This story was inspired by a photograph of Vesuvio Bakery on Prince Street in New York City.
The first time I went to Vesuvio Bakery was when I visited Sandra. She had a loft on Prince Street in Manhattan. Sandra is a writer; she wrote a young adult novel back in the late 1970s. The book was made into an ABC After School Special after it had become a huge bestseller and was in many progressive junior high school (not yet called middle school) libraries. The book was about a teenage alcoholic and was considered inappropriate reading in the more conservative schools. At the time Sandra published it she was living in Greenport, Long Island. They refused to have her book in the school library. And that explains most of what you need to know about Greenport, circa 1970-something.
The money from her book got her the loft on Prince and I was visiting her years later. We had lost touch and then ran into one another in the Village; we arranged to meet. I was dying for a coffee. I smoked a cigarette before ringing her bell, smashing the stub under my shoe. Sandra didn’t drink coffee. At that time coffee was a main component of my diet. Sandra didn’t smoke anymore, either. I wanted to talk to her about writing. She told me that I had to have a story to tell, otherwise there was no point in writing.
I think she missed her espresso and Camels.
I didn’t stay long, and as I was leaving her building I saw the beckoning bright green storefront and the word Bakery. I smelled bread: another main feature of my food medley. Actually, at that time my “food” regimen consisted of coffee, cigarettes, and bread/stuffs. The stuffs meant that sometimes I bought a loaf of semolina from Camareri’s in Brooklyn and ate that for a couple of days. Sometimes I got poppy seed hamantashen from Moishe’s on First Avenue (I consider this a bread — spares me the guilt) and ate them for part of the week. Usually these were washed down with Turkish coffee, black Bustelo (with tons of sugar) coffee, or a double latté made with Lavazza Dark.
The Englishman had recently left, taking all the money as well as my heart. Bread, and its sometimes distant kin, became the only stuff I wanted to eat, so finding Vesuvio was nice. I went in and looked around as if I were in Bendel’s: all the richly colored, fragrant, and delicate bread — and stuffs. Behind the counter, in a bin, were egg shaped golden rolls. They would almost fit inside my closed up hand, my fingers just curling over the tiny loaf. Flecked with black dots, they were beautiful and intriguing.
“What are these?” nail tapping the glass counter just above the small vulnerable rolls.
“Pepper bread.”
I bought a dozen and carried them in a paper bag, resisting eating one until I got home. It was a good thing I waited; they were rock hard, and one bite sent bits of golden crumbs in every direction and all down the front of me. Not vulnerable at all, they were very satisfying: hot, hard, and noisy.
I missed the Englishman.
The next time I went to Vesuvio's I took my friend Jonah with me. Jonah lived in Brooklyn, close to Sahara Market. We bought Turkish coffee with cardamom, fava beans, kalamata olives, and Moroccan oil-cured black olives. Then we shot over the bridge to Vesuvio in his dark green MG. He also had a motorcycle, but after one ride I refused to ride with him ever again. So it was Vesuvio for pepper breads in the English car and home: Fifth Street between C and D up five flights. We left a trail of pepper bread crumbs all the way up.
I have not spoken to Sandra in forever. I heard she sold the apartment on Prince and moved back to Long Island: this time to the fabulous Hamptons. Jonah and I are no longer friends. The last time I saw him he was seeing some girl fifteen years younger than him behind his girlfriend’s back, having also recently cheated on her with a mutual close friend. I told him it was his life and his karma, but I didn’t want the teeny bopper bimbo in my house. The last time we talked I was living in Santa Fe and he called to berate me for condemning his behavior two years before.
The Englishman really has no connection to Vesuvio at all. And yet seeing the photo of it he was included in the rush of memories.
Some say that smell is the most potent initiator of memory. I know that a smell has placed me in a particular frame of mind and has often evoked a memory. Often a sound can do that to me as well. Hearing a lone walker in the dead of night, crunching snow underfoot, brings up Maine and snow blue in the light of not yet dawn as I wait for a bus in five degree winter with slush-caked sneakers on my feet.
But a photo of a bakery . . .
My brother running away from home on Long Island, arriving at my door with tri-colored mini cakes, sweet fruity jam between the layers, from Adrian’s, the bakery in Queens where we grew up.
My father bringing day old cookies home from the same place: my mother, brother, and I laughing until we cried and until he threw them away. He kept saying they were fresh.
Aunt Mary only ate the pumpkin pie she brought from Horn & Hardardt on Thanksgiving which wasn’t really a bakery, but she loved that pie like nobody’s business.
Vesuvio's is my lost life in Manhattan. It’s all gone now; and last I heard, so is Vesuvio's.
