Like the places where one mingles with singles, Sean's building is a rather sterile ecosystem, a vacuum where idiosyncrasies come to die. Two artificial plants sit on either side of the stainless-steel elevator doors like sentries; the tymbals of the fluorescent lights hum in unison, overpowering the faint sounds of an early Modest Mouse record trickling into the hallway from a nonspecific locale. The streets below are muted because the windows are closed even if the day is cool for the season. If it were not for the buildings parallel to the window at one end of the hallway, one could easily forget that this is the city.
Unlike some of the buildings further north or the newer ones in the more trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Park Slope, there is no ornamentation of the walls of the hallway, not even those urbanscapes that often serve as surrogates for windows. The walls are painted white, though the can from where the paint came more than likely bore a name along the lines of “eggshell” or “bone” or “wispy cirrus” or “marshmallow impaled on a stick about to be browned over a bonfire in northern Michigan, Memorial Day '05; you remember, it was the same night that your dad walked in on us in media cunnilingus.” The carpet is short, apprehensive-gray; there is a large brown stain by the door in the shape of Hermann Rorschach. Coffee is the likely culprit. The elevator doors open to reveal a car inhabited by only a camera.
The streets are filled with people languidly making their way through the slate gray afternoon. There are the requisite housewives out with their kids, househusbands out with their kids, nannies out with their kids, kids out with their kids. The majority of the pedestrians, however, are either in their late-twenties or early-thirties. They do not dress as though they are either coming from or going to work. Perhaps they are students — university students — who have one early Friday class, maybe even no Friday class. Then again, most of the schools in the city wrapped up their spring semesters last week. It's fairly certain that only a small percentage of the pedestrians are tourists. The only person wearing a fanny-pack has clearly just come out of the Eighth Avenue bound L station with the intention of showing off how ironic his sense of irony is (“Get it? I'm supposed to be a total douche-bag!”).
A bald man sitting behind a counter welcomes me as I walk into a deli on the corner of First Avenue and Seventh Street to get something to drink. He is on the telephone with his wife, sister, or daughter, as is evident from the loud female voice dominating the conversation, as well as the gentle and perfunctory nature of his sparse language: caring, but not earnest enough to make one believe that he is seriously invested in whatever the other is saying. He rolls his eyes in silence, looks to me with an abject smile, and then unsuccessfully attempts a word over the peremptory voice on the other line. A couple of young Mexican guys beg my pardon as they walk by with crates brimming with cabbages and sweet potatoes. They speak in subservient tones. The taller of the two sports a religious tattoo on his right calf; the other wears an earring.
The scent of fancy bodega, circa early summer, is imperious. The air is an amalgam of cilantro, coffee, stale air conditioning, radishes, and nondescript fragrances from the detergent aisle that no one except for the cat ever seems to inhabit. One of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1048) can be heard coming from a small radio behind the counter. An even smaller black and white television sits next to it blinking images from five or six different cameras strategically placed around the store. The man behind the counter smiles as I pay for a small bottle of water. “Cool one today, yes my friend?” he says in a strong Turkish accent as he cups the phone. I nod and make my exit.
Two people inhabit the first bar I enter: the bartender and a septuagenarian in a checkered cap, who has probably been in the arms of Morpheus for close to a decade. The old man is already swaying in his chair even if it's just past three in the afternoon. Rancid's “Journey to the End of the East Bay” blasts from the jukebox; it resonates off of a concrete floor littered with the detritus of so many fuzzy memories. The walls are black with the exception of a several pieces of art for sale, most of which appear to be the work of a single artist who favors vibrant pastels and virulently anti-Bush themes. The chairs have not been taken down from the scarred tables, and the bartender is still in the process of setting up the bar for the happy hour rush, which, from what I assume, will be limited to a handful of career alcoholics and ornery boozehounds.
I eye one of the bathroom doors at the back of the bar and remember that I've been here before. It was during one of those underage rampages through the dives of the area, those places too desperate for business to worry about what the law recommends. My friends and I entered without even the pretense of sobriety, which assured the bartender that we were, if nothing else, not narcs. The rougher fringes of society played pool and presented their contempt for conformity without the need to constantly talk about how little they thought of what their parents thought of them. A few Steve Earle impersonators floated close by the table exchanging rounds of Buck Hunter. I remember that the urinal was out of order that night, and that most of the men were just going in the sink if an occupied toilet denied them the opportunity of instant gratification. The black walls of the bathroom were coated with several layers of white, silver, gray, and, on more than one or two occasions, orange graffiti. These messages had been accumulating since the Carter administration, something that would not have been discernible had it not been for one writer's outrage over the possibility of a Reagan presidency. The ventilation system consisted of a large hole a few feet above the toilet. It was created by either a sledgehammer or a small explosive.
Just about all of the seats around us were occupied by newer residents of the Village, people who still seemed to be tourists because they were (perhaps they still are) always trying to find “The Real New York,” as if the city as it then stood was a perversion of the Form that existed in the Palladium and the Wetlands and the Limelight and Studio 54 and the stream of destitution that used to line New York's Via Dolorosa, the Bowery. They possessed that type of jealous nostalgia that, when voiced, becomes overtly bucolic in theme, though obviously not always in content.
The majority were students — bleary-eyed radicals and quixotic sophisticates eager to complain, discuss, debate, and argue in ways the dropout crowd calls condescending and the grad-students think rudimentary. Others were graphic designers still waiting to be hired by the company for which they had worked for the better part of a year (independent contractors without the independence, just the reduced pay); there were also musicians without label representation, artists without galleries, writers with too many ideas and not enough discipline, poets with plenty of talent but no connections (who maybe did more complaining than creating), sell-outs with just enough integrity to eschew the more fashionable bars of the City but not the high salaries of Wall Street or Midtown, connoisseurs of the Dive, and people who obviated their disgust for labels by embracing the fashion favored by those who detest labels — which is not a form of cynicism so much as a lack of imagination and an attachment to black cotton shirts. Several hours were spent drinking among such archetypes, people who seem more like clay than flesh until you spark up a conversation with them. We left after last-call and stumbled into the grays of the impending dawn, contently drunk and infatuated with sleep.