p o s t - e m p i r e
In the summer of 2001 I was thirty-seven and my boyfriend had left New York for six months to study in Berlin. He was a decade younger than me, an artist who had addiction issues that we both assumed were under control until they weren’t. I was solo that summer, left to my own devices—even though these ended up being somewhat less extravagant than what we shared as a hard-partying couple. But the summer was filled with a kind of low-humming dread, despite the supposed fun of promiscuity and drugs and relentless socializing. None of that could tamp down the dread that was hovering everywhere. It stemmed from the fact that earlier in the summer I’d been working out at the Crunch gym on Thirteenth Street, two blocks from my apartment, when I suddenly blacked out. When I regained consciousness I was in an ambulance that was taking me to St. Vincent’s, accompanied by a trainer from the gym who told me at the hospital that I’d suffered a seizure, a pretty severe one. For some reason I decided that the seizure had to be connected to the upped dosages of Klonopin I was medicating myself with daily to take the edge off, and the dehydration that probably afflicted me because of the very-hard-drinking crew I hung out with; add to that the hellish heat in the city that summer, as well as the weird bouts of insomnia I was fighting: to me all this seemed the perfect recipe for that seizure. Yet maybe it was caused by something else, so I started getting fearful, and in the packed waiting room at St. Vincent’s, flat on a stretcher, I began to panic and was convinced something black and awful would engulf me along with everybody else in that packed waiting room if I didn’t get out of St. Vincent’s immediately. I left the waiting room, the trainer from Crunch trailing behind and trying to persuade me to stay until I was standing on a corner of Seventh Avenue trying to wave down a cab, my arm lightly bleeding from an injection, my legs wobbling, a headache blinding everything.
My doctor, whose offices were in the Zeckendorf Towers just a block up from my apartment, had been informed about the seizure and wanted to run some tests because to him it didn’t sound like the kind of seizure that was caused by a mild addiction to a benzodiazepine mixed with dehydration and alcohol. I kept promising to come in but the fear of him finding something stopped those tests from happening, and so a summer continued where I was unable to concentrate on the novel I’d been working on and the number of guys I was juggling seemed mystifying since I’d never been promiscuous, and there was the cocaine, and there was the insomnia, which had nothing to do with the cocaine. And then there was the stalker who had invaded the narrative somewhere in that summer as well.
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Long handwritten fan letters were being sent directly to me at the apartment on Thirteenth Street, instead of to my publishing house or my agent’s office, and that fact alone was, during this particular summer, alarming enough. But it was the content of the letters that heightened my dread even further: demands for me to get back to this person, an insistence that we belonged together, that this person knew with a certainty that I was truly the only one, and if anyone else had me there was the not-so-obscure indication that they eventually wouldn’t be able to have me—the meaning of this filled with a tangible threat. The letters kept coming with no return address, just a PO box, and soon packages started arriving filled with “gifts,” including a variety of “spices” in small plastic bags that my admirer wanted me to mix into liquids so I could drink them and get on the same “wavelength”—and then came the letter intimating that my admirer and I should ingest a deadly mix of powders together, which would allow us to have sex in heaven and experience “multitudes of orgasms.” By now I’d realized the admirer was watching my building, knew when I was home, followed my progression throughout the city and, at one point, got past the front desk while the doormen were trading shifts and tried to get into my apartment. Add this to the seizure, the drugs, the heat, the insomnia, the repeated phone calls from my doctor urging me to make an appointment, the absent partner in Berlin, the book on which I was now blocked—it all blew up.
Today, I would have addressed all of these problems like an adult, but for some reason at thirty-seven the fear exploded childishly, and I remember very clearly on an August afternoon finding myself on the phone with the security division of the ICM literary agency—I didn’t know they even had a security division—as they asked me a series of routine questions about my “stalker” in a soothing tone while I paced the apartment. The security team had asked me to place everything I had received from the stalker into individual plastic bags, which had already been picked up, and the head of security was now looking at them while he was on the phone with me that August afternoon. The bemused tone of his voice as he asked the perfunctory questions both calmed and enraged me. You’re not taking this seriously, I wanted to scream. This person’s ruining my life. But in that same moment I was thinking this, another voice in the back of my head was whispering, No, you’re ruining your life. And suddenly that day I found a new and more coherent beginning for the novel I’d been having trouble writing. This was when the real story of Lunar Park began to change and reshape itself: the writer creating the more convenient and more dramatic narrative over the cold and less dramatic neutrality of facts became, in a way, the metaphor of this book, and of how his misinterpretation could lead to chaos and horror.
The stalker, my admirer, was in fact just an overly determined fan, and a week later the man from the security division filled me in on how they’d located this elusive person who both craved contact and yet had been linked only to her PO box address—yes, it was a woman—and the voice over the phone told me they had “dealt” with her and, when I asked what that meant, exactly, the voice over the phone told me not to worry about it anymore: she wouldn’t make contact again. And she didn’t. This was sometime in late August, and it prompted me to take a series of tests to determine what might or might not have caused the seizure. I cut back on the cocaine, cut back mildly on the drinking, started backing away from the random guys, drafted a new outline for Lunar Park and began writing with a fervor that just hadn’t existed during the two years since I’d initiated the project. I started sleeping through the night uninterrupted. Things were clearing up. The haze was lifting.
