Lucy didn’t want to have only one story. She wanted a whole life made out of stories: momentum, propulsion, characters, change. In a small town like this there were only so many ways to feel moved by change, and they were too subtle to be interesting—a snowstorm like the one on the night she was born; a litter of puppies born in town; a boy’s hand on her breast in the cab of his musty truck; the married art teacher, telling her in his soft teacher voice that he just couldn’t do this anymore. Though she always tried to provoke something into happening—calling the teacher’s house in the middle of the night, getting drunk on the bottle of Johnnie Walker her parents had in the cabinet, going to loud concerts and drunken bonfires in the middle of snowy fields—the stories always ended up the same. There were only, after the bonfires or fiery moments of passion were over, more wet drives to friends’ houses, pale afternoons filled with rivers and waiting, gas station parking lots, excuses. Time in Ketchum moved like the shadows that cloaked her house—so slowly you couldn’t see it.
“Good story, Mom,” she said with that same sarcasm, although she couldn’t help but smile. She took a deep breath and scanned the dim bedroom, as if to breathe in the gymnastics trophies from the days when a cartwheel earned you your own personal statue, the framed photographs of friends making peace signs, the posters of rock bands that had never passed through Ketchum but whose records she found in free bins at the thrift stores downtown. These were all the things she would leave behind. She scanned the hundreds of faces, animals, mouths, and eyes that lived in the grain of the wooden walls. Though she had grown up in this house, knew all its creaks and cracks between planks, she had still allowed it to frighten her: the two-dimensional wood-grain animals, the vulnerability of its being in the middle of nowhere, ready to be ravaged by fire or lightning bolt, the sounds the house made, which her mother assured her was “settling”: the house getting more comfortable in itself, while she was growing less so. What she wanted was people. Potential saviors, all at arm’s reach from her, so that if the animal in the wood grain jumped out of the wood she could scream, and someone would hear.
“It’s almost time to leave, girlywog,” her mother said. She smelled like Lubriderm lotion and damp soil.
“I’m ready,” she had said, feeling only remotely guilty as she set Downtown into her suitcase, so shiny and satisfying in its library plastic.
When she looked back on it later, she would think of her arrival and the weeks that followed as some of the most benevolent she could remember, when heartbreak belonged to the city itself—beggars on Bond Street, fearless rats, a hand hanging out the window of the subway at the West Fourth Street station, holding a knife. Her arrival: the red-eye flight, the heavy suitcases, the air thick with that lethargic summer hope. The taxicab that smelled of urine, candy, and leather: the taxicab, a thing that so epitomized the New York of her mind, that made her feel adult and modern and that raced toward the skyline almost as fast as her heart. Then the street—Wooster, that was the wonky, exciting name of the street where the taxi had dropped her—that smelled like garbage, smoke, and something sweet, which she would later find out were the delicious sticky buns at R & K, a bakery around the corner on Prince, whose walls were tiled in yellow bricks, sticky with sugar and grime. But that first day, with the scarily hot sun beating down on the crowded street, she hadn’t known about R & K, just as she hadn’t known about anything that lay in front of her. Especially not where to go right then, toting her heavy suitcase, people swarming around her as she stood paralyzed on the street corner, looking up into the sky as if it might give her an answer.
But, as if by telepathic magic, it did. The sky produced, on a small yet significant gust of hot wind, a flying piece of paper. The flying piece of paper read Room for rent. Girls only. Call Jamie. Under the handwritten message was a lipstick mark, pink and puckered—someone had actually kissed the paper—and then a phone number made up of mostly ones and twos. She couldn’t help but link the word girl to girlywog, and to the postcard, and to the paper trail of fate that had brought her here. She found herself fascinated by the kiss, wanting, oddly, to kiss it back. The paper had a phone number on it, which she called from a pay phone, with one of the quarters her mother had made her keep in her pocket, for emergencies. What emergency could be handled with a quarter, Lucy hadn’t been sure, but as the coin clanked into its silver slot she silently thanked her mother, closed her eyes tightly as the phone made its first loud ring.
