by Dave Holmes
What was cool was that he didn’t stab and rob me. Instead, he broke it down. Fahad had been there for sixteen years and he told me: “It’s going to be hard to live here at first, but after a few weeks, you won’t be able to live anywhere else.” I believed him. He dropped me at a West Village bar called The Monster that was apparently popular with Middle Eastern gay men at the time, wished me luck, and sent me on my way. I made some new friends there, tourists whom I accompanied to the Duplex for cabaret, where I met people who took me to Squeezebox at Don Hill’s to dance to punk music with drag queens. There I met people who brought me up to Club USA, where I made out with someone after talking to him for five minutes, and then rode “The K-Hole,” a three-story slide whose name I was too green to understand. It was an adventure. It was what I was moving to New York for.
I stumbled out of Club USA into a sunny summer Saturday morning, raised my arm to hail a taxi home, and—I’m not joking—Fahad pulled up.
“Well?” he asked.
“I love it.”
I never had the same cabdriver twice again in the eight years I lived there. My first real night in the city made it seem ordained, like God wanted me to be in New York City.
It got a lot less glamorous, pretty much right away.
When you live in New York City and you have an entry-level job and you are in your early twenties, you know every draft beer and chicken wing special in town. This is how you feed yourself, physically and emotionally. You meet and make your friends in these places because you are all there for the same reason. Every bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is a singles bar where all of the singles are also interviewing potential friends. Everyone is twenty-two and fresh out of college, missing a dining hall with a meal program, or their fraternity brothers or sorority sisters, or their actual families. Everyone is at the bottom of the corporate ladder and has been hollered at earlier in the day by a boss who is twenty-seven. Everyone has big plans and nice new clothes and a little bit—a very little bit—of folding money. Everyone wants to find the people who’ll be there for them.
This is what Friends gets right about living in cities in your twenties: for at least a little while, you live as a tribe. You’re out of your parents’ house, and you’re not yet settled down with a spouse and kids and a house in the suburbs, but you still need family. You still need to feel like you belong to something. So you pull a family unit together out of what you find in the places you haunt. You have your hangout where you meet to complain about work. You date people and run them past your friends. You have keys to one another’s apartments, and then you move in together. You travel as a pack.
My official move to New York happened in the summer of 1994, and by the time Friends premiered that September, my posse was established. We rolled six deep, just like on the show. I saw myself as the Chandler of the crew, but in a time before BuzzFeed quizzes it was difficult to know for sure.
The gang started coming together right away. I drove down to New York the day after I graduated, with my parents in a rental Buick right behind me. They moved me in and bought me a Jennifer Convertible and some pots, pans, and plates, and together we furnished my three-hundred-square-foot home. They got me settled and told me that their last graduation present to me would be to drive my car out of the city and back to St. Louis. (I didn’t understand why that was a present and not theft, and they told me: “Wait.” Sure enough, by the end of my first week, I was grateful not to be burdened with an automobile in New York City; I could barely afford to park my body there.) We said goodbye and all of our chins trembled but we kept it together. “Three to five years,” I told my mother. “Three to five and then I’m back in St. Lou.” And they got in the cigarette-reeking Jetta with the front bumper duct-taped on, and I watched my car and the two people I loved the most in the world chug down Second Avenue, getting smaller and smaller as my youth receded into the distance. I wanted to cry, but I am Catholic and Irish, so I started drinking.
