Instead we went to 151, St. J’s older, sadder cousin who lived in his parent’s basement. The door opened and we saw Clarence, and exchanged a hand-slap hug and a single-cheek kiss. Clarence is an artist who has long dreadlocks and a wife and child in Jersey. We have a standing argument. He claims he will never make it as an artist because he doesn’t paint pictures about his own blackness. If you’re black and an artist you’re supposed to paint about being black. I claim that there is no point in making any art that you’re supposed to make.
I’ve DJ’d here before and have witnessed the unending hilarity with which DJs set up and take down the booth. Sometimes a pair of cheap, RadioShack CDJs tumbled around in the coffin box. Sometimes they worked. It sits on a disused corner of the backwards J-shaped bar, far away from where the bartender could reasonably serve you. Like a passive-aggressive stepparent, the bar management stuck a series of warnings and notices to the DJ booth. To cement the feeling of this being your friend’s parent’s basement, the booth plugged into an old stereo receiver underneath the cash register. If the managers thought you had the music up too loud, they quietly turned you down from ten feet away. Like breaking up the fun at a slumber party.
As I made my way through the crowd, I exchanged smiles and backslapped greetings with my friends and their leather jackets. I remembered being very stressed out earlier about something going on in my life, but somehow I managed to drown it out with a little bit of music and a lot of love from a friend.
Gaga gingerly crawled her way onto the barstool, ass out like usual. The bartender looked glad to see us. I don’t remember the DJ’s name, but I remember how crazy it was to see someone use DJ software for the first time. Like watching somebody play a video game about DJ’ing.
“Ohhh!” Gaga kicked her legs and clapped her hands. “Shiny Toy Guns—I love Shiny Toy Guns!”
We ordered a shot each of Sauza Hornitos tequila. I turned and saw Gaga drown in hers before she could come up for air. “I get drunk very easily,” she said.
“Oh, I’ve seen you party plenty, love.”
“No. I’m serious. I’m like four foot eleven and I eat my one meal a day and alcohol hits me very fast.” She was the same height and size as Amy Winehouse, although Gaga didn’t have Amy’s warm contralto, the voice that popped and cracked with the precision of old vinyl records.
“Most teeny girls like you end up doing lots of blow just to stay up and stay skinny.”
“Meh. I don’t.”
“None of it is any good anymore.”
“Every time I’m in LA they want to take me out and do drugs and they’re all like talking a million miles a minute, chatting, blathering, and asking, ‘Isn’t coke better than it is in New York City?’ And I’m like, ‘People in New York can hold their coke better.’”
Candlelit faces smiled at each other through the din of laughter and stacked glasses. Kids glanced at their hair in the mirror behind the bar, plumping it up a bit with their fingers. Every so often you could spy through the crowd the blue-green-lit smile of a girl who had just gotten the text she’d waited all night for. The soundtrack for our evening came from our most trusted advisor as an expectant crowd glanced at the door and hoped for a surprise visit from an old friend.
Gaga and I went back to talking shop:
“ . . . But sometimes an earlier idea becomes something else. Or something I talk about with Conrad turns into a full story later, but that’s because it won’t leave my head.”
“But what you do with it is what matters,” Gaga says. “Have you heard my song ‘Dirty Ice Cream’? That came out of a joke that I heard down at the bar. But when the boys heard it they were like, ‘That’s our thing!’ and I remember being like, ‘Then you should have written a song about it first.’”
“The boys came up with ‘Dirty Ice Cream’?”
“Yeah. But they meant it about girls who become sluts. So I flipped it around and made it about boys who pretended they wanted to treat you right and then treated you like a slut.”
“I get into trouble over that all the time. Once I made up a character after Conrad. He was really into the idea at first, and in the end he hated it.”
“Own it. It’s your creation.”
“When Picasso painted Gertrude Stein, she said she hated it—too frumpy and marmish. She said, ‘I don’t look like that.’ Picasso responded, ‘You will.’”
“Ha! You know that song I have ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’?”
“Yes. It perfectly describes Mercutio.”
“Haha. Thanks.”
“Did you write that after the show at Pianos too?”
“No. I wrote that a long, long time ago. It’s not about my friends from the scene; it’s about my friends from home and from NYU. After I got my record deal, it changed me. I owned my own business and I was in charge of it. But my friends I was hanging out with were still partying and still going out and spending money and looking fabulous and they would buy bags and bags of cocaine. But they weren’t doing it because they were rich or because they were rock stars. They did it because of Daddy. I’d be out with my friends and you’d catch one of them on the phone with their dad, pretending they needed the money to eat or to buy books or something, and they’d hang up and go to the ATM and take out more money to party.”
WE HAD GOTTEN LOST IN the night. I loved that. Hours later my cheeks grew swollen from oversmiling, and our synchronized conversation dazzled with its free-form choreography. I’d locked myself up too long, hidden from my own friends, always acting less bright, less interesting, less excited about theory. Visiting friends filed in and out, but they said little more than hello—giving us our space together. Our conversation had become a dance, a give and take and a romance. I led and she took me to places I never thought I’d see. And together we got lost. When I got to the end of my drink we came up for air, nodding. Getting lost is another word for exploring.
