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

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  And he said, “Pay cover.”

  Although my introduction to New York City nightlife came as an employee, my real introduction came from Motherfucker. I had a job waiting tables at an ill-fated Jean Georges Steakhouse in Columbus Circle. I worked in a maroon-on-maroon shirt/tie combo. (No one else was hiring.) I had no money, no friends, and no life. But on the night of a Motherfucker party, I crammed this maroon ensemble into my locker at work and changed into my powder-blue tuxedo shirt and velvet jacket. I locked my life in that locker and escaped everything into a ceaseless mass of bodies, music, and joy.

  I remember the party and that night and its twists and turns as if it were my favorite movie. Only, I realized with delight much later, this was my new life.

  The party was at The Roxy, the former roller disco from 1978 where Fab 5 Freddy sought to unite the downtown punk scene and the uptown rap crews in the eighties, where the Beastie Boys hung out with Rick Rubin and Afrika Bambaataa and Madonna. Only now girls wore the wildest, most carefree summer outfits, dancing all night with chiseled gay boys as they passed around Fantasia cigarettes, the papers colored like a box of crayons. Everyone smiled in small, cheering platoons of freedom. I danced with a girl who wore nothing but a miniskirt and paper cocktail umbrellas glued to her chest and stomach. The go-go dancers they hired that year were all dwarfs, men and women. When you went to Motherfucker you weren’t a waiter or a student or a failure: You were simply alive.

  I remember leaving The Roxy with the sun coming up to share a cab back to a loft I had in Williamsburg, where my bedroom was suspended twenty feet over the living room and accessible only by a rolling wooden library ladder. I ran into a girl from high school named Samantha. She worked at Coyote Ugly, where the bartenders made their money dancing in cowboy boots on top of the bar and making guys pay to do shots out of their belly buttons and relieving first-time dancers of their brassieres. She wanted to go home with a guy she met that night, but I was her backup plan in case he creeped her out. Trying to curry favor, the guy handed me a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels as we walked under the abandoned train tracks of the rusted High Line. “Where did this come from?”

  He pressed another half-full bottle of Jack Daniels to his lips as we walked into the daylight, took a big swig, wiped his mouth, and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  Hours later at work I was smiling, beaming into the empty restaurant with my tired eyes and maroon tie. My body was in uniform and my mind was bouncing with two thousand people dancing to “London Calling” and I knew I needed to stay in this city. Only after we’d been dating for three months did Nikki and I realize that we’d both gone to all the same Motherfuckers and that at one point we would have made eyes at each other across the packed room.

  WORD OF GAGA’S PERFORMANCE SPREAD. Also now I’d gotten looped into the insanity and landed a regular Thursday night slot DJ’ing at St. Jerome’s, my favorite place on earth. The other bands in the scene had supportive friends, maybe even crossover supporters from other bands. Gaga had fans. I met up with Gaga later that week at Beauty Bar. She was still beaming from the string of successes.

  “Guess what?! Guess what?! Guess what?!”

  “What?”

  “Michael T. just asked me to host the next Motherfucker!”

  The streets aren’t for dreaming now

  Here is how I got hired at St. Jerome’s.

  Guy texted me one Saturday: “You want a job?”

  The thing was: I thought I had a job. One that I loved because as summer turned to fall I had just started DJ’ing Thursday nights at St. Jerome’s. The money was decent and I really liked working with Brent. After ten years of working downtown, Brent decided it was time to get a real job. I would have played every Thursday with Brent for the rest of my life, but Guy had other plans. “Meet me at the bar for training.”

  Thus he imparted to me the Tao of Guy:

  “Bar owners always want you to put hot girls behind the bar. I don’t like girl bartenders. I don’t like ’em. They’re slow, they’re messy, and they take too many breaks.”

  “If you put a girl behind the bar, you need a man around. Someone to stay in control and keep up the pace. If you want to get a female barback, that’s fine. Someone needs to do the dishes.”

  “Actually, I prefer that. You’ll be crawling all over each other behind this bar all night. If you have a guy bartender and a guy barback, it’s just too much dick behind the bar.”

  THE NEXT SUNDAY, AFTER I closed Pianos, I went over to St. J’s to learn how to close with Conrad. For the first time in all the years of playing there, I walked behind the bar and saw the damp limes in the mismatched bar mats, the cold blue water of the disinfecting sink, the place where the ice melted overnight. Unwashed bottles of cheap liqueurs stuck to the stainless-steel speed-rack. The supply cabinet included a CPR kit, baby powder, and hairspray. Conrad guided me through his greater teachings: how to set up the bar for the night in such a way that you may easily close it down stone drunk. Always put the keys here, always put the padlocks for the gates here, always leave your inventory sheet right there. Always do the cash drop when you’re ready to walk out the door. And don’t drink until midnight. “It’s pretty easy to get pretty drunk here.”

  Michael T. came along with me for the ride again.

