Used to Be

Used to Be

Used to be a literary bookstore on the next block with a winding wooden staircase, with tightly shelved science fiction paperbacks downstairs where I used to shoplift as an adolescent, with spasms of guilty joy, and never got caught.

Used to be an Italian cafe near Central Park that played opera, with red walls and fading pictures of opera stars everywhere, with a garden in back where John and Yoko used to go (they had a photo to prove it) and was one of my favorite places, although I never saw them there.

Used to be a Movie Theater over there, which held Woody Allen festivals and played Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight on Saturdays, where I used to go with my friend Pip who was pale, thin, asthmatic, and there was a floor show but we never dressed up in costumes for it.

Used to be gang of mostly Puerto Rican kids who sometimes menaced us and they followed me and my friends into the lobby one night where we had a stand off where I think one of them, the fat one, punched me lightly but then they fled.

Used to be our building on 89th and West End had an old doorman, Joe, who was really interested in Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’ and I found a record of it and leant it to him and we often discussed it.

Used to be we had two cats, Zelda and Delilah, a mother and daughter, the mother was short haired and gray while the daughter was long haired and white. They used to live together in the service closet in the kitchen and became more reclusive, anti-social as years passed.

Used to be we would rent a small house in Fire Island during the summers and I would walk on the hot sand and concrete paths with bare feet, got stung by a bee once, learned to pick the stalks of honeysuckle and suck out the sweet nectar they contained, and there was a whole group of us who played together.

Used to be my mother worked a full time job as a book editor and I was always home alone and addictively watched the 4:30 movies on ABC which included the whole Planet of the Apes series, The Power, Soylent Green and The Omega Man, which somehow indelibly marked my imagination with this dystopian tinge.

Used to be I could remember my babysitter buying Abbie Road when it was released and this tremendous anticipation as the plastic was unwrapped. That was when we still lived on St Marks Place.

Used to be that I loved unwrapping the sticky plastic cling from new records and the first ones I bought for myself — must have been with allowance money (how else?) — were Kiss’s Love Gun and Peter Frampton Comes Alive.

Used to be we had a massive collection of jazz LPs from the 1950s that an ex boyfriend left with my mother after a bad breakup in the early 60s and she had kept ever since but then apartments got smaller and we eventually threw them out which I still regret today.

Used to be I thought a lot about death but not as much as I do now.

Used to be that I spent a very strange year in a children’s residential hospital with an infection in my spine and made friends with many kids with bizarre physical conditions and the boys in my room taught me to masturbate and we would masturbate together when the lights went out.

Used to be I would take the Number 5 bus from Riverside Drive all the way down to Houston St in SoHo where my dad would pick me up and take me to his cavernous loft full of his giant paintings and sculptures of abstract, volumetric shapes where we had lived together before they split up when I was five.

Used to be punk / new wave clubs in illegal basements in SoHo and on the Bowery where my dad would take me after my back healed and I really loved those experiences, felt like something electric was happening.

Used to be we would go to Cafe Dante with his abstract painter friends and they would tell the same stories about Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso as if they were keeping some secret art brotherhood alive in enemy territory now colonized by pop and conceptual art, soulless dealers and wealthy collectors with no taste, although my dad admitted a fondness for Basquait.

Used to be it was actually dangerous to go to Alphabet City, felt lawless, primeval near Life Cafe and when I hung out with that trust fund kid heroin addict — son of famous art dealer — we would go to Ave C where a bucket would be lowered down by rope containing the white packets of heroin from a bricked-up building and he sent the cash up the same way.

Used to be I would lie on the grass with my mother in Riverside Park near the Hudson and look at the blue sky dappled with clouds and wonder if what I saw as “blue” was the same as what she saw or other people saw and how could you actually know this?

Used to be the Watergate Hearings were on the television at my grandma’s house where I was staying and she watched all of them, while I found them totally boring but would watch and listen to them drone on and on.

Used to be I stayed in my mother’s old room at grandmas on 116th St, which was perfectly preserved with a small bed with old wooden furniture and there was an awkward painting of her at maybe 8 years old over the piano in the living room in pigtails and the apartment felt a bit like a mausoleum to me, like the 1930s, and I would have dark, semi lucid dreams of myself as a vampire able to fly as a bat to the windows of the nearby apartments of girls who I went to school with at Bank Street and for whom I must have felt the first awkward stirrings of desire.

