“Why are you talking like that?”
“I’m dying out here.”
“Just stay with me. You’re better off without her and you will be just fine.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? All that jealousy that he puts on you when we’re out and she’s out. All of that is gone. Just stay with me and—”
“ . . . BUTNOTLIKEABOOKONTAPE.” I’m outside telling Nikki way too much about Gaga’s idea of recording the manuscript. I’m excited. I’m vibrant. I’ve just come from a reading!
I’m also wicked nervous.
Nikki looked up at me and sniffed. “Do you listen to yourself talk?”
“Here.” I pulled the pages out of my back pocket. “I made these pages for you. Long ago. You should have them.” Then I realized that I’d handed her the pages that Gaga had written on—the ones I meant to save. “Except . . . here . . . here I have more for you . . . the thing is that, Stef . . . Stef . . .”
“Ohhh,” Nikki said, “is that your new girlfriend?”
Just then Guy came out for a smoke break in this interminable night. I turned to Nikki and said it as honestly as I could: “She’s just helping me with the new draft of Mercutio. She went to school for theater and she had this great idea—Henry said it too—that I develop it into a play.”
I can’t play games. I have to be honest. Nikki, I miss you. I think about you whenever I do anything.
Guy then hollered out, “Yo! VH1! You ever end up banging that chick? You know that girl you brought by the bar last night?” I ignored him and his on-the-clock drunken antics. “What was her name? I can’t remember. I can’t keep all the skanks you bring around the bar straight. Oh, hey, Nikki. How’s things?”
Nikki drifted off to her friends and then disappeared an hour later. I kept my back to her for a long as I could. But Guy always kept an eye on her throughout the night. His stark glance traced Nikki around the room wherever she went. When she left, Guy fed iced water to Gaga and talked to her until his shift ended. The lights came on at four and I made a very cowardly Irish good-bye.
Life is a mystery
Sundays round out the weekends in a lonely, solitary fix. While the rest of the city sat at home, unshaven and waiting for the good TV to start, I dragged myself through Chinatown and into the Lower East Side, where I worked at Pianos. I always came early to check out the show in the back room, where you could catch comedians like the Whitest Kids U’Know, John Mulaney, Hannibal Buress, or Greg Johnson. Comedy got a different part of my brain firing and I always left smiling, ready to get back at it.
I kept an eye on Stanton Street, hoping and wishing that Nikki would come around the corner. If she would just come in and sit down we could talk. She could see me at work, which she used to love. Out the windows I caught the slightest breeze of action on the quiet streets. Tonight all of the bands on the roster came from out of town. They faced the terrible specter of outnumbering their audience. Sundays in the neighborhood had a peculiar diffusion and when it was dead here it was dead everywhere.
Here was all the advice I had been given so far and what I did with it:
Go out and meet someone else. Where?
The best way to get over someone is to get under someone new. Picture me in a strange girl’s apartment. Picture it going well. Picture me saying charming things and making her laugh. Picture shirts getting unbuttoned. Picture me checking her undergarments for Nikki’s labels.
Find one of her friends and take them out on a date to make her jealous. Nothing has to even happen, but you’ll get in her head. I think I started crying when I read the words “find one of her friends.”
When I looked back out the window I saw the face of a little angel. It was the girl who’d given me the hickey. Passing headlights illuminated a little halo around her hair. She had a pair of big-hearted blue eyes and freckled cheeks. And she smiled as soon as she walked in the door.
I had only seen her once since our failed date at Hotel on Rivington the night I saw Nikki out with James. She glowed in the doorway and I nodded to the door guy to bring her right in.
I poured her a Ketel soda and put it on a napkin for her when she sat down. “That’s to make up for the drink we didn’t have at Hotel on Rivington.”
“Apology accepted,” she said, smiling. “You know I worried about you that night. That look on your face. It was like you just lost your best friend.”
I smiled.
“I have a present for you too.” She pulled out a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. In the book a poet writes back to a young student who’d asked him for advice. He tells him to just write and not worry what other people will think because at best their readings of it would just be fortunate misinterpretations.
When I got home I found she’d inscribed it, “To a talented writer, Moby rival, and all around cool guy. I hope this brings you joy and peace.”
It did.
ON MY DAY OFF THE next day I had nothing to do. Tuesday would begin my every-other-day cycle of DJ’ing, bartending, guest DJ’ing, and bartending. My apartment had become a cave of failure, piles of half-finished books and printouts that only felt like the dirt-fill for the grave I’d dug myself.
I had an early demo of some Gaga songs and I decided to take it for a walk. At the door to my apartment, I took my glasses off and left them on the table and walked out into blurry, mysterious night.
From the second I heard that voice inhale on “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” I felt better. It felt like the national anthem of the young and broke. I listened to it on repeat. Again and again, sometimes starting it over after only a minute just to hear the intro. What her song meant to me had almost nothing to do with what it meant to her or what it would mean to someone else. But nothing could change the feeling inside of me.
When I came home I texted Gaga: “I just had the time of my life walking around the empty streets of Brooklyn playing your song on repeat for hours. It’s amazing. I took my glasses off and listened to it fifteen times. I got LOST.”
