Today Avenue C had French restaurants, shops and galleries, and, near the north end of it, one narrow storefront shop, Liberation, a legendary space (Carter used to see bands play there, swear to god, he told her. “How did they fit?” “They just did”) that sold Sarah Lee’s handmade Christmas cards, along with work from a handful of designers, the kind of stuff Sarah Lee sometimes thought of as art, and sometimes as useless crap: Tshirts screen-printed with outlines of birds or the faces of dictators, zines of poems or snapshots or personal tales of hard times on the road all hand-stapled or sometimes bound by a single extra-thick rubber band, and self-produced CDs made by noise bands from places like Portland and Chapel Hill and Chicago. (Sarah had picked up one of these once and discovered she had slept with the drummer from one of the bands and, blushing and horrified, had immediately shoved it to the bottom of the stack, as if that would prevent anyone from knowing the deep dark secret in her head.)
The owner of Liberation was a man named Travis James Crenshaw, but everyone just called him Doc because he was good with his hands. That’s what he said anyway. It may have also had something to do with his stint as a prescription-drug dealer in the mid-’90s, but he went with the line that was more likely to make the ladies blush. He’d had the store for ten years, and had forty years left on his lease. Rent was five hundred dollars a month, and he slept in a cozy setup in the back of the store, about two hundred square feet, enough for a twin bed and small kitchen. So as long as he sold at least thirty dollars a day (minus what he paid to the artist, always fifty-fifty, that was his motto), and cooked all his own meals, Doc could keep up Liberation forever, or at least for the next forty years.
Plus he drank for free (or on the cheap anyway) at every East Village dive bar, so oftentimes he drank his dinner. The female bartenders in particular liked him because he was still handsome, with his dark eyes that flashed as if warning that he could cause trouble at any moment, balanced by a slender and crafted nose that made him seem important, a decision-maker, a leader. And he was gallant and polite, with a nice, warm southern voice he earned from eighteen years in Savannah, Georgia, as a youth. He would drag himself from bar to bar, around Tompkins Square Park, south of it mainly, Doc making the women smile, working the room. Sometimes Carter would join him—he liked making the rounds of lady bartenders as much as the next guy.
Sarah Lee went out with Doc once, right after the first time she met him. “It’s a business meeting,” he claimed. He was interested in selling some of her work in his store. But Sarah knew most business meetings don’t happen at 9:00 PM on a Thursday, even if this was New York.
They went to a dive bar on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B—“What’s this place called?” “7B.” “Right, of course.”—and he proceeded to launch into a tirade about his ex-wife for the next hour. He used all kinds of awful words, obscenities flowed through his speech like champagne on New Year’s Eve, only there was nothing to celebrate, just things to mourn, things to kick and stomp on, things to beat into the ground. His wife had left him for the man who owned the other gallery on Avenue C, the one that made more money, the one that got covered in Art Forum and the New York Times, the one that the man closed quietly, opening a larger space in Chelsea, taking Doc’s wife with him. Chelsea is not that far away from the East Village, but Chelsea is a million miles away from Avenue C.
Put it to rest already, thought Sarah.
“I don’t know why I’m talking this way,” he said, and when he apologized later, it was clear he really didn’t. But she was just sitting there so quietly, and she was new, she hadn’t heard these stories before. It happened to her a lot. She was silent but seemed welcoming, warm, and she was attracted to the kind of people who needed to fill empty spaces with words; or perhaps, they were the kind of people who were attracted to her; or both, of course, both.
But the cursing, it just went on for far too long, and it made her feel that he might have that much venom for the next woman. She could be the next woman. But she didn’t want to be next. She wanted to be last.
Eventually she simply got up and left—it was when he said “cunt”; she had no patience for that talk—and he walked outside after her, stopping to pat the door guy on the shoulder, no trouble here, mate, and then called her name; she was halfway down the block, walking toward Houston, she was always walking toward Houston, it seemed, when she was in the city, and she stopped.
He apologized again and again. “I’m just crazy,” he said. “Please. Come back inside.”
She declined.
“Then come by the store tomorrow. So I know that we’re going to be friends.”