Daisy from Lot

There is a copy of the New York Times Magazine that I have kept with me for eight years. It tidily gauges the amount of time I myself have lived in the city. It has stayed with me through three moves, from DC to the East Village to Williamsburg to Fort Greene. It is dated September 17, 2000 and its cover story is titled, My First Year in New York. I must already have had it in my head that September, during an uninspired year in Washington DC, to move to New York. By November of that same autumn, it was done. In the weeks immediately following, I read and reread the cover story, a series of personal accounts of arriving in the city, wondering which make-good story mine might resemble.

Lou Reed sold fake heroine to unwitting partiers, Sam Shepard gave blood so he could buy a cheeseburger, Michael Cunningham lived in an unheated loft on Water Street. Alongside these stories were those of people whose names we don’t so readily know: a struggling artist, a woman with amnesia, a gay teenager, a woman who followed her boyfriend to the city…

And…Daisy O’Dell Barkow. What a name. Daisy from Lot, “they” apparently called her back then. Her own first year in New York earned the title, “Life is Beautiful…When You’re Beautiful.” What a face.

Daisy O’Dell Barkow worked the door at Lot 61, which at the time was perhaps the most exclusive nightspot in the city, the Waverly Inn of the late 20^th century. I would imminently find myself working the door at another, somewhat less exclusive downtown nightspot. Not that I acknowledged any kinship with Daisy. I’d moved to the city to be a writer. I was headed for different, more loftily intellectual, heights. Mere beauty seemed to me a trifle tiresome. Yet I must have seen some sort of symmetry there, between myself and Daisy from Lot.

She was captivating, gazing out from the magazine page, even though I’d have denied it at the time. I revisited her story and the accompanying photograph often. She is shown sitting on a banquette between a tattooed, unshaven, male model-type, his arm draped indolently behind her, and a female who is only half in the picture. Daisy clutches a flute of champagne, although clutch is not nearly delicate enough a word. She has taken perhaps three or four sips. Her black leather sleeveless/strapless top is accessorized by a fuchsia wrap and an extravagantly chunky silver choker. Her dark hair is chopped and cropped above her shoulders. Her blue eyes gaze at the camera like she is bored, bored, glamorously bored, like she knows she is already on the side of the camera that everyone wants to be on and there’s nothing else to do now. She is two years younger than me.

Perhaps it was because I knew no one in New York City, save one friend in grad school at Columbia who never came downtown, and an acquaintance left over from a summer internship two years previous. Perhaps it was because no one ever took me to Lot 61. Perhaps it was because there was a part of me that coveted some of the things that Daisy O’Dell Barkow was, after all. She wasn’t what I wanted to try to be – but she was what I wanted to be without trying. She represented the sort of instant success that I imagined New York City to be made of back then. Waltz into the grid, sidle up to a bar, land in the pages of the Times Magazine. What next!

In the case of Daisy O’Dell Barkow, it was fame. “Whatever I’m doing 20 years from now, I know I’ll be famous or successful,” she is quoted as saying. “I can’t see what comes between now and then, but I know it’s going to work out for me.”

I identified with that kind of buoyancy back then. People in their early twenties need that confidence – it doesn’t matter whether or not it is justified, because in its way it is justified just by existing -- in order to move to New York. Daisy dreamed of having her own nightclub. I dreamed of having my own Algonquin Round Table. But the underlying optimism of ambition was the same in both of us. Perhaps it was because of this that I liked her even as I didn’t like her.

Daisy’s glamorous first year lived in one of those unpacked boxes that always lurk in otherwise settled homes, reminders that things weren’t always so permanent, until this past spring. That’s when, looking for something else, I came across the carefully preserved copy of the Times Magazine. Revisiting Daisy O’Dell Barkow for the first time in six or seven years, certain things about her story became clear, things that had escaped me when I was younger and less suspicious of the world. She explained her move to New York from London (nee Toronto) as having been a spontaneous decision that hit her “like a ton of bricks” while dining at the London Nobu. Eight years of cosmopolitan living inform one that nothing hits anyone like a ton of bricks during dinner at Nobu. The article’s author, Amy Larocca (now of New York Magazine), wrote that “she bought a ticket, packed up her apartment, gave away her clothes, cried at the airport.” A girl like Daisy O’Dell Barkow might cry at the airport, but she does not give away her clothes.

But despite the likely retrospective embellishments, the article retains its punch – a beautiful girl moves to New York and takes it by storm. The intrigue has aged well because it’s a timeless story.

The girl herself, though, was not frozen in time. Wherever she was now, she was 29 years old. I googled her.

The “Barkow” is gone, but there is no mistaking that the photos on WireImage.com of one Daisy O’Dell (or, if she is DJing, Daisy O) feature the same face that graced the Times Magazine eight years ago. The smile has less ‘fuck you’ in it, the hair is longer, the figure perhaps or perhaps not just a shade less perfect, depending on your taste, but the core sameness is undeniable. She wasn’t easy to find, which seems uncharacteristic of a girl who was searching for fame as the internet self-publicity machine came of age and the lines between private and public lives in some circles evaporated completely. In this regard, I would have expected less discretion from Daisy.

Still, there are bits to piece together. The “between now and then” that she couldn’t put into focus eight years ago is this: Daisy moved to Los Angeles awhile back. New York bored or disappointed her in the end. Or she decided to become an actress and this seemed the best course of action. She eventually became a DJ. She’s worked Sundance parties and, according to a short 2007 article in the LA Times, she has a weekly gig at Teddy’s, which I assume to be an LA hotspot. And she went on tour with Gwen Stefani, spinning her after-parties.

I am disconcerted and also somehow comforted to see tangible evidence that Daisy O’Dell Barkow progressed through life in a more or less straightforward manner, that she has become a more or less normal person. To know how it pans out – with the turns and dips and changes typical of any life – certainly makes the idea of her seem less imposing. Years ago, she represented something insidery that was desirable only because of a shadowy perception that I didn’t know how to access it. Now, something has changed, something having to do with a lifted veil.

At twenty-nine, Daisy is still young. But twenty-nine is too old to get away with saying that one’s whole life is still ahead of one. It’s an age of nascent acceptance of things as they are, not as they might be in the glittery, sprawling future. The story has been written, not all of it, but parts that are significant and cannot be changed. Which is comforting and sad and also not at all. I admit a satisfaction in seeing that Daisy did not become a star. Then again I suppose that I also regret that she is not the rip-roaring fulfillment of her own predictions, because when I packed her into a box eight years ago, the act was a type of investment, irreducibly tied to my own destiny.

--September, 2008