Dreams of the Early 90s

If I had a time machine, I'd go back and spy on late-20s, newly divorced me.

I can’t find photos of myself from my late 20s, and I wish I could. But here’s early 30s Sari.

Sometimes I have dreams about the years just after I left my first marriage. These dreams are neither happy nor sad. In them, I seem to be trying to figure some things out, like a way to go about life differently. It’s as if my mind is reviewing the story of my past and suggesting narrative edits.

It’s not surprising, I guess, since in my waking hours I often wish I’d made different choices then—Why the rush to find another long-term relationship? Why the exhausting, self-defeating campaigns to land noncommittal men? Why so much emphasis on all of that when I was finally back in New York City, where I had the opportunity to pursue my goals of returning to arts writing, and establishing myself as writer-writer, of fiction and personal essays?

This is a Google Maps photo of 111 West 74th Street, where I lived in apartment #BF, basement front, from September, 1992 until September, 1993. My apartment is to the right of the first door, with the bars on it, and an AC unit at bottom right.

A lot of those dreams take place in my first apartment after getting separated, a small, ground-floor studio at 111 West 74th Street, two steps down from the street. I’d settled on it after an incredible (although weirdly-shaped) studio at The Ansonia fell through. So much happened in that 400 square-foot space between September, ‘92 and September, ‘93—formative experiences of my young adulthood.

I find myself looking back and wishing I’d gone about it all differently. I’m happy with where it all ultimately led me, to the life I’m living now. Still, I have regrets about how haphazardly I approached life, how I squandered those years, beginning when I was a few months shy of 27.

***

I wish I had photos to show you (and me) from that time. I’m weirdly nostalgic for those days in my late 20s, even though they weren’t particularly happy days. I’d just like to look back at some images of myself then, to maybe understand myself better through visual clues. I wish I could somehow enter 111 West 74th Street through that Google Maps photo of the building above, slip through the front door or my window, and travel back 33 years to spy on late 20s Sari.

In the early 90s there were no cellphones yet, let alone cellphones with cameras, and there weren’t digital cameras. I had a Pentax K1000 analogue SLR that I used for photography classes at International Center for Photography. But although I occasionally took pictures of friends for my weekly assignments (like the one below of my old pal Peter and his dog Sophie), for the most part I was just looking for a way to illustrate my own stories as a journalist—to develop a new skill that would make me more of an asset in my field.

Peter and Sophie in 1993.

I dated a photographer in ‘93/’94, and while we were together he shot some photos of me. But even though we remain friendly, I’m uncomfortable asking to see them, assuming he even still has any. I suppose I’m afraid those photos might not be flattering.

***

My departure from my marriage began with a terrible conversation on August 9th, 1992, at the end of which, my ex terrified me by punching a wall and putting his hand through it. He was angry that I’d finally brought up what had been bubbling up beneath the surface and causing so much tension: my unhappiness, my need for space, my hope that we’d go to couples therapy.

It was a conversation I’d been putting off for months, and now viscerally could no longer avoid. The truth seemed to be fighting its way out of my body. For so long I’d been pausing and thinking for a minute or two before I uttered a single thought, for fear of what might come out of my mouth. His reaction let me know I’d been right to be afraid.

A part of me had broken, though, the part of me that could fake contentedness. Something had to give, and it finally did. It had been a long time coming.

***

A year before, in August of ‘91, after an airline lost his luggage on a return flight from a business trip, my ex went missing for several hours. He’d called from a payphone around 8pm to say he was dealing with the lost luggage at baggage claim, and he promised to call again once it all got sorted. But then he didn’t call again. There were no more calls.

His father, who worked with him, kept calling our apartment to see if I’d heard from him again, or if he’d shown up. When it got to be 10:30 and my ex was still unaccounted for, his father decided to drive various routes between LaGuardia and our Long Island apartment, to see if he might be in distress on the side of the road. At midnight his father came to our apartment, alone. At 12:30am, my mother and stepfather arrived. Together we paced the apartment, and waited for some dreadful call.

