to go.

But he said, “Fine, all right, I’d do what you want—if you’ll let me play the piano first.”

He asked them to sit down in his living room and listen. And they did.

They sat, he played, and they listened.

I don’t know what music, or how long it lasted. But the big burly men in their heavy, dark blue uniforms sat, patiently or impatiently, I don’t know.

Then, when he was finished, he got up and did what his wife told him, and they both went away.

He never came back.

Ellen Schecter has been widely published in print and online. Her first novel won the Amérigas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. Ellen Schecter’s memoir, Fierce Joy, is being published by Greenpoint Press, on June 1, 2012. It will be available as a paperback and e-book from Amazon.com, B&N.com, and from greenpointpress.org. A long-time Upper West Sider, her summer story, Chilling Out on the M5, appeared years ago on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood and she was privileged to read at the MBN Reading Series at Happy Ending along with Patrick Gallagher way back when she was just beginning her memoir.

Sure, there had previously been a Tintin phase and then a Han Solo period (I was always more a Han man than a Luke), but this was different. Here were Jewish oddballs raised by bohemians who only wanted to be left alone with their punk rock, their Led Zeppelin, their booming beats, Bud tall boys and girls, girls, girls. Just like me, my older brother Asher, and many of our closest friends in our middle class suburb of Baltimore.

And so I bought a Volkswagen medallion in a Fells Point thrift shop and fashioned it into a gaudy necklace. I wore Sharpie-savaged jeans, high-top Adidas, sweatshirts, and—as a committed Oriole fan, this still haunts me—a New York Yankees baseball cap swung sideways.

It was amazing to us that the Beastie Boys were just a few years older than we were. And yet they were already doing exactly what they wanted to do, as they would later declare in a rap. Perhaps one day we, too, could turn our lives into a wild, raunchy goof and call it a career. “My job ain’t a job, it’s a damn good time,” the band chanted and we believed them.

After graduating from high school, Asher moved to northern California to live with our dad. An advanced social creature, he quickly fell in with a roving band of stoners, which led to a gig performing The Rocky Horror Picture Show live every Saturday at midnight at a theater near the Berkley campus. Eventually he found his way to Sonoma State University.

I left Baltimore a few years after my brother and drove straight to New York City to start my freshman year in college. This was the first stop in my accidental trailing of the Beastie Boys. The trio famously grew up prowling Village clubs, collecting sounds and images they’d soon scratch into their own sample-mad, post-modern party jams.

By the time I moved into a dorm overlooking Washington Square Park in 1989, the Beasties’ second album, “Paul’s Boutique,” was my university’s de facto soundtrack. The CD bounced and grinded at parties; the cassette ticked ceaselessly from Walkman headphones. My friends and I banged into packed rooms lustily quoting lyrics: “Hey, ladies!” As another sweaty Saturday night wound down, we’d summon strength echoing the “Paul’s” sample: “Right up to your face and diss you!”

I was deep in a teenage Bukowski funk and I’d wander Manhattan in a tattered sportcoat drinking 40 ounces of Colt 45 until the brown bag was empty. “Paul’s Boutique” was my constant companion: “You know you light up when the lights go down/ Then you read the New York Post, Fulton Street, downtown/ Same faces every day but you don't know their names/ Party people going placed on the D train.”

This educational approach proved fiscally unsustainable so I left New York after one year. Asher convinced me to move to Hollywood to live with our cousin Aaron, take acting lessons and buy a motorcycle. Once he finished school, he’d join us in Los Angeles and together we would become, effectively, the Beastie Boys of the movie business. At the time we were about the same age the Beasties were when they released their first record—so why not?

Coincidentally, the actual Beastie Boys had also recently moved from New York to Los Angeles, shedding the fratty fooling of their early years for a more mature, socially conscious vision. MCA had even discovered Buddhism and become a vegan, while lyrically renouncing the group’s once-perceived misogyny.

And still their songs pumped at parties. I’d ditched my drunken poet pose back East and was once again rocking thrift store jewelry and questionable facial hair. Out West I grooved to the latest funkified iteration of the Beastie Boys.

Asher graduated from college in the spring of 1992 and a week later he pointed his Geo Tracker toward the apartment I shared with Aaron on Detroit Street, not far from the so-called Miracle Mile. There are photographs of us from that time taken at a poolside party in the Valley. Asher, Aaron, and I practically burst from the photos, chutzpah-propelled in outrageous sunglasses, mugging hardcore for the lens.

Then, on June 17, my brother was shot and killed during a botched robbery attempt. He and Aaron had been out that night working on a film script they were writing. After the work session, Asher was parallel parking on Detroit Street when a skinny dude approached the Tracker asking for spare change. My brother went for his wallet, the skinny dude stepped aside and behind him was a guy with a gun.

That fall Aaron and I, shattered, moved to San Francisco to begin putting our lives back together.

Among the many samples on “Paul’s Boutique” is one from the 1971 R&B hit “Mr. Big Stuff,” asking: “Who do you think you are?” The Beastie Boys’ MCA died of cancer in early May at 47 years of age. Asher would’ve turned 44 this month. I'm now married with two young daughters, living in Brooklyn where I sometimes play the Beasties while running Prospect Park's loop.

On one of the Beasties’ early hits, “Brass Monkey,” MCA told us in his deep bark: “I’ve got a castle in Brooklyn and that’s where I dwell.” While I hardly live in a castle, it is a 3-bedroom apartment that’s quite large by New York City standards. But any sense of modern royalty I have is not due to where I live, what I do, or the music I listen to—though all those things certainly make life more appealing. No, the feeling that I have led a rich life to this point is most poignantly due to the people I’ve known, whether intimately as in the case of my brother or distantly as with MCA and the Beastie Boys. Asher and MCA both died far too young, but not before discovering precisely who they were, and helping me figure out what kind of person I want to be.

