Seventh Avenue South

by Duncan MacLeod

  “Oh, there it is. Oh, drat!” Bartleby frowned.

  “What?”

  “Normally the guy gives me government LSD, but this batch isn’t very good. Not good at all. It might just be rat poison.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, it’s not doing a whole lot.” It wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what acid was supposed to do, but it wasn’t doing it. “Should we take more?”

  “No, best to ride it out. Let’s go to Boybar. I have some customers there.”

  It was a long walk in heels for Eleanor, but we made it to Boybar. It was crowded with interesting people. I fixated on a blond bodybuilder with blue eyes. Every time he moved, a shimmering bundle of muscles flexed and stilled. I was invisible. He would never want someone like me.

  Bartleby busted me. “I see you like Roy. He’s a doorman over at the Saint. You do like him, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He only likes black boys and Puerto Ricans. You’re out of luck.”

  “I’m too ugly anyway.”

  Eleanor slapped my face with her purse. “Hey! Ethan don’t say that about yourself. You’re beautiful.” Her words were like a distant champagne glass breaking on a floor in a crowded ballroom. They were the kind of thing that pretty people told ugly people every day.

  Bartleby got busy, selling caplets of ecstasy to flamboyant men and exuberant boys. Eleanor held them in her purse. Bartleby shoved hundreds of dollars into his pockets.

  We moved on. The next bar was heterosexual: the Aztec Lounge on Ninth. It was packed with mohawks and leather. I had that body snatcher sense that at any minute, one of these guys was going to realize I wasn’t straight and alert the whole bar. I think it was a common fear among gay men, especially with AIDS and everything. We were not generally treated well by testosterone-laden heteros. Bartleby was married, so it had to be easy for him to move in between the two worlds. The uptight clone bars on Christopher Street were pretty heterophobic, but the East Village was very welcoming to anyone who ventured in. The Aztec Lounge wasn’t a welcoming place for my kind, though. But it might have all been in my mildly acid-addled brain. The worst part about straight bars for me was the men. The hot, dreamy, perfect men who stared at Eleanor’s breasts and never even noticed I was in their midst. It was torture.

  Mercifully, Bartleby’s transactions were quick and few. He took us to another heterosexual watering hole called King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. At least here the guys were ugly. I didn’t care whose breasts they looked at. Bartleby did a brisk business with the metal crowd at King Tut’s. After twenty minutes, he smiled and held up his hands. “That’s it.”

  Eleanor pleaded with me to come to their place. Bartleby and Eleanor lived next door to the acid church, the Temple of the True Inner Light on 10th and A. Their apartment on the ground floor was decorated in East Village minimalist style, but the furnishings were antiques, not thrift store finds. The candelabra was not an imitation - it was 17th Century Silver. I had been to enough rich kid’s parents’ houses to know the difference.

  Bartleby wasn’t interested in discussing his decor. He wanted weed. In the bedroom, he rolled a joint and brought it over.

  “Are you having any?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “I just like to watch, like I said.” She gave him an extra-long frown which he ignored.

  I wasn’t a big fan of pot. It made me hear voices and see things that weren’t there, but not in a good way. It was like I was afraid the whole time that my Mom would find out or the police would arrest me. I told Bartleby about my misgivings.

  “Oh, that’s paranoia. Look, this shit is the best weed money can buy. Humboldt Purple. You won’t get paranoid. Have you heard of a shotgun kiss?”

  I shook my head. He fired up the bowl and took a few puffs. Then he turned the joint around, bringing his lips to mine, and exhaled smoke out the mouth end of the joint and down my lungs. It was extremely intimate. It wasn’t innocent. Bartleby had designs. I peered through a smoky haze at Eleanor, who was watching us intently. She was rubbing one of her nipples. “I like to watch” it echoed through my head. Was I about to lose my virginity in front of a girl?

  Bartleby smiled. “Did you like that?”

  I gave a coy grin. “Yes.”

  Bartleby held up a finger. “Wait! No.” Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he went into convulsions. Eleanor screamed.

