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.

I didn’t get a ticket that morning. Not because they had sold out, but because I didn’t have enough money. Even the blue nosebleed seats were now $5.50—a whole dollar more than the year before—and I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed. Some of the kids were so disappointed they started tearing up the selling floor, tagging and throwing mannequins around and cursing. I was having none of that. I had spent a half-hour in Central Booking for graffiti writing and vandalism once and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. So at 10:30am, I left Macy’s with my five crumpled one-dollar bills and walked back to school, figuring the day wasn’t a total loss, as I had only missed three periods. I got to school a little past 11:00 and right away saw something was up. For one thing there was a phalanx of cop cars around Westchester Square train station. For another, I heard the yelling all the way down the hill. And then I remembered. Today was Kill Whitey Day.

I know that in some alternate universe one’s high school days are a halcyon, carefree time, with fond, gauzy memories of homecoming days, pep rallies and proms. But at my high school, Herbert H. Lehman High, (fondly referred to as Lehman State Prison) the pivotal events we had to look forward to each spring were “Kill Whitey Day” and “Kill Black & Puerto Rican Day.”

It’s said that gangs are cyclical in NYC. There were gangs in the 1950s. There are gangs now. And in the mid/late 1970s, teenage New York was a city divided and ruled from Parkchester out to Morris Park and up to Throgs Neck by the white gangs The Bronx Aliens and Bronx Ministers. Their black and Latino counterparts The Savage Skulls, Savage Nomads, Mongol Brothers and the biker gang The Ching-A-Lings claimed everywhere south of Soundview Avenue and west, past Yankee Stadium and Fordham Road all the way to the Harlem River. Every spring, every high school would have their week or so when they would be at war. And as in any war, any unfortunate civilians who found themselves behind the front lines would just have to get by as best they could.

The messed-up thing about it was, you knew exactly when it was going to go down. The information crossed gang, race, and ethnic lines and flashed through your entire school faster than group text messaging locks down a campus today. You knew when your Kill Day was going to be. And not going to school that day was not an option. Because everyone would know you had punked out and your own neighborhood would make you a pariah for being a faggot, a pussy, for not having enough heart to risk getting a major beat down with everyone else.

Lehman High School, being in a mostly Italian neighborhood, was Bronx Ministers territory. But by some fate of late-60s decentralization, half the student population were various ethnicities of white, the other, black and/or latino. So Lehman was a school doubly “blessed” as it observed both Kill Days. Kill Black & Puerto Rican Day had been the week before and luckily I had escaped unscathed. Not so the year before, when two Italian boys stabbed me in the shoulder with a stiletto. Not because they specifically hated me, but because a couple of Savage Skulls had whipped them with a car antenna. And since they weren’t motivated (brave/stupid) enough to go down to the Bronx River projects to extract revenge, the next best thing was to attack me. They both actually apologized to me later and hoped I understood it wasn’t personal. I still have the scar.

Since not going into school was not an option, I went around the back way, where I knew (and security amazingly didn’t) a door was always propped open. Fourth period was about to begin and something told me not to try to sneak a cigarette before entering the relative safety of Health class. But I was nervous, so I took a chance. I peeked into the Girls bathroom and seeing no one, ducked into the last stall and immediately assumed the smoker’s position. Crouched on the toilet seat so someone bending down to check the stalls wouldn’t see any feet; constantly waving my right arm back and forth so the curling smoke wouldn’t give me away either. A few minutes later, the Newport Light just wasn’t doing it for me, but I decided to have one more drag. Famous last words.

I was about to flush the cigarette when the door opened and four black girls came in. I knew they were black because of their names. Keishas and Tawandas were in-utero or just being born. Girls my age were the last of a generation who were still named after jewels and desirable attributes: Crystal, Ruby, Precious and Unity. Delicate flowers who stashed razor blades in their afros and carried rolls of pennies balled up in their bandannas. I knew who they were because of their reputation. They were finely tuned, Black Pride lionesses who hunted their prey with particular savagery: What they caught, they would not release. And I knew that if they caught me, I was a goner. Because none of them would stop to ask a light-skinned freckle-faced redhead where her family was born before they beat the hell out of her.

“Dag, Ruby, you see that blond bitch face when we knocked her toof out?”

“Yeah, but my hand cut up, shoo. Precious, watch the door. Oh shit, you smell something? Who in here?”

I had neglected to do the one thing that could have saved me, which was to douse the cigarette and keep still. There wasn’t a thing I could do except wait as the four of them opened the stalls one by one until they found me. It was pointless to fight back. One, definitely. Two, maybe. But there were four of them. And it would have been suicide to try to tell them they were making a mistake. The year before, an olive-skinned Irish girl named Ellen something-or-other had tried to say she was half Puerto Rican and she ended up being held down and raped with an umbrella. That was not going to happen to me.

They pulled me off the toilet and threw me on the floor. I rolled up in a ball and tried to protect my face as they punched, kicked and penny-rolled me. How long? Too long. And then, the door opened.

“Yo, Nan-cee, we got another white girl, you want some?”

I looked up through one swollen, tear-and-Afrosheen clouded eye and saw Nancy Ortiz walk in. Nancy, who really was half Puerto Rican/half Irish, was one of those anomalies in our little world, a blessed creature who moved seamlessly between the races, befriending everyone, beat up by none. She came over to look at me.

“Dag, man, that girl ain’t white, she’s Puerto Rican.”

“What?”

“She’s Puerto Rican. That’s Shell, I know her from Homeroom. She’s from St. Peter’s, but she’s Puerto Rican. She just looks white.”

The punches stopped. A razor blade whizzed by my left cheek and clattered onto the tiles.

The one called Unity said, “She’s Puerto Rican?” and prodded me with her Pro Ked.

