Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  She quietly slid out of the bed, gathered herself, splashed water on her face from the pink, rusty sink. Before she went downstairs and out into the world, she crept back into Jamie’s room to grab her little white purse from the night before. She emptied it and filled it with her own things: her stupid green wallet and her cherry ChapStick and then, for good measure, one of Jamie’s cigarettes, which she pulled from the pack on the dresser: a tiny, precious scroll. Just borrowing, she told herself. Borrowing from her new friend.

  Outside, New York was being New York. The hot asphalt was steaming, the little dogs were being toted or followed by their eccentrically dressed masters, the clothes were bright and skimpy, the smell was sewer and candied nuts, the newspapers were cracking open at the café tables, the sunglasses were enormous, the scrawls on the walls seemed to vibrate. Lucy wandered down the avenue, in search of nothing and everything.

  What she found: fire escapes zigzagging like lightning bolts on the sides of every building, painted over so many times that their surfaces resembled blistering human skin; a group of men in the park wearing orange and white singing the same low song, over and over; a burping black suitcase on Avenue A, revealing a bright red bra; a car radio blasting Mexican horns, its owner flicking his tongue out to reveal gold-covered teeth; sidewalk grates opening and slamming like the lids of boxes, offering glimpses of a whole other dark world below this whole dark world; a spiky, spray-painted crown on a red wall; an abandoned lot, home to a rusted tricycle, a large bird, a sleeping man wearing a ripped plaid jumpsuit, and miraculously, a swatch of morning glories that had just now yawned open.

  Lucy had no reference point for this landscape. It was entirely new to her, and so she could not place it within herself. It moved upward instead of out. It moved outward instead of in. It was only the middle of the morning and already it was a circus of catcalls and coffee smells and crazy sounds. Was she frightened by it? Disgusted? Terrified? Intrigued? All of these things. She wanted nothing more than to call her mother. She wanted anything but to call her mother. She was both desperate and open. Her mind filled and emptied; she didn’t know it, but she was already bracing herself, becoming immune. Through her flat shoes, she felt the city’s hot concrete. Her hot concrete. She could walk everywhere. She did.

  There were problems with living in New York that were not problems anywhere else in the world. Lucy had only thought of her move here as a singular large-scale risk, an enormous leap of trust that required the bravery everyone back home had questioned. Lucy had never considered the wicked guilt of doing nothing in a city constructed around always doing something, or the ordeal of subway tokens, or the carrying of many, many plastic bags that dug into your hands like blades, or the clothes one had to buy in order to feel even remotely comfortable existing among the real New Yorkers, who seemed to know exactly what to wear at all times—when to bring an umbrella, when you were supposed to switch to boots. The skirt she had imagined did not exist, she found, and even if it had it wouldn’t be right. The right skirt, in New York City in 1979, would not be pleated or formal. In fact it probably wouldn’t be a skirt at all but some version of the tight leggings she saw Jamie and the other girls wearing, tight leggings with large shirts, almost to the knees. She would need much more than new clothes to become a New Yorker anyway, she saw during those first days and weeks in the city. She would need to change entirely, and not in any of the ways she had expected.

  She let Jamie bleach her hair in the sink. “Hot, Idaho,” Jamie said.

  At a stall on St. Mark’s Place, she had a man with big round pieces of wood in his earlobes pierce her nose with a silver hoop. “Even hotter.”

  Based on an advertisement where an attractive, wholesome-looking girl held a glass of whiskey under the text: SINCE WHEN DO YOU DRINK JIM BEAM? SINCE I DISCOVERED IT’S SO MIXABLE, Lucy began ordering Jim Beam on the rocks, both wanting to be the wholesome girl who mixed it with something and wanting nothing to do with her.

  She kept her eyes open for the artists in her book, but it seemed Jamie did not frequent the same locales that they would; she met, instead, a series of male suitors who were cleanly dressed and messily drunk, who were looking for a blonde like her to take their minds off their work. Jamie explained that she hated these assholes, too, but they were just another necessary evil in a place that ran on necessary evils. “Plus,” Jamie whispered, “I find their blandness excessively interesting.” Lucy got drinks bought for her—raspberry martinis were a thing—but always skirted out of the chunky, sweaty grasps of the men, often opting to go outside and look up and out at the buildings, to smoke one of her new cigarettes on a stoop and watch the city twinkle itself toward morning.

