I was going to say that this started when Xeni posted a thing on Boing Boing that linked to quite the staggering archive of Danceteria Flyers.

Danceteria. What a goofy word, what a weird little notion. The Dead Milkmen calling a bunch of artfags "Danceteria-tites." Strange ads in those few old issues of RAW I managed to get. Some club that exists in that weird early eighties NYC, post-Taxi Driver, pre-Koch, post-New Wave, pre-Madonna, the Haring/Basquiat/Warhol/Downtown art scene thing. Klaus Nomi. ur-Hip hop. The Gay Flu. Heroin plagues sparking the crack pandemic. In my head, this is all contained by that place, somehow. It's emblematic of that era to me. I was alive back then, sure; all that shit makes it feel like it happened a hundred years ago and on another planet. I thought that was where it started.

But it didn't; not really. It started a few months ago.

I was digging up research and reference for a project I knew was dead before it even got off the ground, and was looking for pictures of couples in hotels. I came across the one you see on your left there.

I was transfixed by it, hypnotized, haunted, whatevered. I couldn't stop looking at it.

See, if you scroll up from the Danceteria flyers, you'll find that they're on the site of a guy called Robert Lund. He was, and still is, a NY scenester, from what I can tell. One of those guys at Those Shows, in That City at That Time. With the girl of his dreams, Zoe Lund.

She died in 1999 of complications from a drug-related lung infection.

Robert Lund has put an awful lot of himself on his site and there's something sweetly earnest about it all. None so much as his stuff about Zoe.

There, on a page of her pictures, he's got a personal page of photos which is, strangely enough, home to the picture that started it all.

Look at them; look at him, look at her. Her painted nails on his hand. The look on his face like he can't believe his luck either. Is that a gold tennis braclet she's wearing? Blank motel furniture in the back. He can smell her hair, I bet. I bet her perfume haunts that scarf she's got on. Look, look. How can you not want that moment for him? For her? For them both?

You can see them in photo booths, blitzed and nearly on the nod; you can see her get older, you can see the heroin take its payback across that face, her mouth. It's not hard to see the girl in the hotel turn into the smacked-out whisp of a girl shooting up turn into that lady with the bottle of coke, ten years later. Look at her on Houston. It catches you, sooner or later.

But, god. Look at them. Listen to him talk about her and it's easy to fall in love with the Robert and Zoe falling in love.

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Oh, and, Robert Lund was violently robbed in the summer of 1996, leaving him incidentally trepanned.