“I axed you, you Puerto Rican?” I spit out a trail of blood and snot and croaked out the only thing I could think of. “Si.”

“See, I told you. Stoopid!” And Nancy, having secured her place in heaven, left the bathroom.

Four pairs of eyes saw me as a person for the first time. “Oh man! We sorry.” “Oh man, we sorry.” “Shoo! Why didn’t she say something?” “Why didn’t you say nothing?” “Come on, help that girl up.” That was Unity, their leader talking. And Crystal, Ruby and Precious picked me up off the floor, patted my hair and tried to rearrange my clothes. “Get some water, clean her up,” Unity commanded. The girls ran to the sink, wet their bandannas and daubed at my face. I took Ruby’s pink bandanna and walked to the mirror to clean myself. She didn’t protest.

“This ain’t right,” Unity said. “We sorry Shell. We didn’t know. Why didn’t you say nothing? You’re not gonna tell, right? We gonna make it up to you. C’mon. Give her your weed.” And Crystal, Precious and Ruby all looked down at their sneakers. “I said, give her your weed,” yelled Unity. “Give it up!”

And one by one, the girls reached into their afros and their tube socks and pulled out crooked joints rolled in banana, chocolate and strawberry EZ Wider. Mutely, with averted eyes, they handed them to me. “We sorry,” Crystal mumbled. “Yeah, man, we sorry,” Ruby said. But not Precious. She had been standing on the other side of the bathroom and was now trying to sidle her way towards the door. But she couldn’t get away from Unity’s watchful eye. Unity’s fist shot out: Biff! And punched the side of Precious’s head so hard her afro pick flew into the sink, clattering in front of me. “I said, give her your weed, bitch!” Precious’s hand trembled as she dug around her bra and finally handed me a crumpled, sweat-stained, half-full nickel bag.

“Look, we sorry, It was a mistake, right?” Unity said. “You’re not gonna tell right? I mean, like we did you a solid and all. Come on, let’s go kick some real white ass.” And just like that, they left. I stood there for a moment and totally accepted what had happened as just the way things were. I still couldn’t quite believe my luck in escaping with just a cut lip and black eye. And then I looked at what was balled up in my clenched fist—and I did believe it. I walked right out of school and over to Zappa’s Corner where I sold all the pot, then ran back to Macy’s, getting there just before Ticketmaster closed at 4:00pm.

The day wasn’t a total waste after all. I was going to see “Kashmir.”

Michele Carlo has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and can remember when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. She has been published in the short story anthology Chicken Soup For The Latino Soul, is Editorial Director for the online underground entertainment newsletter Toxic Pop and is the curator/producer of It Came From New York, a storytelling show featuring and celebrating native New Yorkers. She is currently at work on a memoir of growing up in the NYC of the 70s-80s, entitled Red Sheep: The Search For My Inner Latina.

If it weren’t for the telltale guitar-printed carpeting, the lounge might pass for something on a cruise ship: raised daises and brass rails and long tables spaced around the stage. There’s a standing-room-only section in front of the bar, but if you come a little early, as I did, they’ll seat you at a big table with whomever else happens to be there.

I sat with Brent and Cindy–an old-time Furs fan and a Furs novice, respectively. We chatted a bit as we waited for the opening act, Roman Candle, to come on. (They never did.) Assorted 80s tunes that would never have been caught dead together (“Villiers Terrace” by Echo and the Bunnymen alongside “Xanadu” by Olivia Newton-John) played from an iPod in the control booth ahead.

Brent and Cindy both worked on Wall Street. I asked more questions than I answered, mentioning that I was from Canada, that I used to work in publishing, but was now, well, doing other things. Cindy, a slight brunette in her late twenties, told me she’d been in banking since graduation. A glance told me the earrings were diamond, the sweater cashmere. Back at my apartment, jeans and a black cotton top seemed good enough for a post-punk concert, but here in this eclectic crowd, it was difficult to determine just who was under–or over–dressed.

Brent leaned across the table, “So what do you do now, Nora?” He was about forty–my age. The kind of polo-shirted student council type I rarely crossed orbits with in high school, since grown up to be a leather-pant-wearing power-player with a brokerage firm.

But I didn’t have to answer. A hush fell over the room as the house darkened. The stage lights went up and the band came on.

“Sister Europe” was the way it started. A looser and grittier sound than the 1980 recording. Richard Butler’s voice somehow both languid and rasping. Short hair now. Glasses. Black-suited. Arms mapping out a lazy semaphore.

“Love My Way,” “Into You Like a Train,” “Mr. Jones.” The Furs played them all. But among the crowd, a groundswell was rising: “Pretty in Pink!”

“Pretty in Pink!” hollered Brent.

“Pretty in Pink!” said Cindy, though not very loudly. The song that John Hughes named the movie after. The one song the Brents and Cindys I knew in high school would always know.

What I was waiting for was “India.” It had been some 25 years since its whisper-quiet opening first stopped me in my tracks. I was standing barefoot on the wood floor at my high school friend Fiona’s. She’d been showing me how to tease up my hair with hairspray. “Not too much, though. That’s for posers.” With enough black eyeliner, I’d look like Siouxsie Sioux.

“The Ghost in You.” The first set ended, leaving our table silent. I fiddled with the red swizzle stick in my bourbon as Cindy sipped her wine.

Brent leaned over to me again across the polyester tablecloth: “So, Nora–you never told us what you do.”

All right. For me, anyway, this kind of thing takes practice. “I’m a writer.”

“For a newspaper?” Cindy asked.

“No–I’m working on a novel.”

“Oh,” said Cindy. “Mystery or romance?” And then, “When’s it coming out?”

The questions. The question. But before I could start to answer, Brent looked at me with something like understanding. In a single stroke, he steered things northward: “I go to Canada a lot for the skiing. Whistler, Banff, Blue Mountain, I’ve done them all.”

