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-derriere 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.

Comments

[drew]

My condolences. I think about the privilege and curse of living in a big city (I survived London for 16 years before love brought me to Oslo) and the vividness of the experiences you can share with someone when everything is available and permissable. To have such rich memories is a gift, and thank you so much for sharing these ones. Some stories are long, some are short, but it's the quality that matters and this story you shared together is top tier.

[Titch]

That was a really nice remembrance, Glenn.

[Pedro Canhenha]

Condolences for your loss and to her family.