“Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’.” — André Breton, Nadja

I wish I’d written it down. Maybe later on I’ll go back and see if more accurate details might be had in the text messages I sent you just afterwards. Electric dispatches describing the welcome strangeness of a New York City I never really got to have anachronistically appearing in the Russian Baths that day. Hesitantly letting the water wash off what I’d been preserving with such discreet care, I found myself succumb to same desire we’d all shown up with: to be made clean in an impossible, unnecessary way. That there are regulars fascinated me, especially the terrifying anorexic who hissed the chatty old men out of her way and the man with the plastic bag of sugar we both let him apply to our bare hot shoulders. The place was madcap. I imagined Warhol but had no reference for the association. It just seemed. Like that.

In the baths I heard you effortlessly recount your story and I sat back, draped in a soaked through, house-issued, floor length black cotton robe and a pair of underwear since I’d turned up without a bathing suit, closed my eyes and quietly combed your congenial summary for a variation or some new detail, but what gets me every time is that there is no new information. Your narrative is remarkably airtight and so the same questions that always come to mind push their way back up and remain unanswered.   You give its incredible strangeness up so easily, i think, my head so hot I keep going back to the trough of cold water and dumping it over my body while the man in the toga rubs sugar all over you and the lawyer you’re transmitting the fantastic facts of your childhood to yells at the sugarman every few minutes about the time he put turmeric on the rocks and whether it’s white or brown sugar that stinks the place up. Is this retelling of yours a banishment process? Is this why we cherish the raunchy baths and housesitting for your fancy clients and Greyhound buses and vintage lingerie and certain holes in the wall doomed to immanent closure and Tarkovsky and Fanny and Alexander and all of the music and your fondness for old men and my preference for memory loops?I’m sat on a stool next to the pinball machine and J’s playing like a high school kid. Daytime tipsy from the glass of rose I finished outside in the sun, we’re inside looking for a distraction in the hopes that she might be able to make it through the last band if I can crack her boredom for a little bit. I keep passing her dollars, feeling like one of Belmondo’s girlfriends as I absentmindedly follow the fat ball, wondering when my child learned how to play pinball and how she ascertained that it requires a little swagger. There’s a guy djing between the bands and I notice that I’m no longer watching the articulation of tiny hands, but staring somewhere into space trying to grab at what this song is and how I know it. A repetitive fast snare against a warm guitar riff that turns over and over and over on itself, then that Dylan-y voice drops in and talks its way from the top to the bottom of this thing that’s both totally simple and studied as fuck, bubbling over with what would have been all the right references and obsessions of its time and just as the beards and the hair and the suits come into focus I place who it is and slap into a wall of memories I try to push aside. As a diversionary tactic, I recall instead your stories of hanging out one long summer with these guys, and how you opening up to me with that story, so out of keeping with the prim, uptight European strangeness you’d kept me at a distance with since I’d moved in, changed our interactions. I knew about these guys, you knew them, so now we knew something different about each other. A tiny play that would be repeated in so many other stitches and folds of experiential overlap in the years to come.

I wonder if you remember how we used to crack up every time we saw that Damned album where they’re all covered in shaving cream or whatever it is? Tucked in the piano all the way to the right? I don’t remember either one of us ever playing it, but wasn’t it the only thing we saved when we went back to rummage through the Pompei of their little garage apartment? After they took off for Russia and just never came back? Why was it so funny? Why doesn’t this fade? I don’t know, but that seems important now, those absurd little tiny elations of recognition. Spontaneous laughter being one of the few measures of genuine connection and memory proof that i haven’t just. Made it all up.