The main thing I remember about that day was the color gray, not cold, hard gray like steel, but soft, warm gray like a cloudy sky during a summer rain. I had walked over to a building we called the Grange. A large, gray, boxy building, it was, perhaps, a ten or fifteen minute walk from my home. Public concern about adolescents changes with the regularity of bad fashions and fad diets. That year, they were concerned about teenage idleness, about kids “hanging out” on the street. So the made a room for teenagers in the back of the Grange with pool tables and easy chairs with the intention of keeping us out of trouble no one was getting into anyway. At twelve, I technically wasn’t a teenager, but my older sister was and she said that no one checked anyone’s age. She encouraged me to stop by. The door to the room was at the back of the building and I was walking down the black top driveway that circled the building when it started to rain. It was a mild summer day and the rain felt good on my face. I paused momentarily with my back to the door, lifted my head towards the sky and enjoyed the feeling of the rain on my skin.

My reverie was interrupted by the door bursting open. “What the hell are you doing?” It was my sister. She grabbed me by my shirt and pulled me inside.

“I liked the feel of the rain.”

“People are going to think you’re a fucking freakazoid. Don’t do that again.”

I was always feeling like a freak. Still do. I looked around the room. There were older boys I didn’t know playing pool. I felt my face flush, but I didn’t know why. I wanted to stare at them, but I didn’t want them to know. I sunk into a chair and tried to fit in.

The stage name Picasso Kid gave himself was far better than any moniker I could bestow on him, however I’ll call him the Picasso Kid. His nose had very visibly been broken and bent to the side and one day I remarked to my boyfriend that he looked like a cubist painting. My boyfriend thought that was funny.

One of the professors at school called my boyfriend Stoneface because he was always so impassive, his face never registering any emotion. He graduated, I dropped out, and we moved to a crummy basement apartment in Brooklyn, back when Brooklyn wasn’t trendy. There wasn’t a whole lot in Brooklyn in those days, at least not for us. We lived in an ethnic neighborhood of an ethnicity to which neither of us could lay claim. Quite a feat when I think of the long, and meaningless, list I’ve got.

Stoneface and I were in Barnes and Nobles on Fifth Avenue. I was the bigger reader between the two of us, so it was probably I who had wanted to go there. The site of something on a shelf pulled him away from my side. I didn’t take note because generally, you don’t browse in a bookstore like a pair of conjoined twins. “Come over here. Look at this,” he called from another aisle. When I got to his side, he was holding open a squat, thick book. It was a history of punk music. He showed me a page where the Picasso Kid and the band he had back in the seventies were mentioned.

Most of what I know about the Picasso Kid comes second, and even third, hand. He and my boyfriend were friends and we had a few other common acquaintances, but he hated me. We’d all gone to the same college. It was a small liberal arts school and the vast majority of the people came straight out of high school.  Also, many of the students were rich. The Picasso Kid was a poor boy from the Bronx, and he was older than the rest of us. It was only by a few years, but the student body was so homogenous he stood out. One of his band mates, not the band from the seventies, but the one he was in at that time, in the early eighties, wanted to go to college and found out about a scholarship program for significantly disadvantaged New Yorkers. A semester later, the Picasso Kid followed.

He didn’t last very long, then again he didn’t exactly come for the education. A large part of his motivation was to get out of New York City, to remove himself from the environment he’d gotten used to, specifically, the Bowery. The Picasso Kid was a junkie and he was trying to quit. He had started back when he was fourteen and in a band that often played at CBGB’s way back when. After a semester, he’d fail, and return to the city. He and Stoneface would stay in touch.

Now, Stoneface and I were looking for an apartment. A few weeks earlier, on New Years Eve, we’d gone out in the East Village. The Picasso Kid passed by on the sidewalk. He came in and we had a few drinks. Strange night. It wasn’t exactly festive, but it wasn’t bad either. Later, Stoneface would tell me that he’d been talking about getting cleaned up again. Apparently, he’d hit a low point, or more like the lowest point in a series of low points. He had hocked his guitar. So, I would say to Stoneface, while we were looking, why don’t we let the Picasso Kid live with us for a time.

“You know, he hates you,” Stoneface said to me.

“He barely knows me,” I replied, although I’d gotten that feeling. “It doesn’t really matter. Ask him.”

