Recently, my friend Francesca sent me about a dozen photographs that she had taken of me about as many years ago. One stand-out shows me sitting with my arms crossed on the counter of a fancy diner in the Meat-Packing District. My eyes are soulful, my skin looks good, not much gray hair yet. I'm slim, and I'm wearing a serene, almost wise expression on my face. She's an excellent photographer and it's a very good portrait though it probably seemed more like a snapshot at the time, and, one that I wouldn't mind seeing on the back of a book. In short, I look great, or about as great as I could hope for. Problem is, that's not how I remember myself.
I have always looked back to the time these photographs were taken as pretty much the most miserable period of my life. Insomniac, unemployed, and lonely, I was living in a terrible apartment-share in the wake of a breakup. I had just quit a Ph.D. program, had lost just about all of my possessions in a sewage flood, and was drinking heavily. In fact, rather than going toward rebuilding my life, every nickel I found went to cheap wine, which I would drink in my sad little room while watching a small, staticky T.V. to avoid my roommates and to try to sleep for a couple of hours. I can tell you exactly what happened on every episode of every sit-com I watched during those nights, but I can't remember the guy in Francesca's photographs.
On the day Francesca, a free-spirited Italian who roamed the streets of Manhattan with her ever-present camera, took the picture of me in the diner, I was anxious, a little depressed, and more than a little hungover. We had been walking around the West Side for hours and had stopped in this place for lunch. I only wanted to get a coffee because I needed to reserve my meager funds for my evening wine. But Francesca wouldn't hear it, and told me so. "What for? You'll buy a bottle of wine tonight and drink it all alone in your room? It won't even taste good," she barked. I hadn't told her my plans for the money, but she saw right through me. "Isn't it better to live life?" she continued. "To talk with a woman in this pleasant diner? To have good coffee and food?" And she was right. In the photo, this is what it looks like I'm doing: living life, a good, peaceful life out in New York City, which is about as good as it gets. There is nothing in this picture that betrays the bloated nervous wreck that I recall from this time. It turns out that I didn't drink wine that night. In fact, I went home and slept the night through for the first time in months -- Maybe because of all the walking we had done that day, or a few weeks of sleepless nights had caught up with me. Now I remember waking up a bit later than usual the next day, going for a run along the West Side Highway and the Hudson River down to Battery Park and reading The Times in the sun on a bench near the water. Not the typical morning I remember from this time of my life. Then again, I can't honestly say that I remember many mornings from back then.
Doing the math, I'd say that this dark period couldn't have lasted more than five months or so. I moved into the crappy, yet very cheap apartment in about mid-September, after spending a lost summer with my brother and his girlfriend in Los Angeles, and moved out toward the end of January. By December I had started freelancing as a copy editor for a series of magazines. By February, I had moved to Brooklyn and had started a fulltime job as a writer and editor for a website. In less than two years, I'd be dating the woman I would marry, I'd publish a book of translations, and then another, and then we'd have a beautiful daughter together. But until I saw that photograph, I wouldn't have understood how brief this period was or how quickly things would change. How could I know that I was already coming out of my stupor. Or maybe it was only at the moment that this picture was taken that I started to get my act together. Or maybe my act hadn't altogether fallen apart in the first place. Or maybe one can never make such an assessment.
I met Francesca that October. She was friends with my roommates Anya and Michael, and had apparently once lived in the room in which I then occupied. Within the city, she was nomadic and seemed always in search of a place to stay and would show up at our apartment every once in a while and sleep in the living room for a couple of days at a time. She taught a couple of Italian language classes at NYU and other schools and would give private lessons in cafes. In her spare time, she would walk around taking pictures. When she had no where else to stay, she would breeze in with some Italian treats and hang out with Anya, a Russian musician. In the early morning, when I would give up on sleep, I'd find her curled up in the livingroom. As I wasn't working, we would spend time chatting in the morning, which usually took the form of me listening to her critique the lifestyles of Americans in general and mine in particular. But I was lonely and she was interesting, so I put up with the criticism -- and most of it was pretty spot on.
During that time, I accompanied Francesca on a few of her walks around Manhattan. Wandering with her through neighborhoods like the East Village, the Lower East Side, or Chinatown (neighborhoods I hadn't been to in a while because I was too busy holing up in my shitty apartment) was like existing in a Barilla commercial. I remember that everywhere we went, large, handsome, over-confident European men would step out of a bar or restaurant, wiping a wine glass or coffee cup, and call out, "Ciao, Francesca!" and then wink at this dumpy, glum guy by her side. She'd have to talk to each guy -- in Italian -- before moving on to another street or neighborhood. All the while Francesca was snapping pictures of me or whatever else she saw on the street.
But when I saw that batch of pictures some thirteen years later, that's not the person I saw at all -- or the one that I had identified as for all those years. Had I been sad? Yes, I think so. But I wouldn't say to the extent that I should have identified with sadness as a character trait, or even a worldview. Was I as much as a loser that I remember myself to be? Now, I don't think so. I mean, I was certainly drinking my nights away and couldn't find a job, but I had completely forgotten that I had started writing stories and essays then. And even if no one was particularly interested in publishing them, they would become the basis of the poetry that I would later write. Life was more complicated than the hundred odd wine bottles that I would eventually carry out of the house to throw away at a discreet corner garbage can so my roommates wouldn't see what was, apparently, right before their eyes.
Back then, I was never quite "in the moment" -- except, perhaps, when I was drunk, but that "now" was quickly forgotten, as a consequence of the cheap wine. I was always brooding over past slights and bad luck or dreaming of a better future, when I'd be working, drinking less, and living in a place of my own. I remember isolated moments of acute anxiety and depression, as well as a palpable feeling of illegitimacy, as though I was about to be "caught" for something. What that something was, I don't know.
So here I am, caught in a photograph, not the sad, dumpy guy I remember. Not the loser drinking cheap wine, nursing my wounds in a decrepit apartment, but content, talking to a talented, interesting woman in a hip cafe (if off camera) on New York's trendy West Side. Not so bad.
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