by Jarett Kobek
So it was with no small amount of surprise on that February night when I answered our Mickey Mouse telephone at 1:47 am and heard Baby on the other end, demanding that I meet him at an apartment belonging to some fool whom he’d met at Palladium.
“Baby,” I said. “Surely you can’t expect me to trot out at this time of night? It’s freezing!”
“Listen to me, very carefully,” said he. If wires could transmit odor, it was a certain bet that I’d be flooded with his boozy breath. “I’m only a few blocks away. You do not want to miss this. I promise.”
“I’d rather not,” I said. “I’m reading. Plus, you know. Club people.”
“Adeline,” said Baby. “When do I ever ask you to do anything? When do we ever do anything together anymore?”
A voice shrieked behind him. The shattering of glass. The cheers of a small crowd.
“Do you have Queen Rex with you?” I asked.
“No,” said Baby. “I wouldn’t call if she were here.”
“Okey-dokey,” I sighed. “What’s the address?”
“114 East 13th, between Third and Fourth.”
“What’s the apartment?”
“2D,” he said. “There’s a doorman. He’ll let you up.”
“A doorman? Jesus Christ, Baby. What sort of animal are you associating with?”
“Come here,” he said. “You will not regret it.”
“I very much doubt that,” I said.
I fortified my nerves with two swigs from a bottle of ultra-cheap tequila. I hadn’t wanted to consume that rotten stuff, but a gut-level sixth sense informed me that survival would require stiff intoxication.
The tequila was an artifact of Jeremy Winterbloss’s last visit. He’d made his appearance on the pretext of lending me certain comic books, but the true purpose of this visit was for Jeremy to grow drunk and complain about his love life. “Girls around school don’t seem interested,” he said. “Or maybe I’m not interested in them.”
“What sort of woman are you seeking?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Someone who seems like they have a clue what they’re doing with their life?”
He presented me with two trade paperbacks. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Both published by DC Comics.
“Aren’t you a Marvel man?” I asked. Jeremy’d transitioned from his internship into a part-time job working for Larry Hama, the writer on G.I. Joe.
“I guess,” he said. “But Marvel can’t do something like Watchmen. Our corporate culture doesn’t reward excellence. Other than Larry, the only good writer we’ve got is this woman named Ann Nocenti, who’s doing Daredevil. And most of the office hates her work.”
“Because she’s a woman?” I asked.
“Because she’s interesting,” he said.
*
Walking up Third Avenue, my stomach burned with the old tequila churn. I examined a construction site. A new NYU dormitory. Those were the days when NYU was always erecting a new dormitory on Third Avenue.
I’d asked Baby how he felt having matriculated into an organization with the stated goal of our neighborhood’s complete transformation. “To be honest,” he said, “I haven’t thought much about it.”
In the lobby of 114 East 13th Street, I informed the doorman that I was ascending to apartment 2D. He was one of these self-important little men who cannot help but invest their jobs with an undue amount of gravity, the kind of person who acts as if they themselves own the establishment. He wouldn’t let me up. He insisted that we buzz the apartment.
A drunkard answered, slurring out the words, sure, go ahead, send her right up.
I waited for the elevator, standing by a redbrick wall. On the other side of some glass doors at the lobby’s rear, there was a well-kept garden. A private garden in the East Village. How quaint. How absolutely divine.
The apartment door was ajar. Human clamor drifted out with the smoke of cigarettes. I didn’t bother knocking, sweeping in from the tiny hallway, moving past the makeshift home office.
It was a one-room studio, bordering on loft. Sparsely decorated, prewar high ceilings. Walls painted white. Very little furniture, the bare minimum. A desk with an electric Olivetti typewriter. A futon bed up against the wall.
Three drag queens were in the throes of acrobatic entertainment. A jumble of colored tights, feather boas, and makeup so outrageous that even yours truly wouldn’t dare the attempt. Two on the floor, on their hands and knees, with the third standing on their backs, one foot on each queen. The top mama warbled out a song by Dean Martin, about a marshmallow world in the winter. “The world is your snowball, see how it grows!”
