I’m leaving New York this week. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I do know that there is no Russ & Daughters where I’m going, and there is no Paul.
Since moving to New York City twelve years ago, I have lived in nine apartments. The first was university housing on the Upper West Side. The next six formed a Brooklyn daisy chain, fragrant with interpersonal drama. The eighth, which brought me back across the East River, was chosen more or less because of a sandwich.
I discovered this sandwich during my ten-month tenure at the seventh apartment, a place I landed by necessity after a breakup. The apartment had a sloping floor, a ceiling pregnant with water damage, and a space heater that emitted the smell of burning hair, but not much in the way of heat. But it also had a panoramic view of Manhattan, and it was this view that pulled me from my slowly decomposing residence to the Lower East Side, where I found Russ & Daughters, a nearly century-old smoked-fish emporium. Between its neon sign, glorious aroma, and sense of history so palpable it could almost be sliced as surely as a side of lox, it was, in my eyes, a halfway house between a grandmother’s embrace and a place of worship. I ordered a sandwich involving whitefish salad, horseradish cream cheese, and an everything bagel, took a bite, and knew I was home. A few months later, I moved into my eighth apartment, four blocks away from the shop.
I can’t remember exactly when I met Paul, though I do remember being moderately afraid of him. Among the chorus of white-coated Russ & Daughters countermen, he stood out as a crank par excellence, a silver-haired middle finger pointed in the direction of the city’s capitulation to customer service with a smile. He could smite indecisive tourists with a single sneer, and dispatch more high-maintenance specimens with an eye-roll so world-weary it almost required its own cane. He was a throwback to a New York that predated frozen-yogurt chains and nail salons, a New York of daylight muggings and nighttime shooting galleries. He was old-school, full stop.
Over time, we developed what one might call a rapport. I’d ask him about his day. He’d ask me about my boyfriend. We’d bump fists over the counter. One afternoon, I brought in an old Polaroid land camera, prompting Paul to reminisce about photos he took of various lady friends in, shall we say, compromising positions. “What do you want?” he asked, noting the look I had failed to suppress. “I was a red-blooded young man.”
I came to think of Paul as the dirty uncle I never had. He could work blue, but the only time he made me blush was when he told me, with a disarming degree of sincerity, that I was his “precious little angel.”
by Rebecca Flint Marx, Medium | Read more:
Since moving to New York City twelve years ago, I have lived in nine apartments. The first was university housing on the Upper West Side. The next six formed a Brooklyn daisy chain, fragrant with interpersonal drama. The eighth, which brought me back across the East River, was chosen more or less because of a sandwich.
I discovered this sandwich during my ten-month tenure at the seventh apartment, a place I landed by necessity after a breakup. The apartment had a sloping floor, a ceiling pregnant with water damage, and a space heater that emitted the smell of burning hair, but not much in the way of heat. But it also had a panoramic view of Manhattan, and it was this view that pulled me from my slowly decomposing residence to the Lower East Side, where I found Russ & Daughters, a nearly century-old smoked-fish emporium. Between its neon sign, glorious aroma, and sense of history so palpable it could almost be sliced as surely as a side of lox, it was, in my eyes, a halfway house between a grandmother’s embrace and a place of worship. I ordered a sandwich involving whitefish salad, horseradish cream cheese, and an everything bagel, took a bite, and knew I was home. A few months later, I moved into my eighth apartment, four blocks away from the shop.
I can’t remember exactly when I met Paul, though I do remember being moderately afraid of him. Among the chorus of white-coated Russ & Daughters countermen, he stood out as a crank par excellence, a silver-haired middle finger pointed in the direction of the city’s capitulation to customer service with a smile. He could smite indecisive tourists with a single sneer, and dispatch more high-maintenance specimens with an eye-roll so world-weary it almost required its own cane. He was a throwback to a New York that predated frozen-yogurt chains and nail salons, a New York of daylight muggings and nighttime shooting galleries. He was old-school, full stop.
Over time, we developed what one might call a rapport. I’d ask him about his day. He’d ask me about my boyfriend. We’d bump fists over the counter. One afternoon, I brought in an old Polaroid land camera, prompting Paul to reminisce about photos he took of various lady friends in, shall we say, compromising positions. “What do you want?” he asked, noting the look I had failed to suppress. “I was a red-blooded young man.”
I came to think of Paul as the dirty uncle I never had. He could work blue, but the only time he made me blush was when he told me, with a disarming degree of sincerity, that I was his “precious little angel.”
by Rebecca Flint Marx, Medium | Read more:
