This One Time
my friend Jason and I were walking down 6th Avenue to meet some friends at a bar on Houston. I can’t recall where we were coming from but it’s possible he was meeting me after work1 and we decided to walk down 6th and then cut east on Houston. It was summer, still light out. As memory serves,2 we were headed to Zinc Bar but a cursory internet search reveals that Zinc Bar is on E 3rd St. so it’s unlikely we would have headed that way.
Most likely, however, is that I’m conflating evenings downtown with Jason back then: there were many and they frequently started at 14th Street (his train was the F or the 6, mine the L) or at the video store. We mostly drank at Marion’s Continental on Bowery between E 4th and Great Jones; or for a couple years starting in 1999 if we felt like staying in Brooklyn we’d go to Enid’s. At both places our friends were the bartenders or the bartenders became our friends and made everything as affordable as possible, which mattered because we didn’t have much money but we drank alot. That is, I drank alot, so it seemed to me that everyone did. In any case, we almost always headed east before going farther downtown.
Which, all told, isn’t what I was thinking about. I was thinking about how this one time Jason and I were walking to meet some friends for drinks and in the course of our no doubt chatty and engrossing walk down 6th Avenue, a bird shat on my shirt, and not just a little bit but a sizeable drop — plop! — right onto my guayabera.3 Without missing a step or a syllable of our discourse, I peeled off the shirt, dropped it in a garbage can, and with a leading tap on Jason’s arm, ducked into the Gap to buy a tee shirt4. The entire incident, from bird drop to resumption of our path took less than 3 minutes. I think of this anecdote as typical of the way things were back then, always in motion, always moving in one direction or other, often en route to meet someone on the way to meet someone else. Bird shits on you? Get a clean shirt and keep moving.
I worked at a video store on W 8th Street between 6th Avenue and MacDougal at the time, he worked up in the 40s on Lexington.↩︎
Not very well as it turns out. Memory is, on balance, a lousy steward. A point I seem to encounter often.↩︎
Back then, when one could still hagggle for clothes on 14th Street from 8th Avenue to First Avenue on the south side of the street, I used to buy guayaberas for no more than $9.99 apiece. My preference then for button-down shirts with collars delighted in these nearly-fashionable bargains. They were, from 1997-2001, almost the entirety of my spring and summer shirt wardrobe. Such flair and so many pockets. Also easily replaced.↩︎
There were, at that time, probably 3-4 Gap stores on Sixth Avenue between 14th Street and Houston. I always wondered why there were so many, until the incident described above set me straight. The Gap was there for me when I needed it most. I should add that back then all Gap tees were $9.99, a price I found agreeable for a shirt, even one without buttons or pockets.↩︎