Blue Mountain? I knew that place and wanted to ask how he did. But I decided to leave it–the house lights were already dimming for the second set.

“Pretty in Pink.” Richard Butler kept his cool, but the crowd went crazy. A man in a killer whale t-shirt shouted something incomprehensible. A woman with a platinum ‘do like Debbie Harry stood up on a tufted chair. Brent was singing along, and so was Cindy. Waving their tanned arms and bobbing their heads.

It was the kind of scene I’ve always made a point of avoiding. The kind of scene I would have taken great exception to in 1982.

But it’s 2007, I’m at BB King’s, and the Furs are playing. I think Brent and Cindy are kind of sweet.

Despite the cheery surroundings, I was feeling a little grim.

I’d arrived in New York in the spring of 1979, brimming over with youthful enthusiasm, ready to pursue my dream of becoming a rock star. I threw myself whole hog into the project, scouring the Village Voice every week for “guitarist wanted” ads, chatting up confused and indifferent strangers in clubs and record stores, and going to audition after audition. No stone had been left unturned, no blind alley not run up headlong in my effort to rid the world of my obscurity. It was nearly fall by then, and despite all my efforts, I was still band-less.

I’d met plenty of other guitarists, though. We, the un-attached hopefuls, were a regular community unto ourselves, drifting from audition to audition, convening in crowded hallways to share cigarettes and war stories of near-misses and blown solos.

The same faces, their cocky expressions belied by nervous, hopeful eyes, would pop up again and again, until I came to think of us as the musical equivalent of the last kids picked for kickball.

The most depressing ones were the guys in their late thirties who were still trying to make it. It pained me to imagine myself being them in fifteen years or so, desperately clutching a dream while battling to stave off the imminent realization that my parents were right about my lousy chances all along.

I’d woken up on a recent morning, having suffered a particularly soul-crushing audition the night before (broken string in the first–and therefore last–song), to find my conquer-the-world enthusiasm gone. Poof. Maybe it had caught the train back home, like I often considered doing in my weaker moments.

Since then, I could barely get out of bed, much less bring myself to pick up the paper to scour the musician ads. The idea filled me with a sort of exhaustion I’d never known before. With no other choice at the moment, I’d put the rock star dream on the back burner for a while. Instead, I concentrated on making up for the years I’d spent lost growing up in Nowheresville, Florida by going out as often as possible, drinking my money away, and watching bands I wasn’t in.

I wasn’t giving up, I told myself, just regrouping…waiting for motivation. Motivation was in shorter supply than ever, though, along with something just as important.

“The darling buds have left us…” I muttered to myself, dejectedly.

“What?” Ric, my roommate, hollered from the kitchen.

I sat up a little, and forced myself to project just a bit.

“Nature’s verdant bounty, kissed by flame, now naught but smoke and ash.”

The refrigerator slammed shut. An exasperated Ric appeared in my doorway. “You’ve been reading that stupid poetry book again. Remind me to throw that goddamn thing away next time you’re going out.”

It was true about the book. My friend Jill had lent me one called “Selected American Poems”. She said all I was lacking was inspiration, and I could find it in the words of the poets. Maybe she was right. Who knows? I definitely needed something to get me out of my funk.

I’d been giving the book a try lately, getting lost in the strange world of flowery language. It was strange and funny at first, but somehow I’d gotten hooked on the thing. Now it was rubbing off on me, much to Ric’s chagrin.

Ric was absolutely allergic to the printed page, poetry especially. The only things he ever read were the club ads in the Village Voice. Anytime he walked into the room to find me reading a book a pained, slightly shocked expression would cross his face, as though he’d caught me jerking off to a picture of his mother.

Spouting poetry around him had the same effect. I didn’t mean to do it, but that book had crept into my brain, and lately sometimes I spoke in stanzas instead of sentences.

From the look on his face, I’d managed to set him off again. He leaned against the doorjamb, arms folded, staring down at me. The simple collection of horizontal lines that made up his features all sank in toward the middle.

“Now, what the hell are you trying to say? What’s all this about darling buds and smoke and ash?”

I held up an empty baggie, shook it at him.

“I’m out of weed.”

Ric’s eyebrows pushed further down, almost meeting in the middle, the ‘V’ they made darkening his face. “Already? You had so much.”

It had been a lot. I’d brought a zip-lock stuffed with badass Columbian buds with me on the train north. The bag was beautiful: packed tight with piles of delicious green goodness, it held the promise of many a good time to come. Somehow, I thought it might see me through at least six months, maybe a year. I wasn’t a wake-and-bake, party all day kind of smoker. I just liked to have a little before going out at night, maybe bring a joint out with me for a little pick-me-up for socializing. Or I might have a little hit when I got home from work, the same way my old man would pop a beer less than a minute after walking in the front door at night. Then there were the weekend afternoons when a little taste and some hardcore dub Reggae, maybe Lee Perry or Mikey Dread, would make the world seem perfect.

Somehow, in the course of this maybe-not-so-occasional indulging, I’d set fire to every stinkin’ leaf I’d had. The thing was, I was going out every night, and Ric was always there to help me blaze away a bud or two. Come to think of it, it seemed like every time anyone came over the first thing I did was roll one up, too. Ric’s friends, for a bunch of sophisticated big city punk rockers, sure liked a taste of the hippie harvest.

As glum and uninspired as I’d been lately, anything that might make me feel worse was to be avoided. This was no time for seeing the world without my green-colored glasses. I needed some real help to get me out of the dumps, and the poetry just wasn’t getting the job done. Maybe if Emily Dickinson appeared in my room wearing a negligee, with a pitcher of Bass Ale in one hand and two empty glasses in the other, things might’ve been different. But this was the real world; which was exactly the problem: reality. I needed a little distance from it to get my spirit back.

