I Moved from Anonymous Man by Michael Gordon & The Crossing

I moved into the second floor of an abandoned factory at 22 Desbrosses Street in the fall of ‘81. The door had been left open. The landlord circumvented New York law by renting out commercial warehouse space to artists looking for a place to live and work.

Outside the streets were dark and desolate. The windows rattled from the cold and rain. The loft was piled high with trash. I called the landlord, Mister K, but no success. The building had been occupied by the Romanoff Caviar Company. The floors of my loft had been covered with waves of undulating concrete. There were drains every six feet. I bought the Reader’s Digest Complete Do It Yourself Manual, which had a lot of practical information on building walls and things like that.

I was playing in a band called Peter and the Girlfriends. Peter was a girl who sang. The Girlfriends were a bunch of guys who played guitars and drums. We rehearsed on Desbrosses Street at night at full volume, making all the noise we liked. Then we’d plaster the town with posters for our show and end up at the Market Diner. I was in graduate school at the time and had a job at a furniture store which sold porch swings in Manhattan. A professor from Mississippi, on his Sabbatical year, brought up truckloads of porch swings and hired me to run his store.

• Experimental
• New York