Letter from New York
by Olivia Sandoval
St. Mark’s Place does not appear, but rather comes at me. Third Avenue and 8th Street, St. Mark’s place, a circus in the world. The only colors are neon; everything else is soot gray and dark. The pavement, extending like a finger from Third and 8th all the way to Avenue A, is lined with souvenir shops that moonlight as piercing bars, acting tired and burnt-out during the day, a hung-over grunt in response to last night’s adventures. Sitting between Kim’s Video and an Irish Pub are the stores Trash and Vaudeville. Two stories: sitting above is Vaudeville,– selling clothes and posters and suspenders and general kitsch,– and Trash,– selling all that plus lingerie and shoes. The vernacular dictates that these two stores should be fused as one when mentioned conversationally. Just Trash, or Trash and Vaudeville
Trash sells history. Catapulted into success by the arrival of the Sex Pistols during their brief and fated United States tour, this store grew to become an icon of the punk era, starting from the raw beginnings of 2 dollar fishnets to the eventual capitalistic reality of 150 dollar pinstriped pants. Located appropriately in the gritty underbellies of the Village, it was at the right place at the right time for exponential development. The United States was aching to catch up with British edge, the London cool that had continued to develop throughout the sixties and seventies. Urbane New Yorkers were bored with the lightheaded Crosby, Stills, and Nash fuckfest of 10 years earlier. The punk movement that had swept the UK provided a corseted contrast to wispy flower power age. America was, frankly, horny for something dark, something metal rather than suede. Trash and Vaudeville was the hooker born waiting for us. It gave us what we couldn’t get at home.
When I walk down St. Mark’s Place to get to Trash, I find the soot in the air ironically comforting. A confusion lingers; the difference between world-weariness and experience. The layers of garbage and pollution are like rings in a tree: proof of the years. Here, I see New York as a series of patches and ideas. Small slices of history, the footprints of personalities and icons past and present, individual revolutions fused into one. It is a quilt of a city. In every way and in every place, I can’t avoid walking through the steps of others. There is no section that is completely mine because any given square of sidewalk has borne the weight of thousands of unfamiliar lives. History is more than what we learned in high school. There is more history in the dirt of St. Mark’s than any palm or book.
This store is the whisper of disappearing decades.
Inside, clean, hardwood floors contradict the chaos of the walls, covered in autographed posters and memorabilia. Sex Pistols, Alice Cooper, The Cramps. Racks of skin-tight jeans form neat assembly lines for customers to sift through. The people who shop here float rather than walk. They are aging rockers and hopeful hipsters. They were Debbie Harry and now they are…whoever. The back room has a sale rack and changing stalls where pushy/friendly circus clown-like sales clerks peer with their tattoos over the flimsy graffiti covered door and ask me “ how does it work, honey?” Red lipstick and bleach prevails, everywhere. The pleather skirt I’m trying on feels like an animal to me, smelling like the plastic dust of another generation. It settles stubbornly around my hips. Fake leather, the kind that squeaks tellingly when you move. I put the skirt back on the rack and continue on, fingering my way through other clothes, and what seems to be more than anything an abstract series of relics. The agenda of some wayward god, or the spit of a dead creature, selfishly leaving the stain of another generation.
Jimmy (Trash and Vaudeville’s gaunt and infamous manager) greets me with a “hey there” and a kiss on the cheek. I can’t tell whether he remembers me, doesn’t remember me, or can’t remember whether he remembers me. Probably the latter. I see in him that same oozing sense of time. He is so old he has no age. Hollow, sunken cheeks are the afterthoughts of his past. The weight of his chains and spikes bring him to a slouch and he walks with the mannerisms of the thinnest monkey you’ve ever seen. He is always singing to himself some secret, nearly inaudible, wordless song.
Why do I like this store so much? Is it because here, time is freeze dried? Forcibly stopped? The clothes I try on are copies of something original. They are new clothes inspired by another time. I feel as though I can recall something I’ve never experienced; it’s sexy. Like living in the skin of a dead rock star. It is not 1978, so why does it feel like it? A plasticized version of the past. The way Jimmy is ageless, Trash and Vaudeville is timeless. The punk era rejected all things traditional. So what do we name this abused love child it has created? It’s not really tradition, and so it cowers alone, timeless on its own terms. Trash and Vaudeville is unique because it is a physical manifestation of how we, as humans, will always and forever try and make time something solid, something we can pack and take along as we age. If we are afraid of death, then we are afraid of living. Growing old is a part of living just as much as youth is. We hold onto time as though it were our child, our little baby, a rag doll. And without tradition, time is murky.
Sometimes our interpretation of the truth is more truthful than the factual evidence upon which it is based. Because it is an interpretation, a vision, it is ours, belonging to us more than the events themselves. The absorption dominating over the full swell. If today, in 2007, I look back on those punks and call them wrong or decadent or glorious and original, who’s to say my version is in anyway historically accurate? Even if they’re replications, the clothes in Trash and Vaudeville belong only to my interpretations of the past. They seem real, to me and therefore my interpretation also seems real. It is what I have to remember with and I need to remember. I have to remember. If not, I have no point, no real purpose. Jimmy is dead if we do not see him and acknowledge him as living. People die but keep on breathing all the time, if they are forgotten.
And this is what frightens us most, the idea of being totally forgotten.
This is why we push time onto objects, giving them more meaning than they deserve to own.
I am extremely afraid of death. It scares me till I’m weak, into nightmares and fits of dread and subsequent panic. But here, inside this vendor of impracticality, I feel close to it. It does not threaten me. I’m displaced to an area of my mind outside of time, outside looking in. There is a haunting drawing by Odilon Redon called “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity.” I feel like this charcoal eyeball without a body, hovering above some vast landscape: people like little ants. Cars like toys. I notice the body of the thing. I feel true. There is harmony to be found there, in that view, and in the end, harmony makes my eventual disappearance less terrifying. Part of what draws me to Trash and Vaudeville, I’m sure, is the presence of that harmony. Surrounded by proof of how highly we value our memories, I smell and taste beauty as though it were as factual and existent as Jimmy’s clothes. How odd. How lonely. How full.
During life we try so hard to be remembered we end up creating our own after life. Heritage doesn’t have to be blood family. It can be Trash and Vaudeville too.
I don’t have to look very hard to find spirituality in the everyday. I can see that sense of God, now, in the faces of the people that shop here, in their calculated need to seize and preserve what is special to them. They look for what once made them feel older, what now makes them feel young again. Regardless of what happens after death, there is God happening right now in the smallest ways, in Jimmy’s crystal notion of time.
I pick up the clothes, mutated echoes of people’s histories. These histories are their identities, however changed, they are like families telling me about the days when they were young. They live an interplay of evolution and tradition; against its wishes, the punk movement created a new kind of tradition. This tradition is a human one. I see the sands of time as something just a literal as tiny stones that slip through my fingers. I can see it in the jeans, the way they appear tattered and well worn, but were actually made to look that way, and are brand new. It’s like watching my parents age. I can see the effects right in front of me, constantly. When I die, I want to float up to the top of the earth, but I don’t want to leave it. I’d rather be a specter haunting Trash and Vaudeville, seeing humans as they keep on living. When I die, I still want to be human. I want to watch it all.