I wasn’t looking to get high and lay around like some deadbeat stoner. I needed that weed to help me get back on my game. I wanted to pick up that dusty guitar, to play something, write something. Every time I reached for it, though, my arms felt heavy and my mind went numb. The next thing I knew, I’d be staring out the window, thinking about those auditions, how long it had been since I’d been laid, and all those steaks I couldn’t afford to buy. I needed that weed to form a smokescreen between me and those depressing thoughts, so I could just get in that “nothing exists but music” zone.

It had always worked that way for me. Nothing made me climb so completely into my music as a few hits of the rasta root. One run at the bong, and I was good for hours of jamming, practicing, or just listening to music with a concentration that left the rest of the world somewhere far, far away. No nuance was too subtle; no amount of repetitious noodling up and down the scales would ever be less than fascinating to me, once I’d caught a buzz.

I looked down sadly at the empty baggy, then back at Ric, whose twiggy face didn’t bear a hint of the despair I was consumed by. I thought there might’ve been a little sympathy, maybe a hint of guilt even, but his usual, easygoing demeanor never cracked.

“Don’t look so suicidal,” he said, sounding totally nonchalant. “This is New York, for God’s sake. We have resources, remedies for this sort of situation.”

I perked up an iota or two. “You know someone who sells a little?” I asked, a tiny note of hope creeping into my tragic voice.

“Know someone?” He laughed a hicuppy laugh. “I don’t exactly know somebody, but I know where to get it. Fuck, it’s as easy as a trip to the market!”

“I don’t wanna buy it in one of those parks.”

There were parks, at least three that I knew of, where you could score. Washington Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was one. We’d walk around there sometimes on a weekend afternoon. There were always tons of people hanging out. Skateboarders, magicians, comedians, and jugglers entertained the crowds who’d gather around, enjoying the show in the openness and sunshine the park provided. The Puerto Ricans had an area of their own, where they would blast Salsa music and dance away the day while drinking beers wrapped in wrinkled paper bags.

Tons of hippies hung out there, sitting cross-legged in little circle-y bunches near the fountain. In the middle of each group would be an unkempt, underfed hair farmer with a face like Neil Young but not the talent to match. He’d be holding a slightly out of tune guitar with a peace sticker on it, playing “California Dreaming.” That song must be, like, the hippie national anthem or something, because it’s the only one they ever seemed to play. The whole circle would sway back and forth together, eyes closed, as they all sang along, communing in blissful, off-key harmony.

Ric, always on the lookout for opportunities to spread laughter and joy to those around him, would usually point to the most wasted, disheveled, tie-dye wearing girl with the longest, dirtiest hair and say: “Look! It’s one of your old girlfriends from Florida. Aren’t you gonna go say hi?”

There was no real beginning or end to his comedic genius, just a never-ending middle.

In the West side of the park, tough-looking black guys hung out selling weed. They’d sit around on benches, bullshitting, laughing, and slapping five with each other all day. You’d walk through there and they’d all talk out the side of their mouths as you passed, saying:

“want somethin’?”

“got the good thang”

“smoke, man, got the Sense.”

Further North, on Fourteenth Street and Broadway, was Union Square Park. That urban oasis of concrete and conifers lacked the charm that Washington Square’s diverse circus of humanity provided. It was just plain ominous. The trees cast a shadowy gloom over it even on a sunny day. The only people in there were black dudes selling weed and coke and yelling to one another over their boom boxes. Unlike their counterparts in Washington Square, who wore jeans and casual, funky clothes, the Union Square dealers wore polyester bell-bottoms and Members Only jackets. Their pitches were different, too, way less subtle. You wouldn’t even have to go into the park to hear them. They’d call to you as you walked by on the sidewalk, like carnival barkers.

“Yo, brother, c’mere.”

“Right here, right here, man. I got the good shit.”

“Smoke it up, smoke it up!”

Then there was Tompkins Square Park, between Avenue A and B on the West and East, and Ninth Street and Seventh on the north and south. In that park, which I wouldn’t even walk into for fear of being mugged or worse, there was a section where drugs were sold. Puerto Rican guys would always be there in clumps, drinking beer, jabbering in rapid-fire Spanish, and laughing their menacing laughs under cold brown eyes. The air was always alive with a steady stream of sales pitches as they called out to the brave souls who’d walk in there to do business.

“Valium, valium” (which came out “volume, volume”)

“Goo’ smoke, goo’ smoke…”

“Wa’ choo wan’?”

They hung out on the north side, in the shadow of the public restrooms. The funny thing was; for men who spent their days in spitting distance of a toilet, they didn’t ever seem to use one. I never once walked by without seeing some guy facing the wall of the old building, beer in one hand and dick in the other, pissing on the outside of the old red brick shithouse.

I would see all this as I strolled along the sidewalk of Avenue A, observing from a comfortable distance.

Avenue A was the cutoff point, the eastern end of the East Village, the edge of the safety zone; the borderline where gentrification ended. It was all hardcore Puerto Rican ghetto on the other side, where Avenues A through D ran like a pack of wild dogs to the East River. They called the neighborhood “Alphabet City”.

I’d been through part of it once, in a cab, and had been shocked by the squalor. The East Village, where I lived, was no Mayberry. The pitted sidewalks and potholed streets were filled with drunks, junkies, hookers, maniacs, enfeebled Ukrainian senior citizens, poor white punk rockers and poorer Puerto Ricans, but that’s not to say it didn’t have a certain down-on-its-heels charm. Alphabet City, on the other hand, was desolate and wretched, like some post-apocalyptic movie set that had been left to rot when the movie finished shooting. Hollow, dilapidated brick buildings with boarded-up windows stood next to empty lots strewn with rubble, garbage, and leftover hulks of stripped cars. Old men stood among the refuse, barbecuing on blackened, dented, homemade grills. Kids ran through weedy piles of trash, screaming with a joy that defied the harshness of their surroundings.