Stoneface told me about a day a few years earlier, when we were all in school but he and I hadn’t yet met. He and the Picasso Kid were sitting in a couple of easy chairs outside the cafeteria. In fact Stoneface could often be found there, watching everybody impassively. I walked through the room. After I had passed by, the Picasso Kid turned to Stoneface and said, “That’s the kind of stuck-up girl who wouldn’t give guys like us the time of day.” Obviously, he had missed judged me since I was now dating one of them, but I was used to people misjudging me if they were judging by appearances. The Picasso Kid didn’t really hate me, he hated the person he thought I was because of the way I looked.

Stoneface grew up with his father in a housing project on the Lower East Side. For many years, his mother lived on East First. His parents met through the Catholic Worker located on the same block. Near by, at the corner of First and First, there was a bar, a low-key place where you could actually talk. We sat on one side of a table. The Picasso Kid faced us from the other. He was intently picking the label off of a beer bottle. Stoneface laid out our offer for him to live with us. He stopped picking at the label. “What does she think of it?” he asked, addressing Stoneface instead of me.

“It was her idea.”

The Picasso Kid pressed his lips together and resumed picking at the label. “I’ll think about it.”

Stoneface had insisted on one condition that I had to admit was reasonable. He told the Picasso Kid that he had to promise not to get high in the apartment. He had said, “I want to help you, but I don’t want to come home one day and find a dead guy in the apartment.” In the end, that condition would prove to be a barrier. He just couldn’t promise that. I’ve got to give him credit for honesty.

After having his glasses broken in a shelter, he took to sleeping on park benches when the weather allowed it. He seemed to be going from bad to worse and we didn’t hear from him for a time. Then, he contacted Stoneface and they met someplace in the Village. One day, when he’d been sleeping in Washington Square Park, he woke up to find a beautiful young woman gazing intently at him. She said to him, “I know inside you’re a beautiful person.” She took the Picasso Kid home and he got cleaned up. It sounds like a fairy tale. I never heard about him again, but I hope it lasted. I think the young woman was right.

Last night, my mother, my sister and I watched a documentary entitled A Band Called Death. It’s about three brothers who had a band back in the mid-seventies that went, essentially, nowhere, but has since been rediscovered. Music is such a chancy business that it’s always hard to lay a finger on why a band may have not made it, however, it’s hard to deny the difficulty black rock musicians have had. A person can’t say for sure that the fact that the brothers were African-American was the reason they didn’t succeed, but it must be considered as a possible factor.

A small detail in the movie brought me back to my young adulthood. Several prominent musicians are interviewed. One of those was Vernon Reid, whose band, Living Color, I went to go see several times back in the mid to late eighties. Luscious was a big Vernon Reid fan, as was the man with whom I was living at the time. Thanks to those two, I was aware of Reid before Living Color had released their first album. I remember my boyfriend running out to buy soon after it was released. A week or so later, I went over to see Luscious and she said, “Guess what I have….” and slapped it down on the turntable. Vernon Reid, if my memory serves me correctly, was one of the founders of an organization called The Black Rock Coalition. Luscious took me to several shows that had been sponsored by them, at least a couple of which occurred at CBGB’s.

Somehow, all this free association led me back to the evening I met Luscious.

The cafe was one of Stone’s favorites. A bit dark, a couple of steps down, with brick walls, small black tables and bent wood chairs, I’d been there at least a couple of times before. So when Stone told me that he wanted to meet there I knew where it was. It was a pain to get to, a twenty-minute subway ride and a walk across town. Trying to get closer by mass transit took even longer. So here I am, over twenty years later making the same excuse I did that night for being late. I confess, I’m almost always late, not fashionably late, but embarrassingly late.

Stone and his friend were already seated and had beers in front of them when I arrived. The food was modestly priced. It was a good place for a light bite and some drinks, or maybe just the drinks if you actually wanted to talk. The place was almost always busy and there was the buzz of conversation in the air, but it was cafe loud, not bar loud. I sat down and Stone caught the eye of the waitress and mimed that he wanted a third beer like the two that were already on the table. He’d asked me to come specifically to meet his friend from the radio station, but I hadn’t yet gotten a chance to pay attention to her when the waitress arrived.

“I love watching this woman pour beer,” Stone said as the woman approached, beer in one hand, glass in the other.

