Remembering Josh

I apologize for leaving you all with rambling memories in need of editing. I wrote this on Sunday, the morning after getting the woeful news.  I apologize, too, if my account seems long-winded, but, I apologize, yet again, for its brevity, for I could write oodles more about my beloved friend whom I will miss terribly.

I've known Josh since the early 70's.  I met him through his brother, as my ex-boyfriend and Carl had been roommates at the University of Wisconsin.  Carl had a farm in New Hampshire and Peter and I would visit.  One visit, Carl's brother came up from New York in his MGB.  Though immensely professorial in his demeanor and left-brain dominated, he just had a thing for fast cars.  His last, an Acura he bought second hand, had been fitted with the most earbending and road shaking turbo charge.  He loved to take off, accelerating with great alacrity at the turn of a green light near his second home in Brewster and watch as startled would-be drag challengers pulled up to the Acura, steal a sidelong glance at its driver, blink in a double-take of surprise and disappointment when they found at the wheel a 60ish bald and bespectacled clone of Salman Rushdie and Oliver Sachs.

When we first met, he had just moved to the City from Cambridge, having accepted a teaching position at CCNY.  (Or, was it Rutgers?)  Peter and I found him jovial and easy to be around that weekend, and that was that.  Until, about a week later, we were going to have a meal at our favorite restaurant in Chinatown and ran into Josh with a number of friends.  I’d learn later that this was Josh’s preferred mode of travel: en masse.  We exchanged pleasantries, and, again, that was that.  After about another week, Peter and I were having dinner at Victor's Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side, and whom should we run into, but Josh.  We knew then that the friendship was sealed and made in foodie heaven.  Josh’s first New York apartment was on MacDougal Street above the landmark Village coffee house, La Lanterna.  By an ironic coincidence, I was at the Lanterna yesterday at the very moment when he died, after not having frequented the café for 10 years or more

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He moved to Carmine Street shortly thereafter where he lived until his passing, and, since I was on Sullivan, he and I became really close, in the beginning bonding over food mostly.  Josh was an immensely generous person, with his money, his time, his friendships.  He'd take me to the best restaurants in town just because he wanted to experience them, or have me get to know his favorites.  A year or two into our friendship, we'd begun to meet every Saturday morning at the old Soho haunt, the O.G. Dining Rooms.  I'd bring my dream journal and we'd analyze my dreams of the past week while he'd develop a crush on every new waitress in their employ.  In the end the sessions became reciprocally therapeutic because we’d also get to analyze why he had a penchant for falling for waitresses, women there to serve, i.e., take care of him.  That’s not to mention that these pretty young things were also usually clad in mini-skirts.

Early on in our friendship, Josh engineered a friendly rivalry over which one of us was the “quintessential New Yorker.”  Ground Zero for him was Madison Avenue in the 60’s, and for me, the Bronx.  We liked to point to the other’s creds as proof that the other was the epitome of a New Yorker.  Flash points were, of course, restaurants and food shops, ethnic neighborhoods, an inconsequential clutter of trivia.  Josh not only won, against his protests, of course, but Josh embodied New York, and all the sophisticated and funky things that make this city probably the most engaging in the world.

I remember innumerable meals with him when the restaurant’s proprietor would find us, pull up a chair and take time to chat, either because Josh had barraged the wait staff with questions they couldn’t answer, or he wanted to, diplomatically of course, offer a menu suggestion, or because he’d already established a relationship with that owner. Often times, during these chats, in his always-humble way, he would demonstrate that he was more knowledgeable about the establishment’s cuisine, invariably “ethnic,” or international, than even the owner.

 

I especially loved eating with him at Pao, an exceptionally good Portuguese restaurant in SoHo, where he’d spend a good part of the meal shooting the gastronomic breeze with Frank, one of the owners.  One night, when Joe and Josh and myself were enjoying dinner, and after I’d returned still glowing from my first trip to Portugal, with the help of a good bottle or two of Alentejo wine, we three proposed a trip to the lovely waitress as a foursome. The fantasy lived on with us until Joe’s death.

He got to know a number of my boyfriends and was always available to listen to my relationship problems, offering advice, some of which was right on-target and insightful.  I’d reconnected with a long-lost boyfriend from my undergraduate days at City.  And we became friends.  I just knew that he and Josh would hit it off.  They did, over food and wine, of course, and discovered they were born on the same day, same year.  It was, as all who knew him know, the 4^th of July.  Joe was African-American, though quite light-skinned, and they took to having it on with all they’d meet, passing themselves off as twin brothers.  Some years back, Joe lost his job and, sick with prostate cancer, could not find employment.  Josh “loaned” him I don’t know how many thousands of dollars knowing, but not letting on, that he’d never get it back.  When Joe became really sick, he went out to California to stay with his sister.  Just before Joe died, Josh flew me out there so that I could be with them both and reconnect with Barbara whom I hadn’t seen since she was a child.  Sadly, Joe died a day before I arrived.  Josh came up from LA where he was visiting Valerie to be with Barbara and me in our grief.

When Valerie came into his life, she immediately also came into ours, “ours” meaning all those many, many people whom Josh touched.  He seemed to bring countless numbers of folks, of good folks, into both his professional and personal orbits; usually spun in tandem.  The last I saw Josh alive, just a week before he died, he took me aside while Valerie was in the kitchen and marveled at how well Valerie meshed with all his friends.  I knew how important that was for him and how it made him love Valerie even more.

When the recession hit and I lost nearly all of my writing sources, over dinner one night at an inferior Mediterranean place on the Upper West Side, he offered me a once-a-week gopher kind of job at his lab.  I'm still there.  And now, he's not.

Carolina Amoruso