A loose circle of seven people surrounded this human pyramid, everyone holding cigarettes or a drink. Baby and his friends stood out, younger than the rest, fresh faced and stupid. Baby was wearing a pair of unfortunate lamé pants and a shining gold shirt, and his friends were done up in green-and-purple polka-dotted spandex cutoffs that emphasized their white tube socks and black hi-top sneakers.
“Adeline!” Baby cried out.
We hugged. His bloodshot eyes confirmed my suspicion that he was halfway between the sun and the moon.
“I see the a-a-a-ac-crobatics have st-st-st-started,” I said. “Is this why you dr-dr-dr-dragged me here in the middle of the n-n-n-night?”
“Can you stop doing that?” asked Baby. “It’s really annoying.”
“S-s-s-s-sorry,” I said.
“Anyhoo,” he said. “You’ve got to meet the host. He was just here, talking to his girlfriend. The actress, Jayne Dennis?”
“No idea,” I said.
“She’s on Days of Our Lives,” said Baby. “Oh, there he is!”
A decently sized young man emerged from the bathroom, his suit sleeves stopping well before his wrists. A few buttons of his shirt were undone, exposing his undershirt. There was a wet spot on his stomach. He wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks.
“Come on,” said Baby, pulling me across the apartment.
We came to a halt before the man, who stared at us, confused, unfocused. He’d been partying all night. Perhaps several nights. Perhaps with no sleep. Perhaps he never slept. Perhaps he didn’t know that sleep was possible.
“Meet my friend Adeline,” Baby said to the man. “She’s from Los Angeles, too.”
“Hey,” said the man. I’d been mistaken, confused by the suit. This was no man. He was a boy, about our age, plus two or three years. A boy like all the boys in my life, like all the little kiddies.
“Adeline,” said Baby, “this is Bret.”
“What school did you attend?” I asked, knowing my own kind, a fellow traveler in the privileged halls of private education.
“Buckley,” said Bret.
“You appear somehow familiar,” said I to him. “Were you acquainted with George Whitney?”
“I’m friends with his older brother, Timothy. Did you go to Buckley?”
“No,” I sniffed. “I went to Crossroads.”
Nothing evoked my interior snob like someone who’d paid for a traditional education, throwbacks to the days of company men, to doctoral candidates in engineering at Caltech and Stanford, men who would graduate and build missiles for Lockheed.
“What are you doing?” hissed Baby.
“Baby,” I said. “How many of these dreadful boys do you imagine that I’ve met in my short lifetime? Timothy Whitney! I used to give handjobs to his kid brother!”
One of Baby’s friends positioned himself atop the kitchen counter. Someone had turned on the enormous stereo, which blasted out “Only in My Dreams” by Debbie Gibson. Baby’s friend danced, avoiding any semblance of the beat, performing a drunken facsimile of the cha-cha with occasional Rockette kicks.
Baby pulled me into a far corner, by the bed.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s why I invited you.”
“What?” I asked again.
“Look!” said Baby, indicating the zigzag bookshelves on the wall over the bed, wherein rested multiple copies of editions authored by Bret Easton Ellis. Foreign language translations. Menos que cero. Moins que zero.
“He’s so young.”
“Don’t worry,” said Baby. “He’s too drunk, I think, to have noticed. I’ve been keeping pace and I’m well past the point of being affected by social slights. Just talk to him again.”
“I’ll wait until the proper moment transpires,” I said.
Such transpiration did not occur for some time. Mine eyes played witness to human bodies stampeding through the motions of fun.
Great amounts of insipid conversation, far too many Billboard Hot 200 songs, and an awful lot of that terrible drunken party laughter which always forces one to consider what’s wrong with oneself and then forces one to wonder what’s wrong with everyone else.
