RAW THOUGHTS 7.29.25- My life on East Fourth

i'm a climber.

it's what i do. i need to climb all over the place, i need to explore, i need to pry and prod. i'm just a very inquisitive person by nature.

back when i was a kid, my dad worked part time at a russian nightclub in sheepshead bay. during rehearsals, which i would have to go to whenever we couldn't afford a babysitter(which was often when you have a record store employee and a trombonists salary to play with), i would climb all over the stage. the russians would call me chief climbing spider, which is... benevolent racism, i suppose. i had a crush on one of the singers. so did my dad. she was bad, though soooo...

even earlier than that, i'm spotted climbing on tables and running around. my mom is exasperated. we're at the american indian community house, which at the time was located on lafayette and fourth. right across from tower records. that block is the nexus of my universe. one of the elders pulls her aside and tells her "he is trying to find his way through the world and make sense of it", and that mollifies her. in so many ways i still am that child, grasping and claiming to gain some sense of understanding.

i wish i had other memories of the community house. i only have that anecdote and faint memories of being scared of the ghost dancers. the community house itself would move from lafayette st to chelsea and then to orchard st on the lower east side. i can appreciate it as a sick metaphor for our displacement. so did my mom.

tower records had long since been erased from that corner. reduced to anecdotes, merch and incomplete documentaries. in the past two paragraphs i count three ghosts. hopefully they don't cause the same trepidation i felt as a toddler.

even my personal history with tower records as a store deals with displacement. when i was born, both my parents worked there, with my mom as the manager of the classical section. im sure being able to speak conversational german was a point in her favor. yet another situation caused by the intersection of racial identity and class drift. by the time i was five or six she was exiled to the tower annex. it wasn't in the main building that everyone remembers so fondly, but rather some two or three story nothing across lafayette. i think its an nyu dorm now but then again so is everything below 14th st.

what i hated the most about that is that i couldn't climb anything! tower had so many stairs! every time i went there it was like a brand new adventure where there was always something exciting and interesting to see! every time i left the break room where i was conceived a new journey was always afoot!

as stupid as it sounds this is probably the first time that a random circumstance of the universe caused me to be stifled. i had no new terrains to explore as i was cut off.

looking back i know she felt the same way. working hard just to move sideways. going through a series of doors and passages just to end up back at the same lobby. ironically she was obsessed with ikea.

as an adult i returned to the same block, not as a tagalong but for money. what little was being doled out anyway. the journey through the world of bougie brooklyn retail that had slowly driven me to suicidal ideation had also driven me to drink. my browser tabs around that time were various types of rum(haitian being my favorite), random uniqlo collabs and apartment listings in the twin cities. just to get a sense of the market. i applied for a random job that offered the lure of fully paid sommelier courses after a year. it happened to be right at the end of thar block that was so formative to me so i kinda had to take it. so that's what my plan was. to become so good at drinking that i could get paid tell people what was good. pay was less than i was making at the time but i had a plan for the first time in a while.

first was the trump wine tariffs. trumps attempt to get people to buy american i suppose. there was a small boost in business with people trying to buy up as much burgundy or bordeaux as they could before the tariffs came into effect... whenever that was. which kind of tapered off because everyone realized there wasn't really a specific date that they were going to kick in. it was always kind of up in the air like the tariffs he's pushing through now. the store was still doing well, though. i met kyle maclachlan at a tasting he was doing for his winery based out of washington. i felt like if i stuck with this for a bit longer i could make some moves.

then the world closed down.

the streets were empty. as in completely empty. the trains were full of homeless people, which... best of love. i'm not going to judge them they've been through enough. delancey street on the f didn't smell like piss, which was shocking, but there were still fiends. whether rain or sleet or snow, i suppose.

my job became a warehouse, shut off to the outside for months. shipping booze out to people who had the luxury of remote work. the police state clamped down and people forsook their cabin fever to take to the streets. the george floyd incident happened and i reached out to my minneapolis connect, who was worried because the louis store right by me got robbed. as well as the drinking. both of us were going harder with lockdown in effect. somehow my bloodwork was even cleaner when i managed to get my annual checkup.

days were monotonous. grabbing bottles of wine for people who would clap for me from the windows of million dollar coops, stacking them in piles that wouldn't even shift for two weeks. over and over for nine hours. the japanese coffee place on 9th held me down as well as the h mart, which was bereft of life. asians caught it bad at the beginning of covid so i always tried to be nice to them.

when you're in the middle of something it seems endless.

on my way home one night, check my socials. see someone yell at me, we'll peace it up eventually. a minute later i see that one dynamic shifted kind of out of nowhere. bit shocked, honestly. the bandaid still wasn't quite ready to come off. kind of fun though. i drink a coke and rum and try to get some sleep.

the world eventually opens up again. i get some stimulus money and... i guess some sneakers. my check is the same, the prices aren't. the hours sure as fuck aren't. by the time i qualify for the free wset courses it's talking two checks just to make my rent and business is slowing down. not to mention there's still weird covid rules everywhere and none of them actually match up. kinda weird doing tastings if you don’t know when and where to mask. hours are getting cut and i have no savings. my credit cards get jacked up just to maintain. i cant spare taking off any time to improve my lot in life, which was the reason why i took this job in the first place.

having a discount on alcohol when you're dealing with depression is probably not good. it's educational. i know i have a taste for austrian reds, specifically sankt laurent. i like a good rkatsiteli. i now prefer spanish brandy to cognac, though i put a good armagnac over both. but its not healthy.

time was cut. the stock person from coop city i used to talk about bond movies and 2000s indie rock with was cut. the cute assistant buyer that would flirt with me and who was legitimately touched when i got her that red carhartt hat for secret santa because i remembered a random conversation we had a year ago was cut. getting chewed out for overtime i couldn't even get because half the staff was forced to leave early. this was my reality at the nexus of my universe.

i'm no longer there. i made it out. i still pop in from time to time for a pet nat or something even though they finally stopped giving me a discount. every time you get ahead a little it gets snatched back doesn't it?

i still find myself on that block at least once or twice a week. i'm drawn to it. what was once the best major record store on the east coast is now a blink gym and... nothing. the broadway entrance i knew so well when i was a kid was turned into the mlb studios, then some web show studio and now it's nothing. occasionally you'll see a guy selling photo prints there some afternoons.

whenever i think of tower i think of one story my mom told me when i was a teenager.

so famous people used to buy shit there all the time. keith richards asked her for a cigarette once. of course being british you can guess which word he used. one day john lydon comes in to buy some cds. an old punk herself, mom recognizes him immediately.

she says, "hey i used to see you at cbgb when you were a sex pistol", to which he replies "you cahnt be old enough". she admits she was underage at the time to which john replies "oi guess yew were a nau'hy lil girl den!"

kinda noncey, to be honest. but that was tower records. those type of interactions. that was new york.

and now it's just ghosts.