I wait for Lily at the top of concrete steps looking onto what used to be a schoolyard filled with children, now replaced with hipsters in black coats and pea gravel. It is cold and getting colder and the shadows cast by the building behind me isn’t doing my goose bumps any favors. She arrives in white linen pants, brown boots and a daffodil scarf, her hair pulled back, looking like Lily.
It’s hot inside as we thumb through vintage art books with impossible price tags, dog-eared punk zines with three-staple bindings, postcards of people being spanked. It’s hot and people are pushy, which is weird to me because no one should be racing to go anywhere.
The ceilings are tall and the light is good and I think that this must have been a beautiful place to learn at one point in time, back when it was a school and not an auxialary arm of the MoMA. A calming shade of green lives on the walls and the glass doors are tempered in anticipation of unruly elbows and the occasional fist – the inevitable mishaps of youth.
We walk through the halls, buying nothing but wishing we could – dreaming of the day we both make good enough money that we can justify spending $700 on a fourteen-page booklet called “Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations.” When I’m rich, that is what I’ll do, and my brother will call me stupid and I will buy him dinner to shut him up.
On the northwest corner there is a room with views I dream about: big windows looking over the low-lying rooftops of Long Island City to a fairly uninterrupted view of the Manhattan skyline. Light pours in from two walls, bathing tables of Norwegians peddling art books in the amber light of dusk.
There’s another room but it’s filled with too many people who think everything in there is cool and the omnipresent musk of sweat under sweaters is overwhelming. We leave, walking down the seafoam hallways again and stopping at a window overlooking the yard. Below us a group of bodies huddled around a stage with an act that remains out of sight. We listen to beats and watch people move with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Lily and I stand there for the entire set, trying to suss out the sound of the performance from the room noise behind us bouncing off of the glass next to our noses. I watch a boy donning a Pokey mask and a yellow sweater bump in time with the music, his orange horse-head bulky and foreign. A little girl bends her little knees, the shape of her pea coat and the way her body moves rendering her a small ringing bell. And when the set ends, the people clap, their hands fluttering like pigeon wings. The artist is finally revealed from behind, wearing a striped shirt and overalls, his black hair dyed a sour, doll-like yellow.
“I don’t think I can ever move back to Los Angeles,” I say, staring out the window at the collective bodies of strangers. I watch them – everything and everyone moving as though underwater, their motions subtle and removed. This, whatever “this” is, would never happen in LA, not in quite the same way. This impromptu trip to an art book fair, this watching of people from above wearing black and smoking cigarettes and drinking beers on a Sunday afternoon. This constant exposure to other people’s joy and enjoyment. This constantly bearing witness to how strangers live their life in brief, fleeting vignettes. How the watching of it all makes you feel more human. I stand there and feel estranged from my way of life back West, which never felt like living at all. At least not like this.
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