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

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

THAT LAST SHOT PUT US close to the edge. But not over it. We rode alongside it, feeling the exhilaration of youth in its unallowable future. We collapsed on each other’s shoulders. We apologized for being bad friends. We put the blame on jet lag, empty cupboards and empty wallets. We told the other they were perfectly welcome to do and say whatever was right. No judgments among friends. That night we felt like anything was possible. And it was. I had to admit that it was possible that I was going to miss my new friend.

  “Where do you feel love in your body?”

  She thought for a minute. “In my stomach.”

  “Describe it to me—in your belly button? Your chest?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I feel love in my stomach, and then it burns, like a candle or a lantern,” I said. “It fills in my chest and it gets bright and brighter and my heart starts working and my ribcage feels the flutter.”

  “Butterflies?”

  “For me it’s like a jar of fireflies.”

  “I can feel that.” She looked at me. “Do you feel less creative since you and Nikki broke up?” she asks.

  “Less inspired. But that’s a matter of goals. It’s easy to do something when you can tell yourself why you’re doing it. I wanted to impress her with my work.”

  “I wanted to impress him with mine.”

  “Isn’t that stupid? Do you think they want to impress us with their work?”

  “Ha! Yeah right. I’m the last person he thinks about behind the bar. Even when I’m right there. But I read that your body has the same response to love as it does to amphetamines. Increased focus, lack of appetite, heart palpitations.”

  “It absolutely does. Does that make love addictive? Or does it make it habit forming?”

  “Maybe we crave them. But most cravings are bad for us. Like your cigarettes,” she said. “I read that cravings only exist in your short-term memory. If you can wait seven minutes from when you crave that cigarette you’ll forget all about it. Same goes for food. If you can get your mind on something else, you’ll forget all about it.”

  “So you’re going to forget all of him by thinking about cigarettes and candy bars?”

  “No. But I’m going to break the habit.”

  “By letting the craving pass? You know I never even think about cigarettes during the day? I think they’re kind of gross and a waste and they leave me feeling terrible.”

  “Right.” Gaga smiled. “And I don’t love him, I just want to fuck him after I’ve been drinking. He is an addiction. He’s awful and smelly and I waste all my time and money on him. And for what? So he can make me feel like shit?”

  “You said it yourself: Love is weird. ”

  “It sure as fuck is.”

  “I have this thing I say about being in the prime of your life. It’s like you can only be divided by yourself—”

  “And one, right? Like prime numbers. That’s genius. He’s the one guy in my life who can get away with treating me like that. He barely reads, he has terrible manners.” Emboldened by her next sip she slammed the glass on the counter. She resented him for it. In one of those magical moments of party life the crowd stopped yelling over each other and the DJ missed a cross-fade at the same time that Gaga screamed into the silenced room.

  When the music started up again I sheepishly suggested, “Should we go downtown tonight?”

  “Ugh. I can’t do it. Everyone will want to ask about recording. ‘Are you famous yet?’ I just want to catch up with you and walk away.”

  “So that’s it, then? Does anyone else know you’re leaving?”

  She took a deep breath and gazed at the person she had in her mind’s eye. Guy. “How about that cigarette?” she said.

  “I’m not giving you a smoke. It’ll ruin your voice.”

  “Just one won’t. It makes it more authentic.”

  “You are authentic,” I said. “I have proof.” Unintentionally, I sniffed.

  “Did you want to call ‘Judy’?” She smiled.

  “Who?”

  “Judy is what my friends call cocaine.”

  “‘Judy’ is already here.” I thought about it. What the heck! Why not have a night out with my friend. And then I remembered a stupid promise that I made to a very stupid man.

  Make sure she doesn’t do any drugs tonight.

  JUST THEN THE DEVIL CAME in from the back room. He marched right over to us and said hi like a shopkeeper still waiting on you to come in and pick up that special order. “Yo, man, what happened last week?”

