Today, I brought a ring to a friend so that she could fix it for me. Rebekah Harris, a gifted jeweler, met me in her normally immaculately kept showcase studio in deep Lower East Side, where Grand Street sideswipes East Broadway yielding a rows of scrolling concrete building fronts. I found her sitting among boxes, and looking a little dumbfounded. She was caught in the transitional feeling of closure and regret roiling inextricably. After 20 years of fighting the good fight, she is packing up everything and setting up shop in Montauk where her vacation home will be her full time home, and her jewelry, often based on pirate ships, will find its ends on fine fingers indeed.
We fell into conversation about the decision to move here, the accompanying expectations, the insane mosaic of experience that ensues and how it changes you, and how it becomes time to move on even though you'd never thought it was possible. I wonder about the tunnel vision with which I conceived of a future life insofar as picking a spot on a map and steering myself there doggedly as if it were a homecoming not from New Jersey, but from Colorado, where I didn't want to be. I can admit after these years, that it has a lot to do with Karen Bender.
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| Lost Jester (2007) |
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Excerpt from life notes:
New Jersey (1992) I had to admit, I was very surprised that she did not become a literary celebrity. Just about everyone was up on a pedestal back then, but some more than others. I remember watching her take notes in English. Her handwriting looped elegantly and she always used the same black gel pens. When she spoke, her low-pitched voice emerged warmly, musically, and her voice cracked when she laughed which was often. Karen oozed poise and was possessed of an exotic but wholesome beauty and a womanly shapeliness. She played the harp and had easy casual friendships with the elite and lowly alike- there was no denying the rigid confines of the Cherry Hill West Caste System.
We fell into a friendship which originally was based on our mutual appreciation of Mrs. Obreeza, our honors English teacher, as the most appropriate protagonist in any sort of fantastic scenario we felt like inventing. When she referred to "unrequited love" and "courtly love", two favorite topics, she would shiver a little and roll her eyes. Once she used the word "titillating" while referred to Petrarch's letters to Laura which we found funny, as the idea of someone so ostensibly old talking about the realm of the sexual did not compute. Karen had obtained her drivers permit, and countless hours of mirth were created for us driving around in her Volvo pretending that Mrs. Obreeza, whose creamy arch of hair was so much like a mushroom that the comparison was impossible to avoid, was following us in her Benz.
For the last two years of High School, we were often together, and every so oftten, I would end up at Karen's house on the East Side. She was one of the kids from the eastside that wound up at West, which was less affluent. Her parents were divorced but were warmest of friends. Her father, a Jewish physician 18 years her mom's senior, would take Karen shopping in Philadelphia and buy her any book she even breathed on. Her Mom, a nurse, loved talking about books, and I remember here suggesting I read Mary Karr. I was probably expounding on the hellish years at Saint Peter Celestine which in public school-colored glasses revealed itself in hindsight to be just the as much of a stone-cold nepotistic wasteland I'd suspected. Karen had two older brothers, both living in NYC. One of these, Lawrence Bender, produced Reservoir Dogs. I danced with him at a wedding once and thought of nothing else for the next 8 years.
As Karen's future bore out in a predictable path to New York University, I formulated my own plan to land there (here) eventually. I found out shortly after enrolling in Rutgers Camden that we were to move to Colorado. I stayed with Karen and her dorm mates one weekend, and one of them, a waify girl with large round eyes, returned wearing a pair of boots that a man had bought for her in exchange for modeling them. It was something that could happen back then, as craigslist had not become the breeding ground for menace that it is today.
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Shortly after I landed here in 2002, about 10 years later than when I visited Karen at the NYU dorms, I ran into her randomly on the streets of Soho where she walked arm in arm with a red-cheeked giant of a man. She looked plump and jolly as hell, and they were rubbing each other's bellies. We met up for coffee the next day, and she told me she was moving to Ireland to marry the fellow and to "maybe teach". Her time in NYC was something that had been smoothly paved, and her plans for leaving were free from remorse or regret. When we went our seperate ways, I was left to wonder, "why would anyone leave?" when I didn't really know why I'd come. To this day I feel a piece of me die when someone who has survived here for years decides its time to go. At least now, I can understand a little better. This shit is not for the feint of heart!
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| The Lounge (2018) |
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