  “Not again! Bart you know you can’t smoke weed! Damn you!”

  He was in a full seizure. I had never seen one before. Eleanor went into autopilot. She grabbed a washcloth and rolled it up, putting it between his teeth. “So, he doesn’t bite off his tongue.”

  If weed made me paranoid, this super strong shit combined with Bartleby’s performance put me into a whole new level of fear. I felt my head pounding. I thought I would have a stroke.

  “Shall I call an ambulance?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I mean no, give me a second to clean up.”

  She ran through the apartment, hiding drug paraphernalia and spraying Glade air freshener like it was confetti at a ticker tape parade. Meanwhile, Bartleby spasmed on the carpet. His eyes were still rolled up in his head, so as he moved his head around, it was right out of a scene from the Evil Dead.

  Eleanor ran back into the bedroom. “He’s still seizing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck.” She called 911. “Honey, go. I got this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. It was a lovely evening.” She smiled the celebutante smile that made you feel important and wanted.

  I couldn’t go back to Gia’s. Not until the sun came up. I remembered Save the Robots and braved the stares of drug dealers and thugs between Avenue B and C. I wandered down C until I recognized the dilapidated entryway. They let me in, of course, because I looked like someone. A club kid. It was the fake hair. Save the Robots was empty inside. Bars were still closing, so it hadn’t filled up. I went downstairs and I was the only one on the dance floor. I walked back upstairs and sat in the sand, trying to clear my head.

  A perky blonde girl with Mia Farrow hair plopped down beside me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked with a slight British accent.

  “I’m having a messed-up night.”

  “Are you from California?”

  I nodded.

  “Me too. I mean I grew up in Livermore. I’ve been in London.”

  Somewhere deep inside, I wondered if London really existed. Was she a robot put here to coax me back into the real world? I didn’t care; it was working.

  “I’m from Vallejo.”

  “Ew.”

  “I know.” We both knew what Vallejo was about. The purported birthplace of crack cocaine on the West Coast. Like Oakland, but without all the glamour.

  “Livermore’s not much better.” I liked this girl.

  “At least you have the labs.”

  “Right, where we develop technology designed to wipe out the entire planet and half the galaxy.”

  “I had some bad acid and then weed and the guy with the weed had an epileptic seizure in front of me.”

  “Here.” She took out a vitamin bottle and handed me one.

  I examined the pill. “What is it?”

  “Niacin. It will knock the acid out. You’ll get a flush of heat when it’s working, then it will subside.”

  I popped the bright yellow vitamin in my mouth and took a sip from her water bottle.

  “You’re very trusting, you know. What’s your name?”

  “Ethan. Should I have distrusted you?”

  “Jill. No, not yet anyway.” She giggled.

  “Jill, I can’t go home. It’s haunted.”

  “Come to our place.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Madison and 64th.”

  My jaw dropped. “How do you afford that?”

  “It’s a Vidal Sassoon thing.” She smiled.

  “Huh?”

  Jill explained. “We get our training for free, but then we have to go where S
assoon tells us. I was in London for two years, and now I’m here.”

  I frowned. “It sounds like indentured servitude.”

  Jill grew pensive. “Yeah, it is, except we get paid.”

  “Do they keep some of your pay for housing?”

  “Most of it.” She frowned.

  “What happens if you leave?”

  “Well we can leave after three years. If we leave before that, we have to pay them back for all the training.”

  She examined my extensions, then touched them.

  “Those must itch.”

  “They hurt, too.”

  “I can fix that if you want.” She pored over my scalp like it was a case study.

  “I want it out.”

  “Come on, then.” She took my hand and we left. A cab was idling out front. It whisked us uptown to the fancy Vidal Sassoon apartment. We took Park Avenue so we could go under the Pan Am Building. Jill shared my fascination with roads that tunneled beneath skyscrapers.

  “We have to be quiet. My roommates are probably all asleep.”