Maccabee lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife and two kids. He is the author of Jetpack Dreams, the editor of Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader, and he has written for the New York Times, New York magazine and Salon, among others. He is a News Editor for Fastcompany.com and at work on a screenplay, a coming of age story fueled by sex, drugs, rock n roll and Edgar Allan Poe.

When the company needed a production assistant, they hired one of my musician friends, a handsome Texan who went on to become so famous that years later, I learned about his death from an obituary on the front page of the New York Times. He’d played with everyone from Yoko Ono to Judy Collins, Bette Midler to the Talking Heads. But that was later. Back then, he needed a day job and we worked together in the studio, saw each other in the same West Village bars at night. It was a cash economy, before credit cards and ATMs, five and ten dollar bills passing from hand to hand.

One evening, as Don and I rode the elevator heading to the southbound 8th Avenue subway, I handed him the $5 I had borrowed the night before. He grinned and said, in his Texas drawl, “I may not be free, but I am extremely reasonable.”

And the elevator full of stone-faced New Yorkers laughed aloud.

My secret hope was that I would live in one of those secret apartments one day. I wasn’t the kind of writer who hoped for a garret. I wanted a warren, a private place inside a big structure that would be utterly silent at night. The moment I found the apartment in the basement of The Museum of the America Indian, it became my apotheosis of a writer’s warren.

I had unfettered access to the basement because I’d gotten a part-time job at the gift shop in the Museum. This is back when the Museum was up on 155th Street, sharing one of the grand Beaux Arts buildings of Audubon Terrace with the American Geographical Society, the American Numismatic Society, the Hispanic Society and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The compound was an elegant testament to the retro-classic architecture of the early 20th Century. The people who ran the Museum of American Indian chafed to get out...the dated sensibility of Victorian anthropology clashed with the enlightened post-Modern interpretation of the native American cultures.

I was happy because the job was on the Number 1 Line and midway between my apartment way uptown on Wadsworth Avenue and the Columbia campus, where I was finishing up my junior year.

My primary qualification for working at the gift shop was that I had wrapped packages for a letter press shop was I was thirteen. The hours were flexible and the setting fed my need for eccentric and out-of-the-way New York experiences.

As dated and stodgy as the Museum was, the gift shop was vital and energetic. The manager was one of the most sophisticated buyers of Indian jewelry, Navajo rugs, modern native American painting, pottery and Hopi Kachina dolls in the New York area. The shop also had an extensive collection of literature and research about native Americans.

I was intrigued by the expertise of the people who came in to the shop and began to read all of the books about Native American art that I could sneak out with me at the end of the day. Soon I was allowed to work the counter, and in time I became one of the most confident people on staff talking about the pottery and rugs that we carried.

Nancy, the shop manager, encouraged me to learn as much as I could about the things in the shop. My enthusiasm began to attract her attention. Dane, another guy who worked in the shop with me, didn’t seem happy when Nancy invited me down to the stockroom to see the new shipments that had come in from her last buying trip to the Southwest. Jane, the girl who worked the admissions counter and handled the phones, told me that Dane and Nancy had a thing going, and that I’d better watch out for myself. I wasn’t sure whether I was all that interested in Nancy: she was in her thirties, had stringy blonde hair that she kept in a business-like cut, and her hips did an odd, mis-aligned seesaw switch when she walked.

I was sure that I was interested in Jane. She was a couple of years out of Michigan and lived in a ground-floor apartment on 79th Street, just off on West End, by the entrance to the West Side Highway. She always had an apologetic smile on her face, but her eyes twinkled mischievously, and she wore her bangs over her brows, so that when she didn’t want to look at someone all she had to do was tilt her face down. She favored nice wool skirts and silky blouses to work the admissions desk, and she always had a book to read when things were quiet.

The best thing about Jane was that she wasn’t Janet. I’d been trying to wind things down with Janet in that rocky, unclear way that incomplete relationships fall into.  We’d been boyfriend and girlfriend, and then we weren’t, and then we kind of were again. By the time I started working at the Museum, we were in a suspended state of weren't.

One day I told Jane about my fascination with the custodian’s apartment in the basement. I wondered if she had any idea who I could talk to about using it.

“Why would you want to live here when everyone was gone?” she asked.

“I could play my saxophone as late as I wanted,” I said.

“I could come and play my cello then too,” she laughed.

The die was cast. I didn’t know she played the cello. I was fascinated. I wanted to know more.

One day I asked Jane if she wanted to go over to Trinity Cemetery and picnic at lunch. I figured that this could be a kind of trial date. I could use the time to figure out whether she liked me that way or not, and what her deal was with her boyfriend.

Trinity Cemetery ran up alongside the Museum, and was across the street from The Church of the Intercession. The cemetery was heavily wooded and ran down the hill to the river, surrounded by a high stone wall. We went in through a side gate and ate our sandwiches sitting on fallen grave stones so we wouldn’t get our pants wet. I finished my sandwich quickly and sipped on a seltzer. Jane put her sandwich down. We kissed. I had my answer.

Back then, one of my favorite things to do was to go to the West End’s jazz club and listen to Benny Waters play the alto saxophone. A few times I’d brought my horn and he’d invited me to sit in. He’d been brought back to the states by Phil Schaap, who hosted (and still does) a seminal show on Charlie Parker every morning on WKCR, the Columbia radio station.

I invited Jane to listen to Benny Waters that Friday evening. We hung out on the Walk at Columbia, sitting by one of the fountains, watching people walk by, enjoying each other and stealing kisses that became progressively more urgent, that dulled our eyes, lowered our lids, left our faces flush.