  Luckily in these situations you can always act drunk. “Hey, buddy! Killer party in here. I was just saying to my friend. Everybody’s here tonight. Well, almost everybody. And now here you are.” We did the straight-guy hand-shakehand, half-hug.

  “What happened the other night? I thought you were down at Don Hill’s. You even texted me the show details and you couldn’t hook your boy up at the door?” Hell hath no fury like The Devil uninvited.

  “You should have texted me. I was stuck in the DJ booth.”

  “I saw you from the door. The bouncer said you said not to let me in.”

  “Me? No man.” I searched around the bar for answers. “Maybe the other DJ? I don’t know the guy.”

  Somehow he fell for that and in five seconds I realized why. God bless capitalism. He leaned into my ear and whispered, “Well. If you’re looking for some good blow I finally got those twenty-sacks you guys are always asking for. If you get five I can get you one free. Maybe if you’ve got friends who wanna buy a hundo, I’ll give you the bonus bag.”

  I looked at Gaga and kept nodding my head until he went away.

  “Who was that?”

  “Nobody.”

  “I saw him the other night at the door but he didn’t come in.”

  “He’s a vampire,” I said. “And the only way to keep him away is if you don’t invite him in.”

  He walks away, the sun goes down

  The next day I came to her apartment to get her to autograph a picture for Mike before the Beauty Bar Christmas party. Like the grand dame who won’t let you past the sitting room unless she is ready to entertain, Gaga buzzed me in and came down the rank stairs of her fragrant, classic apartment. The florescent-lit hallways gleamed in the shimmer of peeling paint and bumped walls. She lumbered down the stairs in a sky-blue bathrobe tied at the waist, making a small effort to cover up her breasts as they peeked through the polar fleece curtain of their stage.

  “I feel like death,” she said, rubbing at the nuclear shadow of last night’s makeup. “I can’t even let you in. My apartment looks worse than I do.”

  “You know you look fine.”

  “Ech.”

  “You should write about this. Right now. This exact feeling.”

  “I can’t,” she cried. “It would be like sealing the envelope.”

  I slipped the photo out of the paper Target bag and peeled the sticker off the cheap frame. She thought about it for a moment with her bare legs crossed, sitting herself on the stairs. Her tiny bare feet pointed down like Cinderella the morning after.

  We tore ourselves apart the night before and some kind of fairy godmother guided her home safe because I sure as hell didn’t. Maybe part of me worried that people might see us leaving together, or that we might finish what we had started in the DJ booth the week before. There are people who do terrible things when they are drunk. They yell. They pick fights. They go to bed with people they shouldn’t. I was not one of those people. Mostly because I always did pretty much whatever I wanted and there was no thirsty, repressed monster hidden inside of me that leaked out with a few drinks. Lord knows I drank. But probably my favorite part of drinking was the little vacation I got from that terrified narrator who sang out from my emptiest cavity, echoing through the layers and worrying me to death.

  Her unventilated sadness left the whole tenement feeling stuffy. If she had anything on I would have demanded we go take a walk: The cold New York winter felt like a spa treatment on a hungover
face. Instead, she sat there in a pile and took every last inch of her happiness to write a sweet note in silver glitter pen.

  The worst part of seeing her like this was knowing that it would only get worse. The day after was the easy part. She would miss him more. See him more. She would venerate him and trade all the men in New York, all the record deals on the planet, all the notes on the scale, and everything she’d ever loved before for a single one of his flaws. At least we didn’t do any drugs. As a replacement lover drugs worked like Sweet’N Low, fooling you into believing your craving is satisfied. Drugs weren’t the problem. Fun wasn’t the problem. Partying wasn’t the problem. Being a human being was the fucking problem.

  Being the innkeeper of your soul, knowing that people will come and go and use you how they will and that you will have to clean up their mess—that’s the problem to have.

  I wanted to cry for her, to run the taps and use up all the hot water like a bad houseguest. Crying like that would awaken her deflated heart and prove to her that she was not alone.

  She had come down from that great big high we rode together the week before. Once again she looked like that very first Russian doll, shiny and fresh out of the package. The one hidden deepest inside.

