right now I can’t even wrap my head around it. I’m going to have to make him use a voice changer thing like they do on TV so that I can be around him without spontaneously orgasming…
From: Lindsay Bach
To: Edith Iredale
Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 12:10 PM
Okay, I am glad to hear you two didn’t jump each other’s bones because it TOTALLY FELT LIKE THAT WAS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. Just saying. Did you figure out where BC lives?
From: Edith Iredale
To: Lindsay Bach
Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 1:45 PM
He’s on the 4th floor, way east, which makes sense why I hardly ever see him. So wild, I can’t believe we bumped into him in Manhat. Ugggh. Do you want to watch a movie tonight? Greg’s friends are going to some bar that has bocce ball, but I really don’t think I can rally…
I skimmed further; the conversation veered off into plan making. But god, I remembered that night, Thursday, January 22, apparently—clear as if it were playing out documentary style before me.
The holidays were over and we were cold and bored. Weekend after weekend, we drank cheap whiskey and did lackluster, shuffling dances in the back room of Royal Oak, one of our go-to shitty bars. We racked up Friday after Friday at Calhoun, picking our way up and down littered staircases in search of another sweaty party or arbitrary open band practice or glimpse of the hot guy Edie had a Building Crush on. We sat in booths and sipped drinks instead of talking and finished too many nights with sad free pizza at The Charleston.
Until that night when, in a burst of motivation, Edie and I rode the train all the way to the Lower East Side to see some British band she knew about; the rest of our friends had been too SAD-addled to make the trip. After the show, we downed whiskey-gingers and held shouted, jerky conversation over loud music and were just about to call it a night when in walked Building Crush with a crew of cool-looking friends: model-y, thick-banged girls and a cute blond dude in an acid-washed denim jacket. Building Crush, of course, turned out to be Alex, but it was his friend I homed in on—ashen hair curved in a triumphant windblown wave, like he’d just stepped off a crotch rocket. High cheekbones and a square jaw around an impish grin. The goofy sidekick in a Molly Ringwald movie. Energy that bounded out spastically, bouncing off of things.
What followed was one of those New York City nights that we were too young to see as special: Alex wandered over with a confident “Hey, are we neighbors?,” setting in motion the whole movie montage. The blond dude, Lloyd, not of the building, said his friend had given him the code for her fancy condo in the East Village, and we walked there together, Lloyd running ahead to entertain us with stupid antics like climbing into and then reclining in the basket of an abandoned crane. Edie and Alex followed a half-block behind, talking and smiling shyly. It was an unexpectedly warm January night, and we all felt young and drunk and free, pretty hipsters in an ad for jeans.
Lloyd was a photographer with an insane ability to take a good shot of anybody; he snapped away on his iPhone 3G, and every time he flicked it around to let us see, we squealed in delight, our faces just the way we liked to think they looked. Humoring me, he took my shitty Razr flip phone and lifted a lighter above me as I held a cigarette and looked pensive. It was perfect. Longest-running Facebook profile photo to date, until I grew old enough to realize the fake-smoker thing was gross.
I think he was in a band, too. God, all the men of that era were both photographers and in shitty bands.
We clambered onto the roof of a gorgeous condo on Fourteenth, one I wasn’t ever able to locate again, and one of the girls magically procured a stereo and we danced to stupid nineties tunes. Lloyd kept us moving, pulling me in and then whipping me out to spin. Alex and Edie found some lawn chairs and settled in a little ways away, talking sleepily, while Lloyd finished a bottle of whiskey and, with a holler, ripped off the cover of a drained pool I hadn’t even noticed and vaulted himself into the deep end, demanding that we