She was a little taller than average and a little curvier than average. She arrived at the table and put her weight on her right leg, her right hip jutting towards the table. The contrapposto of her stance emphasized her waist and brought her right breast toward her hip. With the crook in her elbow, which almost rested on her hip, her torso was an aesthetically appealing series of curves. She set the glass down on the table with firm clunk. She turned the bottle over as if she was following the curve of her body, with her thumb over her palm, the opposite of the way most people pour. Stone watched the performance with an intensity that just fell short of the point at which it might be embarrassing. My eye darted towards the friend. Luscious seemed equally transfixed by this hip thrusting, breast heaving, beer pouring performance.

Finally, I got a chance to turn my attention to Luscious herself. During the preceding week or two, I’d been told over and over, “You gotta meet her. You gotta meet her.” So here she was. Cool. Dark. Thin. Angular. If you took a caricature of a rock star and crossed it with a caricature of a fashion model that a rock star might date, you’d get Luscious.

Twenty-five years later, I can no longer recall the content of the conversation, but something I said triggered a warm response in the cool bitch. I think it had something to do with rock-and-roll. Soon, she was animated, squeezing my hand for emphasis, drumming on the table to make a point.

We’d met at an odd hour. That was because Stone worked nights. While Luscious and I were ordering more beer, Stone was slowing down and sobering up. Finally, he had to go. He threw down a wad of bills saying, “I think this should cover it.” Meanwhile, Luscious was still squeezing my hand talking animatedly. I don’t pretend to know anything about music, but I’ll listen eagerly.

We drank more and we drank more. Back then, when I went out at night, I’d keep a twenty in my shoe just in case it got too late and I needed cab fare home. Perhaps it was the only time I did this, but I took the twenty out of my shoe and drank it. Luscious and I stayed and talked and talked until the cafe closed and it was time to go home.

Now, cab fare gone, I had to trudge back across town to the subway. We were on a side street, a quiet side street, about as deserted as a city can be at about one or two in the morning. Luscious was wearing what I would eventually learn was nearly a uniform for her, jeans and a black tank top. Me, well, I can’t remember what was above the waist, but below the waist I was wearing a black and white striped cotton/spandex mini-skirt. I wore a lot of cotton/spandex in those days, and that black and white striped skirt was one of my favorites. Cotton spandex was a blessing for a gal like me. As long as you had a tight body, you could look simultaneously hot and cool on a tight budget.

Silently, a group of boys slid up behind us. I glanced over my shoulder briefly and continued walking forward. Suddenly, I felt a pinch on my ass. I swung around. “Hey!”

“What did he do?” Luscious shouted.

“He pinched my ass.”

With the suddenness of a striking snake, her leg extended with her big, god knows what size, foot at the end. The boy grabbed his groin. His friends turned and ran, the culprit hobbling behind.

“I’ve got better aim than I thought,” Luscious said.

Now, boys, you may have suspected that women have a secret language, a sort of code made up of nudges, raised eyebrows, pursed lips and eye rolls, that they employ when they go out in groups in the evening. If you have ever suspected this you would be half right, half because in my experience only a portion of women actually understand this language. However, in my life I’ve been fortunate to know two women highly fluent in this language.

The day was overcast and the sky was a uniform gray as evening approached. We exited the subway and headed east, as did everyone who emerged from the station with us. Behind us was the downtown business district. Even today, the business district is a ghost town on weekends and evenings. Back in the late eighties it was even more deserted, if that can be believed. We, like the few other figures on the street, were headed to the old seaport, which had been renovated a few years earlier and now housed some restaurants and bars. A shopping mall had been built onto a pier. My friend, Luscious, and I were headed there to hear David Johansen in his Buster Poindexter phase. We got there early with the intention of getting a bite to eat accompanied by a sufficient quantity of beer to render ourselves comfortable.

Walking along the cobblestones of the half-dozen historically preserved blocks with their touristically inoffensive establishments Luscious said to me, “I’m remembering why we never come down here.” Finally, at the last block, we shrugged and walked inside a place that served overpriced burgers. A table full of guys waved us over, bought us a couple of beers and offered to share their bar food. After about a half an hour or so, the guys were getting a bit too comfortable, smiling more broadly and asking more questions. Luscious nudged my heel with her toe; it was time to go.

We emerged once again into the light. We hadn’t had nearly enough beer, but now it was too late to find another place, if there even was one nearby. We headed over to the open area of the pier. A stage was set up at the far end. We were early and a loose group was milling about.