  I liked standing behind the bar. You got a little space to yourself (very little), but in a cramped bar you felt blessed. You got to cross your arms and lean against the beer cooler, smugly raising an eyebrow when someone hoped that you would serve them.

  At four A.M. sharp, Conrad turned off the music and screamed, “If you don’t work here, get the fuck out!”

  He cranked the music back up and got back to showing how to do inventory. Count the bottles on your way in and then, at the end of the night, count how many bottles you emptied. Simple. Then he looked up at the crowd, mostly friends. About half of them worked there. He dimmed the music again. “If you’re not in my phone, get the fuck out!”

  Pretty much every single employee of St. Jerome’s gravitated back to St. Jerome’s around four A.M. Especially if you were already in the neighborhood—diligently drinking with customers and dancing for dollars—and could use an off-duty cocktail. The door guys, the other bartenders, the barbacks—everybody. More than once I have discovered, upon lifting the iron gate to exit, that I had gotten lost inside of this tiny bar and clawed my way out into the morning to a city on its way to work. The bright sun greeted me like a stern parent breaking up a make-out session.

  “If you don’t work here—get the fuck out!”

  Above all, this meant that the few mixed-in strangers of the crowd—who no doubt had friends who worked here—might not feel the need to leave. It was four thirty on a Sunday night—a.k.a. Monday morning. “If I don’t know you—if I don’t go to your fucking parties—get. The fuck. Out!” Conrad slammed his fist on the bar and screamed in Michael T.’s face.

  “Sorry, Conrad. This is my friend Michael T. He hired Gaga to host Motherfucker next week. What am I even saying? We hung out last weekend?” I wondered—out loud—why Conrad would do this to Michael T. The three of us hung out well into Monday morning last week.

  He glared across the bar at him. “Do I know you? Do I go to your parties? No. So get. The fuck. Out.”

  Guy stood at the end of the bar. He didn’t move, and behind that long, unruly mane of his I could see a smirk. It didn’t make sense. Michael T. stood up and grabbed his seventies Pierre Cardin clutch and walked out the door. I tried to stop him, even chased him out. He marched home trailing a roller bag of CDs and cowboy boots.

  When I walked back in I saw everyone doing these half-drunken high fives. I didn’t see it that way whatsoever. They poured a round of Sauza Hornitos shots. “That’s not okay.”

  “That fucking faggot.”

  “Hey.” I turned to Guy. “What the hell?”

  He looked down at the shots on the bar. “You want yours or not?”

  “WHAT HAPP
ENED IN THE BAR last night?”

  It’s Gaga. She would like to know how we could possibly have been bigger assholes last night.

  “When Conrad threw everyone else out, he threw out Michael T.”

  She then, quite charitably, wondered about Guy. Was he in the bathroom while all of this went down in the tiniest bar in Manhattan?

  “No. He was there. He was laughing about it.”

  She let out a long sigh. “He’s such a fuck.” She had an emptiness in her eyes and if you looked you wouldn’t find her. She got this way at times, at difficult moments where she could see her career slipping away from her again. Above all else she knew that she would tread a thin line between artistic greatness and cheesy pop. It all depended on the people around her.

  Now I worried that Gaga and Guy would be fired from Motherfucker before the party even began. Now we had a problem: The record label in LA believed that Gaga was the Queen of Nightlife, not some NYU dropout who had never done anything of substance. She would emerge from the downtown scene like the Beatles out of Liverpool. Never bigger than where she came from, just elsewhere.

  This was the first time I ever witnessed Gaga displaying mama bear–like protectiveness about her career. It would not be the last.

  I was just as worried for my future.

  Michael T. had fed me gigs for as long as I’d known him. Great, center-stage gigs where the girls would come up to you afterward as if you were part sorcerer or savant. Now that would dry up because I was in league with these a-holes. I had hoped to parlay this into DJ’ing at Motherfucker. Now my best connection to do so fell through. Because my friends were motherfuckers.

  The next night I texted Guy. “Fix this. Apologize to Michael T.”

  “I’m in the DJ booth right now kissing his ass.”

  “Don’t let him lick your boots.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Change my pitch up

  Fall came to the city like a returning friend. Same old friend from out of town, only healthier, tanner, happier. Pants and sweaters, leather and denim replaced the uncomfortable stretched fabrics of the sweaty summer. Now we had comfort and confidence and full crowds. New York is not a college town, though every fall we came back together. The bands came back, flush from summer festivals, where people actually paid cover and relished in their merch booth. The bartenders came back from their summer jobs in the Hamptons and summer islands, where they lived temporarily in dark, steamy, shared-shower dormitories.

  Lion’s Den in what they used to call Greenwich Village has a perpetual open-mic, making it a rite of passage for all Tisch School of Performing Arts students at NYU. It had the same problem as every music venue in New York City: At one point, a well-meaning music lover partnered up with a cash-from-chaos bar owner. They wanted patrons to sit there and buy as many seven-dollar beers as they could handle, and the door price got split up after. We came to see Dino’s band, Ism.

