So, I had been going to Lunch For Your Ears regularly for only a short time before I started working there, being only a short walk from my then-St. Marks Place apartment. It was the only place on the east side that would get all of the new Current93, NWW, Foetus, etc. releases immediately upon release, and was also the only place in the city to get music by hundreds of local and non-local experimental/unusual musicians. Many of said local musicians performed in the store. Free shows every Thursday evening, always a small audience seated on tiny folding wooden seats, often a packed crowd standing behind them.

People would often come in to shop during performances, but Manny would quietly tell them that they'd have to wait until after the musician was done playing. I met Keiji Haino here. Eric Bogosian and Kramer were also regular customers.

One could listen to anything in the store before buying, even if you had no intention of buying anything. If you so much as mentioned a band that you liked, Manny, the owner, would spring into action. He'd start pulling CDs and records from shelves to play for you, things that he thought you might like, while simultaneously babbling excitedly about each record and other bands and things in a quick stream that became a blur as you were handed record after record for inspection. But he never tried to 'hard sell,' and it really never sounded like he was interested in selling the records. It always just seemed like he wanted to share new music with you; to expose you to music that you might fall in love with if you only took this (often rare) chance to hear it, and weren't too scared by his over-eager manner. I was once scolded for accidentally selling his last copy of a certain CD. As time went on, though, and new shipments were not coming in, Manny would try to impress upon me the importance of selling the existing stock of records, the records that likely would sit there for ages waiting for just the right person to be looking for them.

Manny looked almost exactly like 'Fly'-era Jeff Goldblum. Very early into my time at the store I met Manny's girlfriend, Suki. Despite her name, she didn't look Asian at all, but she was one of the most beautiful women I have ever met in my life. She was extremely kind, and this also transparently came through in her eyes and smile. Shortly after I met her, she kicked Manny out of their shared apartment in Brooklyn. He had started a fire that, fortunately, had not spread too far, but it was not a small fire either... I remember Manny telling me about the incredibly rare hand-painted Nurse albums that had been destroyed -- amongst so many other records -- by the fire hoses. The records seemed to be the only casualty that registered with him.

I was one of only three employees, a number that quickly shrank to two, and would soon include only me. That's not including Manny. When I was a customer, before becoming an employee, he was always there. Once when I was browsing -- feeling the need to record shop solely because I knew that a new Nurse record had come out that day in England (either 'Soresucker', or the record immediately preceding it, I think), and pissed off that my browsing was for nothing, since it would be another week before it made it's way here -- the lights were suddenly turned off, the blinds quickly drawn, and the door locked from the inside. Manny had all but forced some poor tourist to sit on a little wooden stool in the darkness, hurriedly placed in the middle of the floor facing the TV set that hung from the ceiling above the register counter. Manny fumbled in a box of videotapes and eventually produced an audience-taped concert video of King Crimson. Some portions were rewound and replayed several times for the benefit of the captive, and discussed in great detail (at least by Manny). After about twenty minutes or so, he was allowed to leave, and the few customers who had been waiting outside for perhaps as long as fifteen or twenty minutes were allowed in.

About the time I started working there (and shortly thereafter became the only employee), Manny was never around. I would open the store by myself whenever I could. I was a full-time student at the time, so I was usually only able to be at the store three nights a week, and perhaps one day on the weekends. I soon got the impression that the store was not being opened when I was not doing the opening. Manny would come back to the store to collect the receipts only after I had left. It seemed that he also slept there at night, only to leave well before he'd have any chance of running into me.

Even without him physically being in the store with me, his presence became hard to escape. One of my duties was to go to the bank on Broadway to deposit whatever checks might be left in the register for me. I assume most of these were coming from mail order customers that Manny was dealing with. There were new checks nearly every day. Occasionally they would be smeared with fresh blood.

