A well-read girl with few books. A music super-fan with eight records. A downtown fashion icon with half a closet of clothes. I saw this as a sign of her attachment and not her abdication of the Upper West Side. Anyone from Ohio or Minneapolis who came to New York to be a pop singer would pack every vestige of her former life into the shelves. The Ohio refugee would have a sentimental collection of books, stuffed animals, and cherished, rarely played CDs. Stef’s parents housed all the embarrassing photos and piano songbooks. They keep guard of her childhood and memories while she stayed downtown to work on being Lady Gaga. The kitchen—and really by extension the entire apartment—served as a command center where she could focus on making music.
All she had were six vinyl records that her producer in Jersey had pressed for Starlight to play over her singing. As a record collector, I already felt a Pavlovian sweat come across my fingertips. I reached out and opened them all. Up until then this was the only music of hers ever pressed.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just getting ready,” she said while rifling through a makeup bag. “Would you like a drink?”
“Always.”
Gaga pulled out a bottle of Louis Jadot Beaujolais—one of the world’s finest dirt-cheap wines—and gave me a perfect six-ounce pour in a pint glass. “I never asked you this before, but were you ever a waitress?”
“For years,” she said.
“I can tell. You do a perfect pour just by sight. I’m impressed.”
“Years of practice. But, like, when I was a kid I started at sixteen at this place down on MacDougal. I want to bartend now but—”
“Don’t. Bartending takes away your hunger and replaces it with thirst.” I had a secret in my pocket. Something that made me quite nervous to share. But sometimes when you’re trying to keep something down it’s like pushing it against a spring. I had a new chapter tucked in my jacket like a jack-in-the-box, and hiding it from her made my words come out way too profound.
She leaned out of the bathroom door with a brush halfway through a stroke. “That’s genius,” she said. “But even if I wanted to I couldn’t.” She went on to explain that Guy wouldn’t let her.
“That’s a bullshit reason not to do something, but I think you should just stay focused on your music. You’d never want to have to cancel a trip for recording because you couldn’t get the time off.”
“When they were opening Mason Dixon I asked them if I could get a spot over there and he said no.”
“I wasn’t even offered a slot.”
“Can you imagine what your life would be like if you had a shift at Pianos, St. Jerome’s, and Mason? And you still DJ’d at Beauty Bar? You’d never be able to keep a girlfriend.”
I laughed. She had a point. “My schedule’s kind of bullshit right now. It’s like I work every other day all week. I never get any time away. I like to travel. I like to be moving.”
“I’m the same way.”
I sat on the couch and she kept tidying up, folding bills into their return envelopes and stacking misplaced fashion magazines.
She looked up at me and could tell my mind was elsewhere. “You were thinking about Nikki.” She cocked her head in appraisal and nodded. “You two were really in love.”
I felt lost when she said that. Perhaps I preferred to live in a world where my love of Nikki came as a side effect—a by-product of insanity. Hearing Gaga mention it as fact didn’t make sense. I started to sweat in that tiny apartment. I stood up to take off my jacket and the pages slipped out of my pocket and fell onto the floor. She gasped. “Is that what I think it is?”
Fuck. I had already chickened out on that.
“Did you bring me pages to read?”
“Actually I thought maybe I—I dunno—I could read it to you?”
“Yay!” She did her giddy little clap, bouncing a bit in her bare feet like a little girl. Which—well—she was.
“Yay!” She clapped again. “I’ve never done a two-person reading before. Do I stand?”
“How about this. Lie down and close your eyes and I’ll tell you a story.” She smiled and put her head in my lap.
AFTER I FINISHED READING THE first chapter of Mercutio I put the pages down and took a deep breath. Gaga looked up at me, speechless. I wondered for a second if she maybe didn’t get it or if the pages didn’t make sense out of context. In that micro-pause, I had the vague sense that I had just thrown up. All the unease and sickness I felt before left me empty, but satisfied. She opened her eyes at me. “That was amazing.”
I looked down at her. “Let me see the pages.” She opened them up and whipped through the whole story again, giggling at the parts she liked. “You need to be doing this. On stage. You need to get a group of actors together and perform this in underground theaters until you have someone begging to produce it.”
“Huh . . .” I had nothing to say, nothing prepared at least.
She looked me square in the eye. “And you should do the lead. I didn’t know you projected like that.”
“It’s not really a play. I mean, I get that you—”
“Have you ever thought about using the page itself as a canvas?”
“Uhm . . . I mean it’s a first draft. It’s pretty much exactly how it came out.”
“I mean like this.” She flipped over the page to the blank side. “I took a creative writing class once. I wrote a story about the worst day of my life.”
“When you got dropped from Island?”
“No,” she said, as if I should know better. “When my sister fell out of the tree. I wanted to create a simple way of explaining what she had gotten into and what was at stake.”
Two stories up
She climbed.
Two
Stories
Down
She
Fell.
She leafed through the pages again. “I like what you say about two sides of things.” She glanced over at her command center with her laptop and speakers. “I—” She hesitated just as much as I did. And I knew she had something in store for me. “I have a song with that same idea in mind.”