  It wasn’t long before she had spent all the money she’d saved, and she was ashamed to call her parents for more, not that they had any to send her. She ate hardly anything—bread and butter, candy bars, an apple—but even with her meager ways she could not afford the rent Jamie was asking for: $206, on the fifteenth of the month.

  Although she had known she would need a job, she had not given thought to how she would get one, and, she began to see after a number of discouraging interviews, a job was not going to fall out of the sky like Jamie’s apartment listing had. Each day during those first few weeks, as she climbed from the sweltering underground of the subway stations or taped up a blister she had gotten from walking around the city aimlessly, or felt like a fool in her silly-looking sneakers, slashed with neon yellow strips of plastic, which had seemed so advanced in Ketchum but horribly wrong now, she questioned her decision to come here. Each day she had countless moments where she thought she just couldn’t hack it, where she longed for the wooden walls of her bedroom, Ketchum’s clean air, an afternoon with nothing around her and nothing to do. On multiple occasions she found herself in tears in a phone booth or on a stoop, sometimes even in the dressing room of a clothing store whose clothes she couldn’t afford, always with other people’s hungry eyes on her, filled with a voyeurism linked to the deep need to see reflections of themselves in similar situations at other times; everyone knew there was nowhere to cry in New York.

  It was in the middle of one of these lacrimal instances, in a midtown subway station, on her way home from a botched interview (at an independent bookstore, where apparently you had to know the authors and titles of every classic ever written, on command), dressed probably inappropriately in one of Jamie’s shorter skirts, that Lucy saw her first New York City artist.

  On the other side of the tracks, between the rusting pillars, a man crouched, then erupted like a star, then crouched again. A red stream of paint followed his hand wherever it moved, like magic. The man was small; whatever he was drawing was big. What he was drawing was still unclear; she moved closer to the tracks so she could see. A figure of sorts, an arm, a leg. The most confident lines in the world, rushing from his body like a song. Lucy wanted to watch him forever, this small, magical artist, but she felt the pressure-wind of her train coming to obscure her view and whisk her away. But wait. This was it. Yellow intrusion of train light. But wait! The man was just finishing. The train screeched and flashed in front of her. She jumped in, scurried to the window on the opposite side. The man was gone, just like that. What was left on the wall was a giant penis, a penis with arms and legs and a penis of his own, which was being sucked by another penis. Lucy made one enormous sound like a laugh. A penis being sucked by another penis?! She was the only one in the subway car, which she was grateful for, because she could let herself feel the heat from what she just saw: heat that ran from her heart to her stomach, whether for the artist or his vulgar image, she didn’t need to know.

  When she broke the bad news about the interview to Jamie—“Didn’t go well, Jame. Should have paid better attention in English”—Jamie only scoffed.

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” she said, while mixing a very dirty-looking martini in a mason jar. “Being a girl in New York? It’s just the fucking worst.”

  But Lucy was
n’t sure yet. She wasn’t sure if it was the worst or the very, very best.

  During her fourth week in the apartment, in the armpit nightmare that was early August in the city, Jamie invited people over: a crew of guys whose names all started with R. Immediately Lucy wondered if any of them were artists; immediately she found out that they were not. Ryan, whom Jamie had been sleeping with even though she confessed to Lucy that she thought he was “missing some brain cells,” had big arm muscles and a crooked nose. (“Not the only part of him that’s crooked,” Jamie told her later.) He was talking about a movie he had gone to the night before, something about sharks that he’d seen while significantly high; he couldn’t get the theme song out of his head. Rob, who was more beautiful than the rest when it came to his face, but who stood and was depressingly short, rolled his eyes in Ryan’s direction as he talked, then gave Lucy a high five. Randy, a too-nice guy with a long ponytail and an army coat, said very slowly, between hits from a joint that was almost burning out, “Hey, Lucy, we heard you were looking for a job.”

  Lucy smiled.