“I—” I let out a nervous laugh. I had nothing to say. “I talk too much. I can’t help it.”
“It’s good that you talk too much,” she said. “It means your brain is working faster than your little mouth.”
“Sometimes I wish I could shut my brain off. It’s . . . it’s no fun being stuck up there all the time.” I didn’t mean that to sound so goddamn sad. But it did. And I still mean it. I looked down at the bar, realizing it was true.
“Hey.” Gaga looked up at me through the cowl of bangs and eye makeup. The purity of her eyes startled me. “Anytime you need to come down from there”—she motioned toward my sinkhole of a brain—“you call me. And anytime you want to let someone crawl around in there with you, you call me.”
I nodded and looked around the bar. I am the opposite of distracted. For once in my life, I am exactly where I am. “You ever have that day where you’re busy running around doing something, stressed, and then you hear the perfect song at the perfect moment?”
“Yes.”
“And you feel like your life is a movie?”
“Yes.”
“And you feel like maybe everything is going to be okay because things are happening as opposed to falling through? I feel kind of like that now.” I searched for the right words: “Right now I feel kind of like that. Only it’s different . . . I . . . I mean here I am in the bar I’ve been to a thousand times and I feel . . . I feel like I’m in a Lady Gaga song.”
She smiled and put down her drink. “That’s amazing.”
“In your music you feel like you can do anything. You feel like you’re alive and worth it.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“You ready to take on the world together?” She held up her drink for me to cheers.
“Yes.”
We clinked glasses and she took this as a handshake. I had executed a contract without knowing what I had agreed to. “Good. Because we’re going to start by going to that party. Nikki or not.”
I almost spat out my drink just to void our arrangement.
/> All the smart boys know why
A hunting-themed video game at the front door occupied a pair of guys who hid in their virtual duck blind and hunted antlered creatures. Mason Dixon looked like a replica of bars in the rest of the country. The walls had countrified embellishments like horseshoes and Johnny Cash wood-burn wall art. Gaga turned to me, grabbed my hand behind our backs, and tugged me with her tiny claw. “You’re with me and I’m with you. Got it?”
I squeezed back. Got it.
She let go and we stepped into the honky-tonk. Every blonde girl in the bar made my heart skip. Including Gaga. Every time I turned to her I flinched. The bar snaked around the left side of the room, and from the first curve I spotted a table of familiar faces, normally girls I see when they get out of their waitressing jobs at two A.M. They’re all of Nikki’s friends. Tonight they have on red lipstick. All of them. They came here for their friend’s birthday party dressed like an army of fake smiles. I spun myself around and looked for cover. A few obnoxious, disheveled, out-of-place uptown boys crammed the front booth, drunk and hunched over their pint glasses. I looked out through the sliding barn door and looked with jealousy at the creatures outside. I wanted out.
Just as I turned to run out, I felt a manicured fingernail poke my chest. Gaga stared up at me with a stern look in her eye. “Don’t. Ditch. Me.”
“I’m not, I just . . . I was looking for—”
“She just walked in. She—turn around—hasn’t found her friends yet. Now you sit on this bar stool and smile.”
“I am smiling.”
“You look like you’re being tortured.”
“I am. Why did we come here? This is the one bar with all of them in it all at once,” I whined. These are the people who think James is perfect for her. “We had them quarantined.”
“You better get your act together, mister.” Gaga slapped my chest and collapsed into my leather jacket, rubbing her head into my chest. When her face reemerged she had an even brighter smile on her face. “Because you just said the funniest thing I ever heard. Haha!”
“What?”
“Roll with it.”
“Why?”
“Haha!” Gaga laughed and I glanced up and caught Nikki out of the corner of my eye. “Keep looking at me. I’m your date—haha!” Gaga caught her breath and composed herself, stage-like, with one hand on my chest and lots of semi-orgasmic breathing and abandonment.
“What are you doing?” I found myself giggling. It was contagious. Gaga kept turning up to me and trying to speak, but she burst out laughing again. “Stop that. Hahaaaa!”
Birthday Girl walked over from her table just then and saw me talking to this mystery girl with the platinum blond hair. She brought over a few of her friends and they all failed to recognize Gaga as the somewhat forgettable brunette they’d met a half dozen times before. Instead, they went into protection mode, trying to figure out who the blonde on their friends’ turf was.
Just then Nikki walked over and, through a fluke of the crowded bar, she ended up nudging Gaga into me. Gaga caught herself with one hand on my chest and glared at the uptown offender. Nikki looked over and saw a young girl laughing in convulsions with one hand slipped into my leather jacket.
I hadn’t seen Nikki since the night with James. Who was nowhere in sight. She walked straight up to me and we both stopped, just a few feet from each other. She looked me up and down. My voice got caught in my throat.
I still think about you ever day.
Every song reminds me of you.
I can’t go anywhere without getting reminded of you.
“Nikki, I—”
Gaga grabbed my right arm with her left and lead me away, spinning my back to Nikki and glaring at her in a stage bicker. “Don’t even talk to her,” she said like a pitch-perfect jealous new lover, and walked me over to the bar, where Guy air-drummed to the music, his eyes squinting and his lips jutting out.