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “No.” She stopped and some memory produced a quiver of sadness in her lower lip. Her face soured and then she changed her answer: “Yes.”

  “Did he say he was sorry? Did he say that he loved you and respected you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he come by and apologize?”

  “No.”

  “Has he been calling at all hours of the night?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  When you’re young you’re in the prime of your life—divisible by yourself and one.

  “He sent me a text and—” She started crying until she could only get out the very end of it. I couldn’t understand her and so she pulled her phone out of her bathrobe and handed it to me. The screen read, “Bug Bite.”

  “What?”

  “You were there. One night at the bar I got pretty drunk and I asked for a Bud Light, but somehow it came out as ‘Bugbite.’ It’s his little name for me.” She looked up at me with her big glassy eyes, holding back the tears. She sniffed, “Bug Bite.”

  I would have done anything possible to paint a smile on that face right then. She sat on the cold stone steps, her legs shivering. Can you love someone at their lowest? Can you sit on the stump of the Giving Tree and remember swinging in the branches and eating apples? How could I let this happen?

  “Come here.” I sat down on the step and held her through the flimsy robe the way you would collect a ripped paper grocery bag. She was like a mannequin that had come apart from too much shuffling in a neglected box. I ran my fingers through her dry, bleached hair. I collected the lifeless doll parts of her body and squeezed. Her back had a chilled steam of stress sweat. Being curled up and holding back the tears forced her back to cry. “Look,” I said, keeping her forehead pressed against my shoulder while promising to do the one thing I really didn’t want to do right then, “I’ll talk to him.”

  Through the collar of my shirt I could feel the warm flow of mascara tears.

  Is it in his eyes?

  That night I would join a proud tradition of losers who were fired but went back to their old jobs. One thing that’s important to remember about a scene—any scene really—is that the employees are half of it. The bartenders, the door guys. The bands don’t make a lot, but being there and playing is their job. It felt in a way like I’d been fired from the scene. But I never really would be. I’m like the young exec who lost one of his big accounts. As I put on my leather jacket and boots, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I looked like Oliver North, dismissed from the military and still wearing his uniform on trial.

  I am a soldier.

  Few defeats match the intensity of going back to a place where you got canned. First of all, your former coworkers resent you for getting out—no matter what the conditions. They see you with the days off they wish they had—and with the severance you sometimes get to tide you over in the interim. Frequently you just find another damn job, which means you actually have the time for once to hang out and do unheard-of things like go to shows where you’re not in the band or working the door.

  But mostly, as I discovered that night, you become poison. Most of us get fired for getting caught doing something that every single person you know does. Maybe you drink behind the bar or you let a friend have a few for free and when they slip you a twenty you put it in your tip jar. Never mind. Not maybe. Definitely. Everyone does that, unless their friends don’t have the decency to tip. But knowing that you got canned for it meant other people stayed away from you so that it wouldn’t look like they sympathized with someone who would do such a thing.

  I was a dead man walking down Rivington Street that night. No one said anything about staying away from the bar or taking a week off before coming back here. I had relationships to maintain and DJ slots to fill. Everyone I knew found their way to the bar eventually on a Friday. Because of that I could possibly run into anyone. Starlight, Nikki, Dino, St. Michael, Conrad, The Devil. If I get thrown out in front of any one of them, I will probably have to start hanging out in the East Village.

  GUY LEANED AGAINST THE SAFETY rail in front of the hatchway where everyone locked their bikes. With his hair covering the edges of his eyes he looked like an aging starlet trying to hide a pair of crow’s-feet from her adoring fans. He smoked what looked like one of many cigarettes, his heavy eyes buoyed by a forced smile. He laughed idly at the social crowd with his hidden eyes, incapable of betraying any emotion.

  As I walked up to him a drunk girl stepped in front of me and shrieked, “Hey, don’t you work here?!”