  “Can I get a hit of that?” she said. She realized it was the first time since getting here that she felt confident enough to ask for something, not to wait for it to befall her, and as she sucked the smoke into her lungs she felt good, and alive, and she said to Randy, “What’s the job?”

  He told her it was at a bar. A bartender job.

  Lucy looked, glassy-eyed, over at Jamie, who gave her a sad smile.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Ida,” Jamie said. “This city is built off of people doing things they don’t wanna do.”

  Jamie, Lucy had found out, worked as a massage therapist in the financial district. “The men get really tense,” she had said. “All that money, all that trading.” She had said the words money and trading as if she were running out of breath, and Lucy understood that Jamie’s massages sometimes, if not always, ended up being more than just massages. Jamie also tended to work overtime, from her “home office,” and Lucy often heard the exchanges taking place: the trading, she assumed, then the money.

  Lucy gulped. She felt simultaneously depressed and excited. She imagined herself in high heels, serving fancy people fancy cocktails. It would just be temporary. She could do it for a while—work on her feet until she got on her feet, so to speak. She pushed away an impulsive thought of her mother, what her mother might say about her working at a bar, which went something like: You move all the way out there, so far from your mother, to . . .

  Randy sighed. “Jamie, why you gotta knock my place of employment like that? It’s an upstanding place. Right, Rob? Rob’s there every night. Right, Rob?”

  “I’ll take it,” Lucy said quickly, sipping from a beer Jamie had handed her. “I mean, if Rob’s there every night . . .” She winked at Rob in a way she figured was cute.

  “There’s a place where you can buy live snakes down on Canal,” Randy said, out of nowhere. “I was thinking about getting one.”

  They all laughed, which made Lucy feel okay about things. Thinking about being part of a group of people sitting together and laughing. She imagined Randy with a snake around his neck, serving someone a raspberry martini.

  And so Random Randy, as Jamie and Lucy would start to call him because of his propensity to bring up totally irrelevant subjects at odd times, took her to the Eagle, an underground (both figuratively and literally) bar in the West Village. It was a kitschy, divey place, where the walls were made of fake stones, and there was the vague sense that the bar itself was tucked inside of a log cabin. Randy bent over a plug and a string of red chili pepper lights went on around the windows, though in the daylight you couldn’t really see that they were on. The chili pepper lights made Lucy want to get back on a plane to Idaho, where she would be working for Randall, the lawyer, not Randy, the bartender. She agreed with her mother’s imaginary critique: she did not move to New York City to work in a bar. But then again, what did she move to New York City to do? And what else was there? Randy intercepted her with an arm thrown around her waist, guiding her back behind the bar for what he called the “grand tour.”

  “This is the ice,” he said. “And here are the wells. And the glasses rack up like so. And you want to be sure not to use the Coke button here. ’Cause Sprite comes out.”

  Lucy took the soda gun in her hand. She tested the sprayer tentatively, coaxing a foam of Coke from its mouth, which landed in a stainless-steel sink.

  “And here are Jamie’s matchbooks,” Randy said, pulling one of the white squares from a candy jar and tossing it to Lucy. She carefully fingered the little booklet, and when Randy told her to, opened it. On the inside was a message: DON’T BE CRAZY. BE WILD.

  Lucy laughed once but then didn’t know if she should be laughing, so she stopped. “What are these?”

  “One of Jamie’s projects,” Randy said. “She writes down the things that the guys say to her, the guys she sleeps with. She’s one of those creative types, you know? Not like me. I’m just . . . regular.”

  “Oh, you’re not regular, Randy.”

  “It’s fine,” Randy said. “I don’t mind. I don’t need to be an artist. There are enough of those in this city, I’ll tell you that.”

  “So Jamie is an artist?”

  “Let’s just say she’s not sleeping with those guys for the money. Although there’s that, too, I guess. I’m not one to explain it, but it’s all part of some big art project. She tapes them. Sets up a camera. Then she sort of leads them into things. Put on my lingerie, do a dance, cry like a baby. She’s got these miserable Wall Street guys on tape, acting like fools.”

  “Isn’t that sort of . . . fucked up?”

  “Isn’t life sort of fucked up?”