  The suite was in a nice building, but there were little details that gave off an aura of human trafficking. For one thing, the rotary telephone had a lock that prevented the residents from dialing out. The beds were glorified cots. The walls showed stains from a dozen years of greasy hands. The kitchen was mostly bare. The cookware, scratched Teflon and thin stainless-steel pots, seemed hardly adequate for preparing a good meal. It’s New York, so that wasn’t a big deal. Everyone ate pizza.

  Jill ushered me into the shared bathroom. She wielded razor sharp hair scissors. Carefully, she poked through the superglue clumps and separated the extension, along with a lot of my hair. With each one, the constant headache of pain diminished. It was sweet relief. There were about thirty extensions, and each one took a good five minutes. Less than halfway through, the first of the sullen hairdressers wandered into the bathroom to do her morning ablutions. She greeted me with the same warmth as Christiane F’s mother. In a similar German accent, she said “Those look terrible.”

  Jill said, “Good morning Greta.”

  Greta didn’t even turn away as she pulled her nightgown over her head. She stood, naked, waiting for the shower to warm up. A queeny boy from Russia was next. He was skinny as a rail and hung like a horse. I blushed and turned away. He caught me and smiled. That confidence, how I envied it.

  Jill concentrated so intently, she hardly noticed my interactions with the parade of hairdressers coming and going. “Almost done,” she said.

  And it felt so much lighter. I was free from Gia’s bondage.

  Jill ran a brush through the back of my head and tsked. “There’s a lot of damage and glue. I need to clean this up with clippers.”

  She brought out a pristine pair of German hair clippers and in seconds the area beneath my mop top was a good number three shave. “Let’s add some color, yeah?”

  She applied a powerful bleach that turned my short hairs white in ten minutes. We rinsed that and she brought out the Directions from Manic Panic. It was stop sign red. With a plastic brush she smeared red dye on the underlayer. “I find it’s better to just towel this out. Rinsing sends it flying everywhere.” She used a well-stained clean towel to wipe the excess red dye out.

  “You should take a very long shower the next time. Don’t use strong shampoo like Prell. Baby shampoo is best.”

  My much-longer dyed black hair on top of my head hung over the red, giving a black widow spider effect. She broke out the white Aqua net and coiffed my hair like Robert Smith, with a clump dangling in front of my eyes. “Perfect!”

  “What do I owe you?”

  Jill laughed. “You owe me a trip to the roof to watch the sun rise.” She grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels and we took the elevator to the top floor. There was a set of stairs that gave out onto the roof. Indeed, the sun was peeking through the skyscrapers that surrounded and enveloped us. We ended up drinking half a bottle. I don’t remember what happened after that, but I doubt there was any sex. I woke up in the middle of the day with a hangover and no idea where I was. Then the uncomfortable cot reminded me I was sleeping in the hairdresser slave cave.

  There was one girl in the apartment. “Where’s Jill?”

  “She’s at the shop. I’m going to order Chinese. Do you want anything?”

  “Um, pot stickers. Isn’t the phone locked?”

  She grinned. “Watch this.”

  She went to the locked wall phone and flipped the cradle a dozen times in rapid succession.

  “Um yeah, hi. My phone isn’t dialing out for some reason. Can you connect me to 212-485-1911?” a pause, then, “Oh hi, I’d like to order chicken chow mein, peanut noodles, and -” she turned to me and snapped her fingers.

  “Pot stickers,” I whispered.

  “Pot stickers. Only 4 to an order? Then two orders. Charge it to the Sassoon account.”

  In about 20 minutes, the steaming bags of noodles and dumplings arrived.

  “I’m Ethan, by the way.”

  “I’m Valerie. From San Francisco.”

  “I’m from the Bay Area like Jill.”

  “Cool. Go California.” She made a high five and we slapped hands. We both used chopsticks to eat, which was a sure sign we were from San Francisco. I had baffled my Boston friends at the Asian eateries when I broke out the chopsticks. They simply don’t teach it back East.

