esteban o esteban
our first bro american
our god and superhero
about the very best restaurant experience of the tulipomania years was baby jupiter. it was down on the corner of stanton and orchard and had its own performance space in back or else was convenient to the living room and arlene's grocery and surf reality and nada. max fish. ludlow bar. for about three seconds stanton and orchard was the center of the world. and it was good because it was a flower blooming in what had been a ghetto wasteland. about 1990 when i first looked at it that neighborhood was hopelessness distilled and had been the archetype of nowhere for a hundred years. the lower east side. desolation row. booby dylan sings about fourth street 'cos he's scared to go farther south.
grandparents, great-grandparents, they worked sixteen hours a day their whole lives in a desperate attempt to raise the scratch to get their spawn out of that horrible desolate lower east side so that their grand-children and great-grandchildren could work sixteen hours a day trying to pay rent on a space a third the size their family had in the first place in those mean mean streets that all of a sudden tulip bloomed in little hat shops and juice bars and performance art spaces where tight tummied girls writhed to illbiently selected american kitsch imported from japan.
baby jupiter had a good kitchen. it was always a surprise, how good the stuff came out, though you had to wait for it. which was o.k. cos the girls were cute and the soul patched art directors all had these fassbinderish screenplays they were pitching. there was endless silly distraction though the noise was harsh.
one time beth and i in there having lunch and i see this girl across the room. it was the first day i had seen the jeans sans wasteband thing. that had just appeared (following maybe a mariah carey video some girl told me tho i never saw it). this little baby's brown and bottled blonde and got her jeans cut down low and a white knit tube top. french? i wonder. italian? later in the afternoon we pass her in the street and she's talking to this boy and she pronounces the word 'ask' 'axxed' and i'm like "whoa, child, you're a 'hood girl? my my."
that was the wonderful possibility glimmered in the nineties: all them jennifer lopezes they could blossom proud right where they lived cos all of a sudden the street was good. we have the technology to make the street good. all we have to do is throw away some religion and some of them old popstars.
when i was a boy religion was justified in terms of its ability to deal with the hopelessness of the inner city. but religion was useless. the hopelessness of the inner city was cured by beepers and gangster bop and sex toys.
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