Regulars

2001

A time capsule. A keepsake from one random Tuesday and a handful of people I will probably never see again.

How I made it:

I took the same process I use on my Wallpaper Series and put it on a three-dimensional object. A soup can, basically. I bought a sealable metal can.

What's inside:

Nine strips of canvas (each about one inch wide by three feet long) plus a folded piece of paper. Eight of those canvas strips have three things written on them:

• a person's name
• their usual drink order
• and my own off-the-cuff take on them

The names? Regulars at Muddy Waters Cafe, where I worked back then. The date on the capsule, February 2, 2001, is just a random shift. Whoever was there that night made the list. One regular drank whiskey, period. Another always asked for “extra hot” tea and then let it sit for twenty minutes. That kind of specific.

The ninth strip is different. It's a copy of the NASDAQ listing for Etoys, a company that had just cratered from the dot-com bust plus the three stocks that followed it in that day's New York Times. February 2, 2001. A tiny snapshot of a bubble bursting.

The piece of paper has a strange little story someone left on a table that same evening. No name. No explanation. I found it after my shift and held onto it because it felt like something out of a dream I couldn't quite remember.

The outside of the can is wrapped with an old photo I took years ago: two friends I haven't seen in a long time. That photo matters because one of those friends is the person who originally introduced me to almost everyone in that cafe.

I gave the whole thing to a man named Kaz. A boy really. My age.

He'd asked for a painting. Instead, he got a can full of fabric strips and a ghost story. He was talking about moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles at the time. I didn't want him to go. I thought maybe this silly little object would say that better than I could.

He never made it out of San Francisco.

He died two days after the Twin Towers fell. My closest friend. My dearest. The world was still frozen—staring at smoke, making missing posters, learning a new kind of grief. But I wasn't mourning with them. I was somewhere else entirely. I was 3000 miles away mourning _him_. And that felt like its own small, selfish betrayal.

This web page started as a memento of a non-event on February 2nd, 2001. Now it's just where I keep his name and my memory of him. Years later, I got a tattoo to help keep his memory alive.