Kanlaon

OK, bear with me. It’s Christmas, I can be forgiven for indulging in a bit of nostalgia.

And, this gloomy afternoon, my thoughts are tending– naturally– to a me of some twenty-five years ago.

Think of that, people! A me existed 25 years ago. I’ve been here sooo long.

I remember, for instance:

Kathy Acker, hearing about her

Philip Glass, actually attending a concert of his in the old New York MOMA, in the sculpture garden. Amazingly, hubby was with me (and we were not yet married). The harpists did not play on the harps. Rather, they beat their instruments with soft rubber mallets. A sort of non-musical concert.

I lived in New York City. It was a different city from today. It was dirty, I’ll never forget the assault on my nerves of standing on a platform and watching the subway cars roar into a station, sides screaming with graffiti. (I took many pictures of those subways, I don’t know why. Also, the pictures were on black-and-white film, so that looking at them today, there is an eerie, ghostly quality to all those shots of people trying not to look at the camera, or sleeping). I was a secretary, but on weekends I toted my camera. I knew I wasn’t an artist. The camera made me feel better.

The camera I used was the smallest single-lens reflex of the time: an Olympus OM-1. A thing of beauty, purchased in Akihabara when I was in Tokyo on an exchange program with Sophia University.

There were rapes all the time, I saw the headlines every day in the tabloids.

I was just beginning to read newspaper articles about something called AIDS.

I went for a job interview at The Nation, I was accosted just past 14th street. The man who stopped me was a tall African-American. I looked at his shoes, not at his face. I thought, this is it. But, something made him step aside. I saw his feet move sideways– one, two. I continued walking, not looking back.

I saw a play called “Tracers”, in the Astor Place Theatre. The music was by Springsteen, Huey Lewis, and Laurie Anderson. I had never heard of Laurie Anderson before. Afterwards, I was crazy about her music, especially her songs “O Superman” and “Born, Never Asked”.

Tama Janowitz became hot a couple of years later. I watched a TV interview with her where she said she was so poor she learned how to survive (before she wrote Slaves of New York) on a diet of hard-boiled eggs. I thought I knew that feeling.

I didn’t go back to New York for years and years, in fact not until after 9/11. The Lower East Side (actually, Eighth Street at First Avenue), where I used to live, now had a Gap, a Starbuck’s, a store called Anthropologie. There were no longer any youths with green and orange hair and metal spikes in their lips and noses. The subway cars were clean, pristine things, sliding smoothly into stations and disgorging hordes of people in suits.

It was safe, now. My son, who had never been to New York, felt comfortable walking everywhere.

At a residency in the Djerassi Arts Program, one summer in the 1990s, I met a couple of artists from New York who complained about Giuliani. One, an African American dancer, had once jumped a turnstile and then found himself held in a chokehold by two cops. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that the police had turned into Nazis and even minor infractions were dealt with by the use of excessive force. I couldn’t imagine it. But when I went back to the city a few years ago, I saw what Giuliani had done.

I think my son would not have been comfortable in the city I used to know. In that city, danger was ever-present. There was no MTV, there was no Virgin Mega-store, Times Square was a place for hookers. I was scared almost all the time. Maybe it was a little like Rome before the sack by the Visigoths. It was a bizarre city. I miss it.