We walked over to the West End hand in hand and got a table at the back of the club. The 9:00 set was crowded with jazz buffs. Waters was swinging hard, blowing out the side of his mouth and egging on the rhythm section with quick glissandos and sharp honks. I was elevating: the girl, the music, the night, what might happen.

Jane squeezed my arm and leaned in.

“Do you know that girl over there?” she asked, turning her head.

I looked over to the door.

Janet was standing in the door. She had square shoulders, and her hair was pulled back from her head, so her forehead shined in the stage lights. She was staring hard at me. I hadn’t noticed. She started to make her way over.

“Who is she?” Jane asked.

“My girlfriend.  Ex-girlfriend,” I said.

Now she stared at me hard.

“What’s she doing here?”

“I don’t know. She’s not really my girlfriend anymore. We broke up. But I don’t know why she’s here.”

“Did you tell her we’d be here?”

I tried to remember. I didn’t know. I’d talked to Janet earlier that day. But I knew what the smart answer was.

“No. I don’t know why she’s here.”

Jane narrowed her eyes.

“I’m going,” she said.

“No, no,” I said, while I stood up. “Don’t go. It’s going to be all right.”

Janet stood next to us.

I introduced the two women. They stood there. I searched for that elevated feeling, looking for the escape that would come with floating away in the air, or a blinding moment of invisibility.

The women were silent. Then Benny picked his horn up from the stand. The piano player hit a chord -- E7 -- and then another -- A -- then vamped a little, picking up the shirring of the drum brushes, and Waters lifted his horn to his mouth, licked his lips, and kicked off a little run that took him in the center of the E chord, and the melody broke. A Jerome Kern standard, The Nearness of You. It would have been ironic if I’d known the words. I just knew the melody and the changes.

I sat back down. Jane slipped next to me, held my arm, leaned in. Janet sat on the other side. Waters played, the set ran on. I sat between the two women -- the woman I wanted to sleep with, whose breast I’d tentatively caressed just an hour earlier, who had wrapped her tongue around mine, and the woman I had slept with, who I wanted to be away from, who I didn’t trust -- and looked straight ahead, unmoving. I could have used that custodian’s apartment just then.

After the set we walked out onto the sidewalk. No one was willing to make the first move. Janet looked at me with wounded eyes. Jane looked a little away, like she was bored or had forgotten something.

“Stay here for a sec,” I said to Janet.

Jane and I walked a couple of steps away.

“I’ve got to talk with her. I’m sorry.”

“I get it,” she said. She whispered. “Come down to my apartment after.”

I walked Janet back to her apartment on 106th Street. It was a big building on the corner, a luxury rental once upon a time and well out of my price range still. She lived there with a roommate. Her dad paid the rent. She had wanted to go to art school, but was going to business school instead. I told her that it was really over. She cried a little. Then we got to the building and stood outside the door. She wanted to hug. I held her. The night was warm and sparkling. A cab pulled up to the corner.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. I skipped over to the cab. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I didn’t know why I said that. I told the cabby to go down to 79th Street. I hoped that Jane was still waiting.

J.W. Rogers grew up in Massachusetts and came to New York in 1977. He's been in and around NYC, collecting stories and writing them down, ever since. You can read some of his work at www.drmstream.com.

My husband posed this question in an attempt to liven up a rather staid Upper East Side party one night. The gathered Wall Street wizards, lawyers and M.B.A. types thought about it. “Exactly what we’re doing,” most of them concluded. Finally it was my turn. I didn’t hesitate. “I’d like to be a torch singer,” I said.

Even my husband was startled. I don’t know why; he knows all about my years with a singer named John Kuhn.

I first knocked on the door of John’s music room thirty-one years ago, when I was 23. “I understand you perform miracles,” I said by way of introduction, and he laughed heartily.

John still recalls those words to me now, telling me that he was so charmed he immediately agreed to squeeze me in, even though I had not much ability and no professional aspirations at all.

John was a professor of voice at New York University, plying his trade at the piano in a small cubicle in a West 4th Street building with an uncertain elevator. That fall, while I was enrolled in the graduate journalism program, I had also signed up for guitar lessons with an instructor named Mary Roof, who worked patiently with me on chords and fingering. But every time she tried to get me to sing along, I would freeze. “You really need to get over that,” she’d say. I was painfully self-conscious; my voice was small and whispery. Eventually she said, “You ought to see the man next door.”

“It’s hopeless,” I said.

“Oh, you should hear some of the people he gets in there,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I hear them through the wall. You’d be amazed what he can do.”

And that’s why I knocked on John’s door. I was ripe for transformation. I arrived at his doorstep carting my trunkload of emotional baggage, one of the walking wounded. A year before, I’d had a boyfriend, a heartbreaker musician and actor named Kenny with whom I’d lived the last year in college. He would jump out of bed to compose ballads on his guitar, and would stare penetratingly into my eyes when he sang. What his voice lacked in size it made up for in confidence. I was still young and stupid enough to mistake his self-absorption for an artistic temperament. When the group he played with wanted to make a demo tape, I took them to a family friend who was a sound engineer, and for several weeks I listened as they laid down tracks in the studio, an achingly lovely four part polyphony that Kenny had composed. The girl singer, Laura, had a clear, pure voice without vibrato, and I yearned to sound like that. I knew better than to try, however. Once, reading a book, I had dared to hum to myself, and Kenny looked up, startled. “You can carry a tune?” he’d said, his amazement clearly an insult. That summer, he performed at the Village Vanguard and other clubs around town, and I would sit in the front row, a good little girl friend, clutching an extra set of guitar strings in case one snapped. Then one Friday night, Kenny was going to make his acting debut in an off-Broadway production, and arrived to pick me up on his way to the theater. His best friend Mark waited in the car. Kenny seemed excited, glittery-eyed, as he said, “Sit down, we need to talk for a minute.” I waited expectantly, ready to offer the pep talk I thought he wanted. “We always said we’d be honest with each other,” he said, taking my hand. I’ve since learned to hate when people say that. You know you’re about to hear something you’d rather not.