  The crowd parted and everyone looked at me. I swear they cut the music inside. “I used to. I got fired!” And then, as if I happened to know the funniest punch line in the world: “This is the guy that fired me!” I slapped Guy on the sleeve of his studded leather jacket, pressing the one-size-too-big shoulder against him. He isn’t much more than a half size bigger that I, but he always wore hats and jackets in the wrong sizes, as if he thought that he were buying a motorcycle jacket for a bigger badass.

  Guy laughed at my bravado and chuckled in my acknowledgement that he called the shots around here. No hard feelings. He smiled. “How about a drink?”

  “Fuckin’ finally,” I said. “Been too long since I could just come in the damn bar and not be stressed out.”

  “You and me both.”

  He slapped an arm on my jacket and we herded in the door with the others like the cattle did just before they made our jackets. He walked me into the bar and the message was clear to all around. They must have misheard the rumor. Maybe he just threatened to fire me. Maybe I’d quit, like Brent, and would be an honored guest at any time. False alarm, everybody.

  “Patrón?”

  “I had enough Patrón working here. Give us some Wild Turkey.”

  “Fine. I’m gonna do Crown Royal.”

  “Pussy,” I said. As if I ever call people a pussy for drinking a different kind of whiskey. This is what I mean about Guy. I don’t understand him, but he has a very infectious persona. I continued as if I didn’t care about anything at all. “I’m waiting on a friend. Her family is from Kentucky and they breed horses. They won the derby in ’99. You gotta come with us sometime and bet on the races.”

  “I’d love to.” Two dudes in a bar talking about gambling and whiskey.

  “They have a box at the racetrack and they know all the jockeys and trainers. They always seem to know who’s gonna win too.”

  The gambler smiled. His face looked like a bartender, but his eyes hid the truth. He gave a grin and flirted with girls and bought shots for people. His arm pumped in the air when they played his favorite Iron Maiden song. And somewhere in Guy, the gambler, he broke even.
r />   “New Year’s is a Monday this year,” I said.

  “I . . . I forgot about that.” Guy didn’t work Mondays, but he’d assign himself to the shift. Now we were talking money.

  “Nice to make some extra money after Christmas, right before rent is due.”

  “You wanna spin? You’ve done every other year.”

  “Done. You, me, Starlight. Just like old times.” He smiled. Thinking of old times. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” said the party guy. “Great Friday night!”

  “No. I mean how’s it going?” I said. “Not as your DJ or your employee. I’m your friend and I want to know how you’re doing.”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  For the first time in our relationship Guy’s eyes looked true, not the gambler’s indifferent bluff. I could see he was out of aces. He’d ignored her, texted her, gone out of his way to run into her. He’d put on a front to some people. But when I cornered him like this he couldn’t bluff. His eyes welled up like hers did when I looked into them. His chin quivered and he looked down at the stool on the corner of the bar. Her stool.

  In the Russian dolls of Guy it looked like he had hit the eject button and absconded from the bottom, leaving the outer shell to plod on, lifeless. I felt for him. This outer layer—the one we’re all least accustomed to—went on. It worked. It smiled at known faces and never gave away anything about what really went on inside.

  “It’s . . . hard.” In the mirror behind the bar he saw through his twin layers of hair and into his own eyes. The crestfallen soldier turned and wiped his eyes with a cocktail napkin.

  I HAD ONE PRESENT TO give that Christmas and as much as I thought I should stay out I didn’t. “Stef—I saw your ex-boyfriend out tonight. He misses you more than you think that he’s an idiot. Call him.”

  No man in the world cuts straighter or greater than New York’s number 1 cut creator

  I spent the rest of that year on the phone with Gaga in LA. We feasted on all-night yak sessions that would soon unravel the mysteries of the world. I wasn’t out accumulating brain damage in the Lower East Side. Somehow we would talk and talk into the dark until we both sat in front of plugged-in phones, crouched by the window and hoping for a never-ending reception while our souls and our batteries recharged. We talked about the future, which waited for us on the other side of New Year’s, cheering us on and calling out to us like parents trying to teach a child how to swim underwater.