This morning I
awoke to the news that Anita Sarko, a DJ who worked at such New York clubs as
Mudd Club, Danceteria and Palladium, killed herself.
I didn’t know Ms.
Sarko, but I used to go to these clubs in the early ’80s and probably heard her
deejaying.
Once again I was
confronted with a strange feeling of grief over someone I didn’t know, but felt
like I did. I also felt a need to express my grief, but I was worried it might
seem like I was using someone else’s death to talk about myself (which,
perhaps, I partly am). But I also felt it was important to say that sometimes
people you barely know can profoundly affect your life—sometimes just for what
they symbolize—without their even knowing it.
As it happens, I
had to go to the post office on Canal Street this morning to pick up some mail.
I can’t walk down a street in Manhattan anymore without being assaulted by a
rush of memories, of people and places that used to be. Around the corner from
the post office was the first club I ever went to, the Rock Lounge on West
Broadway, and not too far below Canal Street was, of course, the Mudd Club. Now
there’s an enormous high-rise towering over the post office, completely out of
scale with the neighborhood, just as there’s now a high-rise down the block
from where the Mudd Club used to be.
There was a line
in Michael Musto’s touching obituary on Facebook1 that shook me to
my core. “She couldn’t find
creatively satisfying work and worried about her career, feeling that various
projects had reached an absolute dead end for her…she found that nothing
clicked, since employers were looking for recent college grads, not old-timers
with history and personality.”
Could this
perhaps be my future, too?
I posted a link
to Musto’s obituary on my Facebook page and one of my friends recalled that
Sarko used to deejay at a bar called the Lismar Lounge in the East Village. I
struggled to place the bar (which was right around the corner from where I used
to live on East 4th Street), so I Googled it and found an article
about it2, which also mentioned the now-defunct 99 Records and a
performer named G.G. Allin, who also passed away—could it be?—22 years ago! (That’s another hazard of getting older in the age
of the Internet: any memory can send you off to Google in search of your lost
past, until you disappear down a nostalgic K-hole, to use a drug term that was
popular in the ’80s--or was it the ’90s?)
Maybe it’s my
imagination, but when I hear the drunken club-goers outside my apartment now,
there seems to be an air of desperation to their behavior. They know that
they’ve already missed out on what was arguably New York’s cultural zenith and
that their future looks even more depressing. They think that today’s New York
of chain stores and suburban safeness is fabulous because they’ve never known
anything else.
That’s what I
meant before about someone symbolizing something. And that’s what Anita Sarko
symbolized for me: the pre-chain store, pre-safe New York of unlimited
possibilities.
