New York 1996

photo by Erin Patrice O’Brien

I found an interview of a photographer who died when he was 19 in 1997. His name was Davide. The anniversary of his death was a few days ago. He was younger than me, but we had traveled in the same neighborhoods. LES, Soho, Little Italy, Tribeca, Noho, Chinatown, one place melting into the next. People knew each other’s faces, like any old town, we saw each other at Ray’s Pizza, Two Boots, Veselka, Yaffa’s, that health food store I can’t remember the name of, Walkers, all the bodegas. We took cabs to the east side or walked on Houston past Ludlow and River to get there. The smell of baking bread at 3 in the morning when you walked that route home from bartending was like a miracle. The walkups, the tiled entryways, the coffee place on MacDougal where they roasted beans and you waited in line for a cup that was $2, cheap even then, that was the best coffee you ever had. The Italian shop down from there, where they made pugliese boules with tomatoes and salt and rosemary on top, that you ate like a doughnut. The Ear Inn, Don Hill’s, Bell Cafe. What was the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death? Was it the White Horse? I think it was. And did white horses always symbolize death or only after he died there? If someone said, “I’ll have what he’s having” after Mr. Thomas dropped off the stool, the bartender could have said, “You will.”

When I was a bartender I saw people fall off their stools, but no one ever died. I remember watching a drunk guy go through an entire matchbook trying to light his cigarette, incapable of lining the flame up with the tip, a comic pantomime in slow motion, before he fell off his stool. I have an entire out-take reel in my head of people falling off stools, the sound it made when they hit the floor, like a bag of mail, the person in the next seat looking down and then away. I remember slow motion fights, arms swinging and head-butts and I remember the make-out sessions too, dramatic and tonguey, the hands reaching down low. We were always busy, and people would push up against the bar trying to get our attention. You couldn’t hear anything unless you tilted your head close to the person speaking, their mouth practically to your ear. Can I have a…? Give me a… Make me a … Yes. Okay. 12 bucks. Simple exchanges. “I want something, can you help me?” “Yes I can.” It wasn’t a place to go have conversations with your friends and there wasn’t any music. It was a place to go and stand with others in a hot smoky room, trying to get your needs met.

I thought of all this listening to the interview with Davide, his style and energy reminded me so much of New York in the 90s. His accent, part Italian, part Brooklyn. The way he was totally honest and uncensored. He talked about moving to NY as a kid and said that he got lost on the subway a lot and that was scary. In Italy he could be out all day as an 8-year-old, and people would lean out the window and wave and tell him how to get home. But in NY it was different, it was dark and isolating, reckless. Somehow it was fun, but maybe because that’s what we told ourselves. We were surviving. We were on our own, but on our own together. I remember that feeling. It all came flooding back, just from listening to the video of Davide talk and smile, bite his fingernails and jiggle his foot.