LITERATURE

MEMOIRS

Bartleby on Carmine Street

The Brooklyn Rail, July-August, 2016

When I started renting movies from Evergreen Video it occupied the second story of a dilapidated building on West Houston Street. On the ground floor was Martin’s Bar and Grill, a tenebrous and seedy drinking establishment that seemed like a relic of some earlier version of downtown Manhattan, even thought at the time—the early 1990s—there were still many such survivals: Italian bakeries, Irish bars, Portuguese groceries, Puerto Rican bodegas, second-hand bookstores run by ash-sprinkled Jewish men who often reminded me of my father, miniscule record stores dedicated to particular genres or eras, boutiques whose stocks of clothes hadn’t been updated since the early 1970s.

Missing Footage

The White Review, September, 2014

I. YVES DE LAUROT, WHERE ARE YOU?

An old guidebook tells me that in the 1930s MacDougal Alley, a block of mews behind the north side of Washington Square, was the only street in New York City still illuminated by gas lamps. Last night I went to a party in one of the quaint, two-storey houses that line its cobblestone length. At one point I found myself in a quiet corner where the host was showing off a series of photographs he’d taken at various nightclubs in the early 1980s. In several black-and-white flash-lit images I noticed, among a group of dissolute-looking people seated on a banquette, a man I recognised as one of my neighbours. He was a strange figure who’d sparked my curiosity for years and I jumped at this chance to discover more about him.