East Fifth Street and Second Avenue is the realm of New York’s Losaida. The Lower East Side. I’m sitting alone at some new restaurant with outdoor tables and inside music with a beat that bangs through its slid-open windows. It’s hot out. I’m staring east along 5th street where Jytte used to live. Squinting for her building.
I stare past the scooters and bikes and cars passing too fast on Second Avenue. The street is dirtier than I remember. It seems seedier. I think that’s because the patina of insider hip, and edgy thrills, have been rubbed duller. Doesn’t mean it’s gone. I won’t believe that, not like the traitors I sneer at who’ve run from the city. I know it’s changed. That’s no goddamn excuse.
The cool has been piled over with COVID and tourists and newbies who’ve come because they’ve heard about this curious hillock in our city, and so they’re here.
I can tell them by the way they dress. I can tell who the oldies are in the same way because they wear the ease of not giving a damn. They’ve climbed down five flights to get cigarettes, a newspaper, pet food, or a bag of chips for their weed munchies, some beer. . . Then they crawl back up. I know. I’ve done it.
On this who-gives-a-shit holiday, this stupid July 4, the neighbors hunker inside or are venturing out only for that essential thing or two. Or they’ve come out to walk their refined dogs no matter how scruffy the dog, or them, in ripped jeans, matted tee-shirt, and crisp-cornered eyes. The dogs anchor them, accustomed to the sirens and speeding and screaming drunks or whatever. Dogs are part of the competent team venturing out from the claustrophobic safety of their worn apartments.
Me, I’m back as a visitor from Hell’s Kitchen now. I’m here having prosecco at this new, too clean restaurant because there’s outdoor tables so I can watch the street. But I’m really here for my friend Summer Minerva’s show “As Slyvia.” It will be in the theater that I see is in the building right next door to where I used to live at 87 East 4th Street. That was back then when the East Village was more precisely fine-tuned to the funky and perversely glittery. It was the place that didn’t have to be announced to the world—although it had been since Allen Ginsberg’s time and before.
When I lived here I was close to Jytte, just over there on East 5th between First and Second Avenue. Close, and we got closer. She came from Denmark to study at NYU, then worked at the Museum of Modern Art where she eventually became Film Curator, but that was later.
Before Jytte took her fame in that MOMA niche, we were buddies. We made a short film together, HeatBeat. It’s still a good film. Even Jytte said that when I saw her. We shot it in Kevin Scanlan’s glass studio that was on Great Jones Street then. We had a big party in my loft on the Bowery and Spring for the film. But by a few years later we had drifted apart.
I think Jytte got mad at me about some people I invited to that party where we had slide shows of my African photographs flashing on three walls, up high. Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver lived directly across from me on the Bowery and could see it all from their place. They had full view of the pulsing neon glass sculptures Kevin had made so the colors jumped across from piece to piece where each filled my tall front four windows—window to window. Jim called once and said that it interfered with his cordless phone reception whenever I plugged in that big, segmented sculpture.
That was then. Now I’m sitting at East 5th Street and Second Avenue. It’s decades later, long gone from my beloved loft there on the Bowery and Spring Street and from my place on East 4th. I’m still looking for Jytte although I know I won’t find her here anymore. No matter how hard I wish.
The last time I saw Jytte was when her longtime friend Brigitta was in from Denmark. We did coke together at Jytte’s place. But that was another then, when she lived in the West Village on Grove Street.
Jytte was already a Film Curator at MOMA, had been for a few years and I hadn’t seen her in too long. She called out of the blue when it was during the time I was driving or flying back and forth to Detroit every three weeks. I had to. I had to see my mother who my brother had trapped into a nursing home. It had always been her worse fear, and she always voiced it. But he did it to her anyway. It was cruel because she could have had care at home, but he was a bastard.
So for those trips back and forth to Detroit, once every three weeks by car or plane, I needed help. Coke helped. When Jytte one unexpected day after we’d met for drinks, said come to my new place, Brigitta’s here, I made time for her, told her I’d just gotten back to the city from a Detroit drive and I sure as hell still had some necessary blow if she wanted it. And there in her small Grove Street apartment—weren’t they all tiny?—we shared the blow and we laughed, told stories. We were easy and warm with each other again like we’d never been apart to live other lives. That was the last time I saw Jytte, and Brigitta—and I wish I could find her again, too.
The film Jytte and I had made, HeatBeat, had put us together for months, a year. Back there on East 4th, we had edited at La MaMa just across from where I was living then, barely a block and a bit away from Jytte’s tiny apartment on East 5th Street. God, I’d forgotten how deep in me that was, the feel of my neighborhood back then. I really did love it. The Gem Spa and the Sock Man who was selling on the street, and the Veselka, and the dark arts candle store over by Tompkins Square Park, and. . . And Jytte and I editing upstairs at La MaMa in a small, dim room cranking hand roll spools.
We smoked cigarettes like breathing. We worked hard, and we had good times. We trusted each other. I liked Jytte’s bold directness. She would say do this or that and I’d say yes ma’m or something like that to make her laugh at her commands. But she never changed them, never backed off. If she wanted a shot in a particular sequence in HeatBeat, we’d discuss it, but she usually won. She was usually right anyway. We got along easily through any disagreement. We trusted each other. We liked each other.
And one time when Jytte’s parents came to visit from Denmark, I hung out with them. We had a good time. I showed them a good time. Jytte said I drove them around in my car but I don’t remember that clearly. Doesn’t matter, Jytte was pleased about what I did forever after. She mentioned it to me again there in her place on Grove Street. She remembered the good, but still something had drifted us apart.
Was it because Jytte was such a success and saw that I was living in reverse? Was it because she saw I that I couldn’t show any effort to accomplish anything I did? Jytte knew how to audibly grunt while she worked hard. I learned I had to be silent and pretend everything was easy. I really think that’s why we ended, even with what had been so much trust. How could someone so direct and clear-eyed trust someone like me who only hid?
But now is now. It’s all only a memory that I really lived on East 4th, so close to Jytte. Decades later I drink Prosecco on a corner in front of a place I don’t recognize anymore. And I’m trying to will Jytte to come across Second Ave to meet me. I want to show her I’ve accomplished some stuff after all.
I wish it, for her to come across the street. And I hate myself for having to try like this to make it happen. I try hard. But she won’t meet me.
It’s not because she’s mad at me again, or still, for something un-named—or for who I am. It’s because Jytte will never be on East 5th Street again. Why did I let her move away from our lives? Why did I have to hear that she died? Why did I have to see it written in a Museum of Modern Art announcement? In print, I had to see that she passed away? That wasn’t right.
That wasn’t right, Jytte. You could have called. Could have asked for some blow? Some time? Me? I wish you would have called.
I’d like to blame you. But I know it was me.