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

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  She plopped her purse on the bar and rooted through its shiftless, unstable contents as she sat down on another girl’s stool. Finally she came up with a rattle of a pill bottle and read the tiny instructions by candlelight before looking up at me. “Could I just get a glass of water?”

  “Sure.” I placed it down in front of her. And waited.

  She popped something into her mouth and went for the glass. When she saw me looking at her she stopped, the pill cradled in her curled tongue as she held water just inches from her lips. “Sorry. Is there a charge?”

  “No.” I said. And I waited. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  She looked up at me, a little fearful. The energy between us felt a little one-night-stand-y, one of us with greater expectations than the other. She swallowed and clutched the front of her open shirt, shrinking her shoulders and making herself smaller like a scolded child. “Yes. You’re the only bartender who charges me for drinks.” She dug through her purse, defeated, until she found three dollar bills in the side zippered pockets. “That’s all I have.” She put it down as a tip.

  I shook my head and gave her the money back. “Did you get out of the hospital okay?”

  Her dim eyes flickered to life like the florescent lighting of a basement storage room. “How you hear about that?”

  I looked into her eyes, bright but not quite showing all the vital signs. She had the narcotic glaze of superficiality that looked also like colored contact lenses. “I was the one who put you in the ambulance.”

  Her mouth hung open in disbelief. Then a shudder of recognition. She brandished a shoulder with two bruises. “There were six of them holding me down while one of them shot me up with tranquilizers. They started screaming that if I didn’t calm down they would shoot me again. And they did. I was having a nervous breakdown when you found me.”

  “Do you feel better now?”

  A look washed over her eyes, miles away from the denim and noise of this bar. The look didn’t come from the pills, which arrested her movements and kept even her thoughts strapped down to the gurney. The look came from somewhere inside, miles away. “Yes.” She smiled.

  GUY WALKED IN LIKE HE owned the place. “Why’s the music still on?” Authoritative and full of bullshit and he still wouldn’t look me in the eye. You can’t respect someone like that and I straight up hated it. After taking shit from all his friends all night, I didn’t want to hear any more from him.

  “I’m cleaning up. We had a good night.”

  He walked over to the speaker system and turned it all the way off. “Where’s your inventory?”

  I cleaned one of the bottles with a bar rag. “Almost done.”

  He turned the register key and the battered machine coughed up the results like a bullied informant. He saw the total.

  “You call that a ring? What did I tell you on the phone? I said $1,500 or we’re going to have a problem. Right? Is this $1,500?”

  I looked at the receipt: $1,385. “If it means that much to you, I’ll buy us $115 in shots. And you can still tell the owners you yelled at me. That’ll probably cover how many of your friends came in for free drinks tonight.”

  “This isn’t Dark Room or Motor City or Pianos, where everyone drinks for free. If my own mother comes in here asking for free drinks, you throw her ass out.”

  I couldn’t do anything about drinks I hadn’t sold by then. I went back to cleaning and trusted that by not over-pouring all over town I’d at least saved the bar money. My inventory would look fine.

  Then I heard the twin rattles of keys and spokes come through the door. Conrad let himself in with his keys and pushed the door open. He worked Thursdays at a venue down the street called Fontana’s but couldn’t fight the magnetic force of Rivington Street on his way home every night. For about five seconds I was happy to see him. “How’d the kid do tonight?”

  “Terrible,” Guy said. “Come help me drink to forget how much I’m gonna get reamed out tomorrow for vouching for this kid.”

  Conrad rolled a cigarette from a sack of Bali Shag. The stray bits of tobacco scattered on the bar I’d just cleaned.

  “What’d he ring?”

  Guy told him.

  “On a Thursday?” Conrad licked the cigarette paper. “Didn’t you say Thursdays were the best nights for the solo bartender?”

  I crouched down beneath the bar to hide my fury as I counted the number of empty versus full bottles of liquor in the inventory. Then I heard Guy: “They were. Until this cat came along.”

  Until “this cat” came along? Until I came along and brought my friends? Until I started DJ’ing here? Until I rang more on Thursdays in my residency than you rang on Fridays with two bartenders? So angry. I stood up.

