Aging as Subversion.

And the Myth of Being a Fraction of Who We Once Were.

Tony Luciani. “E.T. Call Home” with the photographer’s mom.

In the early 90’s I moved to NYC to do my Ph.D. at New York University. I was in my mid 20’s. I got a job working on Broadway with a company producing large scale musicals, ones you might recognize. I had no power, as is expected for my age and experience. But I was deeply ambitious and wanted to be taken seriously as a young writer and script doctor. I made barely enough money to live, but I drank for free, worked with some talented celebrities and legendary directors, hung out with cool artsy people, and went to a lot of Broadway shows and fancy opening nights.

I was also too young and stupid to internalize why don’t shit where you eat is such an important addage. I fell in dumb love with the big boss, a guy from European Money, a decade older than me, who headed the New York office. I folded him into my big dream and heaped lots of expectations on us.

I had just moved to the city from rural, blue collar, upstate New York. I had a cramped studio apartment, a Pekingese named Dave, and I thought my 8th floor view was like looking out from the World Trade Center. I thought I could see everything. I thought life, like the city skyline, was limitless in its possibilities. I felt grown-up and free.

This is the definition of full-grown youth, I think. You feel kinda like an adult, you can drink, vote, are required to pay taxes and you still feel like you invented breathing air. Like no one has ever planned to make a bigger bang than you. Everything is way out in front of you. You haven’t been sufficiently crushed yet, if you had a relatively solid upbringing and socio-economic experience, as I did. There is so much potential. Every time I came up out of the subway at 4th street or smelled the ginkgo trees in Central Park, I was giddy on the freedom, the invisibility of the city, the life I could have that no one I knew back home in my small town would ever have. I felt special and ordained.

I was a redneck though at heart. I wore Levi’s, sleevless boys undershirts, an open flannel shirt, and cowboy boots. My friends in New York City were Hells Angels and broke grad students who sustained themselves with the $3.95 soy burger dinner at Dojo on St. Marks. The fanciest restaurant I had ever eaten at was Red Lobster. If a restaurant didn’t bring a complimentary side salad with Thousand Island and a cheddar biscuit basket, I was in rough waters.

Tony Luciani. “Mama Photobomber”

European Money wasn’t even wearing a jacket and tie when he took me to Alain Ducasse’s Essex House for a dinner one evening. We were with his boss and the boss’ wife, even Older European Money, and his boss was also like a father figure, so lots of weight on the night. The maitre d’ took him aside and showed European Money the tie and jacket selection he could choose from. He wasn’t weirded out by this at all, because he belonged there in this fancy place. I didn’t. I was nervous. I wanted to make a good impression with someone important to him. If they liked me, maybe European Money would think I was good enough to keep around. Am I good enough for you? And can I prove it by being absolutely enchanting at this fancy dinner?

I was fine until I saw all the silverware. Ducasse was known for these little tricks with the food, fancy pens to sign the check, special knives for special foods. The changing of the silverware, like the changing of guards, changing of diapers, changing of clocks, was routine, choregraphed as a dance, expected by long-timers. Imagine sparks of movement slicing through the dining room with plates and saucers and utensils being escorted in and floated out by a flank of wait staff, a silent bustle of attention and service. Frank Buni confirmed this in his 2005 New York Times review, where he wrote: “That the constant whirl of ever-changing gadgets, implements and vessels suggests a nightly dishwashing bill to rival the budget of a Martin Scorsese movie.”

But the whirl paralyzed me. Each time a waiter came with a question or another utensil, I was exposed. She does not belong here, does she? It’s so obvious.

The waiter placed a small stool next to me on the floor. I watched The Older European Lady put her bag on the stool, so I did the same. When the waiter asked me for my drink order I couldn’t remember that I liked white wine or Sauvignon Blanc or just anything wine-like. Yellow tail? Boonesfarm?

I stuttered. European Money ordered my wine for me.

My fellow dinner guests spoke a language I didn’t understand. They were sweet and gracious and sometimes broke out of their conversations to clumsily translate for me. But I didn’t need them to. I was focused on the menu. It was all in French. No. No, it wasn’t all in French. It was just food that had somehow escaped my experience and seemed so foreign as to be in another language. I scanned the menu: Jérôme Galis asparagus, wild morel and Arbois wine. What is that? Albufera-style Jaune des Landes chicken, leek ‘à la ficelle’. Really? Pigeon from Jean-Jacques Boga, crapaudine beetroot, wild garlic and marigold. Crapardine pairs nicely with marigold? How do we eat this crapaudine? With our fingers? With one of the ten forks? What is a squab?

I decided I would order what I knew I could eat without embarrassing myself. I knew what Bouillabase was. There was a round chubby spoon for that. Fish soup, easy peasy.

I was fine. I was fine. Napkin in lap. Sip the wine. Nod and smile. Complement the lady’s lipstick. Pretend to understand the foreign language. Excuse yourself to the bathroom at least twice so you can talk to the bathroom attendant and calm the fuck down. All fine.

