Category: Photography (Page 6 of 7)

It didn’t take Marc long to figure out secret of living in the city.  “New York is theater,” he would say, from his studio on East 43rd Street.   “You leave your apartment and enter stage right.  No one cares about YOU. You are the role you play.  Either it is assigned against your will, or you create it with your own hands, like a special piece of Play-doh.”

And Marc certainly made myself.   He asked for no help.  He was taught by his hard-working parents never to ask for a hand-out.   It was his parents who built “The Gaucho House” from scratch — the first faux Argentine steakhouse ever seen in the Buffalo area.  Yes, Marc ran from home as fast as possible, at the age of seventeen, but he always respected the self-sufficiency of his parents.

It was in this spirit of kinship that Marc became his own guide.  He devised a look that intimidated and a way of speaking that invited envy.   And when introduced to others at parties, he would say his name was — Markk.

Growing up in Queens, Lien dreamed of one day having a wedding in her favorite spot in the New York – the manicured French Conservatory Garden in Central Park.  Under the flowery arches, and before the statues of the two Maidens dancing in the shaded pool, Lien would speak her vows of love and companionship to the man who would be her husband.

Lien’s two young sisters, Amy and Grace, were intelligent and deserving women, and Lien was proud of her role in guiding them to maturity. But attending their double weddings this afternoon, in the very spot she had yet to stand, dressed in black like the spinster she had become, felt like two sharpened knives thrust into her chest.

He sat in the back of the van for the rest of the morning, not to avoid traffic, but to be seen. By his neighbors. By the suckers off to their jobs at the banks and brokerage firms, slaving for hours and always dying at fifty. By their snooty kids off to their private schools with the French names. By the too-thin wives stuck at home, bored, giving off that ‘please, fuck me” vibe whenever he’d be over fixing their sink. He was out of this town, and he wanted everyone to know. Goodbye, New York City.

“I don’t care about “making” it here.  That’s fool’s gold,” he yelled at a passing neighbor, the depressing guy who lived in apartment 3D.   “I’m off to Nebraska.”