It was around 4:00 p.m., and the few acquaintances I knew in the city were still at work, so I went to my local bodega to buy a stack of tabloids—the New York Post would be my tabloid of record at last, with a dash of the free weekly New York Press for when I was feeling intellectual and contrarian—and took myself to Kelley’s Korner, a pub at the northwest corner of Eighty-ninth and Second. It was completely empty. After thirty minutes or so, after I’d managed to read about every MURDER HACK and PSYCHO GALPAL and made an honest attempt to learn the names of the good socialites of the moment, a woman about my age walked in. A Jewish beauty with a “Prove Your Love”–era Taylor Dayne mane seated herself a few stools down with her own stack of reading materials. A Daily News and Village Voice kind of gal, she was. It was just the three of us: bartender in Yankees T-shirt, Taylor Dayne, and me, as Seal played in the background. (When you are drinking in the early ’90s and the sun is up, Seal is always playing in the background. Especially at brunches. To this day, if you play me “A Prayer for the Dying,” my body will naturally point toward the nearest source of hollandaise sauce. Ditto for Crash Test Dummies’ “God Shuffled His Feet” and “Bamboleo” by the Gipsy Kings.)
Finally, the bartender spoke up. “Okay, you two have to start talking to each other.” We agreed. Her name was Alicia; she was just starting a gig at the Food Network; and she, too, was waiting for her friends to get out of work. We made the bartender, Johnny, fire up the NTN bar trivia machine, and we faced off in movie trivia. She did not stand a chance, but she was a good sport. Afterward, I invited her up to my place, which was basically upstairs and furnished with only my CD boom box and my steamer trunk full of mixtapes and CDs. We were young and open and confident that the other was not a murder hack or a psycho galpal, and we listened to the Reality Bites soundtrack and talked about ourselves. We’ve been friends ever since.
The group grew from there. A few days later, we grabbed happy hour at The Launch—a place up on Third Avenue that sold $2 cheeseburger-and-french-fry platters before it was troublingly shut down by the Board of Health—and were seated next to Louise, a refined New Jersey girl with British parents, and Aimee, a wild-haired New Orleans debutante with a massive smile, a ready laugh, and the tolerance of a girl who grew up in New Orleans. After a few $5 pitchers of happy-hour draft beer, our conversations overlapped, and then our two-tops joined into a four, our phone numbers changed hands, and it was on. Soon after, a female friend from college went out on a date with a prepster from Philadelphia’s main line and brought him by The Launch to show him off, where he hit on me kind of unabashedly, and thereby I lost a female friend from college and gained an on-and-off boyfriend named Jim. My friend Mike from high school moved to New York because he did a thing called “writing code” and got a job at Sony working on something called their “website.”*
We showed up at one another’s apartment parties that were impenetrably crowded if more than nine people showed up. We made runs to Key Food for Top Ramen together. If we were not at work we were together in one configuration or another, but mostly all six. We went to Pedro’s on Ninety-second, with the frayed college pennants lining the walls. In wintertime, we sat by the fire at Dorrian’s, the place where the Preppie Murderer met his Murder Galpal, playing euchre and drinking ourselves warm. In the summertime, we’d rollerblade around Central Park and meet in the Sheep Meadow to divide up the Sunday New York Times and buy the Budweiser tallboys the hustlers sold out of garbage bags for one dollar.
When our direct deposits showed up in our accounts and we were flush, we’d walk down to J.G. Melon for burgers. We largely skipped movies, because they ate into our happy hour budgets, but we managed to see Pulp Fiction at the Angelica, with the N/R line rumbling beneath our seats at the crucial adrenaline-shot scene. We wore Brooks Brothers shirts or Ann Taylor sweater sets with heavy, thick-soled boots, and we thought about getting our eyebrows pierced, but we never did.
We chose our clubhouse: The Gaf, a tiny place on Eighty-third with a good jukebox, which is to
say a CD jukebox with Oasis’s Definitely Maybe and the first G. Love and Special Sauce, and space for no more than fifteen people. We developed crushes on bartenders up and down First Avenue. (Louise malapropped the perfect word for this, while trying to say bartender and boyfriend at the same time: barfriender.) We met at brunch and acquired appetites for Bloody Marys and pieced together our Saturday nights over eggs Benedict and let our waitresses sit down with us for a moment because they were inevitably as hungover as we were.
