Party Monster

by James St. James

  AND FUNNY!

  I had them rolling in the aisles at the Limelight!

  Peeing their pants at Robots!

  Like the time I took the vacuum cleaner to the club—because “it looked dusty”—and pretended to be the cleaning woman! . . .

  Sheer hilarity!

  “That Michael sure makes me work for my hosting fee!” I told everyone on my coffee break. Then I start vacuuming again.

  Sometimes I’d ride a broomstick around all night, or spontaneously go-go in my jockstrap.

  And when I played “Nearer My God to Thee” on a dozen beer bottles—well, I brought down the house.

  Now on the fourth day, things can start getting a little dicey.

  Emotions are running high—who knew there were so many reasons to just start sobbing? And You and Rational Thought parted ways some time ago—probably before the three peyote buttons, but definitely after you sucked off the crack dealer on the corner.

  Yes, the fourth day is tricky. Let me warn you: there are traps and pitfalls along the way. Like when you decide that it’s finally time to have that heart to heart with your roommate and discuss all the things you dislike about him.

  Hold off on it. Don’t do it.

  Day Four is full of red herrings to trip you up. It sounds like a good idea. Of course, honesty is the best policy, and communication is so important, and I know that toothpaste thing really bothers you, but—

  TRUST ME ON THIS ONE:

  Day Four is not the time to have that conversation.

  In fact, any conversation is fraught with potential danger. Lurking behind every syllable could be a double meaning—“Just what EXACTLY did you mean when you said it looked like it might rain? Are you reverting to cliché to comment on my supposed ‘lack of insight’? Is this really about that boy I slept with three years ago?”

  Many people get into very violent fights over very trivial things on this day. Watch yourself. You may be more irrational than you think.

  Sometimes Day Four is the perfect time to clean your closet. Again, trust me. I know it looks dull. But once you get into it, it will become an all-encompassing, never-ending Sisyphean task. But, it’s a feel-good trip down memory lane, and you will cry when you find that little pink miniskirt that makes you look just like Belinda Carlisle (A SKINNY BELINDA! A SKINNY BELINDA! I didn’t mean anything by that!).

  And if maybe you just happen to crawl inside the closet and shut the door and wait for the bad things to go away . . .?

  WELL GOOD FOR YOU. That’s the most sensible idea you’ve had since Tuesday when you cut out all those pictures of Linda Evangelista and glued them to your wall in a swirly pattern. You’ll never regret that move, no siree.

  I believe it was on a fourth or fifth day of unbridled depravity that we fell so low, even I am ashamed of my actions.

  We had long since passed the point of mindless chatter. That was days ago—when we still liked each other, and we could still combine vowels and consonants to form WORDS. By now, we had taken to clattering quietly, each in our own corner—Jennytalia, Mavis, and me—watching the dust bunnies, between each carefully doled out bumplet of cocaine. I mean, we subsided on whiffs of hints of lint. And you had better really NEED that granule of lint—you had better have a doctor’s note saying it was a medical emergency, a matter of life and death . . . because it was almost gone, and Mavis was feeling a bit persnickety.

  We all looked like hell. Both Mavis and I had that “gravy skin face.” And Jenny was stunning, as usual, but an odd shade of greige.

  I know, I know—we should have stopped all this madcap hilarity a few days ago, when everyone we’ve ever known left us in disgust. They called us “gross” and “greedy.” But like ants and rubbertree plants, we had high hopes and determination coming out of our ears. Uh, noses. We were going to ride this one out! Never say die! It’s not over till it’s over!

  And it was almost over.

  Occasionally, I tried for a bit of levity, but my performance of “I’m a Little Teapot” was met with stony, irritated glares. This I interpreted as peevishly withheld applause. At any other time, my wildly inventive “spout” usually rates at least a gush, or a deep, scraping bow of respect.

  Jenny did what Jenny does after days of drug taking: she got on the floor and began searching for long-lost bits or bags of cocaine.

  Normally, we would lift her up by the scruff of her neck and tell her to . . . just . . . stop it.

  But, hey, maybe she was on to something this time. Maybe there really WAS a long-lost gram between the cushions, or behind the bookshelf. It happened all the time!