About two thirds of the assembled congregation lacked any sense of Bret Easton Ellis as an author. He was simply the man who owned the apartment. The other third could not cease from peppering him with inanities. “Did you really go to Bennington?” “Is it exciting to be a writer?” “What’s Robert Downey Jr. really like?” “Where do you get your ideas?”
They’d ask these questions as they drank his alcohol and then, before he could offer a reply, shouted out follow-up statements. “My father went to Bennington!” “I’ve always wanted to write!” “I heard he’s an asshole!” “I’ve got so many ideas but I just don’t know what to do with them! Can I tell you a few?”
Here he was, our famous author, surrounded by the hottest accoutrements of the American 1980s. A downtown apartment, an enormously powerful stereo, an immaculate kitchen with stainless steel refrigerator, the obligatory Olivetti typewriter, a Les Mis poster, bookshelves stuffed with his own work, a suit cut so right that it was wrong.
For the life of yours truly, I could not see why the man had bothered. Suffocation by plastic wasn’t any better than shitting one’s self with the DTs and crying out to the great gods of dope for mercy hot shot of heroin. He seemed so very lonely.
The young author stepped out onto his balcony. I darted around a drag queen falling asleep on her feet and followed him outside.
“Would you spare one of those?” I asked.
“Why not?” said Bret Easton Ellis.
“I don’t want to bore you,” I said, returning his lighter. “But je t’aime The Rules of Attraction. It’s a to-die-for fave.”
“So you’re the one,” said Bret Easton Ellis. “Did you know that Tom Cruise lives in this building?”
“And?” I asked.
“Don’t you think it’s interesting that Tom Cruise lives in this building?”
“Not particularly,” I said. “No.”
Every apartment on the east side of his building had its own balcony, but none were close to the size of Bret Easton Ellis’s veranda.
“One night,” said Bret Easton Ellis, “I watched two gangs fighting down on the street. One gang had chains. The other gang had a guy with a car. The guy with the car kept trying to run over the guys with chains. It was kind of fabulous. Have you ever eaten at Cave Canem?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s across the street from the Lismar Lounge. It used to be a famous bathhouse, the Club Baths. They had parrots and palm trees inside. The city closed it down, you know, because of AIDS. My friend Hayne Suthon bought the building and opened a restaurant. She kept the décor but cleaned out the cum. Now they serve authentic Roman dishes, circa 79 AD. It’s very yuppie.”
“I know Cave Canem. They’re simply not my sort.”
“I attended the opening,” said Bret Easton Ellis. “Did you really like Rules? The Voice Literary Supplement gave it a horrible review.”
“It’s excellent,” I said. “Though it demonstrates the same characteristic weakness of Less Than Zero.”
“And what’s that?” asked Bret Easton Ellis.
“You exhibit an undeniable strain of American squeamishness,” I said. “You believe in the venality and shame of sexuality and drug use, as if the clockwork of our blue planet stopped and started on what people under the age of twenty-five shoved into the various holes of their bodies. But brother, that’s okey-dokey, the world requires its prudes.”
“One of those queens has some cocaine,” said Bret Easton Ellis. “You could go into the bathroom and shove some sparkling white lines of cocaine into the holes of your body.”
“Why not,” I said.
MARCH 1989
A Radical Shindig at the Anarchist Switchboard
I bleached out my hair and dyed it pink, courtesy of Tish and Snooky, then had it snipped snipped snipped into a Marilyn Monroe by Mark the Barber over at Open til Midnight. Later that very same evening, Минерва rushed into our apartment.
“Big change,” said she.
“George Herbert Walker Bush is our President. One must adjust to the new era,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. “Like all things, this too shall fade.”
She planted herself on my bed, talking as I dressed.