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On the night of September 10 I excused myself early from a party in Lower Manhattan that I’d attended with the writer Jonathan Lethem, and where I would have lingered if I didn’t have a doctor’s appointment—a kind of final checkup—early the next morning. I had an 8:30 appointment at the Zeckendorf—nothing had been found, the cause of the seizure was never located—and as I sat in my doctor’s office being examined one last time a nurse walked in, handed him something, and mentioned that a small plane had hit the World Trade Center—yes, people who weren’t in the vicinity thought, at first, it was a small plane—and the doctor and I thought this was curious and maybe cracked a nervous joke but then the nurse walked in again and said another plane had hit the other tower. A faint, swirling panic set in as we left the examining room and went into the waiting room, where everyone stood below a wall-mounted television and watched the smoke billowing out of the towers, all of us transfixed with confusion and clearly aware that something was deeply wrong. I quickly left the Zeckendorf and walked the two blocks back to the apartment on Thirteenth Street and I’ll never forget how crystal clear, how insanely blue the sky was that morning above the trees in Union Square Park. In my apartment I watched the towers collapse on TV while talking on the phone with my mother, who had called from Los Angeles until we were cut off. I felt, for one of the only times in my life, a real and uncontrollable fear that day, a kind of freezing terror that anything could happen, anything was permissible, that what happened this morning opened up a new door altogether, and that everything was out of control. It also felt like the culmination of everything I had experienced during the summer of 2001.
I remember only two things from that day. A girl came over to my apartme
nt before noon, hysterical: friends of hers had escaped the towers early on and she was telling me about one in particular who had gotten out and was stepping onto the street when he was suddenly sprayed in the face with warm water. He had no idea where this water had come from and then it rapidly happened again, dousing his face and the suit he was wearing until he realized almost instantly that it wasn’t water at all but had come from a falling body that had hit a nearby lamppost. I haven’t been able to shake off this detail since I first heard it, nor the images I connected with it: the young man walking home covered in blood to his apartment in the West Village and collapsing on the floor of his shower sobbing as he scrubbed the blood off. The other thing I remember clearly is walking around the East Village that night in a daze, picking up takeout Thai food on Second Avenue and seeing two wasted girls at the bar of the restaurant, both of them laughing drunkenly, a sound I’ve never forgotten because it almost seemed like a small act of defiance, a rebuke, even if it wasn’t, and I was honestly relieved to hear it. This is the world we now live in, a voice in my mind kept hissing as I made my way back to the apartment.
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The next three days there was nowhere to go, nothing to do: we just watched TV. The entire city was swallowed up by the tragedy and you could literally smell it in the air if you lived in Manhattan, a kind of chemical reek that took weeks to dissipate. That first week everything happened with a stunned deliberation and there was nothing else to reference except this disaster, this apocalypse. And yet, because of it I took refuge in the book I’d to this point been stuck on and now began moving forward with a certainty and clarity that was not only a needed distraction but also genuinely exciting—and in the following weeks a new appetite was unleashed: I wanted to write in a way I never had before, and admittedly haven’t since. I remember feeling this so distinctly after the initial horror wore off—a rising toward something, an optimism. I wasn’t going to complain anymore. I would no longer be scared. I’d get things done. This sounded spiritually mundane but it was real. The first book I picked up after 9/11 was The Corrections, and found myself so immersed in it that I was often as grateful it simply existed in this moment as I was moved by the narrative itself and also deeply relieved that I was able to concentrate on reading a novel again. But reminders of what had happened would always be with us it seemed. That autumn, a group of us had dinner one night in Tribeca and then moved aimlessly down to Ground Zero, in our suits and dresses, buzzed and chattering, somehow slipping past each subsequent barricade until we were actually standing at the site itself; it had been cleaned up by then, there was nothing there, and it was brightly lit as if on display, the white sodium lights revealing what had once existed now swept away, and what moved us into silence was how small it looked.