Used to be I always knew something was deeply wrong but I didn’t know what it was — only understood much later.

Used to be that we wrote a musical based on the Hollywood Ten Trials, making up our own songs or changing the lyrics to hit songs of the past and I played the evil Joseph McCarthy character singing, “Are you now or have you ever been/a member of the Communistic sin?” to a Cole Porter melody, and it remains a high point of my life. This was in fifth grade or what Bank Street called “10s - 11s.”

Used to be dark, huge Chinese Restaurants that seemed quite ancient which used too much MSG and we would meet my mother’s friends there who were other woman writers, editors or agents wearing large pieces of Bakelite jewelry and many big rings, with a great interest in literature who were generally Left Wing, and eat egg rolls and sweet and sour pork, and now those dear ladies are almost all gone.

Used to be that literature and art felt very important — something had to be said, had to find the words to say it, the world was trembling in its great impatience awaiting the new artistic truth that might change everything, who would be the vehicle, the messenger?

Used to be my mother edited Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July; he was a paraplegic, Vietnam vet, anti-war activist with a special car he could drive, and we would drive around with him while he ranted manically.

Used to be my dad had a lovely long-term girlfriend Maggie who looked a little like Patti Smith and was an artist making biomorphic objects out of plaster and was a WASP from New England, loved dancing at SOBs, but got cancer and passed away while still quite young, maybe early forties, and I still miss her.

Used to be my dad was still alive and I would walk past his loft at 69 Green Street late at night and see his light was still on and know that he was painting, which was what he most cared about, and now SoHo is fancy boutiques and rich people and all the artists moved out. And I miss him.

Used to be my two best friends were identical twins a year older than me who lived in Chelsea and whose parents were legendary, mad actors but we were all too sensitive and overweight and in high school we would go to Peppermint Lounge and The Tunnel and even Studio 54 during the Club Kids heyday where I would try to chat up New Jersey girls dressed in elaborate Goth outfits with a fairly low success rate.

Used to be we all wanted to be poets like Dylan Thomas or Ginsberg and played Dungeon & Dragons in binges, often bending or ignoring the rules or the rolls of the multi-color polygon-shaped dice.

Used to be many of my school friends had gigantic, labyrinthine apartments on the Upper West Side you could actually get lost in.

Used to be Teachers, Teachers Too, and Joyous Lake around 80th and Broadway near a few bookstores and mom and I went to them all the time for dinner, really looked forward to that.

Used to be after dropping out of college I met Julie, my first girlfriend, at Teachers Too, she was our waitress and had dropped out of Hampshire after going to Bronx Science with my childhood friend Phineas who dated her, and I met her in high school and had an enormous crush on her. And it was Saint Patrick’s Day and she was wearing a shiny green bowler hat made of cardboard and I don’t remember how I asked her out.

Used to be time moved at a slowly, steadily increasing clip until I rediscovered psychedelics in my late twenties, which slowed down time, changed my perception of time, twisted my understanding of reality so that for decades I never felt the slightest bit of nostalgia for anything in the past or even thought about it so much, as I am doing now.

Used to be rotary phones, cassette tapes, answering machines, record players, electric typewriters, manual typewriters, fax machines.

Used to be the Arctic wasn’t melting, or warming four times faster than anywhere else.

Used to be we would never imagine the Amazon rainforest collapsing as a functional ecosystem in another decade or two.

Used to be my father made tape recordings of his precious punk and new wave record collection for me to listen to on summer vacation and in college and I still have those tapes on a dusty shelf for no reason whatsoever.

Used to be Spring St Natural, Jerry’s, but some places still exist like Fanelli’s and the Ear Inn, where I would go with my dad and Maggie, sometimes mom also.

Used to be Mike Fanelli running Fanelli’s and he would give me a Shirley Temple and sometimes an Indian head nickel for coming in as a kid (actually don’t remember this but was told) with my dad when that was the only place open in the neighborhood, where all the painters drank and I would order a Coke or Shirley Temple.

Used to be five or six billion people on the Earth, now it’s more than eight.

It goes on and on, time.