Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  Dedication

  This is for you.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  New York

  I can’t explain all the feelings that you’re making me feel

  You can’t stop what you can’t end

  Coming out of my cage and now I’m doing just fine

  I can’t keep track of each fallen robin

  I know I should stick up for myself but I really think it’s better this way

  The bellhop’s tears keep flowing

  Happy birthday, Mr. President

  The music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life

  I’m worse at what I do best and for this gift I feel blessed

  We all got in tune when the dressing room got hazy

  The streets aren’t for dreaming now

  Change my pitch up

  This is the kind of place where no one cares what you’re living for

  Empty barrels make the most noise

  Once I had a love and it was a gas

  Ask me I won’t say no, how could I?

  I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when

  Whatever happened to the Transylvania Twist?

  Watch your heart when we’re together

  We’re the dreams you’ll believe in

  All the smart boys know why

  Life is a mystery

  Following the girl I didn’t even want around

  Take a look around, see which way the wind blows

  Hope you guess my name

  There may be some things that I wouldn’t miss

  I was so hard pressed, I called the woman that I love best

  He walks away, the sun goes down

  Is it in his eyes?

  No man in the world cuts straighter or greater than New York’s number 1 cut creator

  Someday, girl—I don’t know when—we’re gonna get to that place where we really wanna go

  The screen door slams

  Little girl, I don’t care no more; I know this for sure

  Hanging on the telephone

  LA Woman’s on the avenue

  Don’t show your face in broad daylight

  We’re born only to fade away

  Whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting down

  If this is it, please let me know

  Get me to the airport; put me on a plane

  Miami

  Rockman lovers driving Lamborghinis

  Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it

  This time around for me baby, actions speak louder than words

  Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick

  Go Shorty. It’s your birthday.

  Los Angeles

  Pedal to the floor, thinkin’ of the roar, gotta get us to the show

  Ain’t gonna do you wrong while you’re gone

  We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far

  In my mind I’ve started to see things clearer

  I want to tell you something you’ve known all along

  New York

  They’ll hurt me bad, but I won’t mind

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Rivington Was Ours

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cast of Characters

  Vh1 DJ, narrator, struggling writer.

  Nikki Lingerie designer, part-time cocktail waitress at Stanton Social, Goddess, narrator’s girlfriend.

  Guy Former counter boy at latenight taco stand. Manager of a bar called St. Jerome’s.

  Gaga Singer, go-go dancer, girlfriend of Guy.

  Conrad Former door guy, barstool poet, bartender at St. J’s.

  Jackie Daniels Go-go dancer at St. J’s, Conrad’s girlfriend.

  Lady Starlight Performance artist, record collector, downtown big sister.

  Dino Former guitarist for dozens of bands. Great guy, too many drugs.

  St. Michael Former bassist, sober for fifteen years, barback at Pianos.

  Joe Germanotta

  Cynthia Germanotta

  Natali Germanotta

  Gaga’s father, mother, and sister.

  Leah Landon

  Troy Carter

  Rob Fusari

  Pro Tools (more on that later).

  NEW YORK

  I can’t explain all the feelings that you’re making me feel

  The upstairs lounge at Stanton Social looked like the inside of a silk lantern, everyone buzzing around in the dim light. They packed the upstairs banquettes and swarmed the bar with their graceless wealth. When Nikki came out in her little cocktail dress and apron, I couldn’t help thinking of those myths where a goddess came down to earth in disguise. She never washed her thin black skirt. It hugged the contours of her thighs and glowed against her skin in the candlelight. She moved around the room, giving customers checks to sign with pens stolen from banks and restaurants.

  They wanted drinks, they wanted to have a look at the bill, they wanted to have a little bit more of her in their lives.

  I watched from the door.

  She came up to the bar to pick up a drink order, double-checking her notepad. That’s when I saw her laugh. One of the off-duty waiters sat on the end seat, drinking from a clandestine water glass filled with cheap champagne and laughing at an inside joke. I loved the people who worked here as much as she did.

  The holiday crowd around her had skirted the coat check and maneuvered around the room trailing scarves and undone winter jackets, their warm hats stuffed in puffed pockets. Nikki stood among them, stark as a nude in a museum. All legs and limbs, smooth skin that shimmered from the toe of her shoes to the hem of her skirt. Her scoop-necked top plunged below her collarbones, the contours of her shoulder blades as stark and visible in the candlelight as a pair of hidden angel wings. Her long blond hair tickled her bare shoulders.

  When I got caught spying, she narrowed her gaze at me, piercing through the impossible gauntlet of the dancing crowd. I gave it right back. A standoff ensued. Then she blew me a kiss and took her tray on to the next adventure.

  Tomorrow we would do and say all the things we didn’t have time to do and say all week. Even sleep. We would have a date for lunch, a date for dinner, a date for dessert. Just the two of us. During the week we had no time. During the week bringing a coffee to the one who got the least sleep meant I love you. A work visit meant I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Waiting up all night to see the one who got out of work latest meant I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. But tomorrow we wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow.

