I met my first true love the other night for drinks at Maison Premiere. She was in town from Los Angeles for an interior design trade show. Frances and I dated from my senior year of high school to my first year at college, a brief but momentous period in a young person’s life. She was a year younger than me. In fact, she still is. Still beautiful too, black hair now touched with strands of gray but eyes as sparkling, smile still stilling, as indirect as water trapped under a thin sheet of ice.
That first year at NYU, when she was still stuck in the molasses of suburbia, boring crap-amber of high school, she’d drive up from Philly to spend the weekend in New York with me. Normally we stayed in the . One weekend though, we staycated in Gregory Corso’s old room in the as yet unfurnished Chelsea Hotel, before the paintings on its walls, made by former residents, became like deer-head trophies in the dens of cocktail sippers.. Corso who worried in his poem “Marriage”:
What if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!
Corso died the year later, at age 70. He was survived by his second wife, Belle Carpenter.
In the summer of 1999, American Pie, the janky Jason Biggs vehicle, came out, the summer I graduated high school. The hero’s quest to lose one’s virginity before one went to college seemed not only reasonable but noble and imperative. So it happened shortly thereafter that, on a vacation with Frances and her sister, Shreb, to Assateague Island, I ended up swimming in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. Wild horses trotted behind us on the beach. Their Dad, who I always admired for his calves and taste in Frank O’Hara, was off somewhere. The sisters, always competitive, got to arguing, joking at first but gradually less so, about which one would deflower me. They played rock paper scissors to determine the outcome. Shreb won. I do not remember how I felt about the arbitrariness of the allocation, or that Shreb won, or even that the sisters were arguing over me while I stood, geek-bodied and tan a few feet away. Probably good. Even then, I was interested in Merce Cunningham, John Cage, stochastic music and, as I was finding out, randomized sex.
Later that night, after making a run to 7-11 for a bottle of Chateau Diana, Shreb and I snuck out of the tent and out on the beach. It was a full moon, as I remember, and, as we lay out the quilt, I could see bands of wild horses coming ominously closer to us. Shreb was on top of me, breathing heavily into my ear. “This is what men like,” she said. I felt the moisture in my ear canal and thought, “Is it?” Regardless, I came quickly, the horses never arrived and the sea crashed before us. We gathered up the quilt and headed back to the campsite.
In the retelling of that story in the years since — which I’ve done often because I like it — I naturally assumed that Shreb had been the winner of the game of Rochambeau. But, as I’ve gotten older and life has shaken me like a branch, facts that seemed incontrevertible to me have loosed and fallen like overripe fruit. What if, it occured to me, Shreb hadn’t been the winner but the loser. What if, instead of prize, I was punishment?
The thought gnawed at me for a while. I’m 42. It’s not like I think about three minutes of coitus from a quarter century ago that often. But the idea that I’d been carrying abour a self-involved misapprehension was, well, it was gross.
My relationship with Frances ended in a heartbreak so predictable it barely merits mention. We were young, in flux, in different states (mentally, emotionally, zip codically). She took up — or perhaps had never put down — a former boyfriend. I fell in love with my ballet teacher. It was sad in a way that made me want to listen to Blood on the Tracks on repeat, sometimes identifying with “Simple Twist of Fate,” other times with “Idiot Wind.” Later Frances did end up moving to New York, working as a bartender in Williamsburg and living in a boat with a boyfriend on the Gowanus Canal, before meeting and marrying her very tall and very handsome current husband and moving to Los Angeles.
A few weeks ago, I asked Frances about that day at the beach. “OMG, did we really do that??” she replied, “I don’t think we would have felt it was something we had to do like empy the dishwasher…so it must have been the winner but,” she continued, “I don’t remember it all though so my conjecture is based on what I can deduce from general childhood experiences.” I felt better, marginally, neither a Maytag nor a memory.