  Guy lit a cigarette and blew it in my face. “Gimme two shots of Hornitos.”

  I put three glasses down. Guy gave me a look. I asked, “Can I get one too?”

  “Not with a ring like that.” He clanked shot glasses with Conrad, rammed the bar with the glass, and took it down in one gulp. “You want a beer? Give Conrad a Bud.”

  He then interrupted every single thing I did for the rest of my shift.

  “Can you believe what a year we’ve had?” he asked Conrad. He pounded his beer down. “And it all started that night I came next door to you just to bitch about my door guy not showing up.”

  Really, Guy? That’s what brought this bar into fruition? Fucking Conrad. I was livid. How many flyers have I made and how many nights have I put in everything I had?

  When I finished my work I looked up at Guy, expecting something. He looked around the room, and when he decided I had done everything I could, he put on his leather jacket and Conrad pulled his bike off of the go-go booth.

  “So look. It’ll take me a while to build Thursdays, but I’ll get there. So I want to talk to you about Fridays. Now that I’m not DJ’ing on Thursdays anymore, how are your Fridays looking? You ready to bring me back in?”

  He gave a smirk around the room—not really at anyone, since the only person between us was Conrad.

  “Here’s the thing. I can’t really have you tend bar here on Thursdays and then DJ here on Fridays. It won’t work. It’s too much of the same thing.”

  “Every other bar in New York City has employees that work more than one night.”

  He smirked again. “This isn’t every other bar in New York City.”

  Whatever happened to the Transylvania Twist?

  Halloween ripped through downtown Manhattan that year like some sort of twisted Chanukah: Eight days of madness in costumes and smeared makeup kicked off the Wednesday before and didn’t truly end until the subway ride home that Thursday morning in an ill-fated outfit.

  This Halloween marked a complete turning point in downtown life, and some would argue that this was the moment where it stopped being fun. What was once a semi-secret escape for a few became an everybody’s-famous fuckfest to sell off-brand energy drinks and vodka to overeager kids who swarmed to online ads and sponsored, bought-and-paid-for mass texts for open bars. I don’t have anything original to say about it that doesn’t make me sound about eighty-five years old. So I’ll just say: We’ve all had the experience of finding something cheap online that later turned out to disappoint. Welcome to the new world of nightlife.

  An icy frost met me at the door to Motherfucker at a club called Rebel. Thomas made me wait at the door in a steady, but not unmoving, line. At the door I could tell something was up. He cleared the sidewalk and the processing area (“IDs out, kids. Everybody’s getting in . . .”) and when he had me alone he looked me in the eye and muttered, “It is like Clash of the Titans in there.”

  I marched around the bi-level club looking for my friends, to tell them I came to support, see if they needed drinks. In every room, I met up with a few no-eye-contact smiles. Somebody locked the door to the main DJ booth, where I had planned on hanging out. The bartenders pressed on, sluggish and Bhutan. Drunk girls teetered on high heels, stabbing me in th
e toes. Drag queens clubbed me with their elaborate headpieces as they turned their heads looking for friends and fixes.

  Q: What did one scenester say to the other when they weren’t partying?

  A: God, these people are obnoxious.

  My night ended with Conrad, at Welcome to the Johnsons, straining to shut up a drunk girl in the nicest way possible.

  At the door I saw Kelvin, completely disgusted with the decade. Kelvin had worked in clubs at the GM level for years and got sick of it. Now he checked IDs four nights a week on Rivington and drank in the bars here the other seven. He sat on a stool while a flock of drunk, loud girls dressed like slutty Little Bo Peeps refused to leave. Nightlife photographers and self-proclaimed reporters circled like fruit flies. Kelvin hung his head in disgust. “It’s like you used to go to the zoo to feed the animals. Now they’re trying to market us feeding the animals.”

  The day after Halloween brought in a mixed bag of news. After that unstoppable Chanukah of Halloween, I was forced to keep up with the task, to text and cajole everybody into one more night before Friday took over. After seven years of throwing absolutely the craziest parties you’ve ever seen, Motherfucker disbanded, citing personality conflicts.