Every sign on every store was cracked, peeling, hanging half-off, and written in Spanish. People filled the stoops and sidewalks, shouting in staccato bursts to one another. Occasionally, one or two would notice me gawking out the cab window, their eyes hardening as they caught mine. One guy, pissed at my expression of horrified curiosity, hollered “What the fuck you lookin’ at? Go back home to your mama.”

The only white faces you’d see heading in there were edgy-looking junkies on their way to score. Ric and I hung out sometimes at a little pizza place on the corner of St. Marks and Avenue A. We’d have a slice and watch the sad parade of junkies passing by in the late afternoon. Their faces would look hungry and haunted on the way in, relieved and eager on the way out. You could see players from half the bands in town walk into Alphabet City on any given day.

I definitely hadn’t been in New York long enough to do my pot shopping in one of these open-air black markets. As far as I was concerned, I would be a lamb among wolves in a situation like that. I was sure that if I tried it, I’d somehow walk out dazed, beaten, and broke; just another chump picked clean by the street-smart city folks. Either that or arrested.

Still, I had to smoke didn’t I? Ric’s pitch had me interested.

“Really?” I said. “It’s like a trip to the market? Tell me more, please. I hang on every word like a marooned sailor, adrift on a gale tossed ocean, with naught but a scrap of his vessel to keep him safe from the briny peril.”

“There you go with that poetry shit again.”

“I’m seeking inspiration in the words of the masters.”

“Whatever…I just think talking like you’ve got an ass full of cock is a bad idea, socially speaking.”

“Anyway,” I said. “Back to the topic: where’s the shit for sale and when do we go get it?”

“The answer is ‘right around the corner,’ and YOU can get it anytime. I have to wait here for a call about some band meeting we’re supposed to be having.”

Ric, the lucky bastard, was in a band, albeit it one that had more internal drama than gigs.

“But if it’s just around the corner, can’t you duck out for a minute?”

Ric shook his head firmly. “No way, not now. I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll buy if you fly.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a ten dollar bill. “Here,” he said, handing it to me “It’s probably my turn to roll a few. This one’s on me.”

What a guy. Smokes a hundred bucks worth of mine, kicks in ten.

I stared dumbly at the money in my hand. “You can buy ten dollars worth?” I said.

“Oh, yeah!” Ric said. “Just ask for a dime bag. Hell, you can get a nickel bag even, if all you’ve got is a five. It’s convenience store shopping at its finest.”

I looked up at him suspiciously, searching his face for a hint of humor. It seemed too bizarre. Back in Florida, pot was always sold by the ounce, or maybe a half an ounce. Who would go to the trouble of scoring for ten dollars worth?

“No shit?” I asked finally.

Ric laughed. “No cow shit, country boy.”

I looked down at the bill again, suddenly impressed with its power. It felt different somehow, this weed-buying wonderbill. It was pulsating now with promise, daring me to dream big. I heard Alexander Hamilton whispering: “Go ahead, son, you can do it.”

“But where is this?” I asked. “Do I have to call someone and meet ‘em somewhere or something?”

Ric shook his head. “Hell, no. There’s little candy stores all over the neighborhood where you just walk in and get what you need. Easy as pie.”

“Candy stores?”

“Yeah… that’s what they call them, anyway. They’re storefronts with a counter and a few stupid little things for sale to make it look legit, but they’re really just pot stores. Some have coke, too, but I wouldn’t buy any, unless you’re feeling constipated. The shit’s cut down to nothing but baby laxatives. Thankfully, for us, you can’t cut weed.”

“Are you serious?” I said. “Stores for pot?”

Ric smiled sardonically. “Don’t you just love this town? Now come on.”

He gave me directions as I dragged myself out of bed and laced up my shoes and threw on my jacket. Then he led me to the door and gently nudged me out.

“Are you sure this is cool?” I squeaked out the words as he was closing the door on me, and my last chance to change my mind.

“This is New York,” he said.” Don’t worry about it. Now go get that weed!”

I walked out of our building buzzing with that combination of nervousness and excitement that strange new illegal activities can give a person. I tried to relax as I walked along, to convince myself that this strange mission was no big deal.

New York really did seem like an easy-going place about pot. You’d see people smoking it everywhere: sitting on stoops, walking down the street, hanging out at the Laundromat. In clubs it was always around. Folks would puff happily away upstairs at the Mudd Club or Danceteria, just like they were in their own living rooms.

I’d come a long way from the surprised, slightly uptight feeling I had the first time I’d seen this. Nowadays, the sight of a high school kid with a backpack smoking a fat joint while sitting next to an old lady at a bus bench seemed like perfectly normal, everyday behavior.

I headed downtown on Second Avenue. The place I was looking for was on Tenth Street, between Second and Third. It was one store Ric had said he’d actually been in. The only directions I had besides that were: “It’s on the left side of the street. And the front is kind of blue, I think.”

I felt butterflies in my stomach as I stood at the light at Second and Tenth, waiting to cross over to the Block of Weed. The light turned quickly to green, right as I was about to begin talking myself out of this whole bizarre misadventure. Who ever heard of pot stores? It was so strange. I didn’t remember passing through a looking glass on the train from Florida.

I crossed over and had taken just a few tentative steps up the block when I noticed a cop car parked at the curb, halfway up the block. Shit. There they are, I thought, busting the place right now!