A raspy yet youngish voice answered—“Oh, thank gawd someone is fucking calling, I need to rent this shithole ASAP”—and told Lucy to come over right away, not that she guaranteed anything, they had to get acquainted before she signed on to living with someone she didn’t even know.
“Okay,” Lucy said. “Can you tell me how to get there?”
“You know the Chinese laundry place with the big cat in the window?”
Lucy said she did not know.
“Right off Tompkins Square Park, the place with the cat? Still no? Jesus, what are you, new here?”
“Yes,” Lucy said shyly. Yes she was.
“Tell you what,” the voice said. “Just get to Avenue B and Seventh Street, I’ll come down.”
Despite the ridiculous heat and the difficulty of the suitcases, the walk to Jamie’s was thrilling. There was the feeling that a school bell had just been rung and everyone had rushed out of their classes and into the streets, and they were now out to partake in whatever the world could offer them. There were incredibly short-shorts and there was incredibly large hair. One woman’s torso was entirely exposed aside from one band of her unitard that covered each nipple; she also wore a large black hat. There was UNIQUE CLOTHING and COMING SOON EAST VILLAGE VIDEO and BEST PORN IN TOWN XXX. Everything—walls, telephone booths, sidewalks—was painted on or marked, in unfamiliar, intriguing scribbles that said cryptic things like DESTROY or LOVERS WANTED. She passed a place called the Aztec Lounge, where a sign read: REFRESHING! ECLECTIC! SOOTHING COCKTAILS! ANCIENT AMULET KEEPS OUT DEMONS! This both frightened and excited her, and she wondered what demons lived here that would require an ancient amulet to keep out.
Lucy wove among the new streets, unnoticed. The feeling of it—of not being recognized or watched—made her giddy and terrified. She could do whatever she pleased. She could take any turn. She could write on a wall herself, if she wanted; who was there to see her besides all these people who didn’t care? There was no Mick telling her to sweep the floors and no mother asking when she would be home. She could answer an ad she found blowing in the wind. Everything awaited her. The buildings soared. Kids played in the streets in their underwear. She was arriving. This was her arrival.
Jamie, who was standing on the corner in what looked to be lingerie, was smoking the longest and thinnest cigarette Lucy had ever seen. Though it was only 10:00 A.M. and she was still in her sleep clothes, Jamie’s lips were already painted a bright red, the same red as the paper kiss. Lucy had lugged her suitcase what seemed like a hundred blocks, and the sweat trickling from her armpits was making its way down to the waistband of her jeans, which, faced with Jamie, seemed highly unfashionable. Jamie was all legs and lipstick, wearing an intimidating musk perfume, and Lucy wondered if her trail of fate had failed her, if she should follow this woman at all. But then again, she did need a place. And a hotel would be expensive; she had only her mother’s quarters, a book of checks linked to a new bank account she had started with the money she’d made at Mason & Mick’s: twelve hundred and fourteen dollars, which seemed like a lot until you began to calculate how long it would actually last. She smiled tentatively and followed smoking Jamie upstairs, watching her black, skimpy chemise work its way up the stairs and up her thin thighs.
The stairwell smelled of urine, paint, and cigarettes: the New York stairwell smell. Not the Idaho stairwell smell (old wood, mud, pine). Then she thought: but Idaho doesn’t even have stairwells! Had she ever been in a stairwell? This thrilled her: a new physicality; a new layout for her life. �
��Hope you’re in the market for a walk-up,” Jamie called back to her. Lucy smiled. Walk-up. This was her new language. These stairs were her new portal.
“Welcome to Kleindeutschland,” Jamie said breathlessly when they got upstairs, to a dismal, white-walled apartment furnished with nothing but an old orange couch, whose material reminded Lucy of a clown’s suit.
“Thank you,” Lucy said nervously, not understanding Jamie’s reference, but not wanting to seem stupid by asking about it.
