Deb

So I guess it was in the middle of autumn in 1979 that my friend Bob told me that he had a date with this pretty inter­est­ing fresh­man girl at New York University, and that I ought to take her out some time myself. I didn’t quite under­stand why, if this girl was so inter­est­ing, that Bob wanted to fob her off on me, but even­tu­ally I figured it out. It had noth­ing to do with her.

Debra was from Orefield, Pennsylvania, and she bunked at Weinstein Hall, which was one of only three dorm­it­or­ies at NYU back then. She had a lot of gump­tion to make that move, but she took to the city pretty well. I had been vis­it­ing Manhattan for a couple of years, mainly to see bands, but Debra was the per­son from whom I learned more of the day-to-day life in New York.

We went to a lot of movies. I think our first date was to see Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. Knowing pre­cisely noth­ing of post-World War II Germany, there was a lot of it we didn’t get, but it still made a strong impres­sion, and taught us not to use gas stoves to light cigarettes.

This was back when the cur­rent IFC Center, which now has like, what, sev­en houses, was a single-screen theat­er called the Waverly. We saw a mid­night show of Eraserhead there, and after­wards she said to me, “That reminds me, I have to do my laundry.”

She was kind of eccent­ric. She mainly dressed in black pleated skirts and white blouses, with a black Danskin beneath. For a long time it was kind of a uni­form. Once as a joke (or was it?) she smashed a Perrier bottle, put the shards in a candy dish, and poured Jujubes on top of the shards, and put the dish on a cof­fee table. When she was a teen­ager in Orefield she had a schnauzer that she named Gandalf. She used to make sheets of sta­tion­ery from the wrap­pings of Wrigley chew­ing gum and write enig­mat­ic, some­times petu­lant and some­times pas­sion­ate love let­ters on them. Once when we were stoned she watched me play­ing Pac-Man and when I ate the big dot that turned all my pur­suers blue, she said plaint­ively, “Look how unhappy they are.”

So this was what you’d call a form­at­ive rela­tion­ship, and one in which we were as shitty to each oth­er as we were crazy about each oth­er, as is not uncom­mon in one’s late teens/early twenties.

I remem­ber the black mit­tens her moth­er had made for her, which she wore on our winter walks from Weinstein Hall to Chinatown, where she fiended after any dish that had snow peas in it. I didn’t take her for a nice din­ner on Valentine’s Day 1980; instead we went to Irving Plaza to see The Feelies, with the Bush Tetras and DNA open­ing. This was the Tetras’ second show (we were under the impres­sion at the time that it was a debut, but that had happened a few days pri­or) and also the DNA show where a naked woman stumbled on to the stage from the wings and bassist Tim Wright just spider-walked around her while Arto Lindsay howled and skronked and Ikue Mori didn’t even look up from her drum kit. During the Feelies’ set Glenn Mercer broke a string dur­ing the solo to “Moscow Night” and Debra and I both gasped and then marveled how he trans­posed it to a string above and com­pleted the sen­tence, so to speak.

This was a time before film and music tastes began to be per­ceived as some­how gender-segregated, so I was hardly sur­prised that Debra liked The Contortions, The Buzzcocks, and The Psychedelic Furs. Okay she also had Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, which I couldn’t stand and which I got an ear­ful of on the Jersey side, too, as it was a favor­ite of my col­lege paper col­league Sue Merchant, later Susan Walsh. Down the hall from her at Weinstein was a guy named Andy, a sweet, soft-spoken, Velvet Underground wor­ship­ping, alarm­ingly thin fel­low with lanky hair who once con­vinced Debra to sing “Femme Fatale” with him back­ing her on gui­tar. (Andy Bienan, as it hap­pens, who later was to cowrite Boys Don’t Cry with Kimberley Peirce, and who now teaches screen­writ­ing at Columbia, and is lately a good friend I don’t see often enough.)

We broke up around May of 1980, after which fol­lowed like maybe a whole year of on-off, which was not uncom­mon at this time. I remem­ber com­ing into town on Election Day that year, and for some reas­on we went on a movie mara­thon. We star­ted uptown with Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut, which ruled. Then she said to me “I’ve nev­er seen a porno movie. Let’s see a porno movie.” So we went to some truly gnarly dive on Eighth Avenue and saw a ter­ribly undis­tin­guished triple-XXX movie of the pimply-derrière vari­ety, which was weird. Then we went down to Anthology and saw a very faded print of Dreyer’s Vampyr with burned-in Swedish sub­titles, which was maybe the only way you could see it back in the day. It was an amaz­ing day in some respects, but I also remem­ber hav­ing a split­ting head­ache at the end of it.

She moved to D.C. around 1982, after which we only stayed inter­mit­tently in touch. She became, among oth­er things, a mom, and some time after that found hap­pi­ness in a mid­life mar­riage. (As I, too, have done.) We recon­nec­ted via Facebook, as one does, or as one did, and exchanged cor­di­al notes. A couple of weeks ago I learned that she had gone into hos­pice, suf­fer­ing from lung can­cer. She couldn’t speak, so I sent her a card telling her how much our time had meant to me, and she sent a note back. A little after that, while I was in Venice, she died, age 61. I was lucky to have known her.

Debra Pearl Buhay-Hockenberry-Salsi, 1961–2022. Photo used by permission.