I had a hundred bottles of White-out in my office and hardly ever used it, now that we had computers. One day I dabbed a little White-out on a postcard, and that was the beginning of a series of collages I made in my office on 42^nd Street in 1993 and 1994.

Walking down Fifth Avenue after work, I’d pick up postcards of New York City, ten for a dollar. Even with all the tacky things on the racks, there was plenty of real beauty, glorious shots of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center. I loved all the shades of green of the Statue of Liberty, but my favorite was a teal the color of cardboard berry boxes at fruit stands in summer.

I started to do some cutting and pasting, tinkering with images. Then I learned, to my surprise, that I was pregnant. I was sitting in a rocking chair one evening, looking at my handiwork—art or craft?—when I first felt the baby move inside me—the quickening.

I gave birth, went back to work, and we moved to California. But California postcards didn’t seem to need anything from me, so I left them alone.

Instead, on business trips back to New York, I’d go to the outdoor flea market on 6^th Avenue at 24^th Street, plunging my hands into piles of old snapshots jumbled in cardboard boxes.

They were ten for a dollar, or a pound for four dollars; sometimes the dealer would charge me a dollar a picture for studio portraits of classy types. But those were not really what I was after. I wanted the cheap stuff that was just one thunderstorm away from becoming pulp.  Before I’d buy anything, I’d turn the pictures over to look at the inscriptions or captions.

The flea market was right across from Billy’s Topless Bar. And though I have never been inside Billy’s, it was an important landmark for me.

In 1986, my husband’s friends lived above Billy’s Topless in an enormous raw loft. They had just graduated from art school. I wasn’t comfortable with them—my sister, who’d once met my husband and his friends, had called them “rich brats” and I knew what she meant—but I stayed there a few nights toward the end of a ten-day vigil that autumn as my brother Joseph lay dying uptown.

Joseph was the fourth of the five of us.  He was dying of pneumonia and cytomegalovirus at Lenox Hill Hospital. When he sunk into a coma on the fourth day, I sat next to him late into the night.  A doctor came in to pinch my brother’s toes to see if he was brain dead yet. He wasn’t.

The doctor left and a sweet young religious nurse came and sat with me for a few minutes. My brother was handsome and young, just 24. Maybe that’s why this nurse took an interest. Some of the nurses were afraid to come near anyone with AIDs. 

As this nurse left the room that night she turned back to tell me something. “Did you know that Duke Ellington died in this very bed?”

My brother died at 3:00 on a Friday afternoon (like Jesus—“and the curtain was rent”—as I knew from Good Friday vigils in darkened churches).

I didn’t know what to do with my parents, who’d been sleeping on the floor of the waiting room, then in a rectory nearby, and finally at Leo House in Chelsea. They were lost. My mother and I were broken, while my father—I can’t say. Fathers had cursed their sons, telling them they’d rather see them dead than queer; and now the sons were dying.

I took my parents to Penn Station and put them on a train to Boston (they had no credit cards, no way to pay, and I did). Then I wandered a while on that warm flat grey afternoon, alone, down Seventh Avenue, through the garment district and then over to the flower district, until I gave up and rang the bell at the loft. They were half-expecting me and they let me in, nodding impatiently at me as I said that my brother had finally died—“Uh huh, okay.” They were having a heated argument about the loft lease and didn’t miss a beat as I walked toward the bunk bed at the front of the loft. I was grateful for the bed.

That night I tried to sleep to the pounding beat of music from Billy’s just below my bed. The music wasn’t too bad. It was the occasional roar of men in the bar that killed me.