“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” she texted back.
“No. Thank you. I can’t wait to play it next week. But for now I’m just listening to it alone and I am in heaven misinterpreting it.”
“Why misinterpret?”
Full of Rilke and probably too much coffee, I wrote back. “The greatest/worst thing about art: it will never be interpreted by the art appreciator as it is by the artist,” I texted, “because they are three separate things.”
“Ha! I love it.”
“Then imagine how much I love your song: I didn’t think of that until after I heard it.”
I knew then that the inspiration I’d searched for in all of those books would stay hidden. But this city and the people in it I loved so much would form the dialogue and characters, and I had to learn patience because a story doesn’t find you all at once the way scenes and chapters do. You need to have everything in place before it can all be destroyed, and your story begins right after that.
Following the girl I didn’t even want around
That first week of winter wind in New York is a death sentence. You have appeals and reprieves, but nothing will get you through it but time. I shivered down the street. I headed out for the night and heard the first good news I’d had in a while: Interscope wanted to hear some more of what Gaga had put together. They wanted Gaga to start writing for the Pussycat Dolls, which would put her in touch with Cee Lo Green—the high-pitched vocalist from Goodie Mob—and Gnarls Barkley. The plan being to help Nicole Scherzinger, the lead singer, go solo. Of all the old-school moves they had over at Interscope, putting together a girl group with in-house talent and then having one go solo made the most sense. “That’s good news!” I said when I saw her back out at the bar later.
“Do you even listen to the Pussycat Dolls?”
“No. Not at all,” I said. “But I will once you’re writing for them.”
“You’re going to love the songs.”
“No, I mean you are going to love the songs. I have one about You Know Who’s always-broken-down El Camino called ‘Your Freakin’ Car.’”
“Ha!”
She sang, “I know where you were last night / I saw you with your hands on her / Rubbin’ her like you love her more than me.” Guy proved an excellent source of material for these tracks. Some of them never made it on an album, but she had written “Your Freakin’ Car” about how he spends their entire weekend together with his ass crack coming out of his vintage jeans, stooped under the hood on the street down by the waterfront. “Glitter and Grease” was about his piece of shit El Camino. Ostensibly, he’s fixing it. But ostensibly we should have a cash register drawer that actually closes.
“That’s great.” I gave her a smile.
“They’re a good mix between what I do and what they are. They have their eye on this one Pussycat Doll to go solo and I’m going to write for her. Which is why I wanted to talk to you.”
“What?”
“Now I have to do what you do: I have to take a minor character and develop her as her own entity.”
“It’s fun,” I said, “and terrifying.”
“There’s one problem. We were going to go on a little vacation to the islands. Nothing big. The good news is I’m going to throw him a surprise birthday party. The bad news is I have to cancel the trip to record . . .”
“When are you going back to LA?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t even know. But I have to be ready. Like you said that time. I gotta be ready for the time I’m not ready.” I started to think of my own half-assed advice. When we went on our fake date to see Nikki I was prepared. I was overprepared. The last time I was really not ready for anything was the next night at Pianos when that little angel came by bringing me a book. I realized something strangely relieving right then: I didn’t know a single thing. What had all of these conversations and failures prepared me for anyway? The only thing that did seem to help was giving up. Being ready and rehearsed only put me on the defensive. But being unprepared opened me up for what was ahead. Whatever that was.
“So I was thinking,” Gaga continued, “if I can’t go to the islands with him, I dunno, maybe he could go with you instead . . .”
“Huh?” I had lost her for a second. “Sure. I’ll talk to him.”
“IT’S BULLSHIT,” GUY SAID, SMOKING outside of Mason Dixon the next Saturday. I don’t get Guy, but I do get one thing: This wasn’t just a getaway with his girlfriend. This was his big birthday trip.
“C’mon,” Dino said, “she’ll be back soon and then you can go.”
“We can’t even plan a trip. Can’t even take my girl to the Caymans for a few days. You know how many girls would kill for that? How many would just flip out that their guy could just take off in the middle of the week and hit up the Caymans?”
“What’s so big about the Caymans?” Dino offered. “Why don’t you go to LA with her? Maybe they could use you on the record. That would be sick. Yo, you know that if she ever needed some guitar parts in the studio to call me, right?”
“That’s not a vacation. That’s more work. Besides. There’s no casinos in LA.”
The two gamblers agreed, finished their cigarettes, and said nothing else.
“It’s done, man. It’s like a summer fling that shouldn’t have lasted this long.” Guy tossed a cigarette down to the gutter. It burned red at first and then sizzled out, disappearing into a thin trail of smoke in the glimmer of a streetlight.
“What do you mean?” Dino said. “You’re not gonna—”
“What the difference? I never see her. Even when she’s in town she’s too busy for me.” His voice gathered up a manful, Theodore Roosevelt accent. “She wants to go out on Fridays and Saturdays when I’m at work. I can’t even go bowling with my girl on a Sunday afternoon.”
“You can’t break up with her.”
“It’s gotta happen,” Guy said.