Finally I could exhale. Thank god we’re doing this.
“Play it for me right now.” She got up and put on a track. It began with a harsh beat, a decaying synth horn, and a backwards-bass effect. “Turn it up.” I lay down on the floor with my eyes closed to hear it for the first time.
She shouted over the backing track, “I wrote this for him!” She meant Guy. “You know how he doesn’t like anything that isn’t metal? And he doesn’t like my sing-songy piano ballads? So I wanted to write a song he would like. I work on the music to impress him, so I can be close to him. But the more I work on the music it’s like the more the music will take me away from him. When I’m famous, I won’t have time for him, but if I don’t work on the music, he’ll get bored and leave me.” The track played on to the part where the paparazzi are chasing her chasing him. “And then it’s like I call him Papa. Paparazzi.” That was the name of the song.
I got it right away, and I liked how it had more to it. “What a brilliant track.”
She smiled and bit her lower lip. “Want more?” She looked for the next track. Most of the songs had obscure titling. She put on “Track 2 - Lady GaGa.” “This is another one along the same lines, only you know that song you guys all play? ‘Girls Girls Girls’? I wanted to write one like it called ‘Boys Boys Boys’ and you’re going to die when you hear it.”
She started up a familiar song with a simple structure. “It’s about a girl on a date with a boy she really likes. She gets really excited and she really wants it to go well, but she’s mostly excited because it’s an occasion, not just a hangout date.”
“You mean this girl is going out and not just going out to the same three bars with her bartender boyfriend?”
“Yes. In fact, they even go uptown.”
“Oh.”
“They go see the Killers in the Garden and make out in the bleachers.”
She playe
d the song, another synth-driver track with a drum machine backup. I instantly liked it. It didn’t sound like anybody else downtown. She looked up from the laptop with her lips pursed into the smile of one who slaved away all day cooking up a surprise for her true love. Gaga bounced a little, trying to hold in her smile. The jaunty synth notes brought me back to that early spring night when we’d last seen the Killers. I remembered the crisp air and the expressionless leather on all of our friends’ jackets. I remember standing on milk crates and looking out on the gorgeous room, everyone with pint glasses aloft.
“Is this the one you told me about at Pianos, with the—”
Gaga put up a manicured index finger. (Meaning both “Shush” and “One second.”)
It was the song she told me about earlier. I didn’t believe it really existed. The one about the Killers and how their friend was the DJ.
It’s one thing to hear that a friend wrote a song. But this. This isn’t some coffee shop singer-songwriter ballad. This is a high-gloss pop masterpiece with tinted windows. This is real. “Let’s go to the party / Heard our buddy’s the DJ . . .”
Stunned. My mouth hung open. I remember the Killers after-party being a thankless task, which annoyed me and Nikki. But then I heard this song and I realized that maybe, just maybe, somebody there had fun.
“Did I hear that right?” I gasped. “I’m in your song—playing a song?” As moronically as possible I say, “I’m your buddy! I’m the DJ!”
Her delighted teeth smiled through the purple stains of the cheap Beaujolais. Despite talking about music, seeing bands, talking about shows, hanging out with other bands, and being completely obsessed with music, none of us had really heard much of Gaga’s music just yet. I felt a cool relief wash over me. In nightlife, it barely mattered if a band were any good as long as it got people in the club. But now, I realized what an amazing talent fit into this tiny little girl. The song ended and I looked up at her. We were both a little out of breath when I said, “Play it again?”
Gaga played her own, personal John Peel, playing the unmastered record samples over and over again.
“You’re gonna die. Ready? Remember when I came back from Lollapalooza all broken and you had me play with Semi Precious Weapons?” She threw on another track; this one began with backwards piano. But right before the beat begins you hear her angelic voice take in a breath, tuning up her instrument at the last second, like a string section second-guessing a change in temperature. Gaga—the one in front of me, not the one on the track—shouted over the loud studio speakers, “I wrote one about that night too!”
“Midnight at the glamour show on a Sunday night . . .”
I stopped the track cold.
Gaga looked up at me in the silence.
I said, “Sorry. I need to hear that opening breath again.” The beauty of it struck me, and it sounded like an angelic choir behind me that night when I sat in the basement of the venue, taking a deep breath and hoping my new idea would work out. Every detail of that night at Pianos, from the Sunday night, from who had to get up early the next day, what people drank, her go-go dancing for dollars, flirting with guys, hanging out with the other bands. She crammed it all into this one track and it still didn’t sound like an in-crowd record. And just in the background, spouted as a boast and certainly only to herself, you can hear a little girl trying to be her own best friend and tell herself how wonderful she is—even if she’s not the person she wanted to hear that from. Even if that person didn’t show up.
“This is just the beginning. I don’t even want to just be a singer forever. I’m going to be a producer. I’m going to bring in young bands and help them develop. I am going to be the grandmother of pop.”