  I knew from the lush crowd that she wouldn’t finish for another few hours. I decided to head home.

  Alone we were overworked and hopeless, delusional maybe. Overextended for sure. There was never enough time, never enough coffee, never enough interest to justify the hours of our lives that passed through our fingers. But together we were the two luckiest people in New York City.

  BEFORE I MADE IT OUT the door I got a text from her: “Did you go home?”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes open at the end of a double shift uptown. I came down on the highway, yawning into my cycle helmet and fogging up the glass on the chill winter night. I’d hoped I could sit around for a few and then give Nikki a ride home to her apartment, to steal an extra hour with her. I had worked since morning behind the gorgeous raw marble bar in the Museum of Modern Art. There were bartenders who spent all day behind t
he stick talking about varietals and classic cocktails and then went out after work to talk to other bartenders about mind-blowing garnishes, and I thought, there’s nothing wrong with that. It was just not what I did.

  “What do you do?” was that awful question people asked at parties. Difficult question if you didn’t have a pie chart handy. I slept four to six hours a night, woke up and wrote stories that no one else would ever read, then I read them over. For my bread and butter I bartended in the most beautiful museum on earth and on my night off I DJ’d parties whenever I could.

  On our first date I was so nervous that I blurted out, “So, Nikki, tell me, what are your hopes and dreams?” I had hoped to disqualify her, to hear she was boring or stupid or in graduate school. I had hoped to find just one reason that I could quit staring at her, to stop imagining how much of my life I’d change just to make room for more of her in my world.

  She told me she was waiting tables ever since she quit designing lingerie for a bigger company. Now she wanted to start her own lingerie company with a partner who’d worked for Victoria’s Secret. They would launch in February.

  When she turned the question on me, I answered truthfully about my secret writings. Afterward we looked into each other’s eyes like two lost sailors who first sighted land.

  Outside the restaurant I got a text from her again: “??”

  It would be hours before she could meet me. I plugged in the words to tell her I’d gone home. Then I imagined her there all alone with the noise and the people and their self-congratulatory drunkenness. If she could only know what time she’d finish I would come right back for her. But at this time of night that might take an hour. She, as equally exhausted, might pass out if I didn’t first. I decided to wait for her around the corner: “Let me know when you’re off. I’ll be at St. J’s.”

  THE LOWER EAST SIDE BEGINS just south of where the numbered streets and avenues end. It’s was where Manhattan stops making sense. Down Stanton Street, I hung a right at the next corner past Pianos, the keyboard store turned playhouse turned music venue. There would be no bands tonight because Saturday nights were just for dancing. A line of scenesters waited by the door doing their own little involuntary pre-dance—shivering and rubbing their hands together to fight off the chill. Lined neatly behind a retractable nylon belt on a metal stanchion pole, they looked like a bunch of people in line at the bank, itching to make their deposit into the night.

  It was a left after that, down the tenement streets and past a few other venues where a lone guitar player shined out of the stage lights in the center of a chatty crowd. The people inside were always as vibrant and drunk as the herds outside. The neighborhood, much to the chagrin of the locals, had given itself to nightlife slowly over the past few years. The voices outside echoed up through the thin windows of the apartments directly above. Older residents had moved here when crime was up and the rent was down. Their new neighbors paid twice and even three times as much as they did in rent just for the privilege of living downtown. If the older residents—fed up and getting older—wanted to move, they wouldn’t find an apartment that cheap without traveling an hour and a half north into the Bronx. I passed a few pricey lounges and hotel lobby bars where they served all the same kinds of drinks and beers, only the music was half as good and the prices were doubled. Two more blocks from there.

  St. Jerome’s was the bare-bones minimum of a bar and that’s why I loved it so much. Loud music greeted you at the door, light from a tattered disco ball showed you to your table at the chummy, half-moon leather banquettes, their seats always torn and taped like the backseat of an old muscle-car. The array of drinks and bottled beers behind the bar (no taps) comprised the entire menu. Their idea of a classic cocktail was a bottle of Budweiser garnished with a shot of Jameson.

  The only other light came from the flickering candles on the tables and a red spotlight beaming off a mirror at a low platform in the corner where a performance artist named Lady Starlight go-go danced to the hard-rock music in a leather bikini. The bar had a dozen black leather stools with metal pipe legs like the kind you see next to guitar amps on stage.

  That’s where I ran into someone we’ll call Guy.

  “VH1!” he shouted when I walked in the room that night.

  If you stuck around here long enough, you ended up with a nickname. Thing was, you didn’t get to pick your nickname. I was known for telling long stories and for knowing a little bit too much about bands in the scene, so I was named “VH1” after a show on the cable channel VH1 called Storytellers. When I first met Guy, he had long, ratty hair, teased out in an obscene heavy-metal style. Baby powdered and hair-sprayed. Everyone always asked him if it were a wig.

