American on Purpose

by Craig Ferguson

  We met Jamesy at the Odessa, that wonderful café on Avenue A. I had never been to the East Village before. I thought I’d died and gone to punk-rock heaven. There were Goths and junkies and rockers everywhere, mixed in with the scary street-life people. The whole neighborhood seemed alive with a tangible, cinematic danger. Everywhere I looked was a movie set—there really was steam rising from the sidewalks, the Checker cabs really were driving frenetically down the avenues. The noise the car horns make is unlike anywhere else on earth, as is the smell that is absolutely unique to New York City—the delicious aroma of pizza mixing with the acrid stench of urine.

  In 1983, the East Village was New Yawk Fuckin’ City at its fuckinest.

  We sat in a booth and ordered cold borscht, which immediately rocketed into my soup top ten, right next to that french onion in Amsterdam.

  Jamesy turned up late, and I liked him immediately. He was very handsome and fashionable, a real hipster. He wore a little porkpie hat and wore a lot of rings. He smoked Marlboro reds from a soft pack and somehow managed to be both funny and cool. We jawed a bit about the old country, drank some beers, and then he asked if I had any experience in construction, as he was earning money working as a carpenter. I told him that all I had ever done was deliver milk and play drums and he laughed and said that sounded about right. He said he could get me a job working on a construction site on 122nd Street. All I had to do was carry Sheetrock all day with a bunch of Jamaican guys—could I handle it? It was three hundred bucks a week, so I told him I’d be delighted.

  And we were in. That simple.

  I borrowed a thousand dollars from my ever-patient Uncle James for the deposit and first month’s rent on a tiny apartment Anne had found. (I will never forget the look of genuine surprise on his face when I actually paid him back a few months later.)

  Apartment #11, 334 East Eleventh Street, had a small living room with the freakiest green shag carpet that ever survived the seventies, a dirty little bathtub in the petite kitchen, and a small toilet off the bedroom. It must have been about 500 square feet total and cost 625 bucks a month, but it was worth it because we were on the top floor and could sit on the fire escape and look at the Empire State Building while inhaling the wondrous smells wafting up from Veniero’s Italian bakery at the end of the block. Anne found a job pouring coffee in a Gramercy Park diner, and we settled into our new American lives. The first few months were magical. We worked hard—I had to leave the house at five-thirty to get to Harlem in time for work, and Anne pulled ten-hour shifts, but we were happy enough. I was too physically exhausted at the end of a workday to throw myself too much into drinking, and after a couple of beers I was out. Unloading and carrying Sheetrock all day was my first rehab.

  The site in Harlem was a big renovation job on a burned-out building near Grant’s Tomb. It was being run by a couple of bigtimey contractors out of Jersey, Lee and Bob, and both seemed to take a liking to me. They thought the world of Jamesy, who was a competent and diligent carpenter, and so his recommendation rated highly, plus there is something about a struggling immigrant that seems to appeal to blue-collar Americans, many of whom are of course the children or grandchildren of immigrants themselves. Lee and Bob told me that if I bought a screw gun and a saw and a few other tools they could promote me to laying floors and installing the stud-and-track support beams for the Sheetrock.

  I invested in the equipment and soon was earning the unbelievable sum of four hundred dollars a week, tax-free because I was illegal. Every time a city inspector in a suit turned up at the site I was convinced it was the INS and broke into a flop sweat. The last thing I wanted was to be deported. I remained convinced that my future life and happiness lay in America, and getting kicked out would make it almost impossible ever to return.

  For a brief spell it seemed as if the madness of the drinking and drugging in Glasgow had finally abated. Anne and I explored and delighted in our new neighborhood. We saved some money and bought some essentials for our apartment. Jamesy introduced us to guy named Rick, who owned a vintage furniture store on Avenue A, across from the junkified no-go zone of Tompkins Square Park. Rick was a tubby English gentleman who loved fifties-style plastic chairs and would set them up outside of his store. I don’t know that he ever sold anything, but people loved to congregate there and chat.

  There, on the plastic chairs, I met Jamesy’s strangely aloof wife, Lucy, who was a very beautiful girl but seemed always to be in a far-off place. Later, after they broke up, Jamesy explained that she used heroin to keep her weight down. I met and became great pals with a small dark-haired Jewish actor from Long Island called Roswell. Ros was fantastically funny, but deadly serious about the craft of acting. He worked with Jamesy and me during the day on the construction site, but at night he took class after class to improve his sense-memory techniques and other such actorly bullshit. I adored him.

  When Dimitri Solzhenitsyn, stepson of Aleksandr, opened the trendy nightclub Save the Robots, on Avenue C, Roswell and I were hired as the doormen. I don’t know why—we were hardly the scariest duo ever to hit the East Village—but it may have been because together we looked a bit like Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. We were fired pretty quickly, first or second night, I can’t remember, but we kept hanging out at the club anyway.

  At Save the Robots, or on the chairs in front of Rick’s store, I ran into just about everyone who was anyone in the East Village in the early eighties. People like Spacely, the legendary one-eyed smack dealer who didn’t seem to comprehend that self-promotion and his chosen profession were at odds with one another, and the rapper Grandmaster Flash, who was a neighborhood icon and on the verge of becoming an international star in his role as one of the founding fathers of the emerging world of rap. I was deeply impressed with his ankle-length gold-lamé coat.