  Suddenly, Jenny wasn’t so crazy after all.

  In fact, now that you mention it, we all remembered putting a stash aside for emergencies. But was that yesterday? Or last month?

  Our search became more frantic as we convinced ourselves that there WAS INDEED a treasure trove of cocaine somewhere, somewhere within our reach.

  We searched the furniture—in fact we dismantled it and ripped open the upholstery. Then we stacked every piece in the corner of the room.

  We systematically covered EVERY INCH of that apartment, and with each passing hour, we only grew more hell-bent on finding the now-legendary eightball.

  We drained the waterbed, and inspected it underneath and inside.

  We ripped the linings out of jackets.

  We checked each ice cube for a frozen treat in its center.

  We emptied cereal boxes, went through the neighbors’ trash, and even strip-searched each other—“I never trusted either one of you!”

  Just as Mavis was about to get under the sink, dismantle the pipes, and begin roto-rooting—

  Jenny became convinced that she distinctly remembered it had dropped behind the radiator.

  Hmmm . . . yes . . . why, by cracky! I think she’s right. In fact I know that’s where it is.

  “Yea! Yea!” agreed Mav. “It fell off the windowsill, behind the radiator! Of course!”

  Jenny had the skinniest arm, so she tried first to reach down that narrow space between the radiator and the wall. The radiator was hot, and it burned her arm, severely, BUT NO MATTER, she . . . just . . . couldn’t . . . quite reach.

  “Get a wire hanger. Bend it like so.”

  She suffered a few more burns, but even the wire hook didn’t work.

  “I think I feel it though!”

  Well . . . what if Mavis and I pulled at the radiator, really hard, and leaned it a bit more forward?

  That could work.

  So we sweated and huffed and wheezed and pulled with all our might . . . Our hands were hot, our faces were filthy, but, By God, we moved it an inch more out.

  “There it is!” She made a stab at something, but—

  “OH NO!”

  There was a crack between the wall and the floor, behind the radiator, and she MIGHT HAVE PUSHED OUR SALVATION INTO THE WALLS!

  There was only one thing to do:

  Rip the radiator off the floor.

  With a hammer, a screwdriver, and a crowbar—the three of us CLEARED THAT OBSTACLE out of the way. YES SIR! GOOD JOB!

  I’m not making any of this up.

  NOW: without that pesky old hot thing to slow us down, we could get on with our mission. All of us, flat-faced on the floor, with matches and later a penlight, peered into the crevice between the wall and floor.

  “Why, Jenny, you’re right.”

  That DID look like a Baggie.

  Over there.

  So we tried again, with the bad luck hanger—but, “Damn You, James!”—it only served to push it (whatever it was), underneath the floorboards.

  YEP. YOU GUESSED IT.

  With the trusty crowbar in hand, we began tearing up the floorboards in Mavis’s living room.

  We had taken off a good two or three rows—when Freeze walked in.

  Picture this: the furniture was slashed and all neatly stacked in the western corner of the room. There was no bed. All food products had been emp
tied into one pile on the kitchen floor. Every piece of clothing was destroyed. The entire neighborhood’s garbage was all right there, in the bedroom.

  And there we were: sopping, stinking, blackened, and crazed. Face down on a ripped-up floor. Next to an upside-down, nonfunctioning radiator.

  “What in the hell is going on here?”

  He wasn’t angry, yet. Just baffled beyond belief.

  We tried to play it down—real casual-like—we didn’t want to look desperate . . .

  “Oh, not much. How was your day?”

  He wasn’t biting.

  Finally we had to tell him of our quest and its consequences.

  I went to go get a beer to help calm him down. When—

  On top of the refrigerator

  I saw

  a plate.

  Not just any old plate. But a plate with an Everest-sized mountain of cocaine on it.

  “Uh . . . guys?” I held it up.

  “Oh yeah—I forgot all about that.” Mavis said, as a matter of course . . . just as blithe as Miss Danner herself.

  So we dug right in, and got all tense again, and didn’t talk to each other for a number of days. Except to periodically look at one another with disgust and say: “I can’t believe what a fiend you turned into there.”

