Happy, Bitter and Drunk — Discovering Lower East Side
I had a very specific purpose in mind; to write a story about Lower East Side, a New York neighborhood enriched by Eastern European immigrants, colored by carefree artists and gentrified by luxury boutique hotels, in that order. History doesn’t lie.
On my first attempt to really familiarize myself with its curved streets and historic establishments, it became quite clear that my task was going to be harder than my creative right brain had originally planned for. I met up with a friend and we hit the ground walking. Weather was just below freezing but our drive to uncover juicy stories hidden behind graffiti covered brick walls older than both world wars was too strong to fight.
I expected to observe and digest so many things to later spit back out in the form of writing. In fact I was already troubling myself with the hard choices I would soon face. Such as which group of locals should I weave into my story? First wave of Jewish immigrants, who settled nicely into the neighborhood in early 1900’s and since dominated its food culture with roots so deep that LES still remains the place to go for a mean lox and cream cheese bagel in town? Or stories of modern restaurants that fail before they even hit their one year mark?
Would I want the reader’s attention on needle-loving artists of the ‘80’s with their rent-free life style or today’s astronomical rents for poorly renovated, prison cell size, luxury apartments, that are forcing few surviving artists of the neighborhood to choose between paying rent or making art?
Once again, my right brain was way ahead of me but reality wasn’t. I needed to come back to the Lower East Side I was walking on, miserably in search of cool stories.
After fifteen minutes of pinpointing the locations we wanted to visit, strange silence on the streets became too loud to ignore. The sound of gray piles of mushy snow being squished under our boots was only accompanied by mid-day delivery trucks’ annoying backing up beeps and men’s humming of directions and comments on last night’s Knicks game. I could no longer hide my disappointment.
“Where the hell are all the interesting characters?”
My friend proved to be more patient and less selfish than I was. “Inside” she projected with determination, suggesting that we accept the current state of affairs as they are on the streets and focus our energy towards what was happening behind the walls. She was also better at finding good food; two major reasons I enjoyed company when I explored.
So we went straight for our main target, a world-famous Jewish delicatessen that first opened its doors 129 years ago and now employed just over 130 people, which I found pretty odd. This much symmetry in numbers could only be a sign from universe telling me to write about this place, not that I was a spiritual person or remotely superstitious about anything. It’s just that numbers easily distracted me and stories told by my interviewee Jake, third generation owner of the establishment we were at, felt a little too scripted. Just when I was dazing off, he slapped me with a dirty incident involving sausages that he personally witnessed, PG-13.Or maybe all the way R; gross details seem to slip witnesses’ minds somewhere between late night and early morning lights.
Jake’s home run with that last story made me focus on him more than the restaurant. I gathered his name was Jacob, which definitely had a catchier melody to it. He was a local superstar and he knew it; didn’t matter to him that by local, we really meant a ten-block radius, tops. A star is a star I guess. There were pictures of him on the walls as a kid. He was dressed up in a hot dog costume in one of them; made me wonder if the cute sausage kid was ever spontaneous or has he always put on the costumes his family picked for him?
My interest in Jake pointed the story in a new direction. Instead of places, I should only focus on people. Weren’t people and their stories always the only focus, anyway? Here, I had Jake to write about and characters in his dirty stories. Clearly, a neighborhood so full of history and rich culture would simultaneously be so full of crazy people! All I had to do was keep interviewing more small and historic businesses asking the right questions. I pulled out my notepad and scribbled:
“What do you do to have fun around here? What did your father use to do? Is this where you first tried marijuana? Was your marriage arranged? No? How did you escape your family’s candidate? Are you still in love? Does it matter?”
Suddenly the potential of digging up original stories from under all the renovation dust and marketing phrases felt dizzying. Overwhelming. So I hit a bar. Booze helped put my thoughts in line, my affairs in order.
I ended up in a jazz bar; the kind you have to knock on the door to be let in and escorted down to a dark, narrow staircase, at the end of which more darkness awaits. They had couches instead of small tables and chairs. DJ set was occupied by the owner of the place; an amazing saxophone player, who has achieved world-wide recognition. He seemed lost among piles of LPs, happy. There was a couple dozed off on one of the couches, dreaming. Were they in each other’s dreams?
With nothing much happening on that corner, I sat at the bar and asked for a cold beer. The only thing worse than being the only person out on a freezing winter night had to be being served a warm beer. Bartender was very nice and chatty. Not in the way all bartenders are as an occupational habit but in a cool and mellow kind of way. He struck me as an avid observer, too. Not in the way all bartenders observe their customers but in a genuine and caring way. So naturally, I started telling him about my writing task and wanted to ask him my mischievous questions but he didn’t need me to. He told me all.
His name was Cedric; he had moved to New York from Nantes, France twelve years ago and his proudest achievement in life was having contributed to a latin jazz album produced by a musician from the Bronx. He was very famous in Europe but not so much in New York. The producer, not Cedric.
“Ten years ago was the end of a road, not only in Lower East Side but in Manhattan overall” he said in his own calm way.
He thought money was the reason for such change. He was a simple man of simple words. “It’s too expensive so artists can’t afford it. They move somewhere else so the profile of the neighborhood may have changed but the cycle stays the same.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant creative, open-minded artists would one day replace current gentrified crowds again but I didn’t want to ask as I thought that might offend him. He wasn’t swimming in money but he wasn’t leaving either. He was just happy. I needed that.
Ten minutes into our chat and the only other customer at the bar decided he wants to sit with us. Cedric was an undeniably genuine and irresistibly nice bartender after all. And me? I was writing. We said yes, though he wasn’t asking.
Our new friend, “Petar from Yugoslav” was neither happy nor interested to hear others’ stories. He wanted to speak his mind and be heard. He blamed the United States governments, past and current, of fascism and presidents, dead and alive, of hypocrisy. Economy was sucking every person’s soul out of their eyeballs; Lower East Side was in transition to become just another shopping mall, a shit hole that was going down. The police made up stories in the ‘80’s to put him in jail. He escaped them and went to El Paso, Mexico, where he spent two full months in jail eating shitty food.
His story wasn’t that interesting but I listened anyway nodding my head to his offensive comments for ten minutes. Come the eleventh minute, which did feel like the eleventh hour, I began tuning out. The excessive swearing I could deal with but the smell of cigarettes in his breath sealed the deal for me. I looked at Cedric as Petar was complaining and he knew right away. I wasn’t as nice as Cedric . He said “This one’s on me”; I smiled.
It was a Wednesday night; place was dead empty with lights doing their show for one bartender, one ex-con and one sleeping couple. Happy, bitter and drunk.