  I met Jean-Michel Basquiat, another neighborhood luminary then being fêted by Warhol and the New York art world as the bold new face of neo-expressionist American painting. He seemed like another vague junkie to me, but his paintings were and are transcendental in their beauty.

  Being around the heroin vibe of the neighborhood got me interested in the drug again. When I mentioned this to Jamesy he told me that heroin was bad shit, and anyway there was a much better drug that was cheaper and more fun—and best of all, it wasn’t addictive.

  Cocaine.

  19

  Adventures in the Big City

  I thought coke was a wonder drug. It let you drink as much as you wanted without passing out or blacking out. If you took some in the morning it would kill your hangover and set you right for a hard day’s work at a construction site. It cost sixty bucks a gram, which was expensive but didn’t seem unreasonable given its magical properties. Since Jamesy had a good coke contact, I bought my supply through him regularly. Anne liked it, too, and though we were far too Presbyterian to throw ourselves into penury and debauchery over a narcotic, we made sure we had some on hand most of the time. At this time, strange as it may seem, coke helped—I can only guess that my relationship with alcohol is so bizarre that at first the introduction of cocaine alleviated the negative effects. At least that’s what it felt like. It didn’t stay like that, of course, but that’s how it began.

  I was happy for a time in New York. The energy and vitality of the city inspired me and helped me become confident, and the streets of the East Village seemed to be teeming with people who valued artistic expression and eccentricity. It felt dangerous and welcoming at the same time. Every night at one a.m., lying in bed, I’d hear a woman sing the most beautiful operatic arias. She sounded like an angel floating between the sirens and over the tar rooftops. I later found out that she was an aspiring opera singer who worked in a local bar and on the way home at the end of her shift she would walk through the streets to her apartment singing at the top of her voice. She did it for protection, figuring that any lowlifes on the street who wanted to do her harm would think either that she was too crazy to approach or that she w
ould attract too much attention. This delighted and impressed me. It seemed indicative of the beat of the locale—art as the best defense in a dangerous but exciting world.

  Roswell, my actor/construction buddy, told me on the subway one day as we were heading uptown to work, that they were having open auditions at a local off-off Broadway theater. He knew the director and suggested I go.

  “You’re funny, man. And different. You’ll get cast just because of that. No one else sounds like you.”

  “But I’m not an actor.”

  “Who gives a fuck? There’s a million nonactors in Hollywood making movies.”

  I said I would go, for a laugh, but only if he would. He agreed.

  On Saturday at eleven a.m. I went to a local bar on First between Ninth and Tenth streets called the Last Resort where the auditions were being held. I had passed the place, later to become the famous Coyote Ugly, many times before, since it was right next to Rosemarie’s, still the best pizza parlor in New York. (Forget about all that Ray’s bullshit.)

  The Last Resort was a gay joint, so I hesitated for a moment, but I figured I could always bolt if I found myself in an unpleasant situation, so in I went, and knew immediately it was where I should be. There must have been fifty or sixty stunning-looking girls sitting in rows, reading scripts. There were good-looking guys there, too, but that was no surprise—it was a gay bar. Roswell was a no-show, which pissed me off and made me feel terribly awkward, because I had never been to an audition before. I’d thought it would be like a job interview, so I had worn a suit, and the other actors eyed me suspiciously.

  The auditions were being held in the back room, which doubled as a dark place for anonymous gay sex during the week and a genteel off-off Broadway theater on weekends. Woe betide you if you arrived on the wrong night, you might inadvertently have to sit through a horribly amateur performance of Our Town when all you wanted was a strange man’s penis up your arse.

  I sat up at the bar and ordered a beer from the bartender, a very camp black dude named Stanley.

  “My stars! That is an adorable accent. Where are you from, sugar?”

  “Scotland.”

  “Oh, I have always wanted to go there…. Where is it?”

  Stanley was funny. He was from New Orleans and wanted to tell me all about it. I yakked it up with him for a while, but it seemed like the line of actors was taking forever to move, so I told him I was gonna go. He told me to hang on because he knew the director and was convinced that he would love me. He ran to the back room and came back a few minutes later, smiling triumphantly.

  “You’re next.”

  I was ushered in to meet a tall, thin, excitable creature in a purple Donny Osmond cap. He was sitting behind a small desk in the dark, smoky room, and next to him was a Peter Pan look-alike who was holding a notepad. He introduced himself as George Stephenson, the artistic director of the American Modern Dance Theater. He told me Peter Pan’s name but I forget what it was. I said hi, and George asked me if I had prepared a piece. I didn’t understand what he meant.

  “An audition piece. A scene from a play or a movie that you’ve memorized.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t know I had to do that.”

  For some reason he thought this was adorable and funny, so he gave me a script and asked me to read through some lines with the Peter Pan dude, who was an aspiring actor as well as a full-time henchman. The play they were going to stage, by Lewis John Carlino, was called Telemachus Clay. It’s the story of a midwest farm boy who travels to Hollywood and finds redemption after adventures in debauchery. I read the part of Telemachus, and the Peter Pan look-alike read the part of the manipulative Hollywood agent. I don’t know how good I was, but I knew that Peter Pan was fucking awful. If this was the competition, I was in clover.

  George thought so, too.

  “I wanna cast you. I don’t know for what, but I want you in the production.”

  “Great,” I said. “What’s the pay?”

  Peter Pan snickered. George gave the earnest showbiz speech, variations of which I have heard many times since.

  “There’s no pay. It’s off-off-Broadway and we don’t have any financing, but if it’s a hit—hey, who knows? Anyway, the exposure will be invaluable for your career.”

  I didn’t see how being in a play would get me more carpentry work and said so to George.

  He told me that if I wanted to be in show business, and he recommended that I should be, then people had to see what I could do. Talent agents and the like—they would all come to this production. That’s why there were so many young actors waiting outside.

  I told him I couldn’t rehearse because I had a job.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “We rehearse weekends and on weeknights before nine p.m. After that this room is booked for other activities.”

  Peter Pan gave another creepy little chuckle.

  I didn’t know what to do, so George gave me a copy of the play and said I should read it. He’d assemble his troupe at one p.m. the following day, Sunday, and would be really delighted if I turned up.

  I said I’d think it over. I thanked him and left.

  When I got there the next day I met the rest of the cast. They were an eager collection of young hopefuls, about six guys and six girls, all of us under the age of twenty-five. George told us he was going to “workshop some ideas” and “go through some exercises,” whatever that meant, and from there he would make his casting choices.

  He had us improvise scenes he conjured up, which always seemed to end with guys fighting each other or making out with girls. If this was what being an actor was all about, I wanted the job. Fuck the pay.

  Eventually, and rather unwisely in my opinion, George chose me to play the lead, the part of the midwestern farm boy, Telemachus. I told him that I couldn’t do a midwest accent and he said it didn’t matter because a Scottish accent would brand me theatrically as an innocent, the main quality the part required. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or grateful, but I accepted.

  I went off to work at the construction site every morning at five a.m. with a breakfast bump of cocaine—by then it was like coffee to me—and I hammered and sawed until three-thirty. Then I took the subway home from Harlem, changed, grabbed a slice at Rosemarie’s, and rehearsed with the theater group every night till nine. Then I would toot a few lines and drink beer until I fell asleep, around midnight. Some nights I would go uptown to see Anne, who by then was working in an Irish bar we’ll just call O’Tooles, because many of the chaps that I became friendly with there value their anonymity.

  If I wanted to talk to Anne, this was my only chance, because otherwise, given our schedules, the only time we were together was in bed or for an hour or so on weekends. This wasn’t as bad as it sounds because at this point we’d started arguing a great deal. Anne felt I was getting up to nonsense with the girls in the cast, and that was partially true. I wasn’t actually sleeping with anyone but some of these improvised acting games were just an excuse for the cheap thrill of frottage and making out with someone you shouldn’t be making out with.

  Anne was threatened by our unavailability to each other, so in order to placate her I started going to O’Tooles every night after rehearsals. Often she would be busy serving customers. It was an Irish bar, but an upscale one on the Upper East Side, so there was food and waitress service.

  Inevitably I got to talking with the other members of staff who worked there, mostly Irish immigrants from Belfast and Derry. There were two brothers we’ll call Finn and Callum who ran the place, and they were an excellent font of tall tales about life and the troubles in Ireland. They were Catholic and I was Protestant but we all agreed that even though that shit carried heft in the old countries it had no place in the New World, so our relations were very cordial. We would sing each other’s sectarian songs while drunk, but I don’t recommend singing “The Sash My Father Wore” in an Irish bar in New York. Even if you do have the glassy-eyed permission of the
owner, other patrons with less of an understanding of the New World rules may take offense.

  It was rumored that a few of the boys of the IRA would drink in the bar when on fund-raising trips to America, and although I drank with many Irish expats, I was not aware of anyone who was openly affiliated with the IRA. Still, there was an incident that was something of a clue.

  One night Roswell came with me to see Anne at O’Tooles. We brought a few grams of the old Bolivian marching powder with us and she took a line or two but couldn’t hang out with us, the place was too busy and she worked for tips. She put us in a back booth with Finn and Callum and a few other Irish transplants. It was one of those nights when the whiskey and coke were flowing like the fucking Mississippi, and after a spell somebody suggested we get out of the noisy shitheap full of drunken yuppies and go to a real bar. If Callum and Finn were offended they never let on, and after explaining to Anne that I was going out for a wee drink with the boys we all got in a taxi and headed over to Hell’s Kitchen.

  My memory is sketchy as to what bar we ended up in but a few red-faced soldiers from the Six Counties were there that night. We toasted and drank and sang together, and as we were leaving to go back to O’Tooles we saw three or four ladies of the evening standing on a street corner.

  With the cheery altruism of a drunk, I decided I was going to talk these girls out of their chosen profession, much to the amusement of Roswell and the assembled Irishmen, who insisted it couldn’t be done.