  “VH1!” Gaga waved when she walked in. I went to hug her. “Don’t touch me—I’m disgusting, straight from dance rehearsal.” She had dried mud puddles of eyeliner smeared down her face. She looked as if she had been marooned on a particularly terrifying rollercoaster.

  “I love you just the way you are.”

  She smiled. The way she took a compliment made me feel so much older than her. She took it like a freshman girl who showed up to the first day of high school and had only gotten taller and tanner since junior high. She was just as excited by the attention.

  “Where’s Starlight?”

  “She has to work in the morning. She can’t stay out late. Probably the only night she’ll be able to rock out anymore is Fridays at St. J’s.”

  “Damn it. I just started Thursdays at St. J’s and I wanted her to go-go dance.”

  She looked like I had just broken up with her. “How come you didn’t ask me?”

  “Honey, I think you were made for better things. When you have to go to LA, I want you to go to LA.”

  “There’s no way of knowing when that’ll happen.”

  “You know what I read last week? I don’t know why this hit me so hard. But I was really upset about Nikki and I was reading about whaling—”

  She laughed. “Of course you were.”

  “I was!”

  “No. I mean, of course you were reading about whaling while the rest of our friends get wasted and blow three hundred dollars on scratch-off tickets at the deli.”

  “Fine, I was wasted and reading about whaling.”

  “There we go.”

  “And I was thinking about Nikki.”

  “Okay, now we’re talking.”

  “And I read about this chapel in Massachusetts where the whalers would go to pray before they left on their voyages. So I was in the basement of Pianos and I read about this harpooner who went under with a whale he’d been chasing. He gripped the rope and wouldn’t let go. He shouldn’t have drowned, but he did because he couldn’t let go.”

  “So that made you feel better?”

  “No, but I realized something. The harpooner had to cling to something, right? They didn’t have life vests then and he came out there in a rowboat. Plus, those guys had to own and care for their own harpoons. If he let go and lost the harpoon he—stay with me here—would be out of a job. Your whole identity on the ship was based on what you did. But think about that poor guy going overboard when the whale got away. Once you learn to let go, it gets easier to hold on.”

  “Wow.” She digested that for a second, blinking her eyes to grasp the concept. “That was in the book?”

  “No. That’s just what I started thinking about.”

  “So you want me to let go? Forget about making records?”

  “No. I want you to hold on. But let go of how you thought it would happen.”

  “And this is working for you and Nikki?”

  “Absolutely not. In fact, I’m not even trying it.” Gaga laughed. I loved her laugh. “But if you wanna give it a shot, lemme know. Okay?”

  “So that’s what you learned from reading about a dead guy in a whaling book?”

  “The weird part is what really made me feel better. The chapel engraved this dedication to him, sort of too little, too late. But it really did make me feel better.”

  “Is it a prayer?”

  “No. It’s just a Bible verse. It just reads, ‘Therefore be ye also ready for in the hour you thinketh not: the Son of Man cometh.’”

  “Wow.”

  “I know, right?” Gaga and I both had religious upbringings. We knew you couldn’t top The Book. “Be ready for that time when you’re not ready. Be ready for that moment when you’ve lost faith.”

  “Believe so big that you can still believe when you no longer have the strength to believe?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So that made you feel better about Nikki?”

  “I meant it in your case. With the record label. Be ready for when you’re not ready anymore.”

  “Then I guess I am ready.”

  “But are you?”

  “No, I’m not ready.”

  “Then you are ready.”

  THE BAND TORE INTO A very different song, one unlike anything they ever played. It started with some looped guitar, unlike the progression they normally did. The drumming came off as digital, but they were playing instruments. This is still just in the wake of when real New York City rock ’n’ roll had just collapsed, leaving a dozen half-realized bands in the dust. When I was coming up in the scene, it was considered respectful and earnest of a younger band to cover a song by an older band they admired. It created an honorable mention, literally. Ism did both when they started singing “Smack My Bitch Up,” a somewhat forgotten summer hit by Prodigy from ten years before.

  “Change my pitch up,” Andre sang, and strummed the rhythm guitar as Dino shredded the lead. Leigh cut in on a thunderous, haunting bass and Mike Higgins kept up with an almost industrial drum thrash.

  I had never liked this song, but I lo
ved it now that I saw it being put together.

  About halfway through the song they moved into the breakdown and Gaga crawled on stage on all fours. The crowd that once kept talking all goddamn night now pressed against the stage while this feral creature detonated on the floor, crawling around the wires and guitar pedals.

  Dino passed her a mic and at the explosive moment where the song devolved into its most stripped down moment she sings one single vowel into the void she left in the once chatty room:

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Her reverb channels clanked into each other like the heads of two bad guys in a ninja movie. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” She sang like the lonely captive of a harem.

  The stunned room looked on as Andre added one final, punctuating, “Smack. My. Bitch. Up.”

  The band looked up and for the first time at one of their shows they had a throng of eager fans. The fans applauded. They wanted more. But the band already played a cover song as an encore because they didn’t have any other songs.