Walking back time

or a living amends to my old spinning self

I moved away from the NYC area in the fall of 2009. Came to Nashville, a stranger, a Yankee. I’d gotten a divorce, I was struggling to make ends meet living in a studio apartment with a backyard (rare) in Jersey City, making my living touring as a musician. I’d gotten signed to a record label and management in Nashville and realized for the cost of what I was spending each month for a closet apartment, I could rent a full house with a backyard and front yard in a cool neighborhood, pay my car payments, my health insurance, and basically live like a regular old lower middle class human being who can buy the good groceries and not eat Ramen like a post-college grad student anymore. Since then, I’ve gone back to NYC to play shows, but I never stay long. I drive in for the gig and out that night.

Last weekend, I had the rare opportunity to stay in the city in a hotel in Columbus Circle for two nights with free days to wander. I lived in NY from 1991 through 2009. I lived on W. 99th between West End and Riverside in a maid’s closet room (toilet in the actual closet) in a pre-war 3 bedroom for $450 for two years. I lived on Morton Street in the West Village for 2 years. At 432 E. 11th between A and 1st for three years in a studio for $575 a month. I also lived for a forgettable summer in Cobble Hill Brooklyn and for years in Jersey City Heights, then Hoboken, then Jersey City (near Grove Street PATH train). So I took the subway to 7th Avenue Sheridan Square and started walking. I walked down Christoper Street to Hudson, then down Hudson to Morton to see my old building. There was a rumor that Robert Pinskey lived across the street from me and would walk every day. I have, at times, lied and said that I saw him, but I doubt I did. So many things are gone from that time. But so many still exist. Henrietta Hudson’s, the lesbian bar, is still there. Anglers & Writers, my writing cafe on the corner of Hudson and Morton is gone. I spent hours there writing bad poetry and song lyrics. I walked across Bleecker to Broadway, then across to the East Side and up 2nd Avenue. There was Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant I’d eat hot borscht at 2am after drunken nights at the KGB bar. It’s there but it’s changed. Kiev is gone. My old building is there and still looks dingy. The mosque on the corner of 1st and 11th is there, but instead of a line of cabs, their drivers inside praying, it’s a jumble of bicycles, delivery men inside praying. The city still smells of that warm fog of beer and piss and garbage that steams up out of the subway grates. But it’s cleaner than when I lived there.

I sat in Veselka’s thinking about that woman I used to be. Ambitious and broke, an Ivy League (adjacent) drunk spinning in circles in my personal life, but spinning out songs and stories to stave off the hangovers. Late nights closing down Motor City bar with the theater company Expanded Arts after we’d done “Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot” in the summer time. Tequila shots and dancing on the bar and falling in and out of love with other drunk actor/poets. Days at law firms typing away legal briefs and memos, taking too-long lunches to shop for things I didn’t need at Saks, or to linger with a hot dog at the Central Park Zoo in front of the sea lions. Dreaming of when “I made it” and it would all be easier. Dreaming of when the right One would come and make it all easier. Rescue me. I was always looking for a rescue. I was not a good friend. I was a terrible wife, girlfriend. I wonder whatever happened to Sandra who I spent almost every day with at the cafes on St. Mark’s Place, Cafe 9, where Dechen Thurman (Uma’s brother) worked and he and I became fast friends for a small time. I can’t find her online. I wonder whatever happened to Kennedy, one of the best actors from my 2 year program at The National Shakespeare Conservatory. Or Lainie Kazan, the larger than life actress/singer. I was her personal assistant for a few years and saw enough of the acting business to realize I wasn’t cut out for it.

I wandered those streets in the cold last weekend, grey sky threatening to rain or snow. I must have walked miles. You don’t walk as much in Nashville. I miss that. I thought of the lawyers I worked for, Paige, Barry, who became friends for that time. I thought of Ken Gorka from The Bitter End who gave me my first solo show. I thought of hauling groceries up 4 flights of stairs. I thought of the day I watched the towers fall while I sat on the Hudson River in Hoboken in silence because I was supposed to have been temping there that day and I had many friends who worked there. I thought of those 2 decades of definition. I’m not really from anywhere. I was born in Baltimore, but we left when I was 7. We left Minneapolis when I was 12. I left Williamsport, Pennsylvania (the middle of nowhere) when I was 18 to go to college. So I have no real long-term ties to anywhere. But NYC. NYC shaped me.