She was in New York because her cousin had told her that she knew some people who were looking for singers. She wasn’t a singer, but had a feeling that she might like to be. This was back in those days when it was easier to try things in public, and no one would remember your experiments, so it was possible to grow in outward directions. New York has shifted in many ways since those days, but there are still great luxury hotels here where you can hole up and make some decisions about these kinds of life changes. In those days, the only real improvement over today was in the freedom of choice in expression.
So she was in New York, living in the glory days of Nico, who became a certain kind of role model for her, and a stuttering dream for me. Everything stuttered then, because we were always wide awake and getting wider as the day wore on. My face was usually somewhere tattooed on the inside of her head, and she said she would focus on that, and sing to that. She hadn’t started singing yet, but when she did start, that’s what she was going to do. There weren’t very many of us in those days with our strange combination of genuine heart and deep suspicion.
Or perhaps it’s better to say that everyone in those days had that strange combination. But people of our tribe didn’t talk to each other, because of the mistrust, and that can make it difficult for a tribe to ever get to know their own numbers. For a few short moments, though, she had my number in her brain, and I had hers, and those numbers were the only numbers that would matter. Nico would perform at the Knitting Factory, and when we would go, we would float, close to the bodies we’d been born with.
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