Lush, 144 Newbury St., Boston, MA
When I heard the bombs go off, I was standing in this shop with a tiny box of their “solid toothpaste” in my hand. I instinctively stuffed it in my pocket, unpaid for, when I bolted out the door. A few weeks later, I pulled the box out of my bathroom cupboard and took out a toothpaste “tablet,” let it start to melt on my tongue before spitting it out.
That summer, I brought the toothpaste back, explaining why I’d accidentally stolen it, presenting it to the Lush staff like a recovered family heirloom being returned undamaged.
Steve Madden, 118 Newbury St., Boston, MA
Shops selling $400 shoes and $70 t-shirts with uninspiring designs. “New American” restaurants selling lobster, steak, risotto. Frozen yogurt. A few smaller, reclusive venues—a sex shop, comic books store, smoke shop—like scuffs on leather shoes. On this street, you can buy what you want to feel how you want. Lately I don’t look at my bank statements, don’t want to imagine there’s any limit to that possibility.
Lolita, 271 Dartmouth St., Boston, MA
My first flashback was near Lolita, a dark, hidden-away lounge near the finish line, its walls plastered with black skulls with red and orange eyes. Out the window of my Uber, I saw Boylston Street in the daytime, traffic cones and barriers forming an open lane for the runners—and then it was 10 pm again and soon I was on a date, drinking ginger-peach sangrias until I could touch a woman who I didn’t want touching me.
Had I been nestled in this bustling bar a few blocks from the finish line, the T rumbling below my table, would I have even heard the sound of a bomb, logged it in my brain like a mysterious but memorable chord? Had I been drunk that afternoon, would the memory of that day ever have hurt, ever been more than a party being broken up?
Casa Romero, 30 Gloucester St., Boston, MA
and MJ O’Connor’s, CGK, Joe’s American Grille: I really don’t mind it when you card me, even when my patchy beard has become a visible mess and I’m chatting with my friends about the plight that is teaching college students. Every time I buy a drink legally, I think of the inconvenience of finding alcohol when I was 17, of driving to strangers’ homes to get shitty vodka. I only learned years later about bartenders’ careful hands that can make the unpalatable palatable, the punishing taste pleasurable. Had someone put Mules and margaritas in my hands when I was 17 and could only think about the smallness of my future, I would’ve drank and drank until my present expanded, ballooned in my belly, became an unbridled, bankrupt circus.