I guess it was a good performance. Luscious had never seen David Johansen perform. I had, back when he was performing under his own name. If I had to name a handful of moments that have shaped my taste in music, seeing Johansen perform when I was fourteen or fifteen would be one of them. My expectations that night nearly a decade later were far too high. After the show, I was antsy in the way one is when one is pleased but not fully satisfied. When Luscious said to me, “Let’s see if we can find a bar,” I nodded my assent.

Seeing as we had already walked by, and passed, most of the places along the street, she suggested we wander into the shopping mall built on the pier. We were barely five feet inside the door when we were hailed by a man with a lilt to his voice. Did we know, perhaps, if there was a pub or something of that nature nearby? We informed the man and his friends that we did not know but we ourselves were in search of just that. Another good-naturedly informed us that yet another one of their number was getting married the next day and they were looking to celebrate. Would we care to join them?

I hesitated. My stereotypes of male behavior included some very, very bad behavior on the eves of weddings. Luscious, with her unerring ability to sense free beer, locked her arm in mine, forcing me a few steps forward. “Shall we look for a place together then?” she said genially. Without my six-foot tall back-up, I would have never gone forward.

Soon we spied a restaurant that had a bar. One of the men expressed pleasure that the place appeared to serve Guinness. Still unsure, I muttered under my breath quietly so that only Luscious could hear, “I thought you hated Guinness.”

“But I like free.” She whispered in my ear.

The men, it turned out, were four Irishmen and an American of Irish parents who was a relative of the bridegroom. The men bought beers all around. And more. And more. Enough that I began to decline. Luscious patted me on the head, “Little person,” she teased as she continued to accept more drinks. We were I quite thoroughly sloshed when the bridegroom asked with the sincerity of the truly drunk, “Should I get married tomorrow?”

Luscious, as only I knew, was a true romantic deep down. “Are you in love?” She asked with a breezy expectation of hearing an affirmative response.

“She’s a nice girl.”

“Then you shouldn’t get married,” Luscious said decisively.

“But he has to,” the American one insisted.

Luscious and I had had enough girl-to-girl conversations about love, men and marriage that I knew that, to her, marrying without love was on par with matricide. “Clearly,” she said, her typical imperiousness enhanced by inebriation, “he doesn’t feel comfortable with the idea of getting married or he wouldn’t have brought it up! Why on earth would he have to get married if he doesn’t want to.”

“Because he needs to stay in the U.S.” the American man said, continuing their exchange. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the quietest one, who had stopped drinking along with me, glaring at the American.

“Why would he need to stay in the U.S.?” Luscious challenged.

“Because he’s in the IRA and can’t go back because he’s wanted there.”

The quiet one clapped a hand on the American’s shoulder. He looked me in the eye and smiled, “He’s such a joker.”

I forced a laugh and, for the second time that night, I felt a toe kick my heel. “Well, I think I’ve had far too much to drink,” I said on cue.

“Yes,” the quiet one said, “I think we’ve all had too much.”

“I could have another,” the American said.

“Well, we really should leave you all to celebrate alone,” Luscious said linking her arm in mine again and pulling me onto my feet. “I really need to get her home.” We left quickly. I can’t recall that we even took the time to say thank you.

When we got out on the street, Luscious and I agreed that it wasn’t the claim that was scary, it was the denial. We found a cab easily, which was a nice change of pace, especially considering how utterly smashed we both were. We sunk into the seat. “I hate Guinness,” she said. Considering how much beer she had poured down her gullet that night, I don’t think the brand mattered. She rolled down the window. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said softly.

The cab swerved over to the curb and came to a screeching halt. “Not in my cab! Out! Out!”

We stumbled out of the cab near City Hall. Luscious didn’t get sick. In all the time I knew her, I never saw her get sick, although I’ve never seen anyone else drink quite the way she could. “Walk with me a little,” she said leaning on me. This was something of a roll reversal for us.

“Will you always be my friend?” She pleaded, stroking my hair like I was a pet. “I need you.”

We sat down on a bench and she hugged me and stroked me and held my hand. “You’re so important to me. I feel like you’re a part of me in a way. Even when you’re not around I find myself thinking of you. Something happens and I think to myself, what would the Kid say about this.”

She continued to squeeze my hand and get sloppy and sentimental. I let her talk until she was worn out, then got us another cab. From that night on, our friendship was altered. As long as she was sober, she would act as if we were just friends, but after enough liquor, she would begin to get oddly affectionate.