“When I was 19 I was a student at the New School and I was living and working at the Marlton Hotel, an old Greenwich Village SRO on 8th Street that was infamous for (among other things) having been the place where Valerie Solanas lived when she shot Warhol. The Village had already changed a lot when I got there, but still we had a few old-timers from the factory days hanging around at the Marlton, mostly decomposing on their feet. I lived on the second floor and had one window with a heavy-duty burglar gate on it that looked out onto a side alley with the next building six feet away. When I moved in, my girlfriend gave me a fern that I hung from the burglar bars. It was dead in a month. As fall wore down into winter and the days got shorter it felt like I was living at the bottom of a stagnant pond silting over from the top down.”
“We broke up that winter. I was in love with this girl–we’d known each other since high school and we both moved from California to NYC at the same time–but I fucked it up bad. She was uptown having an IVY league experience at Barnard while I was living very, very downtown. She was a genius scholar, a good writer, and MTV-gorgeous. I was new in town, zealous, looking for beatnik adventures. This 30-year-old Argentine fashion designer who lived across the hall took an interest in me and I got all wrapped up. I cheated on my hometown girl. I was just mannish enough to come clean, but in the most pitiful whimpering way you can imagine. That was the end of all that.
So a bad fall moldered into a bad winter, and I was digging way down into a self-flagellating depression that was amplified by everything about my living situation. The room was so small I put my mattress underneath the bed-frame and laid cardboard over the springs so I would have a space to work, prepare food, and for the beat-to-shit thrift-store turntable I dragged with me across the country. The only place to sit was a ramshackle leather office chair I found on the street that I leaned up in a corner beside the window cause it was missing a wheel and would tip over anywhere else. I would just sit there all night listening to Leonard Cohen Isle of Wight, smoking out the window in my dirty salvation-army coat, pretending to read, but really just staring.
So one of these nights I was out of cigarettes and down to my last $5. I was playing in the subways then for grocery money and between class and work shifts at the Marlton (which got me my room paid for). It was gonna be a few days before I could get down into the trains and make some more cash. I had a few cans of black beans stacked up on the bed-frame and most of a sack of rice, so I decided, fuck it I’m buying smokes.
A cold, spitty rain was just starting when I headed for the store. The used-book-n-records guy on the corner was throwing garbage bags over his merchandise but it caught my eye on the corner of the table–a vinyl box-set of the Late String Quartets of Beethoven–and I got knocked out by this perfect gleaming kids-in-love memory. Two springs earlier back in San Diego, home-town girl and I got to hear the Emersons play a program of the late quartets–there’s us walking around in our trying-to-be-grown-ups clothes, holding hands as the lights go down in the hall, both of us freaking out at the drama of the music, squeezing tight when it gets intense, me caressing the base of her thumb during the slow movements, walking out of there high on music and each other–a beautiful, warm Southern California night. And now me here alone, cold and soggy and stuck to the sidewalk in the New York winter.
I stared at the box and shoved my fists way down in my coat pockets, feeling that grimy fiver rolled up in my hand. I peered at the label, hefted the box.
“How Much?” “Six dollars.” “I only got five.” “Alright. Come on.” He was just a cigarette sticking out of a hood and two grey meaty hands attached to the sleeves of a parka. One of the hands shook out a plastic bag and the other one stuck out at me, palm up, beckoning for the money with his thick fingers.
I thought about the smokes I wasn’t going to smoke, then again, oh fuck it, gave him the money, turned back toward home.
I sat up in my chair the rest of the night, listening to those records, crying a little, side after side, crying some more, trying to write down some memories, and thinking there’s some point to feeling this lousy because how else could music sound like this. And finally nodding off in the chair, giving up and rolling onto the mattress under the bed at 5am.
I didn’t smoke the rest of that winter though. And I still have those records. I love putting them on when the house is empty and I can just sit in a chair and look at the wall while they play. The record is an invitation to this kind of indulgence. An invitation to allow just sitting and feeling to become an occasion; an invitation to remembering. And the memory formed of that remembering makes it into a reflexive ritual action. The record spins and I sit and remember the night when I sat remembering while the record spun.”
—Skye Steele
Skye Steele’s full length, Up From The Bitterroot arrives in stores January 20, 2015 via HouseTown