  Still, Gaga walked into the bar the day after Halloween with a huge smile. “Can you believe it?” she said to me. “That somebody came to Motherfucker Halloween dressed as Lady Gaga?”

  SHE CAME BACK HALF AN hour later with Guy. Big smiles on their faces. Guy had a smirk a mile wide, the kind you only see on his face the moment he threw down his winning cards. Gaga basked in his attentive light as he put one hand under her leather jacket, gently guiding her in the door by the small of her back. He had on a matching leather jacket with equally sagging shoulders, embellishments of chains, studded spikes, and other bangles clanking along. They were both laughing about something that neither could quite explain. You had to be there.

  “Will you make me one of those VH1 margaritas?”

  “You mean a Gagarita?”

  Under the bar we have, inexplicably, a few proper bar tools (nothing fancy: a muddler and a strainer). We don’t have any fresh juices here and our margaritas rely heavily on lemonade from the soda gun and Rose’s lime juice.

  But when Gaga came by, I liked to try something special for her, something more becoming of a semi-highly-trained bartender. I took all the best parts of a shitty dive bar and made the best of it.

  ½ lemon, muddled

  ¼ lime, muddled

  1 deli packet of sugar (but usually 7UP and a little OJ)

  1 oz. triple sec

  2 oz. Sauza Hornitos

  Shaken and served on the rocks in a pint glass

  Guy went out for a smoke and I smiled at her. “I’m glad you guys worked it out.”

  “You know how he gets.” She took another sip. “We should hang out more.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I mean, like, not in a bar with you DJ’ing or bartending. Like in real life.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “But he’ll kill you if he finds out.”

  I looked at her for a second, trying to figure out what she meant. “We can all go out together. You guys and”—there comes a day when your friends have all paired off and the only way to see them is on double dates—“I dunno, you got a sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perfect.”

  “She’s sixteen.”

  “Oh.”

  Guy walked back in through the creaky, insistent door. Before he sat down, she whispered, “Just you and me then. I’ll play you the new tracks I have. Bring whatever you’re working on. Just don’t say anything to him. He’ll kill me if he finds out.”

  “What are you girls yakking about?” Guy sat down and tossed an arm around her.

  “Music.” I said. Which is true.

  Something on the projection screen caught his eye. Gaga tossed me a smile.

  “Can we go now?”

  “Fine.” Guy got up from his stool. “Now remember what I said. Fifteen hundred or else . . .”

  THURSDAY LED TO A DARK autumn Friday. I stayed in bed. I spent the night before in a fit of hospitality, coaxing broke downtown kids into doing something crazy—like buying a drink. My day started with a text from Guy: “Your drawer is $26 short.”

  I dropped by the bar that night and it felt like I never left. Lady Starlight was dancing in the red light of the go-go booth with a pair of pom-poms and little else. One of Guy’s clones headbanged away in the DJ booth, blinded by the disco ball. Denim and leather from the front door to the back bathroom.

  Guy flirted with a couple of bar creatures and then greeted me. “I heard you had fun last night.”

  “Did I?”

  “Sounded like it.”

  Gossip travels fast and slippery on this block. Whatever did or did not happen is inconsequential as long as it did or did not happen with a limited number of pre-approved people. It’s not a sin to like someone that someone else likes, but you cannot like someone that someone else doesn’t like. Extra points available for any kind of achievement that includes anyone new to the scene, but no points awarded for any work done with an unknown.

  I ordered a beer and a shot of Jameson and turned to watch Starlight dance to her favorite Faith No More song, “Epic.” When I turned back, I saw Guy with his hair in his eyes, making no effort to move his hands from the bottle he’d just opened for me. He stood there, motionless, with a grip on the sweaty neck of the Budweiser bottle. I looked around to see what went wrong. As a reflex, I stuck my hand in my pocket and handed him a twenty. “That’s for you.”

  He nodded and put the bill in his tip jar.