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All of this came back to me a few years ago, in 2015, while I was watching Alex Gibney’s epic 248-minute HBO documentary about Frank Sinatra, All or Nothing at All. I found myself thinking about Empire, the American culture I’d grown up with, and once more I was reminded of, and overwhelmed by, how much cultural power Sinatra had amassed and consolidated for himself as a pop performer at the height of Empire in mid-twentieth-century America. I’d thought I knew the Sinatra story pretty well, but Gibney fills in the major events with a tidal wave of archival footage that I’d never seen before, and the effect is so hypnotic that although I thought I was only going to watch the first two hours on that Monday night in April, I changed my mind. Part one ended with Sinatra’s comeback in 1953, and I was wiped out not only by the intensity of Gibney’s approach, but also by Sinatra’s tenacity, so I spent the rest of the evening watching the second part, completely rapt at the exhilarating ride that constituted the rest of the Sinatra story as it unfolded for another two hours: the big years, the great records, Vegas, a pop performer whose life mirrored the century in which he came of age—Sinatra’s trajectory was America’s trajectory. He was a self-made king and the first modern pop star, complete with thousands of screaming teenage girls mobbing his early performances—a phenomenon that hadn’t happened before. But Sinatra’s story is really about pragmatism, defeat, loss, pain and the romantic disappointment that (in the guise of Ava Gardner) nearly destroyed him, and about the way he turned these things, those feelings and that hurt, into art, deepening the songs he was simply performing (he didn’t write any of them). Through the force of his artistry, he both caught and created the mood of a nation and connected with a massive audience that is unthinkable now. I’m not talking about racking up a billion YouTube hits, but about an entire country that was lastingly stirred.
The Gibney film skirts some big stories, among them the death of Sinatra’s mother and the Hollywood movies he made in the 1960s and into the ’70s, and you’re sometimes reminded that the documentary was created with the approval of his estate. At times it seems we’re witnessing a settling of scores, especially when the film explains Sinatra’s disillusionment with John F. Kennedy after he’d campaigned for him incessantly and was then shut out of the White House because of the same mob ties that Sinatra had called on to help Kennedy win the election. But All or Nothing at All stays on its point that Sinatra was an artist, with pain and regret and loss informing his greatest work, and though he wasn’t a songwriter, he rewrote the songs he sang with his phrasing and vocal inflections and with a doomy pragmatism that permeated everything from “That’s Life” to “Summer Wind” to “It Was a Very Good Year.” Sinatra was also open in interviews and joked around drunkenly onstage with the Rat Pack: an Empire performer who believed in the power of Empire. How could he not? It built him. He influenced it. Sinatra seemingly said and did whatever he wanted. Free and white and male, he could be loose and funny, contradictory at times, outspoken and playful, sometimes a bully, or else lost or haunted, glamorous, argumentative, even plain weird—just a man, unapologetically.
Sinatra never apologized for anything because that kind of culture didn’t exist then—a world where anyone, even prominent people, could be policed into muteness—although he was occasionally attacked by the press about his appetite for women and the louche Rat Pack years in Las Vegas, which he single-handedly reinvented as a mecca for tourists. He knew everyone, a vast and amazing cast that stretched from Hollywood to New York to Washington, D.C. Sinatra somewhat foundered in the late ’60s, unable to figure out where he stood when surrounded by the Beatles and the Doors, and when he retired in 1971, people thought it was the right time in a rock era where he came off as vaguely fossilized. Yet in typical Sinatra fashion, his restlessness moved him to stage a comeback tour in 1974, and he continued to perform in sold-out stadiums—the crowds got bigger—until his death in 1998.
Watching All or Nothing at All, I was reminded there can never be another Sinatra because neither pop culture nor our society works like that anymore—in a way that allows someone to fail repeatedly and to get back up, to act brashly, and sometimes badly, without apology. Pop culture now would be hesitant to invite anyone like Sinatra (or Miles Davis or James Brown) back in, and while watching Gibney’s movie it chilled me to realize that maybe this democratization hadn’t been all that great for pop culture itself. How would any of those artists have fared in a self-censorious society in which everyone tiptoes around trying to appease every group that might take offense at any opposing view, in essence shutting down creative excellence thanks to the fears and insecurities and ignorance of others? Could Sinatra have been forced into singing songs that exclusively made us feel dreamily better about our own identities, while ignoring the painful realities of life and human existence? And as the movie ended, I hated thinking what might’ve happened to Sinatra in a day and age when, for example, he sang “the lady is a tramp” in a song? Misogyny! A chief of the white male patriarchy! Toxic masculinity! Don’t buy his records, comrade! Boycott the label! Sinatra would have been disgusted by the Orwellian tenor of our current moment, but I can’t imagine h
e would have ever bowed to it.
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“Drugs?” is the first word Charlie Sheen utters in his only scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a Reagan-era epic from the summer of 1986 whose ad line was “Leisure Rules” and is the one John Hughes teen movie that seems the least dated. This four-minute scene, expertly written and directed, takes place in a police station in suburban Chicago where uptight Jeannie Bueller (Jennifer Grey), waiting to get bailed out by her mom and fuming about brother Ferris’s charmingly anarchic ways (he breaks all the rules and is happy; she follows all the rules and is unhappy), realizes she’s sitting next to a gorgeous sullen-eyed dude in a leather jacket who looks like he’s been up for days on a drug binge, but he’s not manic, just tired and sexily calm, his face so pale it’s almost violet-hued. “Drugs?” is the first thing he asks Jeannie. Annoyed, Jeannie asks, “Why are you here?” and Sheen answers, deadpan and with no regret, now referring to himself: “Drugs.” And then he slowly disarms her bitchiness with an outrageously sexy insouciance, transforming her annoyance into delight—and they end up making out.
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