Kenny looked long and hard into my eyes and said, “I’ve met someone else.”

And with that bombshell, he told me that Mark was waiting so we had to hurry, pushed me out the door, and drove to the theater. Chilled and nauseated, I sat through the first act, then spent Acts II and III sobbing on Mark’s shoulder in the front seat of his Trans-Am. Later that evening, in the midst of breaking up with me, and making sure I heard all about the sexy, talented actress who’d snared him, Kenny said, “I forgot to ask, what did you think of my performance tonight?” I stared at him, and finally said, “You mean, ‘aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’” The truth was, he’d probably been good; Kenny was good at many things, except kindness.

So when I knocked on John’s door a year later, I needed to prove something.

John started me out on scales, of course, and songs. Wonderful songs. Show tunes, pop music, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Stephen Sondheim. Melodies from little known musicals, and poignant songs from World War II that somehow seemed to be about my lost love as well. “I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places…” I would sing. “You have a small voice, but your pitch is professional,” he told me. He taught me breath control by having me blow at a candle without extinguishing it, and showed me how to sing from the diaphragm, supporting my voice from below my rib cage, not from the throat. He demonstrated the difference between chest voice and head voice, showing me how to feel the buzz of sound through my sinus cavities.

John had performed with the NBC Opera company, recording and touring. He was born in Munich, where both his parents had been opera stars. His mother sang with Caruso.

But because he was half-Jewish, he had fled Germany in the thirties. His wife Erica, also German, had been a dancer, though by the time I met her she was a day camp director, big, hale and hearty. They lived on the Upper West Side in a prewar apartment with high ceilings, dark furniture, and Erica’s mother, who would answer the phone in a little girl voice, though she was well past eighty. He and Erica had no children, but John fussed over a terrier that he always referred to as “my little fellow.” He would often invite me for parties, where with very little urging the guests could be persuaded to sing. But never me. And I told no one I was taking lessons, for fear they’d ask me to sing. I did it for love, for the pure pleasure of it, because it was better than therapy, it was therapy, and I felt exhilarated at the end of our sessions, floating along the east end of Washington Square, home to 10th street, where I’d bound up the stairs humming happily. Daily I’d practice my scales in the bathroom, because John said the acoustics from the tiles would amplify my voice pleasingly. I sang even when I had a cold, because John said that the stuffiness gave you more chest resonance.

John was short and ebullient, and when he needed to teach me how a phrase should sound, he would mimic my range by singing in falsetto. But occasionally he would demonstrate a few notes in his own voice, a powerful tenor, which was a joy at such close range, and always so unexpected from this puckish, red-haired man who was a shameless flirt. He was a wonderful teacher, excited, animated, encouraging, and I loved him for it. Often I’d bring him little treats — homemade brownies, or champagne grapes. Because I knew he went long hours without eating, frequently I’d surprise him with coffee and muffins. I’d tell him stories about my boyfriends, or my career in book publishing. I could always make him laugh; he could always coax music out of me.

Whenever he returned from Europe, he would always bring me back a bag of his favorite, cherished nougat cookies. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said. “It took every ounce of my self-control not to finish them. You are the only woman I share them with.”

“I bet you tell that to all your women,” I said.

Sometimes I’d meet him at the end of his teaching day, and we would go to one of the many overheated coffee shops that ringed the campus, all of them smelling of dog, damp wool and scruffy students. “You shouldn’t drink milk,” he’d tell me. “It gums up the voice.” Always animated, he would order the blue fish platter, and, wiping flecks of food from his chin, regale me with stories about the places he’d sung, the people he’d known.

“You must be bolder,” he’d tell me. “Sing. Emote. You’re too controlled.” I took it metaphorically: I was too tight, too constricted. Life lessons, music lessons, they were one and the same. Take risks, let your voice crack, don’t be embarrassed, it’s only the two of us and the piano, he’d say. And I’d reach for that note, sometimes failing, laughing with embarrassment, and still he’d push me further.

“It’s time you sang in a group,” he told me the summer night he took me to an open sing on 57th street across from Carnegie Hall. One of his students was doing a solo. I couldn’t sight read, but clutching the sheet music they’d passed out at the door, I managed to stumble along beside John as we worked our way through the “Carmina Burana”, a medieval melding of voices and glorious sound.

“You want me to sing what?” I said the time he handed me the music to “Hey Big Spender.” “You need to be looser,” he said. “Oh yeah?” I said. “I suppose you want me to wear a boa and do a bump and grind too.”

“I don’t think my heart could take it,” he said. “Just sing.”

And I sang. I sang all the time. My voice became a small, tuned instrument, a source of pleasure, and healing.

Eventually, I married and moved out of the city, and the lessons tapered off. The last time we met for lunch, I told him my news: I was pregnant with my first child. Today we don’t see each other often, but we talk a few times a year on the phone. “And how is the great American novelist?” he’ll ask. Each May, I remember his birthday, and always send him delicacies at Christmas — Royal Riviera pears, chocolate truffles, linzer tart cookies. Always food. Summers, when he and Erica go to Maine, he visits the Harbor Candy Store I told him about in Ogunquit, and never fails to send me a few pounds of fudge. Our friendship has lasted more than thirty years, forged from love of food and song, contrapuntal sustenance for stomach and soul.