Until they brought the bouillabase.

A waiter came wheeling around from behind me, and landed a new knife next to my dish. He tells me its a knife for my soup. He calls it a fish knife. Do fish require special knives? Do I cut the fish in the soup? Or transfer it to the bread plate and cut it there? Or maybe cut the fish like all people cut the fish in the soup with their teeth or the side of a spoon? Why is everyone looking at me? Why am I just staring at the bowl unable to move?

There are no fish knives at Red Lobster. And no Thousand Islands at The Essex House.

Tony Luciani. “Internal Reflection.” A statement about how dementia separates the person from themselves.

But this experience, embedded in my memory, reminds me of how we see youth. Being young is freedom and unbirthed potential and endless energy and ambition. It’s newness. Trying things out. It’s saying yes to everything and jumping in, unaware of lurking dangers or being able to see around corners. It’s pregnant with possibility, as they say.

But it’s a host of other disheveling things, too.

I was under-prepared a lot as a 20-something- year-old. Out of my depth. I cried in a job interview once. Hysterically cried, so the interviewer had to console me. I didn’t get the job obviously. I yelled at bank tellers and store clerks because I hadn’t figured out my own emotions and learned to regulate them. I believed what anyone said to me at face value without interrogating it. Every person I met could be a networking, ascendance opportunity, so everyone had their usefulness or uselessness to me. I fell in love with the wrong people, fucked the wrong people, trusted the wrong people. I gave more than I got, and sometimes I was the asshole who took more than I gave. Once, I couldn’t tell someone I wanted to break up with them so I treated them badly until they broke up with me. They adored me and I broke them in the slowest, most grueling way possible, simply because I couldn’t be honest with myself about how I felt. I was a divider and a breaker of things. Reckless. A beautiful beautiful mess. I had all the potential, but it was just that: papery, wispy potential that might come to something or not. And so each moment in my 20’s felt like the one in Essex House. Every mistake felt potentially catastrophic. The mistakes had a lot riding on them. They could buckle me. I was never sure I could recover, because without having actually recovered on my own, I hadn’t proved to myself that I could recover.

The photographer in these photos, Tony Luciano, has one photo of his mother he named I’m half of who I once was. This is the photo:

Tony Luciani. “I’m Half of Who I Once Was”

But are we?

The name of the photo stood out to me, because I think this is what people think about aging. That we are less than we used to be. That it is all loss: Loss of mobility. Of memory. Of influence. Of ambition. Of personality. Of beauty. Of worthiness. Of friends and community. And there IS loss. No one is denying that. Loss and more loss, until you decline and die, sure. That is inevitable. But all parts of life have loss, including youth. In fact, being young is about specifically having an absence of the things we have now.

We represent the embodiment of what can be accrued across a collection of years.

At the Essex House: I couldn’t laugh at myself while using that stupid fish knife. I didn’t have the experience to know I could joke my way out of uncomfortable moments. Or that uncomfortable moments weren’t totally my fault or the end of the world. Or that they would make a great story to tell at a cocktail party or form the foundation of an empowering or hilarious essay. I didn’t trust that I was worthy of being liked by people who were different from me, and from my perception, better than me. I didn’t fully enjoy or revel in my good fortune to dine at one of the most iconic restaurants in New York, and eat what might be, a once-in-a-lifetime $300-a-person meal, because I was too worried I didn’t belong there. Instead of focusing on making the other guests feel seen and connected, I was in a narcisstic haze of worry for myself and how I was being perceived. I felt the need to be an impressive fictional creature, not a real person. More a veneer of myself, the illusion of something I hadn’t quite attained, but wanted people to see in me, and maybe by living it, for me to see in myself.

And the bigger issue? I was pumping all my energy, love, attention and hope into a one-sided relationship with European Money who would end up cavalierly fucking a dancer on the show we were working on, lying to me about their sex for so long that I ended up hiding in the bushes on 68th street and Central Park West, peering through his floor-to-ceiling windows with binoculars, trying to get a glimpse of what was really going on in our relationship.

I let him subsume me. A literal rookie mistake. Why would anyone want to go back to this level of life incompetence? lol.

My age has given me extraordinary gains. Your age has given you extraordinary gains. And frankly, the world needs us right now; to tell our stories, to give counsel and advice, to shut up and listen when people are broken and need silent company, to be there in real time - we are not the generation chained to our phones, it is a gift for us to use - to hold someone’s hand when they grieve a great loss, to hold someone’s baby so they can gather themselves, to hold off making quick assumptions because we know the truth is deeper than what we see on the surface, to cook someone a meal who is starved for that kind of love, attention and care, to stand up for the people no one is standing up for, to emulate forgiveness and empathy and off-set some of our world’s cruelty and violence. Because the depth of this knowledge is coded into our being and in every wrinkle and scar. We are its keepers and orators.

Getting old is Punk Rock as fuck. Don’t sleep on it.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim