The news from LA changed every day and the record seemed imminent, but formless. Some days there was talk of a Snoop Doggy Dogg verse. Sometimes she had a duet with Akon.
The marketing people worried, constantly, How are we going to present this girl to the world? She wasn’t uptown enough for hip-hop; she wasn’t LA enough for R&B. She wasn’t mainstream enough for pop or pop enough for the mainstream. This was the year of mixtapes, when the record labels not only relied on copyright infringement but treated it as the new A&R.
Interscope began talking to celebrity DJ AM about putting together a Lady Gaga mixtape. DJ AM was the favored boyfriend of Paris Hilton. Only AM had talent. Pure, raw, music-and-the-message talent. Going to see him spin was like taking woodshop from Jesus. You always found yourself looking over his shoulder, wondering how he’d prerecorded a segment or achieved sonic resonance with two dissonant tracks, mixing hip-hop, rock, and house. DJ AM was set to take over the world and he worked at an inhuman pace. Vegas one night, LA the next. Interscope wanted this great figure to put his weight behind Gaga.
Gaga wanted me to do it instead.
They gave me the passcode to what I began calling The Vault. They worried that if they emailed me the track it could leak. God forbid somebody hear the damn song (which you could hear for free on her website and record it if you wanted). Only they didn’t give me the password for a protected file. They gave me the password for every file.
This is the crate digger’s version of the Matrix.
My natural curiosity got the best of me. I could see from the indexes that many of the working artists I admired had new songs in the works, many of them in demo versions I could listen to on this server.
These songs were terrible.
Gaga’s track blossomed, like a single daisy sprung from a field of horseshit.
“WE DON’T HAVE A RELEASE date yet. That will come but we have to be ready.” Gaga called me and told me that she would fly home from LA for Christmas. And one other thing.
“We?”
“Yes. Today I had a meeting with Interscope and they said that I needed to pick a permanent DJ. And I told them that I wanted it to be you.”
My heart exploded. I knew she might need me to help out or even book shows or DJ her after-parties. I’d volunteered to do that on the night I met her. But I never thought you’d see me on stage, outfitted behind her. I would be her biggest fan, her greatest supporter, and I would get to ride shotgun. And then a panic took over me. What if I cost her all of her dreams? What if I weren’t good enough or I messed something up? What if the record skipped in front of some important industry people? What if—
“Stef. I just want to tell you something and I’m only going to say it once. But just remember I said it.” She paused. Who wouldn’t be thrilled? Especially someone so adventuresome.
“Okay . . .” she said. She had not expected such a sullen reaction after crowning me as her partner.
“There is going to come a time when you are going to have to leave me behind. And when you think you’ve gotten to that point, I want you to do it.”
“We’re not there yet, w—”
“I know. But when that day comes and you have to make the decision, don’t blink. I want you to know right now that I support your decision and I understand that you have to make it and that you will only make that decision when you get to a point where you can’t turn back. So do it. I’ll always be your biggest fan.”
She stopped again. In the background I heard some workplace chatter. She must have called me straight from the meeting.
“Okay. I promise. As long as you know that I’ll always be yours.”
Someday, girl—I don’t know when—we’re gonna get to that place where we really wanna go
I met the choreographer Laurieann Gibson for the first time on Valentine’s Day at sound check. Gaga was able to fly home when DJ Alex English booked us for a show at Le Royale. The last time I walked through that club’s doors the place was called Luke & Leroy, home of Misshapes and Michael T.’s Rated X parties. I had DJ’d their last night in business, and when I woke up the next morning at Nikki’s house we broke up. Gibson had an impossibly glamorous regality to her, touched with an aw-shucks Canadian grin. Her vivacious personality came off on Gaga, who looked up to her for every move.
It was a sunny day in a sunny time. Guy and I had made up enough for me to DJ New Year’s at St. J’s again. Plus, he owed me. They’d gotten back together.
And in that time I had fallen deeply and hopelessly in love with Leigh. The hickey girl.
“He’s being difficult again,” Gaga said calmly, as if noting the weather. Something had changed in her.
“That’s okay because that will ground you,” Laurieann said with a nod and a smile, choreographing Gaga’s response. “Is he coming tonight?”
“It’s . . . difficult. You see, he’s . . . it’s like here at home he is the star, and I can’t . . . I respect that.”
“That’s good,” Laurieann said. “That sets boundaries. You need those.”
No one absorbed technique as well as Gaga. In the intervening months she had added words to her vocabulary the way other people learned dance steps. She padded through them with the uneasy legs of a novice. She’d begun to open up to SoCal alterna-speak, the everybody’s-okay language of people who did a lot of thinking by themselves.
“I THINK I’VE HAD A life-changing experience since I saw you on New Year’s.”
“We should talk then,” I told her. “I had one too.”
“Really?”
“Big time.”
“And now you patched things up with Nikki?”
“No. I let her go. Like the harpooner should have.”
“Just logically or did—ohmygod, you’re in love.” She gripped her hands together like a bridesmaid clutching a bouquet. “Who is it? I want to meet her!”
Leigh had burrowed her way into my life before I had words for it. Once at Hotel on Rivington, once when she came in to make sure I was okay when I got jumped at St. J’s, once when she brought me the book at Pianos. I was the last one to know that I was in love with her too.
“How could you tell?” I looked down and found Gaga’s face pressed into my chest, her arms wrapped around me.
“It’s all gone. The fear, the anger. You look stronger. The sparkle came back to your eyes. I missed that sparkle when I was in LA. For a long time you just looked so empty. Oh!” She wrapped her arms around me again. “We have to catch up. You had your life-changing event without me and I had mine . . . without him. What’re you doing right now?”
“Nothing. You’re my full-time job.”
She smiled. “I have errands to do, but maybe you want to talk for a few?”
“I have my Vespa.” I held up my helmet. “I have an extra helmet. Why don’t I just take us around to do some errands and we’ll catch up?”
“Ohmygod, that would be so much fun!” She put the helmet on and I draped a scarf around her neck.
WHEN I SEE THIS PICTURE in my head now, I still feel the chill sting of February air, waking me up like an iced coffee to the face. I can feel Gaga’s tiny, soft hands in the twin pockets of my jacket as we sail around the West Village in the early afternoon. The cobblestone streets jammed up with cabs, people rushing from one place to another, salt crunching beneath their feet on the frozen sidewalks. A few times in your life you get to have a moment like this. You’ve done all the hard work and shaken all the right hands and dropped off your gear and done sound check. You can’t worry about how the flyers got printed or how you will be received for a show you haven’t performed yet. The only thing you can do is hope that tomorrow feels as good as the excitement for it does right now. And even if tomorrow doesn’t feel that way after all, it can’t change the thrill of now.
“This feels amazing!” she hollered into my right ear as we sped down the avenue. “I miss New York so much!”
I leaned to my right so she could hear me. “I know. What
a wonderful way to see the city.”
“I want one.”
“The label will never let you get a motorcycle.”
“But it’s just so much fun!” She was right. With a swivel of my hips we slalomed around three sharp manhole covers and ducked between two cars as we helped ourselves to the fading yellow left-turn arrow. Gaga held me tight and low, perfectly following my lead as we snaked around the city and made our way uptown.
“I don’t want to wear the disco-bra tonight because I keep getting hints from the label that we’re going to do a video,” she said. “I want to save it for that.”
“Crazy. For which song?”
“That new one. ‘Just Dance.’”
“Hmmp.”
“What?” she asked into my helmeted ear.
“Nothing. It’s just I didn’t see that really being your first single.”
“Me neither.”
Later in the trip I said, “I mean, here we are the headlining act for a show on Valentine’s Day and we don’t have a van. We don’t have instruments or anything. We just roll up like, ‘Uhh, hello, we’re the band.’ No guitars, no entourage. Just three girls and a guy who all took different subway trains.”
“The first video needs to look like that,” she said, almost to herself, and if she’d had on the other helmet I might’ve not heard her at all. “Or capture that. Maybe the video should just start with you and me. Like we time it so that the beginning of the song is at my apartment in the LES. I climb on the back in the beginning and you have your record case on the very front. I step out into my helmet and I start singing on the way there.”
“That sounds awesome. Remind me to wear sunglasses. I think I look too geeky in glasses. And we want to look cool.”
“We are cool. We don’t have to look cool.”
I had on a cheap but thick navy surplus sweater and my leather jacket, which had holes in the armpits. I tried again and again to sew them up with waxed dental floss, but it left me looking like a shoddily stitched stuffed animal. Gaga had on her soft leather jacket, the best one in the store that fit her.
When the wind got unbearable, I shut my visor. At the next stoplight I made the mistake of breathing, which made my visor fog up and then freeze. I could only tell the light went green by the tinge of the ice. In my nylon saddlebags I had a pair of cheap St. Mark’s Place sunglasses. I put them on to block the wind and left the visor open.
“Those look awesome,” Gaga told me.
“I think it’s kind of obnoxious when people wear sunglasses indoors,” I said. “Plus, I wear enough glasses as it is. I don’t need any more. I just wish they made regular glasses that could block the wind.”
“You should wear them more,” she said. “It fits your whole persona as the mysterious guy behind the dials, controlling everything.”
“You’re right. Sunglasses say, ‘I’ve seen everything.’ Glasses just say, ‘I’ve read the liner notes of everything.’” We dipped between two cars on the corner of Fourteenth and Sixth, just past the Urban Outfitters. I knew this block cold from late nights at work when the only respite came from the twin forces of the late-night eats at French Roast and the all-night bagel cafeteria. “I’d probably wear them behind you if we had a tour.”
Her little paws gripped me tight around my waist, the fists in my jacket pockets Heimliching me with excitement. “Ohmygod, can you imagine if we ever had a tour?”
“I’m just as impatient as you are. We just have to hang on. The world isn’t ready for you yet.”
“Then they should be ready,” she said, quoting me and Jesus in the same breath. “For when they’re not ready.”
“That’s when to hit ’em.”
Her hands squeezed me harder.
We pulled over at her favorite midtown lingerie boutique and she found costumes for the night, parading them through the half-empty shop for me. Her skin was sun-kissed from the Los Angeles beach and the poolside parties of her new friends.
WE SERVED OURSELVES PAPER MUGS of tea in the upstairs alcove of a nondescript deli where the shopping bags and cardboard drink holders advertised things we would never buy. As we worked on our set list, I showed her how we could signal each other for space in the act by creating loops with the new programs I had started working with. Whatever she had gone through in just a few short weeks without me, I liked it. She had a vision for what it would take and a commonsense approach to each of the steps. Plus, she could now see how I fit into that plan in a way that no one had before. After we ordered tea at the deli, Gaga went to take a phone call. We had just finished shopping in the most pristine underwear store I’d ever seen. She handed me her bags.
I heard her say, “We’ve met before. When I was about nineteen. . . . My mother still has your book of poetry!” When she finished she kept her eyes fixated on her device.
Eventually the screen went blank and she looked up at me. “That was the best phone call of my life.”
“Really?”
“Do you know who Bert Padell is? He was Madonna’s business manager in the nineties.”
“The batboy who saved Bad Boy?”
Gaga looked at me like I was speaking in tongues.
I said, “He was a batboy for the Yankees and then saved Diddy when he and Biggie got dropped from Uptown Records and helped form Bad Boy Entertainment.” My ears had perked up over another thing, though. He was fond of sending people out of his office with his self-published books of poetry.
“Well, that was him. On the phone. Just now.”
“What?”
“Someone played him my new stuff and he says he wants to be ‘on board.’”
“What does that even mean?”
“It might mean really big things. I haven’t even signed with him yet and he already wants me to get to Miami. He says he’s got big plans.”
“And you know he’s legit, right? Your dad wanted to get you working for him years ago.”
“Yes. And now he wants to take over.”
“Good. I think. Right? That’s good. He’ll take over for your dad?”
“That means I have to tell my dad he’s fired.” Gaga and I looked up at each other. Way too many people had gotten that lately.
GAGA’S PHONE RANG AGAIN. AND then again and again. Everyone on Gaga’s team in LA, it seemed, had gotten a call from Bert Padell, and ideas were coming in from all sides. A songwriter no one cared about last week was now an act that had people scrambling to meet with her.
We tried to leave the deli three times, each time a false start. The calls kept coming, and because of the cold outside, we didn’t head out until the last phone call finished. Gaga tugged at her helmet with one ear on the phone. After several stalled beginnings, the rest of her career would begin at the end of this phone call. “Okay, okay,” she finally said to Leah Landon at her management company in LA, the last of many calls. “Okay, I have to go. We have a show tonight.” Less than an hour earlier the most excited surprise in her life had been a Vespa ride. Strangely, that still excited her just as much as getting informed that all her dreams were scheduled to come true. I say this because then Gaga did a little impatient dance, shaking the passenger helmet in her free hand and blurting out, “Okay, I have to go and get on a motorcycle now.”
You can imagine the amount of squawking that I could hear coming out of the receiver.
“No it’s—we’re not even getting on the highway. My DJ is going to give me a ride home. We—of course I’ll wear a helmet. No. I’m not taking a cab. We have too much to do before the show. I’ll—I’ll be careful. Okay . . . okay.” She handed me the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
“What?” I took the receiver in my hand. “Hello?” I tried to smile like they teach you in customer service.
“Are you the DJ I’ve been hearing about?”
“Yes. Speaking.”
“I just want to be very clear. You are about to give the future of pop music a ride home and tonight you two have a very important show. And I
just want your word that you will be more careful than you have ever been.”
“You have my word.”
“I will call you guys when I hear about the next step, but be ready. And remember—”
“I’ll be careful. I promise.”
“Because if something happens, I’ll come down to the Lower East Side and track you down.”
“You have my word.”
*Click.*
“Are we going to your Stanton Street apartment?” I nervously mapped out the route in my head. From the club, I just had to drive her two blocks to Houston and then go across town. But we were inching closer to rush hour in midtown, so I’d have to probably take the FDR—which I promised Leah I wouldn’t.
Gaga’s eyes hid a little secret. “No, actually. We are going uptown. We need to go to the West Seventies. To my parents’ house.”
The screen door slams
Central Park is the Times Square of actual New Yorkers. Tourists on Forty-Second Street like to look up at all the advertisements and think, “We’re here! We’ve made it!” And it’s true. They have made it to Times Square, New York City. But Central Park is the only place in New York that never changes and always welcomes you back. It cools you off in the summer and the empty paths of white lamps guide you through the crisp trails in the winter. Hills (which were flattened in many other parts of the city long ago) pop up out of midtown like the forest in a children’s book. When you get just far enough into the park you can look out and see the tops of faraway buildings—as if you had left the city far behind. Or you’d slogged through the wild to get there. Maybe as a kid you had a backyard or a forest or a tree to hide in. That tree is waiting for you in Central Park.
Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives Page 18