I froze. What to do? Keep casually walking forward, just saunter along with what I was sure was a guilty look? There had to be a complete confession written across my face. The tense features would provide the cops with a glimpse into the criminal plans I had up my leather jacketed sleeve. I might as well have stepped right up to them, stuck my wrists out and said: “Okay officers, slap the cuffs on. You got me dead to rights. I’m the public enemy who came here today to destroy the greatest city in the world. I’m the one, I admit it!”

Instead, I sat down on the nearest stoop and lit a cigarette. I took my time about it, lingering over every step in the process. Someone walking by might have thought that I had never so much as seen a cigarette before, that I was trying my damnedest to figure this newfangled thing out. I finally stopped fucking around and got it lit. I took a long drag, exhaled it slowly, then allowed myself a look down the street to see what was up.

The cop car was just sitting there; double-parked and idling One cop was in it. He sat on the passenger side, staring out the window. What was he doing? Resting after roughing up a few suspects? Maybe he was the “bad cop” and was giving the “good cop” a turn. I’d seen the movies. I’d watched ‘Barney Miller’. I knew how the shit worked. What if I had left the apartment ten minutes earlier? I might be lying on the floor in the little Pot Shop right now, face down with a fat knee in the middle of my back, as they slapped on the cold metal cuffs, making sure to tighten them to a hand-numbing turn. Next, it would be off to Riker’s Island in the back of a paddy wagon, with Paco the Pot Guy and his evil henchmen.

Then there would be the phone call I’d have to make, the one I was sure my parents had been dreading and expecting since the day I climbed on the train and waved goodbye. Those tears in their eyes as they stood on the platform hadn’t been from sadness; they’d been from fear! For the downfall they were certain would come as soon their little angel got caught in the web of sin and moral decay that waited for him in New York, New York; so full of vice they had to name it twice.

Two young, pretty Puerto Rican girls walked by, their soft brown shoulders naked save for spaghetti straps. The slightest, downy hairs caught the sunlight on their shiny skin. They chattered musically as they walked up the sidewalk, indifferent or ignorant to the gritty urban crime drama unfolding in their path, not to mention the pervy lech salivating behind them.

I followed them with my eyes, using my leering as a cover for a quick surveillance of the rest of the block. It looked like any another day on any other street in the neighborhood. Puerto Rican men and women sat or stood on stoops, chatting with each other and the people walking by. A woman across the way hung laundry on a fire escape. At the far end of the block, some kids were screaming and kicking a soccer ball, bouncing it off car after car. Distorted Salsa music, the ever-present soundtrack to life in the East Village, blared from a high window somewhere down the way.

I snuck another absurd, covert glance through a cigaretted hand held up to shield my eyes.

Another cop appeared. He walked out of a deli on the North side of the street holding two cups of coffee and a brown paper bag. He strolled over to the driver’s side of the cruiser, handed the stuff through the window, then opened the door and climbed in. After that, nothing, all was quiet. The cops just sat there, drinking coffee and talking. Maybe they’d called for backup and were snacking while they waited for the SWAT team?

I forced myself to look away. I began mentally cataloguing the debris in the gutter before me. There were flattened beer and soda cans, soggy cigarette butts, one of Barbie’s arms, some mushy-looking paper bags, and a dead rat—-about eight inches long—not including the tail. A real whopper. The rat’s yellow front teeth were sticking out through pulled-back jowls, making a hideous splash of color against his dirty fur. Were rats grayish-brown or brownish-gray? No matter how often I saw one scooting around the trashcans on the sidewalks, or foraging along the tracks down in the subway, I could never quite make up my mind. It was harder than deciding if the Gulf of Mexico back home was greenish-blue or more bluish-green.

I was staring at my fallen fellow New Yorker, ruminating on the mysteries of the color chart, when the cop car came rolling up. They stopped right in front of me. I stared at that rat with everything I had; praying that today was not the day for me to feel a nightstick against my head.

Instead of jumping out and beating a confession from me, they just kept sipping and yacking as they waited for the red light. I distinctly heard the word: “Mets” through the open window, but nothing about a “drug den” or a “bust” about to “go down”. After a few seconds, they turned the corner and were gone.

I took another few drags on my smoke, making sure the coast was clear, then stood up and flicked the butt in the gutter. It landed at the end of the dead rat’s tail, made him look like a rat bomb about to be lit. I sauntered up the street, as cautious and alert as a Green Beret on covert mission.

No sooner had I begun walking, then I saw what I figured to be the place. It was a third of the way up the block, across the street on the left side. It was a little storefront, painted bluish green (or was it greenish-blue?). I shook my head, tried not to get caught up in the color game. Across the top was a sign with a black background and yellow letters that spelled “Candy Store.” There were little lumpy things painted around the letters. As I got closer, I could see they were different types of candy. Peppermints were dancing with chocolate kisses while jealous gumballs sat by, ignored and sulky.

I walked as slowly as possible, taking my time to check the place out on my way up the block. It seemed quiet, no one going in or out. The closer I got to it, the harder I tried to talk myself into crossing the street and going in.

I was just about ready to make the move, when I came to a group of old men playing dominoes. They sat at a worn-out card table on the sidewalk next to a stoop. The table only left a couple feet of sidewalk for pedestrians. The smell of cigar smoke and stale beer hit me as I prepared to veer around them, feeling suddenly self-conscious.

They were talking in Spanish and seemed oblivious to me, except for one gaunt old grayhead with an unshaved face the color and texture of a baseball glove, wearing a tan guayaberra shirt with a frayed collar. He leaned back in his folding chair as I came up, let his gaze slip away from the dominoes. He tilted his head back, took a sip of beer from a paper cup, and gave me the once over. His sunken eyes were dark as raisins, and I didn’t exactly feel the warmth of his tropical homeland from them. I passed as quick as I could, trying to avoid his suspicious, hostile gaze.

