The day before the Nakamura job I take the F train and walk to my old street—Orchard between Delancey and Rivington. The “Bargain District.” It hasn’t changed. Maybe it shouldn’t have, not in just one year, but in New York when you move away from a street, a neighborhood that was really yours, that place always seems to die from your absence. During your tenancy there the streets were alive, the asphalt and metal and glass were sentient. The birds knew you and whether to bother with begging for crumbs as you stood on the corner with your bagel. Even the people you didn’t know, you knew. But when you come back, all is changed, changed utterly; its terrible beauty is dead.

Without you, it has become just a place.

At first Orchard Street looks the same. The racks of single-stitched sweatshop guayaberras for $7.99. The leather and shearling and fur outlets, none of which sell leather or shearling or fur. The shop windows full of cosmetic, Kevlarless vests. The daughters of tourists in their sherbet-colored minis getting eyefucked by vendedores. The suburban kids in Ramones concert tees, tribal accouterments, and black match-stick jeans, hoping to absorb some grit and ethnicity, maybe a new obscenity in a foreign language they can bring back to school like a pet that does tricks.

But something is wrong. I came here for some kind of reassurance. I wanted my Lower East Side to say to me, “Don’t worry, Otto. I know who you are. You had a life before Charlie, and you’ll have one again.”

It doesn’t, though. It doesn’t say anything. It has no clarity for me anymore.

So I check to make sure the plastic container of Thai chicken hasn’t opened in my bag, reshoulder it, and then head to the East River to observe the same prejob ritual that’s been holding me together for the last year.

Pinkerton didn’t like dog treats. He refused Greenies and Jumbones and Choo-Hooves. He’d sniff a Pig Snooter—perhaps because, in a Nietzschean way, it sniffed back—but he never ate one. He only wanted human food. Correction: he only wanted the food he saw me eat. Normally, even the blandest human food gives dogs the shits, but my usual menu—soaked, I’m sure you can guess, in exotic hot sauces that feature on their labels all manner of medical warnings and legal disclaimers—was all he ever wanted.

Now, every day before a gig, I come here, past Cherry Street to Corlears Hook, and sit in this spot, the place where I made Pinky’s watery grave, and make an offering of his favorite dish.