Blood and boots
The first mouthful of my antipasti appetizer- Spedini di Mozzarella alla Romana- at my favorite restaurant- Angelo’ s- in New York’ s Little Italy area was the indicator that I was back in the old neighborhood. Sitting across from me was my good buddy, Eddie Pacio, who had moved back to the East Coast after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute. Eddie and I had come to this top rated Mulberry Street restaurant that was a notorious mob hangout many times as we were growing up and the Southern Italian spicy red sauce type cuisine was without doubt, the best in the City. Of course, the 1974 bottle of one of the best Italian wines available- Barolo- complemented the sumptuous meal we were now enjoying. Although Alaska had the wilderness, New York had the food and culture. The exact opposites of the two geographic regions of North America really allowed me to fully appreciate each. A yin-yang concept indeed.
Eddie had secured a great job with an upcoming animation company in Manhattan and had a beautiful apartment in a highly secure, gated community in New York State about 40 minutes away. He was kind enough to let me stay in his upscale Tuxedo Park apartment for a couple of months until I found a place in the city that would allow me to attend graduate school for 12 months. I would catch a ride into Manhattan with Eddie in the mornings and attend the ultrasonography courses that I had signed up for. Between classes, I would walk far distances throughout the City to explore and sometimes shop.
One time I was walking down the super fashion street of Madison Avenue around 50th street, when I saw this dumb Hasidic Jew charge his car forward along a group of parallel parked cars. He actually hit the accelerator instead of the brakes. His action had pinned a pedestrian between the cars. Instantly people ran over to help and push back the cars to free the man. I was closest to him when he became freed and blood shot out at least 5 feet in the air from his femoral artery which is a main artery in the leg. I immediately put pressure on it and stopped the bleeding and reassured the roughly 35 year old man for a seeming long time until the ambulance arrived. I had just bought brand new boots nearby and the man’ s blood had soaked them. When the ambulance arrived, the medic literally knocked me out of the way and abruptly told me that they would take over. I did say good luck to the man and that was that.
I joined the New York Microscopical Society as I was still very much interested in microscopy. The Society met every week in the Museum of Natural History and we had the opportunity to use a very special stereoscopic scanning electron microscope. Film was provided free by Polaroid and the specimens were provided free by the Museum. This is where is got interesting as they gave us rare African wasps and many other unique animals to use. After plating the specimens with gold, I was able to zoom in to more than 50,000 times magnification. At each magnification it looked like a new world as we would try to figure it all out. Using a scanning electron microscope is so interesting and fun.
Windows, Little Italy, NYC Photo by Barry Epstein
BARRY STEVEN EPSTEIN- PhotoAutobiography DRAFT 41 of 156