In the tango of Lower East Side lovers Guy lost interest in the two of us as soon as we sat down and talked to him. Gaga, still in character, actually loved this because it gave her a second to catch up with me while Nikki’s hot glare tanned my neck. “You’re doing fine.”
“I want a drink so I can have an excuse to throw up.”
“Look at him.” Gaga shook her head at Guy. “Blows me up on text all night, hassles me about who I’m with while he’s at work, and then the second I get here he completely ignores me.”
“Uhm hm . . .”
“Stop thinking about her. Pretend you’re listening to me talk about something. Pretend it’s interesting. And sexual.”
“I am pretending I’m listening to you talk about something.”
Gaga looked up at me with those eyes. I couldn’t help it. “Don’t forget that we’re in this together.”
Guy swaggered over, stopping periodically to impress his big smile on drunk girls along the way. He made it just a few feet at a time, always glancing at Gaga and I and then ignoring her. Finally he bopped over and put his hands on the curved bar. Unlike at the other dives where we work, here a tiered speed rack of liquor bottles filled an alcoholic moat of bottles, four deep, between us. “Where’ve you been tonight?” He always opened with this question in the way that scenesters always wondered if they’ve missed a party somewhere else. FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. But this time he said it to mask the subquestion he really wants to know: What are you doing here with her?
“151.” The lie becomes the truth. “How’s business here?”
“Good. We got the lights fixed and the mechanical bull going.”
Gaga trotted off to the bathroom, leaving me and Guy alone.
“How long were you guys at 151?”
I hate questions. First of all because they distract me from waiting for my heart to explode if I see Nikki again. Second because I’m so preoccupied that I’m likely to answer them a little too truthfully.
Guy: “So you have a Saturday night off for once and now you have a thing for my girlfriend ever since you got dumped?”
Me: “Actually I was in her apartment long enough to totally nail her three times. Then we talked about all the books we’ve read. There were at least eleven of them.”
“What?”
“Crazy night!” I finally said to Guy. Then I just tried to focus on something he understood. “This place must be a cash cow.”
“Well, it’s no Pianos.”
“Right . . .”
He looked at me. “What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong. The fact that Guy is the one asking me that question is what’s wrong.
“Look at her.”
Guy stared over my shoulder at Nikki and even his eyes twinkled. “I am lookin’ at her. How’d you ever let that one get away?”
Somehow I just magically convinced Guy I’m not into Gaga by having us both admit that we have a huger crush on Nikki. “Fucking hell.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You always land hot girls.”
I decided to change the subject. “Man, that girl loves you, though.”
He acknowledges it without pride or feeling—rare for Guy not to pitch something to his ego. “I know.”
“No. I mean she really loves you.”
“I know.”
GAGA CAME BACK FROM THE bathroom just then and teetered onto her stool just like usual. Her dainty mount hit a few kinks before she treated herself to a seat. “This one,” Guy said, and smiled at her like she just woke up from being passed out in the bathroom. Just then I looked over at the two of them and I saw something weird. Gaga—who had barely had anything to drink, by my count—acted drunk. Meanwhile, Guy—who barely cared about her when we walked in groping each other—now only cared about her because she was another drunk girl. Something backfired on the way here from 151. “This one’s drunk.”
“I’m just here to keep VH1 away from You Know Who.”
“Why’d you get my girlfriend so drunk?” Guy joked. But in the joke we found the words she wanted to he
ar. The G word. Guy only got possessive when he got territorial. He turned to me. “You want a shot?”
Before I could even register the question and readjust the abacus of my brain into an answer, I found myself clinking glasses with Guy. He’s already poured the damn things and we have one shot each on either side of the bar. We toast. We drop. We meet eyes. We drink.
Supposedly that’s part of an old trust ritual. Supposedly we’re friends who don’t need to reaffirm our trust.
“Where’s mine?” Gaga wondered, a beat behind the rest of the band.
“Obviously, VH1 got you drunk enough already.” He gave her the dim-eyed bartender smile, in lieu of a toast. He gave me that cold-hearted, “I’ll-fuck-you-up” grin.
“We need to . . .” Gaga trailed off. “We need to set VH1 up with someone else.”
Guy answered, “Yes.”
“Somebody who will treat him right.”
As if that were an afterthought he shrugged. “Sure.” Guy carried a blank look on his face. He did the social-scanning thing that everyone hates, cruising the bar for more interesting people to talk to, which for him meant drunk girls.
“And we need to keep him away from her, especially now.”
“Absolutely.” Guy drifted off to the waiting crowd. Away from us.
“It’s weird to visit your boyfriend at work and have him totally ignore you.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So?”
“So. You have your job”—I realized immediately that she had a different frame of reference—“and he has his. Your job is to dance in front of boys and make them pay you. His job is to make boys dance in front of you by making girls dance in front of him.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“But we’re both being ignored,” I said. “Do you think he has time to deal with his employees on his night off at another bar where he doesn’t have a management scenario?”
Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives Page 13