Just then a big, drunk idiot comes down the street. Me. I sailed down Rivington in a cloud of whiskey and misplaced optimism for my undisclosed future. “Hey, happy birthday,” I said to Guy, and then gave him the hand-slap half-hug.
“Why does everyone keep saying that? My birthday is not until next week.”
“Oh.” I made eyes with the other guys. First I heard of it was on the text from Gaga to help plan his surprise party.
Dino steadied me: “He wants to break up with Stef.” Even in Dino’s vacant, drug-smeared eyes I could see a look of terror. Somewhere in the back of his hoovered brain Dino always waited in the wings, careful to help out at shows, hoping that one day he’d get to record with her and show Interscope what he could do. He filled me in on what I’d missed and I looked up at Guy.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Guy turned to me and went to go text her the breakup news.
I looked at Dino. “Just tell him.”
Guy looked up. “Tell me what?”
Dino wavered for a second, then launched into it: “She spent all week planning your surprise party at the bowling alley tomorrow. She even went through your phone to find some extra surprise friends.”
Guy looked up from that very phone, seconds away from programming in the launch code that would have made their entire relationship self-destruct. He slipped the phone back into his pocket.
Take a look around, see which way the wind blows
A scent of grilled-cheese sandwiches mixed with the glory of bowling shoes and spray disinfectant filled the bar. The windowless, cinder-block bunker took up a huge section of the block among the brownstones and fire-escape village that surrounded Melody Lanes in Brooklyn. The paint colors on the wall all came to match a polyester shirt minted in 1979. A nearby vending machine sold socks, wrist guards, and ball-polishing rags.
A single mural spanned the wall with bowling pins in a wild, airbrushed orbit. A handmade oak-tag-lettered banner hung just under the ceiling, advertising bowling league games and sharing in the pride of local teams (Bay Ridge Ladies, Match Point, Summer Triples). A hand-lettered, framed sign on the wall advertised the unintentionally naughty sounding “Adult Parties!” Which is what the kids of Rivington High came here for today.
“Yo, VH1!” I turned and saw Dino waiting in the bar area with a couple of friends. We merged in among the longshoremen as they commanded the gray-haired, bow-tied bartender to change the channel from one game to another. This is a Sunday in Brooklyn, a time to observe the Sabbath with football.
The entire cast of party kids filed in. Late. Sundays for us came at the end of a long week filled with too many smoke breaks and a little more whiskey than required. Today, my kidneys felt splintered by the wood barrel of last night’s Jameson. If downtown were an office building, we would be the gossipy coworkers who harangued each other at the water cooler, talking too loud at the desk of the most hungover employee.
Gaga stalled the ceremony as long as she could, pretending to be on the phone with someone from the label in LA (which annoyed Guy, who was by now in on the secret but no less frustrated with men who needed her in LA). I kept texting her the whereabouts of various friends and scenesters. Your real life can only match the delight of a movie once the whole cast’s assembled.
The guest list of a surprise party will never be the guest list of a party you would throw for yourself. It reflects more the ideal social circle that the person throwing the party—ideally the most important person in your life—would have prescribed you. (None of the drunk girls who we see every single night get the invite, for example.)
However, it still follows the same rule as every other party: The person whose name is the least secure on the invite list arrives first (Dino) and somewhat uncomfortably early. Your real friends arrive on time to support the host and to catch up, knowing that once the party starts they will not find time for this. Then it’s the wildcard guest—someone who isn’t really a good friend but gets the invite to give everyone else at th
e party something to talk about (Georgie from Motherfucker).
Like a band slogging through rehearsal we all missed our cue when Guy finally arrived. “Surprise!” everyone yelled. Separately.
Gaga came in with her video camera, rolling in behind him. “How amazing is this group?” Gaga peered through the viewfinder. “Years from now people will be talking about the day this group of rock ’n’ rollers went bowling. Hey, writer!” She aimed the camera at me. “Did you guys know that VH1 is an amazing writer?”
Guy perked up. He may act like a moron, but he isn’t an idiot. Somewhere in the past week I had learned all of Gaga’s songs and she had started quoting my manuscript.
I grumbled and shrank and tried to take the attention off of me. “So says the poet laureate of pop!”
Gaga panned the video camera around at the cast. Conrad came over from the jukebox. The Doors’ “L.A. Woman” infected the entire bowling alley with its long, stuck-in-freeway-traffic intro release, while this crew of semipro guitar players air-strummed along.
“Right,” Guy moaned, putting on his bowling shoes, “like we don’t hear this enough on Rivington Street.”
“I wanted to set the mood,” Conrad said.
I went over to the jukebox and put five dollars in. I’d rather not have any music on than hear the mismatched bullshit that people put on their “Party Jamz” playlist.
“Were you surprised?” everyone kept asking Guy.
His answer got caught in his throat. He muscled a smile across his delicate face, behind the hair and mutton chops. “Are you having fun? That’s the question. It’s not fun if everyone doesn’t have a good time at your birthday.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Yeah.” Guy gave a conspiratorial eye to Dino and me.
“What was that?” Gaga asked.
Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives Page 14