I SCROLLED THROUGH THE TRACKS on her computer when she went into the bathroom. She had a couple of Gwen Stefani songs, but she didn’t have that catalogue of music that we always talked about. Judas Priest’s “Living After Midnight,” “Your Love” by the Outfield (which I assumed was her father’s influence), “Fergalicious” by Fergie, “Metal Militia” by Metallica (which she and Starlight had played between songs at Lollapalooza), “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran, “Forever My Queen” by Pentagram, and “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips. And that was it. Again I’d like to read into these in some way. But all the songs really came out of some necessity on the road. I scanned the dates of the tracks. She only got Fergie last winter, which made sense—before Gaga started hanging out with us downtown, but around the time when she still had to impress people at Island Def Jam. Starlight turned her on to “Metal Militia.” But then she’d had it longer than she’d had the demos to “Boys Boys Boys” and “Paparazzi.”
She opened the door to the bathroom and walked back into the kitchen. “I was just thinking how excited I am for your book.”
That surprised me. Were we still talking about that? “I’m even more excited for your record,” I said. “But I’m not sure there ever will be a book.”
She plopped down next to me on the futon. “What matters is that you wrote it. You perform it really well.” She picked up the pages again. “Maybe you could . . . maybe you could just record yourself reading it.”
“I wonder if that would suck. It’d probably be better if I read it to somebody.”
“You can read it to me.” She smiles. “Anytime.”
“Maybe you could read the girl parts?”
“I wish. My record contract has my voice locked down.”
“What if we mic’d your heart? We could record me reading it to you. It would be like invoking the muse; Shakespeare with dick jokes.”
“What if you rewrote it as a play? You could do this as a stripped-down underground production and—” She laughed and right then got a text.
Checking your phone was the new yawning. Contagious. Don’t know why. I checked mine even though all my friends were at work or in front of me.
Her phone buzzed again and she said only, “Uh oh.”
“What?”
She looked up at me. “Were we going to Mason Dixon tonight?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Apparently it’s somebody’s birthday party in the back.” She looked up from her phone. “And Nikki’s there.”
That just erased the entire night in my head. I looked up from my seat on the futon and the tenement walls rose high above, leaving me in a chasm of my own devising. “I want to go home.”
Gaga’s lips started moving again, but I couldn’t understand a word she said. Or sang. Or whatever she did.
“You can’t ditch me,” she said. “We have to stick together. It’s Saturday night and my only option is to go down to Mason Dixon alone and watch my boyfriend flirt with other girls for tips. It’s disgusting. You have to be my fake boyfriend.”
“No.”
“It’ll be fun.” She pulled me up from the couch, bodily, and wrapped my hands around her waist. “Nikki doesn’t know what I look like now that I’m a blonde. No one remembers me. I keep having to introduce myself. I can be your fake girlfriend too—you know how jealous that will make her.”
I let go of her waist. “It’s not gonna work.”
Before I let her go, she pushed me away with one of her small hands. “You should have let her see the hickey.”
My face went flushed. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You don’t understand girls. She doesn’t want you when you’re pathetic and walking around alone like a little puppy. She wants you when she can’t have you.” She fanned out her arms. “Like when you’re with me!”
“The answer’s no, Gaga,” I finally said. “We can go out. But we’re not going there. I can’t handle it and”—I know I shouldn’t have said this next part—“your goddamn boyfriend would be all too happy to see me crumble in front of her.”
“Fine. But we’re going out tonight. Ever since he started over there on Saturdays it’s like I don’t have a social life anymore. Pick any other bar to go to and we’re there. I wanna talk more about you
r book.”
I let out a deep breath. I felt empty again. “Can I hear that song one more time before I decide?”
We’re the dreams you’ll believe in
Yellow streetlights shined through a puppet show of leafy shadows, and a few stray neighborhood kids blared music out of prepaid phones as we walked down Stanton Street. A nearby school, closed for the weekend, blanked out half the block. Clinton Street breathed life into the gap as chuckling herds stood outside of tiny restaurants, smoking and commenting on what they just ate and how it lived up to the reviews. Soon the shutters would come down—starting with the bakeries and boutiques—giving the neighborhood its familiar, abandoned look. By Rivington Street, I started to calm down. I recognized the graffiti tags on the mailboxes and found small amounts of comfort in seeing my friend’s band’s stickers on the street signs.
Gaga dusted her bangs in her reflection on a parked car and then turned to me with a big smile, presenting herself in an off-the-shoulder teal top with a metallic note. “How do I look?”
“Wonderful,” I said. “As always.”
“See? I can’t trust you.”
“Not true. I promise to tell you if you ever look fat.”
As if announced by a butler, all of downtown society turned to genuflect when they heard the clack of Gaga’s platform heels. She escorted me down the block, clomping like a show pony with her thick platinum mane as the streetlight danced off the glitter in her eye shadow. The downtown panopticon surveyed us. The door guys along the way said hello; they knew Gaga went along with Guy, but that he worked Saturdays and I didn’t. They approved of this only because they could keep an eye on both of us this way as long as, god forbid, we didn’t do something crazy. Like walk up to the East Village.
We didn’t go to St. J’s on Saturday nights. Our bars, bartenders, and DJs had less overlap than in every other bar in New York City. And this isn’t every other bar in New York City. The Saturday night crew had their own breed of DJ; they never remembered your name.
Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives Page 12