  Lucy smiled down at her matchbook, then tucked it into her pocket. So Jamie was an artist. She lived with an artist. The thought made her heart quicken.

  “But don’t bring it up with her,” Randy said, now sounding tentative, rubbing the part between his nose and his mouth. “She’s not into talking about it. I guess you could say she’s not really into the whole artist thing, you know? She’s more of a lone wolf. Says she wants someone to find the tapes when she dies.”

  Lucy was quiet; she watched Randy suck in a batch of stale air and raise his arms to stretch.

  “That’s about it for the tour, really!” Randy said. “If you don’t know what’s in a drink? Ask your customer. Your customer always knows.”

  But there were no customers yet, at four in the afternoon, and Lucy stood behind the sink wondering if this was indeed her fate: an empty bar with dust shimmering in the sunlight, an empty life.

  But quickly the empty life began to fill with bar regulars (Sandy the shoe-repair guy and Pat the failed writer and Gabby the hickey-boasting hooker), and Jamie’s crew of men friends, and bits of toxic white powder and slices of the moon, spotted in the valleys between the buildings after her shifts, close to 4:00 A.M. She began to know the streets (Sullivan, Delancey, Mott) and the subways (screech, ding, swoosh, spark) and the outfits (big boots, big shirts, small pants or small boots, small shirts, big pants). And with her post at the Eagle came extraordinarily easy access to one of the things New York had in as much abundance as pretzels: men.

  Bret with one t. Large loft, small penis, too many candles, who cared, she liked him. Small penis or not, he didn’t like her enough not to move to California three days after their meeting, for a job at a computer company that had been started in someone’s garage.

  Tom with no shirt on, offered to help her carry a mattress up to her apartment. Fell onto the mattress and fucked; when Lucy woke up, he had migrated to Jamie’s bed.

  A woodworker whose name she didn’t know who took her to pancakes at Pearl Diner and kissed her in the subway, who when she asked him his name at the end of the night said: married.

  And on and on; the men adored and then disposed of her. With each of them she felt briefly and tightly tethered, hopeful that they would deliver her to that place that s
he craved: the deep dark cavern of love and lust, the place where longing stopped. But none of them did, and in between her encounters with them, and usually even during, she felt deeply alone. And besides, when she thought about it hard enough, from the part of her that craved something beyond just a body in the bed, she knew they did not interest her. She briefly tried to turn her experiences with them into a project, like Jamie had, but she knew it wasn’t hers. What was hers? She didn’t know. For now it was the twelve-foot expanse of mahogany that she wiped a hundred times a night, behind which she had started to feel almost, if not totally, at home; by December the smell of the old limes didn’t bother her anymore.

  As the months grew colder (cold was something that she knew, from the endless, deep winters in Ketchum) she actually began to feel a tinge of comfort in the chaos that was her new life—the street fights and the snow trudging and the late nights—and to take a sort of young-person solace in her loneliness, floating nicely in her melancholy, which was reminiscent of her teenage years in Idaho, the sad mountains, the ease of getting caught up in her own plight. This was part of the waiting, she knew. She knew if she waited long enough it would happen. The big bang, the cosmic crash, the delightful disturbance that would determine her true city fate.

  Of course that was back when Lucy still believed in fate at all. When she still held superstitions—if she said things out loud, she felt they wouldn’t come true, and if she wished for things hard enough, she thought they might. First stars, worry dolls, lucky pennies, matchbooks—she had alternately believed in these as things that might alter her entire course in the world. That postcard on the side of the road was one of these things. Jamie’s red lipstick was one of these things. And Randy, who randomly invited her to be a bartender at the Eagle on Bleecker Street, he was one, too. She let herself believe that all of this—coming to this city, taking this job—was all a part of a cosmic plan for something big to happen in her very small life. She just had to wait. She had to wait until she had mixed a million drinks. Until the matchbook she pulled from the jar read: KISS ME HARDER. Until time tipped past midnight and it was technically Tuesday and officially 1980. She just had to wait until the crowd died down and parted and the noise around her silenced and the red chili pepper lights were the only lights left in the world—for something, or someone, to change her life.