  When I met Guy he was a humble guy in a bandana, serving tacos at a latenight storefront called San Loco up the street. He’d played drums in a band called the Fame. Now he worked at St. J’s.

  He had small eyes, perpetually on the verge of the kind of squint you see on drummers when they pull off a killer solo. His lips jutted out in the same way. He had a pair of mismatched mutton-chop sideburns and when customers made their drink orders he always listened with his mouth hanging open like a third ear. The hair, always teased out and sprayed in different directions—baby powder dusting the shoulders of his black T-shirts—managed to hide the fact that underneath it all he was a very fragile person with very delicate features.

  At first glance you might find an emptiness to him, but in music, especially great music, emptiness isn’t expressed as silence. It comes through in reverb.

  Guy moved to New York City to become a rock star. He was a drummer. Or he had drums. He still played in bands but had an inherent disdain for any music that wasn’t authentic, original hair metal. I didn’t understand Guy. But I don’t think there is that much about him to get.

  He also had a five-year running crush on Nikki. I’d only known Nikki for about six months, but she wasn’t into him.

  Rumor was that Guy had met quite the catch. Someone new. I had seen her around the neighborhood before and I hadn’t seen them together until this night. They made a cute couple, the little brunette girl, only twenty years old. When I walked into the bar I saw her with him.

  Only he wouldn’t let her speak to me.

  “Where’s Nikki?” he scoffed, as if I’d forgotten something he ordered.

  “She’s at Stanton Social. She’ll be by.”

  “Who’s Nikki?” The girl looked at him. She had an open curiosity of his world, always trying to piece together the names and faces from his stories.

  His smile turned guilty, so he changed the subject. “I heard you’re writing a book.”

  “I’ve written two.” I looked down, knowing that failing twice isn’t the same as success. “Haven’t sold them yet.”

  “Two, really?” Guy said. “I think I’ve read maybe ten books in my life.” He walked away. Guy took great care in putting me in my place in front of this new girlfriend. And she wasn’t interested in being put in her place.

  When he went out for a smoke she marched right up to me. “You’re the DJ, right? I saw you spin at my friend’s birthday party.” Of all the things I did, DJ’ing I failed at the least. It made me smile. I looked up at the young girl. Behind her dark bangs she had the delicacy and eye makeup of the tiniest egg in a set of Russian dolls.

  “Yep and you, uhm . . .” Oh, geez. Even I can’t avoid another “What do you do?” so I said, “Where do you work?”

  “Oh, I don’t work anywhere. I’m a singer.”

  “What’s the name of your band?”

  “It’s not really a band anymore . . .”

  “Then send me your record. I like playing friends’ music.”

  She started to answer and then let out a sheepish laugh. Her eyes fluttered back down to earth, heavy with makeup and impossibly thick lashes. She looked up, biting the corner of her lower lip. “I don’t . . . uhm . . . I don’t have a demo or anything. Not yet.”

  “Oh.” I felt for th
e girl, actually. I’m the writer with too much to show for it. None of it good enough to share. “Well, when you get some shows together maybe you could book an after-party with me. Let me know, I’ll give you my number.”

  I realized then that Guy never actually introduced us. I didn’t even know her name. “How do you want me to put you in my phone?”

  “Gaga.” Her eyes sparkled like two disco balls. “Put me in your phone as Gaga.”

  “Gaga?”

  “Gaga.”

  “Like Freddie Mercury?”

  “Yes! Finally someone gets it.”

  “All we hear is radio Ga Ga . . .” I sang a bit of the Queen song. She came in on my harmonies.

  She shrugged her shoulders when she smiled in a very adorable, surrendering way. “And I’ll save you as—” Her screen lit up. So did her eyes. “I’m sorry. This is really important.” She ran out the door to take a call.

  I sent her a text: “Save my number and maybe we can work together. Good luck. —VH1.”

  WHEN GAGA RAN THROUGH THE door outside she found Guy scheming on a girl by the door. Nikki. Gaga shook her head and walked away as he cleared his throat and tried to wipe the smile off his delicate face. She pressed the phone hard to her ear.

  “Hey!” Guy yelled after her, changing the subject. “Who’s calling you this late?”

  “Hang on one sec,” she said as she shouldered the phone, enjoying the cat-and-mouse routine. She scowled right up at him. “It’s my producer and I need to—” Just then her phone had another message from another man chiming in a little too late on a Saturday night. “Oh! And I got a text from VH1.”

  She turned her back to him and went back to her phone call.

  I knew none of this yet. But seconds later the door of St. Jerome’s burst open. Guy, now incensed, glared over at me. I couldn’t tell if this were supposed to be a joke. Then again, it’s hard to tell with this one. “Stop texting my fucking girlfriend!” he said with that faux machismo that just didn’t work downtown. Too bridge-and-tunnel.