Lisa
It was snowing in New York the day I was born, almost half an inch fell in Manhattan. It was February of 1956. About three weeks earlier, my childhood friend Lisa had been born, though of course I didn't know that at the time.
This is a photo taken of us in the park. How appropriate – a Dutch angle. It looks like early Spring of ‘57, we were probably about 1. I’m on the left. It seems like Lisa is grabbing for my crotch and I am trying to fend her off, while pretending nonchalantly I didn't notice. Of course, that's not what was happening, but it was kind of in character, for both of us.
Lisa and I stayed friends as we grew up, because our parents were friends. She lived around the corner from me on Third Avenue between a pawn shop and Central Art Supply with her mother Joan, who'd split by then from Lisa's father, Bill. We became toddlers together and played in the park and in our apartments and in Bill’s studio across Tenth Street. We copied Nancy comics from the Sunday News onto Silly Putty. (I related to Sluggo.) We climbed around fire escapes when no one was looking.
Then we were 8 and 9 together, we made other friends, and soon we started to become teenagers, and we stayed close, even as we were already starting to go our separate ways. We played spin the bottle, and we even had a little puppy love. We listened to Donovan and Rubber Soul endlessly on the mono record player. “Donna Donna.” “Norwegian Wood.” “Catch the Wind.” Burned punks in a dirty pilsner glass and left the ash.
When rain has covered leaves with tears
I want you near to kill my fears
To help me leave all my blues behind
But by the time we entered high school, we didn't see each other much anymore – Lisa had moved out to East Hampton to live with Bill sometime in the mid-60s, I think. It's a long time ago, and my memory's not what it was. She traveled in faster company, went to private school, spent a lot of time on Long Island with her father before coming back to the city where she later gravitated to the bikers on East Third Street – the Hell’s Angels club next to the Third Street Music School where I hung out for a while with a Puerto Rican drummer named Ramon Rodriquez. Late at night, after hours of rehearsal, my buds and I would drift over to Ratner’s for a bowl of mushroom and barley soup, those incredible rolls with the fried onions on the inside, and an ornate steel bowl full of crushed ice where the butter pats stayed cold and hard forever.
Lisa was gorgeous then, with natural blonde hair over bright blue eyes and big rosy apple cheeks like a Dutch girl, which she was. I grew tall, and she stayed pretty short, like her father. And then, suddenly, Lisa was gone and it never occurred to me that she’d gone for good – gone from my life, I mean; I guess I assumed she wasn’t around but probably would be at some point.
Lisa died this past Friday. She was 56, my age now – well, three weeks older. She'd never quite gotten over drinking and drugs, I’m told, though maybe she had. Still, when I heard she'd fallen down in her house in the Virgin Islands, I figured she’d probably been blitzed.
We hadn't been in touch since the 70s, but I was surprised to find the news hit me pretty hard. She’d been a painter's kid like me. Shared my street, my park with me. In my mind I can still see her big smile, coquettish in the eyes, in love with danger, daring you to join her in some adventure, whether it was scaling what seemed to me at the time an immense boulder in Central Park or smoking a joint behind a VW van in a parking lot near Union Square. I really didn't know who she'd become after all these years, I was never a part of that scene, but I miss the young girl I knew, who lives on in my memory as though we'd never aged, never had children of our own, never had to do business with the demons that would find us later.
In my mind she's laughing breathlessly, throwing a ragged stuffed monkey of mine across the room where it lands upside-down on the mantelpiece. Or me later in my ridiculous leather pants and Nehru shirt at 12, pretending to be all grown up but inside completely terrified of her. She’d become so much cooler than I was, was hanging with an older crowd. I don't think I ever saw Lisa terrified, but maybe that's because I didn’t know what to look for.
It’s half a century since we dug holes to China in the Washington Square sandbox, supervised by the Hero of Two Worlds, or twisted wildly through showers of water barefoot and half-naked in the big fountain, as if we could dodge the drops through sheer contortion. Fifty-odd years, but I feel the loss nonetheless, or a feeling for which “loss” is the best we can do.
Time tears at us like a strong cold wind, shaping the soft stone we were born as into something sharper and harder, more defined. Pieces are sliced off, hopes suited to one age are filed down or filled out or traded in. Streets are closed then, passageways boarded up.
No one ever sees all of us, only the parts they can use. The sad and glorious truth is that we can never be completely known, so we walk through our days peeking through curtains at glimpses of ourselves, alone in the experience of life, at times desperate to be known, as if being known by someone else would make it easier to know ourselves. But it doesn't. Knowing is the task we were meant to face, the only task that matters. The passage of time clarifies this, but doesn't free us from the job.
Neither are we free from memory, which is something like an ivy that grows inside us and penetrates all that we are and have been, body and soul. It’s a blur we catch in passing, a blur that is flavor and feeling more than representation, a sudden inexplicable recognition of the heart that can't be held fast, a Proteus. A presence.
We can find a memory in our tissues, or in the perfume of gum turps, or in a menu. I wonder sometimes if we can even claim it’s our memory at all. Could memory rather be a way of touching the universe, a faculty whose power isn't recollection at all, but a sudden perception of connectedness, or the possibility of it. Because in the end memory is always about incompleteness. Even happy memories have this wistful quality to them, a certainty that there is more out there.
Lisa, I didn't in the end know you that well. We didn't know enough to know knowing mattered. We were children. When we knew each other, living was enough.
Running up 4th Avenue past the A&P, past the post office, the scratchy songs on the phonograph, holding hands outside Sing Wu, climbing the big tree in St. Mark’s churchyard, strolling along the East River where the Latin boys played soccer in the park. The silky fine yellow hair running through my fingers like sand in an hourglass. You were my first friend, and I am remembering that. And in remembering you now that you're gone, I pay my respects, not to a grown woman gone, which is beyond my ken, but to the exuberance and innocence and conspiratorial joy of childhood, of your childhood, and mine. These things mattered. They made my own childhood so much less lonely. They are as real as anything we can put our finger on. They are real now. For me, they always will be.
And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire, isn't it good, Norwegian wood.