And then, a trade show and excavating memories neither of us had talked about for years. I had come to remember the relationship largely for its unlovely end (and the unusual Assateague Episode.) But it was like I was in Edwin Abbott’s two dimenionsal Flatland, regarding the past simply as a point, when truly, as I could see when I transcended the plane of pure emotional reactivity, it had its own wondrous form. Even after all these years. Another way of saying that: I had been regarding a fluorescent light at its terminal, not seeing the brilliance of the bulb. Seeing Frances again was enlightening. Afterwards, I felt lighter, retroactively shifting the beads of my memory abacus from bummer to joy. Could have been the oysters. Could have been the champagne. Most likely it was the ebullience of love, untarnished by desire, undimmed by time.
Some Things I Wrote
I wrote about finding my scents as a father for the now defunct (!!!) Fatherly. Here’s the best part, imo:
And while there are many things I’ll be leaving to my children — a collection of erotic art, hypercholesterolemia, $10,000 — one legacy not being deposited in their memory banks is the nostalgia-crushing scent of fatherhood.
Someday, as a sirocco ladened with hot Saharan air and Mediterranean lushness whistles past their grown-up noses, I’d like them to think of me. Or at the very least, I’d like them to remember me as pleasant-smelling. Even as my belly bulges, knees give out, wrinkles form and hair disappears, even then might I live on in their minds as the 40-something weirdo, full of whim and vigor. Cologne might be my only chance.
I wrote about San Sabino, the new restaurant from the Don Angie couple, Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli for New York Magazine. The best line was killed. I knew it would be. It was mostly just for Alan, my editor.
The concept is coastal Italian. On first blush, unremarkable. Coastal Italian is to restaurants what girls in front of slot canyons are to dating profiles (or men with a fish they’ve killed.)
Best Restaurants I’ve Been To Recently
I eat out a lot. These are a few of the best restaurants I’ve been to recently. I think I might do this in every newsletter.
Noksu - Magical subway portal into ineffable beauty. Every single dish is like a Calder mobile: light, balanced, dynamic.
Naks - Did you know cow penis is called a pizzle and that it’s delicious in the famous aphrodesiac Soup No. 5? (It’s like Hims but in soup form and less subway advertising.)
Demo - Not quite open yet but from Wildair’s Jacob Nass and Chef Quang “Q” Nguyen in the West Village. It’s small and loud and one of those independent restaurants everyone always can’t exist anymore but magically do. A simply citrusy bright scallop crudo was the best bite bitten.
LittleMad - I will never tire of skillful hansik. The newly launched a la cart menu includes my favorite dish, Lobster, All of it Miso, White kimchi. (The white kimchi is made with emat from the claw and knuckle; the tail is roasted with pine nut and garlic butter; the tomalley is made into fried rice and stuffed into the head; and the shell becomes a miso soup.)
Gulaabo - Terrible location — 43rd street — brilliant and subtle Punjabi cuisine from Chef Paramjeet "Param" Bombra including a foot-long aloo-stuffed amritsari kulcha and dhahi balla, a savory appetizer of fried lentils in a sweetened yogurt.
Bar Miller - Omafuckinase. No arguing with the joy of a fish chip made with all the other fishes. Or the cute pottery. I waited outside in the cold for my date, scream- singing Valerie by Steve Winwood to keep warm.
Roscioli - A collaborative dinner with Hosteria Giusti, a 400 year old hosteria in Modena. A woman walked into the sliding glass door and banged her head really hard. The tortellini, with mortadella, was tiny and perfectly wrought.
Shukette — Went with my older son. He kept saying it was fire. He usually just says Kanye West is fire (I agree, musically; less so politically) but we agree here. I took all the dips home. Frena bread makes me hard. Also, watching the choreography of the cooks in the narrow AF kitchen at the head of which Ayesha stands, expediting.
Figure Eight — Between Figure Eight and Tolo, Chinese cooking is, I think, the next wave of gonzo brilliance. (Formerly, and still, Korean; also Indian. Calling things waves is problematic!) The soy poached half chicken is fully bucket-list worthy.
Oh here’s a idea.
What if I had a paid subscriber thing where you could just tell me what to write about for some nominal fee? For reasons probably embedded above, I enjoy surrendering some degree of control. What do you people think?