We were, as Des’ree commanded, bad and bold and wiser. We were young New Yorkers. We went to one another’s restaurants—all of us except Louise, who worked on Wall Street, had second jobs at restaurants, because we were all entry-level and the rent, even then, was too damn high—and we comped one another’s meals. Aimee picked up the weekend breakfast shift at the Barking Dog up on Third; I served schnitzel to New York’s German community at the Yorkville Inn on Second.
I had never waited tables before, but I fabricated a long résumé of restaurant work because I needed the money. I was twice as inept a waiter as I was an ad guy; I would bring you the wrong thing always, and you would never get water or salt, but I knew how to make conversation, so I held on for a few months. And then one night, I showed a young couple to their table and handed them their menus, which were made of paper, over a lit candle. His survived, but hers caught the flame and began to smolder on the upper right corner. I said, with the practiced calm of a young advertising person who doesn’t want anyone to know he has no idea what he’s doing: “Pardon me, ma’am, your menu is on fire,” and I took it back, stamped it out, and got her a new one. My manager watched this with wide eyes and I nodded at her, and at the end of my shift I silently turned in my apron and that was that.
At any time of the day or night, I could tell you where the other five of these people were. We were in constant contact, which in 1994 required effort. We had no cell phones or e-mail or Instant Messager; we could not text one another; and as Julie’s behavior toward Heather B. in the first episode of The Real World so memorably demonstrated, beepers were mostly for drug dealers. Keeping tabs on one another meant calling and leaving messages on one another’s answering machines, which, if you had an upscale model, would allow you to check your messages remotely from your desk or a phone booth, with a four-digit security code. There were no emojis or even emoticons; if you wanted to wink at someone you had to actually wink right at them in real life, which is a thing we can all agree is gross. We were forced to interact in real life. And because we didn’t know any better, we loved it.
It was good that I was rarely alone, because I did stupid things when I was alone. Once, after a work happy hour that turned into a legitimate barhop in the West Village, I got up, did the Irish goodbye, and began my long journey home: West Village to the Upper East Side, a three-trainer, exhausting under the best of circumstances. I hopped on the 1 to Forty-second, took the shuttle to Grand Central, and got on the northbound 6 headed for Eighty-sixth and Lexington. At Seventy-seventh, the train pulled into the station and the doors swung open, and then it just stayed there for a while, like New York trains are known to do. The train had stopped due to congestion ahead, or something of that nature; I’d have to walk the last ten or so blocks. I got out of the train to do that, just as an idea slunk through the fog of my brain: What if I don’t walk home on the street? The tunnel is right there, what if I go through it on foot?
What if I walk through a subway tunnel at 3 a.m.? (That’s how stupid I was in my twenties: I didn’t have a ready answer for the question What if I walk through a subway tunnel at 3 a.m.?)
There was a narrow walkway the same height of the subway platform, and it ran as far up as I could see, so I took it. I walked until the light from the Seventy-seventh Street platform faded away and it was pitch dark, and then I kept walking. Somehow it kept getting darker. I was alone at 3:00 a.m. in a subway tunnel. I walked until I couldn’t even see a pinhole of light in front of or behind me. I was so scared I passed scared and came back around to calm, the way you get when you skydive. Except unlike skydiving, you can actually really die when you’re alone in a dark subway tunnel, and it would be a much more difficult death to explain to your parents.
For reasons I cannot explain, exploring felt like the thing to do. I came upon a stairway and walked a few steps down it, and then I heard skittering. Not the skittering of rodent feet; sadly, by this time I was able to identify that noise. No, this was people skittering. This was the noise of tunnel people. These were CHUDs or drug addicts or CHUDs who were addicted to a drug that is derived from human flesh. These people might kill me, or eat me alive, or pull me down to become their mother. Whichever, respectfully: no thanks. I ran back up to walkway level and broke into a dead sprint toward Eighty-sixth.