“Sing out, Louise,” the stage mother in Gypsy calls. And I do. John gave me back my voice. I will never be the chanteuse of my fantasies; I still sing sotto voce, low and soft, not meant to be overheard. But still, I sing, trusting that the notes John taught me will be there when I need them.

Liane Kupferberg Carter’s essays, articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times syndicate, McCall’s, Parents, Child, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Newsday, The Westchester Review, Mom Writers Literary Magazine, Memoir(and), Literary Mama, and Writers’ Bloc. She is a 2009 winner of the Memoir Journal Prize for Memoir in Prose.

This means that instead of waiting in the hyperborean dungeon beneath the main level for $20 tickets, we are now corralled in a narrow maze of floor space divided by 6-foot lengths of retractable maroon belts and movable copper stanchions.

The herd is not happy. “I don’t understand this at all, there’s no space up here.” “I can’t stand like this until six o’clock!” “How can they do this to us?”

Problem solvers emerge.

Frail lady with dyed black hair: “There’s gotta be a better system! Why not hand out numbers?”

Elderly woman in beach chair next to her: “We’re already here, they’re people in the ticket office, I don’t see why we have to wait!”

Large middle-aged man with cane: “They ought to sell us tickets now so we can go home!”

I bite my lip. I’m tempted to intervene, “Look you nitwits! If tickets went on sale at 2 PM instead of 6 PM you’d have people beginning to line up at 8 AM instead of noon. This is New York for God’s sake. Anything cheap here involves misery. Anyway, nobody’s holding a gun to your head to wait here.” I remain mute.

I look around me. It’s mainly the same old collection of weirdos, eccentrics, and impecunious opera fans I’ve seen the two-dozen previous times I’ve done this since my first opera 16 months ago.

You’ve got the frail bag-of-bones who barely seems to have enough energy to draw a breath to speak let alone wait in the cold for four hours. You’ve got the spry-looking man in his 50s with a navel-reaching red beard conversing with the sophisticated German woman who always wears a fur coat. There are yarmulkes reading Torah passages in Hebrew, foreign students sitting cross-legged on the cold marble floor studying books, and today one young buck wearing a gray hoodie is being ogled by the older gals as he sports buffed blond-haired legs in Adidas shorts.

Bend your ear and you’ll hear a clutch of foreign languages: German, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, French, Serbian, Portuguese, Spanish. While many silently read books or stare into space, others drone endlessly on their cell phones or engage in passionate conversations about where the nearest spot around Lincoln Center is to get cheap food. (Answer: Nowhere.)

Listening to rush ticket people for hours on end can be mind-numbing. Around my small circle of space several conversations take place. A group of elderly folk discusses the eternal topic: the discomfort of waiting and the need of a new system. A dissertation on preservatives in pomegranate juice occurs between a Korean student and a shaky woman with dyed black hair who staggers every time she stands up from her rickety three-legged stool. There’s a tête-à-tête between a 50-something son who is stumbling through Russian, sounding out words with a Bronx accent, and his septuagenarian gray-haired father who’s holding a textbook and correcting his long sentences.

My mind is beginning to seize with numbness. I grab a magazine, plop my bag in my cramped plot of floor then take a walk.

It wasn’t always like this.

In that time before construction began on the garage and walkways downstairs, a time that seems as primordial as the first photosynthesizing ocean bacteria spewing oxygen into the atmosphere, the area below the main floor was bearable. It was never the lounge at the Waldorf Astoria, but it was relatively warm, there were working outlets where you could plug in your laptop and besides the humming of chatter it was relatively quiet. There was even a bathroom.

But for the past year the outlets in the wall no longer function, the cacophonous banging of construction is incessant and, in the coldest months, your lips turn blue by the time you begin the migration upstairs. I silently glare at the construction workers, smoldering as I consider the Empire State was put up in 12 months.

Rush tickets go on sale two hours before the performance, which is usually 6 PM. The first people in line arrive around noon. Through trial and error I’ve found that if I get there by 2 PM I will be Number 20 in line and will get Row “L” in the orchestra section, which is excellent. I bring papers to read and a pen. When the temperature dips to below 20° I wear six layers of clothing but still have to walk around after a few hours to get some sensation back into my limbs.

An hour before rush tickets go on sale everybody is forced to stand and tighten up the line so they can wait another 30 minutes until they are let upstairs to wait in another line.

Looking at everybody’s eager expressions moments before the Met usher drops the velvet rope you realize there is one common thread that runs through all these discordant ticket buyers: a potent love for opera. $20 is only a Starbuck’s Venti White Chocolate Mocha away from a movie ticket in New York these days. All the discomfort of waiting in line – the stiff leg muscles, the aching back, even the possible amputation of toes due to frostbite – become worth it when you are able to sit elbow to elbow with the Haves, to witness the glittering chandeliers that disappear up into the gold gilt ceiling as the house lights are dimmed, to hear the silence wash over the audience before applause erupts for the orchestra and conductor, to view the magnificent stage settings as the heavy golden curtain is slowly pulled away, then be able to hear glorious music sung by singers bedecked in the most dazzling costumes while following along on your dimly-lit screen in the crimson seatback in front of you.

After that initial rush of pleasure you derive from your first $20 opera, a wondrous boon in these dismal economic times, it’s easy to become a rush ticket masochist.

Ken Paprocki is a photojournalist based in New York, who photographs and writes about real life, from hunting the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the peculiarities of his home state Nebraska, to the daily grind of New York. He had an article entitled “Water Warriors” published in the June issue of Reader’s Digest.