“Little Germany,” Jamie clarified. “This street? Used to be the German Broadway. The storefront downstairs? Used to be a cobbler. Now, of course, it’s a porn shop. Personally I like to imagine the Germans phasing in to the new biz. You know, cobbling dicks for a living.”
Jamie laughed roughly as she inhaled on her cigarette. Lucy forced herself to laugh a little bit, too. She pulled her suitcase into the tiny room—closet-size, with no closet of its own—looked up at the ceilings, which were, oddly she thought, made of tin, indented with a flowery pattern. A crack ran from the central light fixture down to the bedroom’s door, where it was dead-ended by a loose piece of finishing. The crack made Lucy feel nervous, and then, as she followed it down to the floor, where a glinting black bug scurried around the baseboard, she was pushed into full-blown panic. She looked to Jamie for some sort of explanation, but her new roommate was unfazed.
“The love shack,” Jamie said dryly. “Space for a bed, and hey, that’s all ya really need, right?”
Love shack? Dick cobbling? Enormous, foreign insects? Lucy felt the blood drain from her face. She felt as white as the paint on the walls. Cracked as the paint on the walls. Hair as bright as the moon out the window of the plane that got her here. That one window to open. She did, impressing herself with her decisive action, how easily the glass shot upward. Hot air flooded in. Wood floors covered in splatters of paint. She stood in her new home.
Jamie pulled a cigarette from her blue-and-white pack and held it out for Lucy. She took it, slowly, and put it in her mouth. She had never smoked a cigarette before, and had never wanted to. But now, with no one watching her, it felt exciting and novel and right. The flame of Jaime’s match moved toward her; she could feel the heat on her face. Jaime lit the bright white end of the cigarette and Lucy inhaled.
“So tell me everything,” said Jamie. Her voice had changed almost entirely, from intimidating to intimate, nearly sexy, her face so close to Lucy’s as she blew out the match. Lucy felt the panic again—what could she possibly tell this woman, this woman wearing practically nothing but lipstick, who had most likely heard every story ever told, seen everything there was to see? But Jamie smiled suddenly, and there was a gap in her teeth, and the gap told Lucy things were going to be okay.
“What do you want to know?” Lucy said, taking another drag.
“Just everything,” Jamie said. “Everything you’ve got.”
This is how New York began. A willingness, and then a pause. An attitude, a confidence, and then this: cracked walls and huge bugs, your first cigarette, the taste of your own fear. Fear not for what might be in store but for what might not be, that your bravery, which looked so big in your hometown, would not amount to anything, that New York City would not deliver on its promise, for something grand and glamorous, unknown and unknowable. Suddenly it was as if everything you knew about space before (the V-shape of a highway that went on forever, expansive wooden decks, backyards that never ended, the shapes between the leaves where the sun filtered through and made stars) has been discarded, put in a box that you cannot unlock until you go back.
But how can you go back? You have only just gotten here.
Now, as Lucy toured the dismal bathroom (a ring of mold circumnavigating the toilet), the two-burner stove (“Busted since May,” said Jamie), the bars on the windows (But why, when they were so many flights up?), her throat got caught in itself. What had she imagined? A picturesque painter’s loft with huge squares of light coming in? A shiny mug of coffee on a white desk? A professional pleated skirt? A set of high heels in the corner of a huge room, sitting pretty beside a stack of very interesting books? No, that was not her New York. Her New York was one hundred square feet of hell and dust.
She suddenly felt the deep urge to create a feeling of okay for herself.
“Jamie?”
“Yes, Idaho?”
“Where can I get some paint?”
The paint store: in Ketchum she would have had to drive there. Here: right down the busy block. Six or ten guys working. New Yorkers to the bone, but Lucy didn’t know about them yet.
“What can we get fo’ yah, sweethawt?” one said, his buzz cut buzzing.
“Yellow,” she said. “I’m looking for yellow.”
“We’ve got Sunshine and we’ve got Scotch,” the paint man said. “And those ah the best.”
