The first time I saw the five members of Pine City, I was nineteen years old. They were standing outside what would someday become Team Gallery on Grand Street in Soho, sharing cigarettes and laughing. It seems in my memory that everyone in the intersection turned to look—that cabbies craned their necks through the half-lowered windows of their broad yellow Crown Victorias, that shop owners materialized in open doorways, that even the old women walking arm in arm behind me stopped to gawk—at those five ravishing, obscene young people on a street corner. In person they seemed like these glamorous lightning bolts, something between human and divine, the embodiment of the moment Zeus turned into a swan or a cow or whatever other thing that was not human but was still a fuckable divine being. It was shocking, to me, how they looked.

Pine City was the name of their group—their collective—though they didn’t make work together. Three of them had graduated from the art school where I was a currently a sophomore, and all five made the type of nihilistic, shrewdly absurd work that smart young people on drugs will inevitably make, and it was of a kind, it seemed like a collective action, so they became famous together—for their work but mostly for being bad, for being attractive and defiant, for making money and lighting it on fire. And like everybody else at the Academy, I was completely obsessed with them.

A poster for Carey Logan’s show, THE BURIAL PROJECT, had been wheatpasted on the side of the college’s non-ferrous metal forge two months earlier. Selling off meals from my dining plan at half price ginned up enough cash for a same-day round-trip bus ticket in and out of Chinatown, and so—there I went.

The walk to Soho took only a few minutes. After rounding the corner at Grand Street, I was almost an hour early, and unprepared for Pine City to simply be there in the street.

By contrast, anyone could tell that I was a college sophomore. Baby fat rolled over the waistband of my jeans, pushed uncomfortably against the sleeves of my thrift-store shirt, and my skin was rosy, flushed even, from crippling self-consciousness. My head swerved. Time slowed, to fractions of seconds, as I moved my eyes to the toes of my shoes. Who did I think I was? The answer, of course, was nobody.

I was nobody.