By this time, the train had started running again. The conductor was at the front, at the controls, and his headlight fell right on me. I turned around and stuck out a thumb. Like: Can you believe what I’m doing right now? He could not believe what I was doing right then. He put his hands out to either side of his head, the international sign for What. The. Fuck?, and stared at me, stupefied, as he passed. I ran all the way to the Eighty-sixth Street station and onto the platform, sprinting up the stairs past the police and the station agent, and all the way home. On the way, I passed the Yorkville Inn, where I had waited tables and acquired a fairly solid reputation as an idiot. A few of my coworkers were there, and my body was flush with adrenaline; I wanted to tell them what I’d done. My old coworker Eamonn looked at me and said: “David. Go to the bathroom.” I said I didn’t have to go to the bathroom, I had to tell them a story. He said: “David. Go to the bathroom.” So I did, and I looked at myself in the mirror. I was covered head to toe in subway tunnel soot. I was in blackface. I was a mess.
I told the rest of my gang that story over brunch the next day, slightly proud of myself. A few hours later Aimee called me and said: “We talked about your story for a while after you left, and we all agreed it was the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard a human being do.” I couldn’t argue.
This is the moment when I had the conscious thought, for the first time in my life: “Maybe I shouldn’t actively try to kill myself anymore.”
It was Louise who ended up giving me the second half of the wake-up call I needed. We were talking about what she looked for in a boyfriend, and her first and least-flexible requirement was that he love what he does for a living. It startled me. “Really?”
“Yes, of course. It’s what you spend most of your life doing, so it should be a thing you’re in love with.”
It’s a simple, undeniable truth, and I can’t believe I didn’t hear someone say it out loud until I was well into my twenties. Though it was never said to me this way explicitly, I’d come to regard work as a thing that must be endured, a pain in the neck, a thing you affer up t’Are Lard. We even treat business and pleasure as separate travel categories, as though they can’t be the same thing. As though to be a man in full, it was my responsibility to put on a necktie, disappear for ten hours a day, and then come home and not talk much about it, just as my father had, just as his father had.
“Do”—I was stunned by this new concept—“do you love what you do?”
“Of course I do. I can’t wait to go to work in the morning.” It was like finding out one of your closest friends can levitate, or is Mormon. My world was shaken. I was suddenly self-conscious about the idea that I didn’t love what I did, and I wasn’t particularly good at it besides. And I was a little hurt because I kind of assumed she spent her whole workday counting the minutes until we could all be together again, the way I did.
Louise saved my life with one offhand comment. You do that to one another when you’re twenty-five.
In a separate conversation, Louise gave me another life lesson: if your office has one of those massive toilet paper rolls in the stalls, and if you can work a fingernail or a coin into the center screw of the dispenser, you can take the cover of
f and turn the roll into a kind of pillow for an early-afternoon nap. “Just put your forehead right on it. You can get a good fifteen minutes that way, and sometimes that’s all you need.”
I put the second lesson to work right away. The first one took a few years to digest.
* * *
* He brought me to his office one Saturday afternoon, just to show me what the Internet was. He directed me to “Yahoo!,” and said: “Search for anything. I bet there’s a website for it.” I searched for Small Wonder. There were eight websites devoted to Small Wonder reminiscence, memorabilia, and fan fiction. There was never a time when the Internet wasn’t ridiculous.
Man, I miss the 1990s. I mean, I’m very happy now, but I’m also exhausted and sore and furious at everyone who disagrees with me even a little bit about anything, and I find myself pining for a simpler time. Nineties nostalgia is at a fever pitch at the moment, and while we’re naturally a little misty-eyed for things that happened twenty years ago, I think it’s about more than that. I think we left something there, something we can’t get back. Here are a few of those things.
Optional Snark
In the 1990s, if you wanted to look down your nose at something, you could relax, because Janeane Garofalo was available to do it for you. Snark, a particularly cutting brand of sarcasm or irony, was a thing to be deployed by smart people: David Letterman, Spy Magazine, the people who wrote the Dubious Achievement Awards for Esquire. Then David Spade brought it to the masses with SNL’s “Hollywood Minute,” blogs and social media were invented, and now even children are over everything.