When my ex finally arrived home at 2:30am, sloppy-drunk, he told me, snottily, that he’d been out at a bar with a flight attendant whose luggage had also been lost. He said this not knowing his father and my parents were within earshot in our bedroom, overhearing him slurring his words and being nasty toward me. His father gave him shit about it, and then, after everyone else left, my ex gave me shit for the array of parents he’d found in our place, even though I hadn’t asked for any of them to come.

He was annoyed that I was upset, so I simply decided to not be upset. I did what I always used to: I froze, then tried to pretend it hadn’t happened—just as I had the two times I found condoms on him, a birth control method we’d never used since throughout our relationship I was on the pill to treat my endometriosis.

For a few months after The Stewardess Incident I was able to hold it together and pretend. But then, in January of 1992, my ex went on a three-week business trip, and wouldn’t tell me what hotels he’d be staying at, so that I might reach him if I needed to. No, he’d call me, as per usual, when he had time. He traveled about half the year, but usually a week or less at a time. A three-week clip was much longer than we’d ever been apart.

In that time, I had something resembling a nervous breakdown. I sunk into a deep depression, rarely showering or leaving our apartment. The reality I’d been suppressing threatened to enter my consciousness. Not knowing what to do with that information—desperately wishing I didn’t have to do anything with it—I put myself in a dark, stagnant place, a cocoon I hoped I’d never need to emerge from. Being depressed felt safer than being angry, or making any kind of move that might upend my life.

***

A few friends begged me to find a therapist, and eventually I did—in the city. I wanted to have a reason to travel to Manhattan again, and there, in my new shrink’s West 56th Street office, the truth began to spill out of me. Not at my first appointment; that day I outright lied, to my therapist and to myself, and said that the only good thing in my life was my marriage.

But over time I started to face up to reality. With each 55-minute session (for which I traveled over two hours roundtrip, on the LIRR and subway), I revealed more. The more I unloaded on the therapy couch, the less I could hide from myself and my ex at home.

That sparked an incredibly uncomfortable seven or eight months between us. I found it harder and harder to front. I didn’t know how to disagree or stand up for myself in a way that wasn’t harsh or explosive. In hindsight, after so much hiding and managing my emotions, maybe that was for the best.

I know that what it led to was for the best. But I still feel bad about the way I handled myself. I wasn’t the best version of me. Then again, at 26-and-change, who is?

***

What was good about those early city days was how much I loved living there. I walked or jogged through Central Park most mornings. I went all the time to movies and museums, and now and then to events I got to cover at Lincoln Center. I liked to bring a book to Cafe La Fortuna, on West 71st Street, or Cafe Mozart on West 70th, and drink cappuccinos while I read and people-watched with classical music playing in the background. I spent way too much money eating out at restaurants, and taking out from them, too. But the sheer number of choices—places to go, things to eat, culture to inhale, people to observe—it all made me feel alive in a way I hadn't in my “starter marriage” on Long Island.

I went back to working in a newsroom after a few years of freelancing from home in Long Beach, and that also gave me life. I miss newsrooms, filled with smart people buzzing about, all working together to put out the next day’s paper.

Every day there was so much for me to discover in my new world, at work, and at play. When presented options, I often chose wrong, especially when it came to men. There were many elusive ones, who went in and out of my life erratically—and dramatically. So much drama in those days. Through all that relationship chaos, I came to think of the city itself as something like my significant other.

***

Sometimes I reflect back to a night when I was newly settled in on West 74th Street. Now 27, I was adjusting to being single after having married my college sweetheart, the second man I’d ever dated.

I had no idea how to behave like an unattached person. I’d been attached, to one of two boyfriends, since I was 15. In an effort to start feeling less awkward about it, I took myself out to Bear Bar on Amsterdam Avenue. I sat on a stool, nursing a grapefruit-and-seltzer, while observing the people around me as they effortlessly kibbitzed and flirted with one another.

Would I ever be able to socialize the way they did, I wondered, with such ease? Would I ever be comfortable as a single woman, alone at a bar? Or would I always feel more like an anthropologist in such situations?