As I turn on my Spotify station and hesitantly press Garage Revival, images flash of the brightly colored fairly large dimly sun lit apartment I had in NYC two months after I left the lower east side after 9/11.
I scrolled to see the names of the bands Spotify deemed Garage Rock and delighted in seeing the Strokes, Interpol, and Sleater Kinney-a few of my favorite bands from the turn of the century. I like being able to say that. I like using the term the aughts and saying things like "back in the 1900's when we used to used calling cards to make phone calls in a telephone booth". Shit like that should be embraced and owned to torment and tease or teach (thank you autofinger typo) the youth. Isn't that what old fogeys are supposed to do? Aren't the youth looking to the elderly to school them about the olden days? The old skool?
I have a great photo my friend took of me while I was sat on the floor in my khaki JNCOs, a sexy black tube top, my black Chucks, and my short black pixie cut, gingerly holding a make shift ceramic garage sale or thrift shop found bowl made from some schlump who never quite got the wheel right, as I am trying to or just had pulled a drag from my Drum rolled cigarette. Yes we smoked profusely in those days-indoors, devil may care attitude if you were a non-smoker chillin' in that room with us. Holy fuck do I have shit to write. I was only going to write for 15 minutes...
Anyway, in those days I loved having humans over. Lots of them. All day every day. Now, at 43, the very thought of a human in my habitat brings on pangs of anxiety and self loathing since everyone that I know at this age has a house with a living room the size of my one bedroom apartment that is basically the same size as the apartment I had in New York City almost 20 years ago. I LOVED having people over in those days-the day drinking, the cigarette smoking indoors...mostly the cigarette smoking indoors. Can we just talk about that for a moment? Every adult I knew growing up was a smoker, and every single one of them smoked inside, in my face, no window open. You'd be arrested and or kicked out of your apartment for that kind of shit nowadays. Maybe not in Mississippi-they seem to be going back to the 70's these days...
God we were so cute back then-bar hopping till 3am and then sitting outside waiting for someone to sell us cocaine. What a life. Of course the cocaine thing only happened like twice in my whole life, but those two nights of waiting outside by some steal roll down door in my neighborhood in the upper west side a block from Harlem and a block from Central Park or by the Circle K in Flagstaff, Arizona made me feel cool and crazy. And terrified. Which is why I only ever did it twice. With the same crazy bitch. I miss that crazy bitch. I wonder if she still does crazy shit like that. Last I heard she was buying random drugs online. That seemed about right. When you get older, you can't be asked to wait somewhere at 3am. We're dead asleep at that time now, cocaine or no cocaine.
So we were all hanging out and smoking cigarettes, or at least two of us were and everyone who didn't smoke probably hated our fucking guts, while listening to the Strokes' Is This It. I'm sure I was bragging about having met them at some dive bar in the lower east side (god, that's thrice in the same story that I've referred to an area in NYC that way-imagine if I started saying that about places in Phoenix...) where we'd go for Happy Hour because PBR's were $1, and in NYC in 2001, that was the best fucking deal on Earth. My friend (who waited for cocaine with me and Crazy Bitch, but wasn't Crazy Bitch, just Hyper Bitch) and I just started playing pool with them and drinking these damned hipster beers (yes, even in aught-one we knew we were being hipsters). That's when we saw Vincent Gallo walk down the street outside the bar and it was like the whole world stopped for a moment as we all paused, rushed over to the window, and watched the lanky indie film star head into the shadows, head down, probably on heroine, probably had just gotten in a fight with Chan Marshall from Cat Power. We were all thinking it. Buffalo 66 was the quirkiest, coolest film that made you feel awkward, but not like Kids did. That just made you never want to go to another party for the rest of your life. Only you did. Over and over again, knowing your friend could probably pull a Casper on you...
It's kind of funny how many famous but only to a few groups of humans people I've met. But there's plenty of time for those tales later...