The one guilty glance I’d stolen at him told me he knew all about me and my reasons for being here. I’d come up this block, his block, to stare hungrily at his virginal senoritas and buy drugs from his sons. He looked at my torn jeans, my leather jacket, and my dirty-blonde hair and saw a marauding stranger, uninvited and unwanted. I was just another gringo with no good on my mind, passing through to defile his beloved little barrio.

Once past the domino table, I came abreast of the alleged candy store. I’d tried hard to pump myself up for the trip to the unfamiliar store, but the old guy’s mojo-hex staredown had freaked me out. My hard, steely resolve had gone as soft and mushy as a bowl of flan. I walked right on by the place without so much as slowing down, much less crossing the street to it.

“What the hell was I thinking?” I said aloud, as I hurried toward the open air ahead at the end of the street. I was just gonna head down some strange block and walk into a store I’d never been to, an actual retail business, and buy drugs? Just stroll right in and say, “Howdy Stranger! How ‘bout some a that loco weed y’all are sellin’; can I get me some a that?” And to do this in a strange new world where I was in the minority, not even able to speak the language? I had to be nuts.

I walked all the way to the corner, then stopped. Third Avenue opened up before me, wide and buzzing with traffic and people. A man in a velvet suit walking a wiry little dog nodded at me as he waited to cross the street. Arriving at the intersection was like a welcome return to a different New York, the one where I was just another citizen, as welcome as anyone else, not some debauched Conquistador stumbling along in a concrete jungle.

I took a deep breath and stared up the Avenue. Maybe I should just forget the whole thing, go on up Third and head back home. It was a beautiful day; maybe I could go for a stroll. Any direction, except the one behind me, would make for some pleasant walking. To the left, two blocks down was St. Mark’s Place. There were cool vintage clothes stores and a record shop I liked there. I could spend some time browsing, maybe grab a slice of pizza. Why not just say “fuck the weed” and go have fun?

I needed an excuse, though, something to tell Ric. I couldn’t just hand his money back to him, after all. I’d been sent on a mission. But what would I say? Should I just fall on the floor in a fetal position, wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and whine: “I’m sorry, Ric, but I was so scared! First the cops got me all nervous by buying coffee, then a raisin-eyed man looked at me funny.”

That option wasn’t particularly appealing to me. I decided on option number two: I’d tell him the store was closed.

That decided, I headed towards St. Marks.

I’d only gone about half a block, when a teen-aged Puerto Rican guy walked past me wearing a t-shirt that said “Calvin Klein” in big letters. This was a bizarre phenomenon I’d been noticing lately. The big designers had decided that people who were too poor to buy their fashions might just make themselves useful another way. They’d begun printing their brand names with no design, nothing to distract from the message, on poverty-priced t-shirts and selling them by the gazillions. With this simple, cynical move, an army of walking billboards was set forth on the planet. Somehow they’d fooled these poor suckers into thinking that, by wearing a t-shirt printed with the name of a designer, they were wearing designer clothes. Couldn’t they see what ridiculous pawns they were in the corporate big money game? This was just the sort of thing someone needed to write a scathing punk rock anthem about.

I stopped dead in my tracks. There it was: that old, familiar feeling. It wasn’t as intense as before, more like the first little tug you feel on your fishing line, but it was definitely there: inspiration. Finally! I liked the way it felt, too, that sense of purpose it gave me, that sense that my life was about bigger things than pizza and beer.

I didn’t want to lose that little spark by fucking around window shopping. I decided to skip St. Marks. The gods of creativity had tossed me a bone, and I wasn’t about to let go of it. I had to go right home and write a song about those bullshit t-shirts.

There was just one problem: I needed to seize the moment, but not scare it away. I didn’t want to pressure myself back into uselessness. I needed to get deep into the music, without being uptight about it. The answer to my dilemma was obvious: I’d need that weed. I headed back to Tenth Street.

I stopped at the corner, looked back down toward the candy store. It really didn’t look any different than the block Ric and I lived on. The same four or five story buildings were stacked next to each other, all in various shades of crumbly gray concrete; same skinny sidewalks; same little stoops with people coming, going, and sitting together; same cacophony of radios, people shouting to one another, and squealing kids. What was the big fucking deal here?

I had felt the same way on my own street, the first few weeks in town, but now I was perfectly at ease walking there. The people, at first so strange and indifferent, now felt like neighbors to me. I would nod and smile at them, and they occasionally even returned the greeting. At least they didn’t look at me funny anymore. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds comfort. On my street, I was comfortable, so why not be the same on this block, a mirror image of mine?

“Fuck it,” I said aloud. I began walking, pep talking myself as I marched forward: “If they built a store to sell weed, they’ll probably be happy to see me—a customer—stop in. They’ll probably smile and say ‘Bienvenidos, Amigo!’ just like the old guy in the bodega on our corner did when I stopped in for a six-pack. Hell, maybe it’s my lucky day and I’ll get a prize for being their one hundredth customer this week. Nothing bad will happen!”

Now, if it was only the right place…

I got within spitting distance of the store and felt my legs began to hesitate in their pace, my knees weakening again. “Come on,” I growled. “We’ve got a song to write!” I forced myself up the steps and through the shabby little doorway.

The dimly lit room was about the size of a one-car garage. The walls had, at some point in the past, been a shade of white. Now they were a patchwork of smudges, stains, finger marks, cobwebs, and splatters like the ones you make when you shake up a can of coke before opening it. Musty shelves ran along the right wall. A smattering of products was laid out on them in a comically haphazard attempt at retail presentation: a can of beans here, a small bottle of bleach there, a box of Bic pens laying flat on its back. A flyswatter with the Puerto Rican flag printed on it rated a shelf all to itself. Laying thick over everything was a patina of gray dust; even and undisturbed, as though nothing had been touched since first taking its place there long, long ago.