The first warning of the grim hours we faced was the approach of a toney couple who stopped, as we did, to peruse the wonderfully artificial, sparkling white frou frou (saved by crisp tailoring) in the docile twin windows of Ralph Lauren, Women. Because, as everyone knows, there is no longer one home for any given designer but at least two, for gender, and often three: Tots. Marc Jacob Tots. Gucci Tots. Juicey Couture Tots. Well, maybe not. The woman, whose honey hair leapt upward into a Grace Kelly chignon, smiled wanly. However, her gent was more expressive, warmer, and well, a lot touchy-feelier. His hand went right to my student’s hair. The hair her mother had combed when she was four and five and six. That whacky Jamaal had pulled in the seventh grade. That she herself had turned into a burst of magnetic softness. It was only after she issued an icy smile, stumbling backwards in a sort of civilized form of naked terror that he said, “May I touch it?”

What could she say? He already had.

“Well, that was weird,” I offered as we evaded his wandering hands by lurching towards Olive Bette’s. “Oh yeah,” she answered, with the emphasis laying slightly on the second word. But she didn’t really seem offended. I thought, “Of course, she’s learning to be famous!” and took some solace from that inward monologue. So I smiled again at her, up into her hazel eyes, and realized she was bored with all the striped rain boots in the window, a carnival of nauseating pinks and greens, which should have been a “Tots” but was, sadly, nots. It was then that I fatefully suggested we go to Marc Jacobs.

Now, Mr. Jacobs not only has innumerable stores (men’s, women’s, tots, pets, slave/master’s, Singapore hotties’, mothers, father’s with strollers’s, hipster’s, lollapalooza veteran’s, recovering drunk’s) but also, he uses the display windows as bully pulpits. When Hillary’s campaign began, a riot of famous female faces appeared on t-shirts worn by male manikins who showed their love. When AIDs was losing its fashionista status, the good fight was re-ignited in a wall of support up and down Bleecker. More to the point, when our sista Lil’ Kim was arrested, she pouted disdain for The Man in several different appealing poses on t-shirts that were one hundred percent pima cotton. I myself have had only one Marc Jacobs t-shirt, bought on sale. It said: “Where’s the Outrage?” but I had to give it away to another former student since no one could read the rubric on my shallow poet’s breast. But I still had the seven dollar flip-flops—in fact, I was wearing them. My starry idol wanted a pair.

It became painfully clear, after only a few moments, that the dark face, the great wand of hair, the non-brand t-shirt that read: “I was raised on hip-hop and I’m STILL ALRIGHT” was not doing it for the security guard. When we moved, he moved. When my girl’s hand moved, his eyes moved. We laughed, he frowned. We looked away, he looked harder at her. And that’s the way it went until we just caved and slunk out. Minus the flip-flops. Which had quadrupled in price anyway.

“I want to go back to Ralph Lauren,” she said with a faintly militant look as we stood on the sidewalk studying the ever-lengthening line for sugary indistinguishably-flavored cup-cakes from Magnolia Bakery, purchased by the dozen by hairless guides catering to the needs of the flocks of girls and women waiting to be photographed on the doorstep of Carrie Bradshaw’s digs, with flecks of vanilla icing still on their lips, tottering on Manolo Blahnik stilettos paid for with endless overtime, fired by this, their dream of being bused into the Village to buy a “Rabbit” at the sex shop, to come to Bleecker Street, to be bused back to Port Authority dreamily remembering their Sex in the City tour. As they munched, we meandered back toward the ermine-doused leggings and salty white berets of Ralph Lauren, Women (Summer Season).

We entered. “Oh, hi!” said a slight transsexual salesperson, “Just yell if you need anything.” It seemed unlikely we would be yelling at such a sweet individual. We wandered through the heaps of rustic belts, burnished alligator bags, weathered mini-motorcycle jackets, fringed shrunken sweaters, ivory-topped canes with little birds traced in silver, cowboy hats, frangi-pangi, lassoes, old kettles, and things for which the argot would be “objets.” Our eyes laughed at the little fake mice eating the woodwork. We swooned trying on the huge cashmere coats woven by monks from some place other than Tibet. We tossed on this, we tossed back that. “Want that in blue?” queried a bright blond thing. “Oh yes,” I sighed. Whatever it was. I think it was in fact a jacket although I never quite got it buttoned because the fastenings were made of Yak-hair which is very hard to handle. “Want a coffee?” a third helper asked and we both said yes. After a few hours we left having bought nothing—which did nothing to dampen the smiles of our new best friends who in fact gave us each a memento, a dear little fake mouse.

“Creepy” commented my hip-hop legend. But that was about the mouse, which she tossed in the nearest garbage can. “But they were nice in there,” I ventured. “Oh very,” she agreed. “And now I want another slice of pizza.” This was easily done, and not too much later, we parted ways, she to a party, me to my moss-lined rooms in which I have long written my impossible poems and hibernated. As I fixed a cup of tea my dachshund Pushkin came toddling into the kitchen. “Who would have guessed,” I mused aloud, “that Marc Jacobs would be so lame, and Ralph Lauren so haimisch?” He sort of shrugged and waited for me to sit somewhere so that he could bundle into me, snatch the fake mouse from my pocket, and tear it apart mercilessly.

Cynthia Kraman’s new book of poetry The Touch is coming out soon from Bowery Books. To get on the mailing list email .

John was with another guy. We inched closer to them, as star-struck as those legendary teenage girls who screamed whenever they heard the Beatles sing.

“Hullo,” John said, and it would be the first and last word I would hear him utter. He playfully popped his hat on top of my head.

“Where do you girls live?” asked John’s buddy.