“Interesting thing about New York, bright girl,” she said. “I think Americans are not knowing how much Uncle Sam exports hatred to rest of world. Soviets hate Blacks because Hollywood hates Blacks. Ronald Reagan loved putting Negroes in cages. When I come to New York, I see race is myth. темнокожий are no different. Some terrible, of course, but when is teenaged male not terrible? When was last time great hymn and high Hosannas written to virtue of horny seventeen-year-old? And in person, I see many are quite attractive.”
“I thought you were a lesbian,” I said.
“Passing phase,” said Минерва. “No more nights at Cubbyhole. Enough kitty cat for one lifetime.”
“Are you looking for a boyfriend?” I asked.
“Eh,” said Минерва. “Maybe boyfriend is looking for me.”
I donned a black dress with matching jacket and gloves. I wrapped a tiger-print shawl around my neck. I tied old chains to my wrists like bracelets. Just above my right breast, I attached belt buckles like a soldier’s medals.
“This is more than enough,” I said, regarding myself in the mirror, worried as ever that I’d added poundage in the posterior. “Let us journey out into the evening.”
*
Revolution was in the air, pollen clouds shaken loose by the riot’s whirlwind. Минерва, sensing my interest, suggested that I accompany her to a radical shindig at the Anarchist Switchboard.
On our way, my dear Stalinist pal inquired about Kommie Kalifornia, asking if it were better than New York. “The weather is primo,” I said. “But LA is real dullsville.”
“What of San Francisco?” she asked.
“I’ve only been thrice, in high school. The people appeared a bit confused.”
“Fucking hellfire,” she said. “I am looking for graduate studies. Otherwise visa trouble.”
The Anarchist Switchboard wasn’t much more than an uncomfortable room painted stark bleeding red in a dingy little basement on 9th Street. Bare light bulbs offered illumination. People sat on broken couches and metal chairs.
Some were flat-out radical intellectuals, their lives consumed by multiple re-readings of Bakunin. Others were bearded weirdos, leftovers from the radical ’60s. A handful were obvious addicts, nodding off into psychoactive oblivion. The rest were kids dressed in the media-manufactured uniform of The Punk. They sent me. They really sent me.
We occupied two open cushions on a couch, the broken springs jabbing into my meat. Sitting beside yours truly was an older woman
, a bottle of schnapps emerged from her coat pocket.
“Bad time keeping,” Минерва said, looking at her Swatch watch. “Fucking anarchists.”
An older man in a Yankees baseball cap started the meeting. We were there, he said, to consider whether or not the indictments of a few police officers made a lick of difference. “Show trials!” said the old woman, schnapps blooming as she opened her mouth. “Enough talk! I want to know what we’re going to do!”
“At least someone’s being prosecuted, right?”
Hisses and boos.
The Yankees aficionado mentioned that the city was making cash offers to victims of the Riot, all below $15,000. “It’s an insult!” shouted the woman.
She was not alone. People blurted out whatever ideas traipsed through their silly little heads.
Behind us, a young man spoke with a noticeable accent. New Jersey. Not particularly thick, but surely noticeable.
“The problem as I see it,” he said, “is that we’ve been living on borrowed time. There was a collective delusion fueling the Lower East Side, that we could exist here with impunity, that we were free to run wild and that our way of life was sustainable into perpetuity. We were mistaken. You can’t break the rules and get away with it forever. They’re going to steal it from us, slowly, over time. If you think it’ll end here, you’re wrong. It won’t be finished until every poor person is driven out of the city, until they transform all of Manhattan into something that we can’t recognize. We’re doomed. Sitting around talking revolution in an East Village basement is as good as twiddling our thumbs. The reason why the poor always get shafted is because we’re victims of human nature. We’d much rather squabble amongst ourselves than go the distance with the rich. The only reason the rich are the rich, as far as I can tell, is that they lack the social mechanisms of restraint. They do what they want. They tell poor people to jump and poor people ask, ‘How high?’ One thing I like about this neighborhood is that we’ve transcended restraint. We need to harness that energy and transform it into distinct political action.”