To the left was a glass counter. Behind it stood a skinny, middle-aged Puerto Rican guy in a Perry Ellis t-shirt. Once again, my mandate was spelled out before me. It was time to start the revolution, and as soon as I was done here, I was gonna roll a fat one and get to it.

Unfortunately, I had no idea how to get this retail dope deal going. Did I just saunter over to the counter and say “Good day, sir! I’ll have a dime bag of your finest Sensemilla.”

That seemed a little indiscreet. Maybe there was a secret handshake, like the Masons had. Or maybe there was a code of some kind: you ask for a certain amount of a certain candy, and it really means you want x amount of y pot. For all my ignorant ass knew, there could’ve been a menu of the products available written on the wall in Spanish.

I stopped pretending to be fascinated by the fancy flyswatter and glanced over at the guy behind the counter. He met my eyes and gave me a drowsy smile. He was missing a tooth right up front, where it really counted. Not such great advertising for the candy. I smiled back, but my own uptight grin probably looked more wooden than George Washington’s.

The ice successfully broken, I decided to approach the counter. I sidled the few steps over and stood, hands in pockets, looking down at the pitiful display of sweets. It wasn’t the packed-in-tight, sugary bounty of tooth rotting delights that the Seven-Eleven’s shelves had tempted me with throughout my childhood. This was a new approach: kind of a ‘less is more’ thing. A single shelf held a sparse assortment of candy. A few said Hershey’s, but most of the meager offerings had Spanish names. It was kind of sad, really. There was barely enough sugar there to send a small family crying to the dentist.

Still, I felt a twinge in my sweet tooth, and briefly wondered how you say ‘nougat’ in Spanish.

I looked the man in the eye as best as I could, but ended up mostly staring at a mole near the inside of his right eyebrow. Gathering my composure into a ball of nervousness, I began my pitch:

“I…umm…uh…”

The guy cocked his head toward the back of the store. His eyes made a quick dart in the same direction.

In the back left corner was a raggedy curtain covered in ducks, like something a hunter would have in his trophy-studded den. The ducks were flying; their wings spread wide to catch the wind and birdshot. The rod it hung on was bent at a ninety-degree angle, which formed a little telephone-booth-sized area behind it. It looked like it might be a changing room, but I didn’t see any clothes for sale, not a single designer t-shirt.

So what was the curtain for?

Somehow, thankfully, the fog of idiocy eventually lifted. The man was trying to tell me that the answer I sought was waiting inside, beyond the quackers. I grunted something like a thank you, and headed over to see if The Great Oz was hiding behind the curtain. I was more than willing to settle for the Wicked Witch, as long as she had some weed to sell.

I shuffled to the corner and gingerly pulled at the curtain. I opened it just a little and peered into the mysterious space. There was no kindly old man pulling at levers. There was…nothing, just the floor and some air above it.

I looked back at the counter guy. He made a gesture as though stabbing at someone, probably me, with an imaginary knife. Fully freaked out, I turned back to the emptiness before me to see if his disconcerting clue would somehow solve The Riddle of the Empty Curtain.

I looked all around at what little there was to see, then spotted it: In the wall, about knife-stabbing height, was a slit in the plaster about an inch high and a couple of inches wide. Suddenly it all fell into place. The purity, the simplicity of this genius retail plan came as clear as the glass candy counter. Having completed the puzzle, I stepped into the little changing room and closed the curtain behind me. I pulled Ric’s ten out of my pocket and gingerly poked it through the opening. I gave a little start as I felt it yanked from my hand.

A furtive voice came through the slit. “Weed or coke?” it said, in accented English.

“Weed.”

A tiny ziplock with a fat bud packed in it appeared in the hole. I took it and stuck it immediately in the pocket of my jeans. The deal done, I pushed aside the curtain and headed for the door.

As I stepped outside, it took all my concentration to avoid the disapproving stare I was sure old Raisin Eyes was firing my way from across the street.

There was lightness to my step as I hurried home. I was high already from the adrenaline rush of a new experience and the sweet taste of success from a mission accomplished. All that and inspiration, too.

I stepped in the door of the apartment to hear Ric saying “Yeah, okay, man… it all sounds like bullshit to me … right… whatever…” He slammed the phone down in its cradle. The lines all collapsed into the middle of his face again. He slumped forward on the couch, elbows on his knees.

“What took so long?” His voice had an annoyed edge. “Did you get it?”

“Yeah.”

My voice was relaxed, breezy. “No problem.”

I plopped down on the couch and pulled out the little baggie, held it out to him. “Here we are.”

His face lines lifted a bit. “Well, roll one up, man, roll one up!”

I searched through the debris on the coffee table for papers. I finally found them under the poetry book. I put an album jacket on my lap and began twisting up a joint.

“So you got your call, huh?” I tore the bud apart and dropped bits of it into one of the folded papers. “What’s up with the band?”

Ric rubbed his temples and sighed. “I don’t know what the hell’s up, exactly, but apparently we’re still on ‘hiatus’ while Steve, our singer, ‘gets his shit together.’ He rubbed his temples some more. “It all sounds like bullshit to me, but who knows…” His voice drifted off.

I finished the joint and handed it to him. He put it to his lips and lit up. After taking a couple deep pulls, he passed it to me. I took a long drag, held it in a few seconds. I leaned back on the couch, felt it already working its magic as I exhaled.

“Ah…” I said, closing my eyes as I settled back and put my feet up. “Nature’s leafy blessings. Surely no garden bears a sweeter fruit.”

I heard a weird flapping sound, which reminded me for a second of the ducks on the curtain. I opened my eyes just in time to see Jill’s book flying out the window, the pages plumed out and fluttering as they caught the air.