2025: Echo-location - Walking With Ghosts
Echoes. People and places that are gone, but like phantom limbs, I still feel them.
“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” That’s one of the AA ninth step promises. At 67 years old, with thirty-four years of sobriety rattling around my brain pan, I’ve racked up decades of recovery, therapy and self-help work.
At the very least, I should be able to just be in the present moment.
My newest therapist’s office is on 60-something and Central Park West which sounds innocent enough until I’m pushing my way through ghosts that crowd the sidewalks, as I walk to or from the subway.
If I wanted to, I could tell you the story of adult life by way of 57th Street, east to west, from the rundown residential hotel where I lived when I went to school, drunk; to the hotel cocktail waitress job I took because it was so close to to my junkie cop spots I could cop before, during my food break, and after work; to the talent agent job where I’d finally got sober, to training as a death doula.
Between 57th Street and therapy is Central Park and my history with Dead Frankie, and the Columbus Circle spot you’d wait for the 4am prison bus that made the four-hour drive to FCI Otisville.
At (Patrick) O’Neals Balloon near Lincoln Center where my girl Patti and I spent too much time drinking and late for work she flagged a cop car down to get us to work at the Lollipop Lounge in Little Brazil and they stayed all. night. long.
Walking down 8th Avenue to catch the #7 train, past the Westerly, where Patti lived and we had “heroin parties” and she made stuffed pork chops, where she took me in after I was beaten; “the diner where I was raped” even though it didn’t happen there, but I was there with the man who’d rape me later that day. Look left down this block to the former home of Possible 20 filled with pimps and musicians, it’s name a jazz reference. On the right, the Camelot where friend and coke dealer Eddie and Uncle Ernie lived, the block where O’Neals (the hustlers bar where I met the love of my life—not to be confused with the legit O’Neals the night of the cops as cabbies) was, Queen Anne’s Saloon had an elevated platform so when tending bar your my vagina in tight spandex, was level with the bar. Where Show World was, and pimp/friend JJ Huntsberry lived in the shitty apartments upstairs as he slid his down from being top dog ace number one pimp to being a beaten down flyer guy for porn palaces. McHales, which might have been the bar Mouse threw a garbage can at their window after they threw us out, either way, either the Mouse was allowed in, or I was, but never the two of us together, because, well...we didn’t know how to behave on our own, but together, well, flying garbage cans happened.
Central Park is, of course, still there. As is the firehouse where Mouse and I cruised fireman after cruising hustlers at O’Neals. The Westerly and the Camelot are standing, a little worse for the years. Everything else is unrecognizable to the eye.
I can try washing my brain, focusing elsewhere, being present, marveling at the newer architecture, or try distracting myself with a podcast, but the body knows. Forty or so years have passed, I still feel it, smell it, sense it, know they are there. The fluid, the 98% liquid that’s ruled by the moon, knows where it’s been, where it is. It geolocates me. It’s echolocation.
I feel the echos of who I was, who we were, what happened.
What’s happening still, in a parallel play. Like ghost buildings, phantom limbs, more of them were I to make a left towards Times Square down any one of the blocks I’ll pass.
The Carter Hotel, Bernards, the Gaiety Burlesque. Colony Records. My body holds the history of Times Square and Hells Kitchen. It happens downtown when I walk almost anywhere below 14th Street. A ping inside me, like a find my phone app for my past, there’s a visceral shift. A small mouth opens at that spot my ribs begin to separate, just above my diaphragm when I get near the old cop spots, even if I’m not paying attention. My skin gets tight in anticipation and recognition of the diner, the hotels, the bars.
The things we live through, change us, on a cellular level. Like a sense of direction, we develop the ability to geolocate, even somewhere that no longer looks familiar. The body knows details that elude the brain.
I could walk through that gossamer separation between now and then, time runs parallel rather than linear, to people and places like phantom limbs. Gone, but still they itch.
By all rights, it should be one big blackout, my lost years. My drunk years. Years of me being drunk drunk drunk. Drinky, Drunky, Dead Drunk Girl. And it was early in the drunk years, there was a decade of drinking that would follow, that should have wiped it all from memory. My time at any of those spots was short compared to the length of my life.
It would be reasonable to expect that I wouldn’t remember a goddamn thing.
Echolocation.
The locations are gone. The people are mostly dead. The architecture has changed, been razed, “developed.” The echoes, remain, and I walk a ghost town…
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