  That was the spring of ’94, a legendary binge that began in February and ended in July. I only weighed about twenty-seven pounds . . . But those were SOME TWENTY-SEVEN POUNDS, I tell you! Each and every one of them STYLISH TO A FAULT! TWENTY-SEVEN pounds of fabulosity!

  I took a lot of acid that spring, as well, and throughout the month of April, I thought I was a space spider—of course, of course—and so I shaved off my eyebrows, pierced some things, dyed my hair green, then chopped bits and hunks of it off until there were four otherworldly antennae leaping from my head.

  Because that’s how space spiders styled themselves in 1994. And my patented Spider Dance never failed to slay them after hours.

  Ah, youth! Such folly!

  The nightly after-hours at Mavis’s took on a quasi-mythical quality.

  Every night Freeze and I dredged up a new “star” for Mavis to meet. We really did bring in a stellar mix. She got to meet some fascinating people, hard-to-meet people, A-listers.

  And Mavis and I worked exceedingly well as a hostessing team.

  We took turns, bouncing up and down, taking care of everybody’s particular needs.

  One of us would dazzle the crowd with witty banter and sophisticated anecdotes, and the other would, you know, make sure the ashtrays were emptied and there were enough free lines on the table.

  We were a team! 50-50!

  I really looked forward to these parties.

  And the craziness at her house only intensified in the coming months. People came at all hours, in all conditions, and stayed for days. They came alone, or with entire flotillas. There was an armless drag queen wearing a floral bikini who spent a great deal of time shivering behind Mavis’s potted ferns. I remember one occasion when I suddenly realized that I’d spent two whole days describing my bloody stool to the Mexican delivery boy who didn’t speak a word of English, but nevertheless, he had so much fun he quit his job and became a club kid.

  Of course eventually things started getting dangerous, too much rickrack. And people started stealing, you know, little things like eightballs and boyfriends. And there were fights and mishaps. Ugliness was everywhere.

  Then . . .

  One day, Freeze accidentally sold a vial of K to a Latin King gang member who thought it was cocaine, and consequently this gang member fell into a K-hole.

  A simple enough mistake. Happens quite frequently. I, personally, look forward to it. (K-holes, I mean.) But gang members are a notoriously humorless lot of people, and supposedly there was now a contract out on Freeze’s life.

  Now, really. A stern talking-to might have been in order. A bit of labeling advice, perhaps. But death? Because of a drug mix-up?

  That’s just silly. Things like that don’t happen. Not in clubland.

  Anyway.

  On the night in question, Freeze was at my apartment packing up drugs for the evening. He did it there because the super at Mavis’s building was getting suspicious of all the traffic in and out of her apartment.

  Mavis and I were kickin’ like chicken at her place, waiting for the goodies to get back. The buzzer rang, and through the intercom an adorable dealer named Cookie-Puss said he was coming up, and it was “very serious business.”

  Now don’t get me wrong. I love Cookie-Puss to death. I think the world of him. He’s gorgeous. The face of an angel. Salt of the earth. Don’t have a bad thing to say about him.

  But I didn’t have my face on. I looked a mite craggy. And I just didn’t have the energy to compensate for a weather-beaten face by being witty. So I went into the bedroom. And pretended to be asleep.

  Well, the door burst open, Mavis screamed, and all hell broke loose.

  Cookie-Puss was not alone. Someone else was with him, and this someone pulled a gun on Mavis. “WHERE THE FUCK IS FREEZE? WHERE’S THE CASH? WHERE ARE THE DRUGS?”

  Pickle, the dog, began barking loudly, and the gun was turned on Pickle. “SHUT THE DOG UP OR HE DIES TOO!”

  Cookie-Puss, bless his heart, took Pickle into the bedroom, where I was pretending to be asleep.

  “Oh, hi honey.” I smiled and yawned, ignoring the hoo-ha in the other room, “How are you?”

  “Oh, hi James. Sorry about this. Do me a favor: shut the fuck up. Shut the dog up. Don’t come out of the fucking room and whatever you do, don’t look at my friend. If he thinks you’ll recognize him, he’ll have to kill you.”

  “OK. But how are you?”

  “Fine. Fine. Yourself?”

  “Good.”

  “You look good.”

  “Thanks.”