  Money made Guy smile. Money made him wink at girls he’d never speak to elsewhere. Money kept him in town when others might take a vacation. Money sent him to Atlantic City on his first day off. Money brought him into the bar to open the safe on quiet Monday afternoons to count the money—not even his money. Just money. Money was my boss’s boss. I took another sip from the bottle. Normally the overcooled beer fridge at St. Jerome’s produced the world’s best ice-cold beer. They lay flat, like treasure in a wine cellar, maturing and nurturing its contents with a fine layer of sediment. That night, it just tasted like buck-nasty beer.

  I leaned across the bar and dropped the bottle on the bar mats. And bailed.

  Watch your heart when we’re together

  I got off the D train at Grand Street and took my usual walk through the markets of Chinatown, where the sidewalks stank of brine and iced fish. Some stayed open late, peddling plastic bags of obscure sea creatures, many of them still flapping their gills. Middle-aged men stood on the grease-stained sidewalks, wearing knitted grip gloves with rubber palms. This commute of mine only cost me one stop on the subway, rather than transferring to one of the nearby lines to find an F train, or taking the subway all the way to Union Square, and taking the L train to First Avenue and walking fourteen blocks to Allen Street. The Lower East Side does not go out of its way to be convenient.

  I went out of my way to go past Stanton Social, knowing that Nikki worked upstairs. Her network of hostesses and bouncers might see me walk past. I marched with dignity, with shoulders back and with a deep, abiding sadness inside of me. We had been broken up longer than we were ever together. It still didn’t get any easier. At Allen, I crossed over and took Stanton on my daily stomp past Pianos, Living Room, Iggy’s, through that blank block of actual respectable establishments on Rivington between Ludlow and Essex, until I crossed Essex and passed along greetings to the various soldiers and sentries I met. Most of them wanted to know if I’d be at Mason Dixon later. There’s a party. Someone’s birthday. Meet me there. Meet me there at midnight. We’ll do a shot.

  I have succeeded now in discovering a reason for going out and partying another night.

  GAGA’S APARTMENT ON STANTON STREET looked like it was designed by the witness protection program for a young female informant. My grandparents would call it a tenement.
One flight up the florescent-lit, chipped-paint hallway on a narrow, echoey, too-steep staircase where your feet clacked on the stone. Like many things in my daily struggle, each step felt just slightly more difficult than I imagined. Carting synthesizers and secondhand furniture up these stairs never got any easier. Sometimes the wooden railing with too many coats of paint was the only thing to keep me from misjudging my step and tumbling to my own slapstick demise.

  Her building was suspended in time; the cooking smells rose from the half-agape transom above the doorways. A pair of glass doors separated the bedroom and living room. They also separated this tiny space from the studio category on Craigslist. By dropping out of school at nineteen, Gaga missed out on much of the college-kid experience, but she made up for it by living in this adorable Fisher-Price toy called “My First Apartment.”

  “Hi!” she chirped at the door. Her hands in her blond hair. “Still getting ready. Come in.”

  A few discarded pairs of heels were lying on the floor by her door—wounded soldiers on the battlefield. She greeted me with a beautiful smile and then went to mill around and do the kind of last-minute cleanup that we could all dispense with. I think we were the kind of friends that could accept each other as is, but I’d probably do the same thing if she came over to my place.

  A cheap flat-screen TV blabbed in the background with its overexposed colors and gabby spokespersons. She had abandoned flipping channels somewhere in the basic cable range.

  Two pint glasses sat in a near-empty drying rack by the sink. A mismatched, unpainted Ikea kitchenette island floated in the middle of the room next to a single stool, last week’s mail, and a set of black and yellow Guitar Center studio monitors. She had a pair of brand-new Technics 1200 turntables and a base-level mixer, all stacked up on a shelf, both used just once at Lollapalooza. The uniformity of both her furniture and equipment reminded me that she was still a young girl, fresh out of the nest. Nice girls from the Upper West Side don’t have basements full of dated furniture to pilfer on the way to their first apartments. A fresh bookcase on the end held a few records, some books, and miscellany. The entire apartment had the air of something purchased on the run, with a few parental flourishes of domesticity.