Somehow the four of us started walking together, toward my fifth-floor walk-up on Eighth Street.

“Want to come up?” Susan asked them.

I stared at her in awe and shock. She lived back across the park, in a tiny studio on Sullivan Street, but I shared a two-bedroom with an NYU psychology student. In a half hour I was due at NYU, where I was studying for a Master’s Degree in the evenings.

The next thing I knew, I was unlocking the black gate to ascend above Eli Wilentz’s Eighth Street Bookshop—my landlord, the infamous bookstore where I converted checks into cash in the days before ATMs, the hip gathering place of poets and artists with a customer base of literary superstars: Auden, Cummings, Moore, Schwartz, Kerouac, Ginsberg.

We were actually climbing the creaky winding staircases to the top floor—with John Lennon! As soon as we were inside my apartment—which cost me a hundred and sixty-two dollars and fifty cents a month and had a working fireplace—John’s buddy was all over Susan. She was petite to the point of looking frail, but she was no pushover. Her liaisons with men, women, and combinations were far more brazen and widespread than mine, yet she kept pushing him away. I smiled wanly at John, sitting in my very own living room whose design scheme could only be described as Post-College Dorm. He was so stoned he was nodding off. He was devastated by his break-up with Yoko. How did I know this? I just did. Poor lonely John.

I was twenty years old and having problems with my own boyfriend, a college crush turned lover, who was in medical school in Guadalajara. Although I wanted to marry him, he’d rebuffed my offer to come live with him in Mexico, leaving me alone and lonely on Eighth Street. Most nights my roommate’s boyfriend stayed over, a drummer who earned his living selling cocaine and listened to Coltrane while I was trying to study Abnormal Psychology for grad school. Susan had an on-again off-again boyfriend who lived in Alphabet City in an era that made Rent look tame.

It would be years before Nixon would resign and the Vietnam War would end. The Beatles had once seemed counterculture, but their rebellious image waned in comparison to the groups that came after them. It’s hard to believe that their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was so revolutionary. They were wearing ties! And yes, I screamed into the TV when they sang, “All My Loving.”

Susan was still trying to fend off John’s aggressive buddy. There I was, at what seemed like a critical juncture in my young life. We were either going to sleep with John and his buddy (whose name we never knew), or we were going to throw them out.

Susan threw them out.

I stared at her incredulously. Even though I don’t know what I would have done if we’d allowed them to stay. Even though I doubted that John was capable of doing anything much that night—except passing out.

John’s buddy shrugged, and he guided a wobbly John out the door.

What were we thinking?

“Wait. Your hat,” I managed to say, and placed it back on his head.

What was I thinking?

John nodded, smiling.

Then they were gone.

“What’re we…crazy?” I said to Susan. “Do you know who we just asked to leave? John Lennon!”

Susan could have taught a Ph.D. level course in one-night stands, but why did she decide to be moral that night? “His friend was a pig,” she said, and then she suddenly started having misgivings.

We raced back down the five flights of stairs and into Washington Square Park…searching…searching. No John. No hat. Not on Sixth Avenue. Nowhere Man.

Despite the fact that I was a shy, unadventurous girl, I’ve had regrets about the way that evening turned out. John and Yoko would soon make up, but they would not live happily ever after. My boyfriend would dump me, catapulting me into an overwrought period of despair, where I often found solace in Beatles songs: I’ll pretend that I’m kissin’/The lips I am missin’….And when jobs took us in different directions, I would lose touch with Susan and never see her again.

In the years that passed, I enjoyed telling my John Lennon story repeatedly to friends and family. People loved hearing it, and I had my fifteen minutes of fame. You met John Lennon? they gawked. He was in your apartment…and you let him go?

Sometimes I even joked about my story, saying that if I hadn’t sent John on his way, I might have been Sean’s mother. I’ve even told the story to my teenage daughter, focusing on the hat part and editing out sections leading to the possibility of sex with strangers.

After John was killed, I stood alongside thousands of mourners in Central Park in what is now Strawberry Fields. I cried, and sang, “Imagine.” It took many years before I was able to re-enact my John Lennon story.

I’ve often wondered: if John had stayed that night, would my life have been different? Or would my John Lennon story have been better? I’m glad, even relieved, that our brief encounter ended in a pure, innocent way. Although I wish I’d kept his hat.

The End

Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and many other publications.

But in my case, I was only into my third or fourth year of study when I received my first remuneration from playing the violin. It wasn’t a large sum of money, as will be seen. Perhaps it helps to give a short back-story to that occasion, so that the reader can fully appreciate the circumstances.

When I was about eleven years old I would ride the Independent subway from Queens by myself, on Saturday mornings, to the Henry Street Music School, to take violin lessons. The school, at 8 Pitt Street, in Lower Manhattan, just off Grand Street, was an adjunct of the famous Henry Street Settlement House, located several blocks away, and actually situated on Henry Street.

Prior to that time, my mother would accompany me there on the subway, and during my lesson, she would while away the time in the waiting room, conversing with other women. (She struck up a friendship with the mother of a two gifted brothers, one an older violinist, and the other a gifted pianist about my own age, both of whom later would become famous as performers and teachers. In fact, my mother received from this woman gut strings discarded by her violinist son, because they were too worn for him to continue to play on, but were still adequate for me, considering my skill, or lack thereof. (Remember, this was still the Depression).

The building housing the school, which, in retrospect, was probably a renovated old-law tenement, was connected to an old theater, or playhouse, just around the corner, which was used for recitals by the students and faculty, or dramatic presentations. Its address was 466 Grand Street.