  I heard crashing plates in the next room.

  “WHERE THE FUCK IS FREEZE? THAT ASSHOLE IS DEAD, DO YOU HEAR ME? WHEN WE FIND HIM, HE’S DEAD!”

  Where the fuck was Freeze, indeed. He was due back twenty minutes ago. In fact he was probably on his way up the steps right now. That boy has the worst sense of timing . . . Wouldn’t that be just like him to walk in right now?

  The whole situation seemed more comical than deadly. Pickle and I giggled over Mavis’s plight in the next room.

  Cookie-Puss came back in the room and blew me a kiss.

  “Sorry about this, James. See you later?”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey.”

  He smiled and I got hard. He stole the phone and warned us both not to leave the apartment or call for help or they’d come back and kill us.

  I sat thinking about how sweet Cookie-Puss was for caring about me so much . . . I wondered if his friend was as cute as he was . . . How nice that he didn’t want me to die . . . What a good husband Cookie-Puss would make . . . We could go around knocking off drug dealers together . . . I’d be his moll.

  Mavis was slightly hysterical when I went to check on her. She was holding her neck. Apparently Cookie’s hot little friend had tried to choke her and had played with her boobs, or something equally odd. I mean, who would play with Mavis’s boobs?

  “What did they take?”

  “All they got were a few rolls of pennies and three grams of coke,” she sobbed.

  “Shit. I really wanted a bump of coke. You don’t have any? I hope Freeze gets back soon.”

  Inexplicably, she threw a glass at me.

  Post-traumatic stress, probably.

  “FUCK YOU, JAMES!” she howled. “I WAS JUST FELT UP AT GUNPOINT, MY HOUSE WAS BROKEN INTO, BUT LET’S WORRY ABOUT GETTING YOU A FUCKING BUMP! I AM SO SICK OF YOUR ATTITUDE, I COULD STRANGLE YOU!”

  Then she ran to her bedroom to cry.

  I think she’d been doing a lot of speed lately, too.

  Freeze came home and seemed rather blasé about his death sentence. “What are ya gonna do?” He didn’t think the Latin Kings were really after him. He figure
d Cookie-Puss got a little too sketched out on crack and concocted the whole story as an excuse to rob them.

  Freeze must have been out of his mind, too. Would my sweetheart do something like that?

  Daylight—Avenue C.

  I ran into Cookie-Puss, lovely little Cookie-Puss. . . . He was looking a little haggard.

  “J-J-James! H-h-how are you? W-w-want s-s-some c-c-coke?”

  “No thank you. How are you, though?”

  “G-g-great. Sorry about the other night. They really wanted to kill Freeze. I tri-tried to protect him, y’know. Th-th-that’s why I was there. To protect him.”

  “Sure, honey. That was sweet. Maybe I will do just one bump.”

  We did it on the street corner.

  “I’m going into rehab tomorrow,” he said. “Six months.”

  “Good for you. I hope it works out.”

  We said goodbye. When I saw him three weeks later, he looked very bad indeed. Almost not cute. There were scabs on his face. Circles under his eyes. His clothes were dirty.

  “Hi, Cookie-Puss,” I said brightly. “My friend here needs some drugs. Can you help us out?”

  “G-g-give me the money, quick. I’ll g-g-get it for you.”

  My friend looked dubious.

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him, “this is Cookie-Puss. A close friend of mine. Of course we can trust him!”

  Cookie-Puss grabbed the money and ran.

  “James, how do you know that person running off with my rent money?”

  “Oh, he held me at gunpoint a few nights ago. Isn’t he cute?”

  Needless to say, I never saw Cookie-Puss again.

  And I never again felt comfortable at Mavis’s apartment, either. Her snippy manner, coupled with Freeze’s increasingly imperial attitude, were wearing thin. They seemed to have forgotten all about my piquant charm, and the beguiling physical presence that drew them to me in the first place. In short, I started to feel like I was on the way out.

  I knew it to be true when, one night, quite unexpectedly, Michael showed up at one of our after-after hours. Something he NEVER DID.

  This was when Michael was still just dabbling in drugs, and exaggerating their effects. Going to a party at nine o’clock in the morning was inconceivable, back then.