Many things happened in 2022, but for me, it will always be the year that my friend Gary Taustine died. Gary died suddenly at home at 50, of natural causes, in June, attracting a standing-room-only crowd at his Greenwich Village memorial. Many of his survivors had never met each other before, but they all shared the same feeling: We didn’t know how much we needed Gary until he was gone. Gary spent nearly all his life in the lower third of Manhattan, growing up with his older sister and brother, Rhonda and Mark, on the Lower East Side and gravitating...