The once-fairly-tidy back storage room, which one had to pass through to get to the toilet, became some sort of awful nest: a massive pile of corrugated cardboard, record jackets, paper cups, unopened mail, assorted garbage, and cheaply-printed euro anal porn mags that covered the entire floor of the approximately 7' square room. The door could just be opened enough to squeeze through (assumedly an easier task for the skinnier Manny). This room would soon start to smell. Badly.

One early afternoon, upon opening the store, there was a slice of pizza lying face down on the paint-bare wooden floor. I think there was one bite taken out of it, although it might not have been touched at all. I don't remember. A white powdery substance was also spread all over the place: on the floor, in the record bins, on the records, etc. My experience with drugs is reasonably extensive, but I have never free-based. My understanding is that baking soda can be used in free-basing, and I assume that that was what I had to clean up before the customers arrived.

And then it started to get bad. Manny's mother, a small Jewish woman from the upper east side, respectably dressed in cardigan and beehive hairdo, would come and just sit in the store. Just waiting on the off chance that Manny would come by. He never did -- at least not while she was there. But I did see him at the store a few more times. I went in to open up the store early one evening -- I think around 7pm or so -- hoping to get some Soho late-night weekend traffic, and was surprised to find him there. In some sort of drug-fueled need to disperse pent up energy (which I am very familiar with) he had hundreds of CDs out of the display cases and spread out on the floor like a miniature replica of the Great Wall of China, presumably looking for some new way to alphabetize them. The white powder was all over the place again, too.

I am not certain, but I think this was also the night of the bug spray. He asked me to go across the street to the bodega and get some (I don't remember if it was flints or lighter fluid) and a Raid room bug-fogger. Eventually, I reluctantly agreed. I had no problem getting the bug fogger, as I thought the back room really needed some such treatment. I did not want to get the flints -- I think it was flints -- as I knew they would be used for his terribly out-of-control habit. But I did anyway. I'm not sure why. If all this were happening now, I would not have bought them for him. But I would have bought the bug fogger, as I was, at the time, unaware of what it was to be used for.

I handed Manny the bag, and expected him to tear into the flints and start cooking up. But he went straight for the bug fogger: stripping off all of his clothes in the middle of the store, pulling the tab on the bug fogger and then spraying himself all over with it.

I think I had to leave then, as I could not breathe the insecticide that filled the store. I think I went to work there a few more days... maybe. Maybe on that night I told him that I was through, maybe I held out for a few more days. Soon afterwards, though, the store was shuttered. In paint marker a long, long letter, written by Manny, appeared on the shop window: a long diatribe ranting against all of those who had conspired against him, and a few lines earnestly thanking the people who had helped him and who had stuck by him. He had thanked me. And I felt very bad because I had stolen so many records from the store during the final few days...

I started working at Venus records on St. Marks place: a much more laid back place. Every now and then Manny would come in to sell records; he was obviously just selling them for drug money. It became a regular occurrence that the managers soon tired of: his asking eight dollars for a record that no Venus customer would pay a dollar for. It was just the difference between the two shop's clientele. Venus didn't cater to the art/experimental crowd, and could not sell most of Manny's records. But he kept trying -- until one incident that got him banned. I don't know exactly what happened, but I do remember the last time I saw him around that time. He had shaved his hair and eyebrows off.

Eventually I was only working at Venus on weekends, but I would still hear about Manny from the store managers. He'd still try to come by and sell records, or, later, just borrow money. I later heard that he was in Riker's Island Prison. Later still, I wasn't working at Venus anymore, and so I never heard what became of Manny...

Until about ten years later: until this past weekend, Saturday February 23rd. I was going for lunch at a favorite place of mine on 5th street, right next door to a small record store owned by one of the original Lunch For Your Ears employees (one who had quit just as I started working there). As I walked by, I saw Manny sitting in the store, talking on the phone. His curly dark hair had grown back. He looked well fed. He seemed -- for as briefly as I saw -- healthy. I was stunned...

Next time I walk by, if I see him, I will go in and say hello.
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