She studied the charming swatches. In Ketchum she would have chosen Sunshine. But Scotch, she decided (a decision whose equivalent she would make again and again in her new New York life), pointing to the darker yellow, the one that almost looked orange. She’d be here for only a year or so, anyway; the color didn’t have to matter.
“Absahlootly, no prablem; absahlootly, no prablem,” said the paint man as he rallied a paint mixer into its dramatic whir. “No prablem at ahl.”
No problem. She could do this. Paint the walls and feel brighter. Buy coffee from the deli downstairs. Listen to Jamie’s loud, chaotic music through the walls, let her heart boom with its energy. She would make a tiny orange sun of a room and she would be fine. The painting would fill her day. The sun would fall. She would get through her very first day in the Big City without any problems . . . until she was so exhausted that her eyelids were falling and realized—she’d laugh about this to herself later, but right then it was tragic—that she had no bed.
The tip of Jamie’s cigarette appeared in the doorway just as she had this thought.
“Come on, Ida,” Jamie said. “We’re going out.”
“I’m sort of exhausted,” Lucy said. She looked down at herself: white shirt and bad jeans, all flecked with scotch-colored paint.
“This is New York. Everyone’s exhausted,” Jamie said. “Come on, put some shoes on. We’re going to the Paradise.”
Reluctantly Lucy got up, unzipped and flopped open her suitcase.
“I don’t really have anything to . . . ,” she said, looking back at Jamie.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jamie said, blowing smoke. “Now I have to dress you? Come on.”
Jamie outfitted Lucy in a tight, cropped shirt with plastic geometric shapes sewn onto the fabric and a pair of faded black jeans whose waist reached well above her belly button. The outfit seemed absurd to Lucy, but she figured it was what people wore to Paradise, and so she went with it, accepting as well a smear of cotton-candy-colored lipstick—another of Jamie’s signature hues. Jamie threw a lot of exotically womanly items—more lipsticks; hard, red candies; condoms; cigarettes—into a little sparkly white bag that made an extra-satisfying click when it closed, and Lucy wondered if she should have a little bag like this, too, but she did not, so she stuffed a few five-dollar bills in her pocket and followed Jamie down the stairs and out the door and all the way across the city—which was crackling with the noises of a young, hot night—to the Paradise Garage; the sign boasted a neon muscle man.
This is a girl on her first night in New York. A girl in someone else’s clothes. A girl who can feel the slice of her stomach showing, between someone else’s shirt and someone else’s jeans. A girl who is being handed a drink involving gin, that tastes like poison and sunshine at once. A girl in a room full of other girls just like her, who have come here to tunnel down into their own dark parts and find the light. A girl who is being swept out into the middle of a crash of dancing bodies, who lets her own body writhe among them, who lets the fire of the gin heat her already hot stomach, who begins to wiggle her extremities, who lets two beautiful boys who are dancing together pull her between them, wh
o laughs while they gyrate against her, who lets the beautiful red and purple lights spin around and inside of her, thinking:
This is it, this is it, this is it.
Lucy woke up the next morning, in Jamie’s bed, to a feeling of extreme hollowness. Where was she? What had last night meant? Where had that feeling—the energy of newness, the blissful tug of communal movement, the absence of any worry—gone, and how could she get it back? Now she was all headache and smeared makeup and fear. Jamie’s slender back was turned to her: the back of someone she did not know at all, on the other side of an unfamiliar bed. A witchy tapestry hung above them; on it sperm-like shapes spawned and multiplied around some Indian goddess. There was a torn Blondie poster on the wall to her left, and a line of nails strung with Jamie’s bounteous necklaces. A tube of deodorant on the dresser. A box of Tampax and a lipstick kiss on the mirror. These things comforted her only slightly: this was the stuff of girls everywhere. But the panic returned when she thought about what she would do now, awake and alone in the city that was supposed to be her home. She thought she might wait for Jamie to wake up—maybe they would make breakfast?—but she also had the feeling that it might be hours before Jamie woke up, and that someone like Jamie probably didn’t make or eat breakfast at all. Plus, the broken stove.
Tuesday Nights in 1980 Page 9