On Saturday mornings, in order to reach the school, after exiting the East Broadway Independent station, I would walk several blocks along the north side of East Broadway, until a block before it met Grand Street at a sharp angle, and the school was right across Grand Street, on Pitt Street. On the opposite side of East Broadway, there was the tall Forward Building, which housed the largest Yiddish language daily newspaper, followed by the Educational Alliance Building, a stately structure, as well as numerous four-story walk-up tenements, extending for several blocks to the east. On the north side, however, starting at the end of the park, the old-law tenements ran one after another, tightly packed together, with ground-level stores (looking like they needed a thorough cleaning) having signs in Yiddish, (which I couldn’t read or speak), some of which were translated into English. These shops offered for sale such exotic items as glass eyes, with some wondrous examples displayed in their windows, or trusses “for men”(who knew what a truss was?). There were also store windows which stated “We do cupping,” which is an ancient Chinese traditional treatment, still in use today. It was also adopted as an Eastern European Jewish folk remedy with the Yiddish name bankes. In any event, being the Sabbath, the shops were always closed.

While walking along East Broadway, I was frequently accosted by men with long beards, wearing broad-brimmed “strummels” (fur hats) and long black coats, who apparently spoke no English, but who nonetheless vociferously reprimanded me for playing the violin on the Sabbath, or possibly, for all I knew, even for only carrying the violin-case. (It has always been somewhat difficult to conceal a violin-case from view.) I obviously understood what they were saying, regardless of the fact that their speech was foreign to me, but having been brought up Reform, I didn’t take their admonitions to heart. On one morning, which I distinctly remember, a man similarly bearded and dressed, stopped and asked me to read to him the contents of a postcard he had received from a public school. It saddened me then, and still does, when I remember it, having to tell him that his daughter had not attended school for some period of time, and was therefore considered a truant. He was instructed to see the principal of the school. I can only imagine how he must have felt.

The subway entrance that I used, both coming and going to the Music School, was located in Seward Park. There were no doubt at least two different exit kiosks for the same station, but this one, located at the rear of the train coming from Queens, was the only one that I used, as it was the closest.. One flight below the park level, there was a change booth, where a male attendant would change bills or large coins, so that a rider could have a nickel to insert in the turnstile. (The fare wouldn’t go up to a dime until 1948, some years later.) Two long escalators led to the deeply buried tracks.

On one particular occasion, returning home from my lesson, after I had gotten change at the booth, the attendant asked me: “Hey kid, what are you carrying in the box?” or words to that effect. I told him that it was a violin. He suggested that I play something for him. I tried to resist gracefully, but he insisted that I play. “Tell you what, if you play something for me I’ll let you go in free under the turnstile.” (Remember, again, this was still the Depression).

So I went inside the change booth, rested my case on the floor and took out my fiddle. I played “La Cinquantaine,” by Gabriel-Marie, a short piece I had memorized and played in my lesson only a few minutes earlier. The agent seemed pleased enough, and told me I could duck under the turnstile, which I immediately did, after packing away my violin. Even though I have been playing the violin and viola in numerous orchestras, and as a soloist for organizations, for well over 60 years since then, that was the first and only time that I ever earned any money (although it was only a nickel) as a solo violinist. I seem to recall, however, receiving a severe tongue-lashing from my mother when I related the story to her. Apparently young boys were not supposed to be induced into change booths by grown men, for any reason.

Just under a year ago, my wife and I had the occasion to revisit the area, after many years in my case, in order to see an old friend who had moved from Queens to a condo apartment on Grand Street, which happens to be just a block away from my old music school. We took the subway down from Penn Station, and although I wanted to retrace my exact steps from sixty-odd years ago, we inadvertently got out of a different exit, so I was unable to see if the change booth (the scene of my “debut”) was still there. However, walking along East Broadway was truly an enlightening experience. On the south side there still were the imposing Forward and Educational Alliance buildings, now no longer used for their original purposes, but beyond them were what appeared to be tiny store-front synagogues or religious schools, in each of the old-law tenements that had remained there apparently unchanged since the end of the 19th century. In fact, one building similar to most of the others had the date 1889 engraved in the frieze above the roof. Some buildings looked even older, but it was certain that many decades had gone by since they had either been repainted, in the case of painted fronts, or had their exposed bricks repointed. There were some buildings that were finely detailed, with figures carved into their ornate stone lintels. They must have been extremely fashionable in their day, but now a coating of grime covered all of the surfaces..

On the opposite side of the street, there were a series of newer high-rise apartment houses, apparently post-war, surrounded by park-like settings. The old four-story walk-ups and their grimy show-windows with glass eyes and other exotic products displayed, were no more. The disparity was striking. One side of the street had been modernized, at least relatively so, and on the opposite side it appeared that well over century had passed from the time that the buildings had been built without any physical changes to them, whatsoever.

And when we reached the site of my old music school, the old playhouse, now renamed the Henry Street Settlement Harry DeJur Playhouse, at 466 Grand Street, was still there, and in fact in 1975 had been designated a National Historic Landmark, as a bronze plaque so attested. A much newer and larger modern building, named the Abrons Arts Center, had been appended to the east side of the playhouse, where other buildings had once stood. And farther along Grand Street, there were several post-war high-rise apartment buildings, in one of which our friend lived, as well as ground level stores of all types, attesting to the dramatic changes made to the entire neighborhood.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the old tenement buildings along the formerly narrow Pitt Street, west of the playhouse, had obviously been torn down to widen the street, and my old music school was only a memory. How a neighborhood can change after 60-odd years, and what remembrances it can bring back. Especially, about the only time I received any payment for my violin playing.

Philip Wesler is a retired engineer living with his wife in California, land of wildfires, earthquakes, floods and landslides.