"Rugged is too mild a word..."
“New York City was totally bankrupt,” says Kevin, over his
rectangular glasses, recalling the late 1970’s. He is my father’s cousin, my
third cousin. He begins the interview by describe the state of delipidation New
York City had fallen into when himself, my Aunt Keelin, my Uncle John and my
desceased uncle Colin relocated there from Western Washing. Colin moved here
before any of the other Currans. Kevin estimates 1976 at age 18 or 19.
Colin Curran
Just the
other day I visited Kevin Curran’s daughter Sophia, who found a cheap rental in
the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The Brownstone she lives in is beat
up, exposed wooden ribs and slanted skinny stairs make the compromise of an
interior. It is just the place for us, acquaintance second cousins, with our
green eyes and imaginations. She takes me near her bedroom window in the
morning and shows me the boxes of things that had been left from the past
tenant.
Coney Island
Sophia Curran
“I am
obsessed with dead peoples things,” Sophia said. I smiled, very aware of our
common trait. Shelves of books towered to the crown molding. Hand-me-down
furniture yawned. Repossessed possessions enveloped us. This afternoon I was
going to go to Coney Island alone to witness the wintering amusement park in
shambles after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.
Sophia gave
me a lesson about using her 35 mm camera. After feeling the old light meter
shift and focus turn, I took her portrait in the room. Black and white film,
soft window light, just the face, Curran girl to Curran girl, the image was
captured. She traded places with me and exclaimed behind the lens-
“It’s
beautiful! The lighting is beautiful here.”
I was only hoping that our
portraits of each other would match the one I’d seen all of my life. Keelin’s
portrait of Colin. I want his New York eyes to seep out of ours and ignite or
world with heritage. I want to give our families the gift the reminders and the
echoes of our blood. Our morning portraits are stories of how Sophia and I have
met in this city in the rippling of the 1970’s, of poetry, and of Colin
Curran’s suicide.
“I think
Colin loved New York,” Sophia’s father, Kevin, tells me in his kitchen. This is
the first time I have been to New York and the first time I have heard tell of
Colin’s New York years.
“He lived down in the east village,
on East 3rd Street, across from the New York City chapter of the
Hell’s Angels. And he lived on the fifth floor walkup.”
Colin came to the East Coast alone
after graduating high school in Kent and living in San Francisco. He was a
young gay man, nineteen at the oldest, when he settled into his apartment. The
first time he tried to kill himself he jumped from the fifth story of his
building.
“The trees
broke his fall. Limbs broke his fall.”
‘His fall’
has been of mythic proportions to me through my life. How my uncle, my father’s
older brother, could have jumped off of a building, I could never fathom as a
young girl. I imagined it and I still imagine it- what he felt falling. What he
saw. Were his eyes open? What was he wearing? What did he feel when he hit? The second time he attempted suicide, in August
of 1982, Colin was successful. “Because he went up twenty stories,” says Kevin.
Kevin’s voice is a storyteller’s voice. His vocal rhythms and intonations need
to be heard by the ear. He speaks like a poet, like a lawyer, like an honest
man who has witnessed the shifting of New York City by the people who have with
him through it.
Kevin arrived in New York City in
1977. “You felt like you were walking into a- quasi living museum.” He does all
he can to promote my adventurousness while I visit here here. He practically
forces me to get an unlimited metro pass so that I may travel to any corner of
the subway system and not miss any of January 2013 in New York and its
surrounding Burroughs.
“My impression of New York then,
was there was a lot of retail space. Now-, you’ve been all over town- you look at
New York, a lot of it looks brand new, especially in Manhattan. It looks brand
new. All the retail space is gleaming. That wasn’t the case in 1977. The stores
were 20 and 30 years old. Their construction was 20 and 30 and 40 years old.
“A new store would open and all
they would do is paint it. It would be the same construction. So you always
felt like you were walking into the 1940s, the 1950s, in some respect. And then
if you went to Staten Island, you were
virtually, literally were, walking
into the 1950’s, post-war, 1940’s.”
The idea of spaces veneered by
their past interests me. I look into the faces of buildings and wonder how they
have survived the generations. I sense the streets beneath me as currents of a
people’s history. Inside of Kevin’s apartment I smell the air of my family, a
torrid heat taste of garlic, old wood, cold window glass, rain, and the urine
of pagan animals strained through Catholic frankincense. As I have smelled this
smell in every member of my extended family’s houses to some degree, I wonder
if it is the buildings that bring it on. More, I feel it is the Curran
lifestyle of frugalism, kindness, cooking, and the collecting of books and art
that lights the incense of family.
The past is not far from where
Kevin sits, putting his salad on my plate. He is bringing to life the
sensations of a far-gone New York into his century old apartment kitchen.
