I turned 75 on July 4th 2026 and as I was having my morning coffee I began to reminisce about how I spent the Bicentennial. I had only been living in my loft in Manhattan for 5 months. I was gigging a lot and doing a bike messenger gig during the day to supplement my gig money plus it was a good way to see all the neighborhoods in Manhattan but this day was special.
The morning of July 4th, 1976, broke over Manhattan's soon to be called Tribeca in a haze of thick, oily exhaust and the bitter, heavy reek of roasting coffee pouring straight out of the coffee importing building on the corner of Hudson and North Moore Street. It was the Bicentennial-- a massive, manic national milestone-- but my immediate universe was reduced to a desperate, early morning nicotine craving. I left the second-floor loft, hit the cobblestones, and ducked into the local deli to secure a pack of cigarettes.
The line inside was small, maybe four people deep, but the atomic weight of the room shifted entirely because of the guy standing right in front of me. He looked like he had slipped out of a late-night noir celluloid reel: fedora creased low, black leather jacket practically fused to his spine, and black trousers that had seen their share of neon-lit underbellies. "You're Tom Waits, aren't you?" I asked. He spun around on his heel. His eyes locked onto mine with a sharp, defensive glare, sizing me up instantly like I was some desperate Shylock holding a note for a thousand bucks he owed. The tension hung in the air for a split second before I threw out the only truth that mattered: "I really like your Nighthawks at the Diner album."
The defensive shield cracked. A genuine, raspy smile took its place. "Thanks, man," he grunted, grabbing his own pack of smokes. He vanished into the New York humidity, fleeing the scene before any more daylight could touch him.
The rest of the day was an easy, unhurried slide toward darkness. I had absolutely no plans other than to wait out the sun and scale the heights of our building at 64 North Moore. When evening finally dropped, the whole crew assembled on the roof above the fifth floor-- my former wife Christina, our roommate Drew Whitaker, and a loose collective of tenants from the lower floors.
We fired up the barbecue, cracked open adult beverages, and looked out over a sprawling, chaotic landscape. To the south, a massive high-rise apartment building threw sharp geometric shadows against our brick paradise; to the north, a gritty, silent vacant lot filled the block. Straight ahead lay the ghost of the West Side Highway, officially shut down and rotting under its own weight, its upper deck serving as a surreal, elevated concrete track for neighborhood joggers. Below that rusting steel canopy sat the surface road, stretching all the way west to the dark Hudson River docks where my van was parked-- sitting pretty in a spot that cost me a grand total of eighty bucks a month.
Then the sky blew apart. The Bicentennial fireworks erupted over the Hudson River, raining red, white, and blue fire over the docks, the highway, and the water. The weather was flawless, the stars were cutting through the city smoke, and the booze was cold. You couldn't have engineered a better, more beautifully raw 4th of July if you tried.
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