  The pot stickers weren’t as good as the ones back home, but they were still tasty. They were all pork and no shrimp. If there were shrimp, it would be that nasty tiny bay shrimp that resembles clipped thumbnails. New York has a lot of food, but it’s not easy to find the good stuff. Valerie insisted that I try the peanut noodles; they were pretty good.

  “The best I ever had were in Hong Kong. If someday we’re ever allowed to go to Shanghai, I hear they’re even better there.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to go to China in our lifetime.”

  Valerie shrugged. “Change is the only constant.”

  Valerie gave me Jill’s phone numbers so we could stay in touch, and I left her Gia’s number.

  ✽✽✽

  My hair never looked better. I waltzed into the vocals store to find Gladys and Andre with their arms folded.

  “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “I start at 1pm.”

  “It’s 1:20.” Gladys was livid.

  She caught sight of the red dye in my hair. “You come with me.”

  She dragged me down the block to the secret store - the one we only spoke of in hushed tones.

  “I don’t want anyone seeing you, so you’re working here. Got it?” She unlocked the two heavy duty padlocks on the security gate and the three deadbolts on the door.

  Inside was a record factory. Bootleg records of concerts lay scattered in heaps.

  “You wrap these in shrink wrap, use the hot cutter to seal the two sides and use this heat gun to tighten it up. You think you can handle that?”

  I shrugged. “Show me one.”

  There was a giant roll of clear plastic folded over to form a continuous open sleeve. She slipped a Grateful Dead bootleg into the plastic and lowered a heat sealer. This had two red hot wires that cut the plastic and glued it together at the same time. Then she picked up the blow dryer device and shrank the plastic until it clung tightly to the LP.

  “Got it?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Do those Allman Brothers and Fleetwood Mac. I’ll be back to check on you. She closed the door, and padlocked me in. The space was filthy and scattered. No customer was ever permitted inside the bootleg factory, so why clean it?

  I grabbed a stack of Allman Brothers, and slid them into the plastic shrink wrap sleeve. I lowered the device with glowing hot wires, and it severed and sealed the record. A faint acrid odor rose from the burnt bits of plastic. I felt like I was going to get cancer.

  The blow dryer belched scorching hot air. I had to hold the records by the edge. The coolest part was w
hen the shrink wrap shrank and clung to the sleeve. From some of my earlier menial jobs I learned that you move more quickly if you complete things in batches. I sealed 10 records, then blew them tight. In twenty minutes, I was done with both stacks.

  I was locked in. I had to pee. I searched the space for a toilet, but there was none. The only option was a jailhouse sink in the corner. Gladys must have doubted my ability to complete a task, because an hour passed with no sign of my jailer. I was bored. There was no sound system in the place. After a thorough search, I found a Mickey Mouse turntable buried under a pile of empty boxes. I found a Led Zeppelin bootleg and put it on. The quality was difficult to judge. The needle on the turntable might have contributed to the muffled sound. I turned up the volume. Now it sounded good. I could hear concertgoers buying weed and planning sex. I recognized those voices. It was a young Andre and Gladys. The way she pronounced the word ‘Fuck’ was unmistakable.

  “What are you gonna do to me baby?”

  “I’m gonna blow you.”

  “And then?”

  “I’m gonna let you fuck me.”

  “Where?”

  “In the ass.”

  “No, I mean where will we fuck?”

  “Right here.”

  The rest was drowned out by the high voice of Robert Plant, “If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break…” The guitars were not powerful or coordinated like on the album. It sounded like everyone in the arena was stoned and horny, including the band.

  Gladys startled me. “Who said you could listen to music? Why aren’t you working?”

  I smiled and pointed to the stacks of albums.

  She picked one up. “I told you to hold the heat gun at least three feet away from the album.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Don’t you fucking contradict me.” She pulled a phone out of a desk drawer and dialed across the street. “Andre, get over here and see what the boy did.”

  Andre lumbered across the street, a scowl on his face.

  “What, Gladys?”

  “Look at these. $120.00 each, and they’re warped.”

  Andre hated me less than Gladys. “Did you show him the right way to do it?”