“I’d go into barbershops,” Kevin
pauses over his salad plate, “and you’d never
see anything like this now. I believe
you wouldn’t see a barber shop like this:
Where all the pictures on the wall
were people that were dead-
Dead film stars, dead singers, or,
if they lived, they were old people- like Frank Sinatra. Many of them were
dead.
This barbershop would be vast, and you’d say, ‘Wow, this was a real barbershop! This appealed to the glitziest of people. And now its just,
its just, dusty, drab, peeling on the walls.’ Those places were all throughout
New York in the 1970’s.”
My Aunt Keelin Curran
Most of the Pete Curran Family
Kevin said there are pictures of my
aunt Keelin, Colin’s older sister who took his portrait, as she tended the
garden of her 83rd avenue apartment. She found her way to this city
with her boyfriend, my uncle John. I like to explore the colony of my family.
Who are we? What is this tangible sensation of inheritance? Who am I when I’m
breathing? Kevin praised me for cleaning his cast-iron pan yesterday. He was
worried I’d used soap and scrubbed the seasoning of the pan. Flavors of his
family’s meals had accumulated on the pan for years. The wooden salad bowl he
used was seasoned as well. The oil tattoos on the kitchenware here played a
huge role in this interview. I felt an entitlement to hearing his stories
because of how I’d honored the flavors of his past.
The talismans, here the cast-iron
and the wooden bowl, cement my concentration. Through the physical world I can
navigate stories of the past. As I prepare to leave for France tomorrow, I
swirl around virtual worlds and Internet spaces. Online images meet, sleep,
dream and dislodge themselves from sensation.
The New York of the 1970’s was
analog.
“Rugged is too mild a word- it was
a tough, gritty, mean…”
He recalls walking home in the
middle of the night having beer bottles thrown at him, breaking at his feet. He
remembers the works of art on the interiors and exteriors of subway trains, the
massive tags of graffiti artists. He remembers people on the street yelling,
“Oh, SHIT!” when they noticed the dog feces they’d stepped it.
“New York began to change in the
80’s I would say. It still had a huge murder rate, cars were getting stolen off
the st constantly- you always heard car alarms. But, the city was changing. You
could feel that they were investing in the Subways. When I first got here buses
were slow, belching black smoke, the subways barely ran- it really felt like
the city was falling apart. So they began to buy new busses, replace many of
the older busses, so you knew that the city was changing. It didn’t have an
impact on the crime rate, really. Rents were still pretty depressed. Real
Estate properties were still pretty depressed. But you could tell that the city
was changing”
Trekking out to Staten Island,
Kevin could leave the riskiness of the city by inhabiting a distant past.
“For all intents and purposes, if
New York is slowed down in development, Staten Island is at a crawl! A
standstill! So you’d get off the subway and it would feel like you just walked
into your dad’s- my dad’s- young
life. Right? It was so weird.
You’d feel like, you’d expect to
see a guy, 20 years old, in a uniform, just released from his last bit in
combat. From World War two. I’m
serious! I mean, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.”
Colin Curran entered New York
alone.
“Think of how much courage!
Chutzpah! Whatever you’d like to call it, to go, by yourself, right? Growing up in this kind of suburban, safe, you
know, bland environment- to come right in the middle of this town at 19.”
Colin’s time was heavy, at times
joyous, teeming with the realities of life, never disassociated from the social
reality of New York City. It must have been. He headed straight into the
rawness of America. The way Kevin describes New York in the 1970’s reminds me
of the way New Orleans is now. The murder rate is America’s highest, the busses
never run on time, the cops can be bribed with cash and the strangers can have
no hesitation in taking out aggression towards others. And yet, my experience
living there for 2012, opened me to the sensuousness and diversity of life. I
imagine Colin had a similar need to be saturated in the belongings of the dead,
in the intoxication of the half-living and in the splendor of those who loved
him.
The
artifacts of the past, the portraits of the present and the cities of the
future now surround me. I recognize myself in Kevin Curran’s children, Turner
and Sophia. I recognize the significance of his choice to father his family in
New York City. I recognize how the Colin’s need to be immersed in and tormented
by life brought him to Manhattan Island during the darkness of the 20th
century.
As the
interview ends, Kevin slips into a rhytm of description. How did we get to be
two Currans eating salad on 80th street?
“Lets say Colin came intrepidly by himself.
Lets say Keelin kind of came cause Colin was here
and also she had a school thing
John came because of Keelin
I came because of John and Keelin
Jeremy K came because of Kevin John and Keelin
Nick came because of graduate school and Kevin John and
Keelin
Vicki came because of Kevin John and Keelin and Jeremy
That kind of thing happened
Everybody Left
Colin died
Everybody else left.
And
I stayed.
We stayed and I’m so happy
I’m happy for my children, that my children were raised in
New York.
I think it’s really colored who they are
I like the people that they are because of the exposure to
New York.”
Central Park, near the full moon.
