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

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  “What about the bar?”

  “I’ll get someone to fill in. You—” Then I remembered the task I had a head of me. I had to deal with Guy. “You should come with me. Do you want to be in the video? It could be fun. As it stands now we’re going to Miami just to play a show. It’s basically a free trip. All I have to do is DJ like four songs again.” We both had flashbacks of the Valentine’s Day show. I tried to put another image in her head. “We can have hotel sex!”

  She smiled. But it faded quickly back into reality. “When I agreed to give you one more chance you said things would be different.”

  “I know, but—”

  “And even then everyone said you were hung up on your ex. That you were bad news.”

  “I’m great news. I have great news. This is good news.”

  “And then you just say yes without talking to me about it.”

  “Listen, Leigh. You—”

  “No you listen. I’m going to go to work now and you’re going to decide if you really want to be in this or not.”

  Don’t show your face in broad daylight

  Here’s how I found out it was really, really happening:

  On March 14 I got a text from Guy: “Stop texting and emailing my girlfriend. Stop calling her on the phone. And stop following her around the country.”

  I texted, “Can we just call it a truce? I’m going through some heavy shit with my girl.” I found myself borrowing his farm-boy cadence and lingo. When I said Guy had an infectious personality, I meant it in the biomedical sense. I didn’t talk like this, ever. But the only defense I had wouldn’t make him feel any better. But I already had a tall, beautiful woman in my life. It was impossible to keep one woman, let alone two, and I didn’t need to go screwing around with my friend’s girlfriend/bandmate.

  “That’s great. Leave my girl alone.”

  I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about until I got an email asking me to approve the flyer and the flights to Miami and Los Angeles.

  We’re born only to fade away

  That Saint Patrick’s Day, Conrad and I got the old band back together for a reunion show. We set up our party at Arrow Bar, which used to be next to Opaline, where the original Rated X party had been. Arrow had a reputation of being a hangout for the DMS crew. Before I ever heard of the downtown scene I knew about the Lower East Side from bands in the DMS crew. In the early days of pre-expert Internet we heard that DMS stood for Droppin’ Many Suckas, Doc Marten Skin[head]s, Demonstratin’ My Style, and later—when they started to incorporate more Latin kids—Demonstrando Me Stilo. I always had great respect for the DMS crew, the way you automatically revere the seniors when you are a freshman. If you hate anything about them, you hate that you are not them.

  I opened up with “Dead at Birth,” a hardcore song by my friend’s band, Death Threat, and for some reason this hopeless song always made me feel better. I grew up in the music scene, literally and in the greatest sense. Whatever core values I have about scene unity, being open about scene history, and giving respect to those who came ahead of you not only came from the scene, but probably from the liner notes to a song about respect, unity, or music history. The songs in my home music scene sounded detrimental or abusive. But if you can understand the lyrics, you can get a big boost. “I got nothing but I still got friends / I’m fuckin’ broke but I still make ends.” Those two lines could have summed up this entire project.

  The bartender looked over as I started the song. “You know these guys?” he asked. I told him who I knew in the crew. “I toured with them years ago,” he said. I smiled. In the hardcore scene, you develop a personal mythology about the bands you’ve seen. None of them get to last very long. The important part was that you saw the bands when you could. Every scenester from home had a wall in their room with flyers lined up. And the purist would only put up flyers to shows they had actually been to. I had all of the great ones in my little bedroom when I was a kid.

  But when I looked down I saw The Devil had invited himself to the party. The bar had a rolling DJ booth with two turntables and no CDJs or anything. My record spun around the turntable and The Devil had placed a tiny vial of coke on it. The bottle spun around and around.

  I looked up at the room and couldn’t believe no one noticed The Devil on Saint Patrick’s Day. “No thanks.” I handed him the vial back.

  THE NEXT DAY I TEXTED St. Michael. “I’m going to Miami for Winter Music Conference.”

  “Nice! I’ve never been.”

  “I need you to tell me something so that I don’t get into trouble down there.”

  “You don’t need it.”

  “I just need something to tell myself if I get into a situation.”

  “No. You don’t need it.”

  “I think I need something to tell myself or to do if I feel like I’m going to slip up.”

  “No you don’t. You don’t need it.”

  “What?”

  “Simple as that. You don’t need drugs and you don’t need a girl and you don’t even need me to tell you this. If you did you’d be in trouble. But you don’t need it.”

  “Really?”

  “Let’s put it this way. I haven’t had a drink in fifteen years. Did I ever need one?”

  “No.”

  “Did I ever want one?”

  “Probably.”

  “Now you see the difference?”

  Whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting down

  If you had to pick a single rehearsal space in New York City to get excited about, you would pick Smash Studios. You could rent a room for just a few hours to have your first band practice. You could have a music showcase, shoot a video, or record your entire album. Smash Studios had the promise. The possibilities. If you were a young band at Smash Studios, you were already having the best day of your life. Rehearsal spaces and recording studios lined the hallways like some kind of rock ’n’ roll high school. At the front gate they sold official drum sticks and T-shirts as if Smash Studios were your all-time-favorite band or theme park. In the back room they had a wall of video games and couches. Whatever happened while you were in Smash Studios, you would remember it as the best day ever. When I got there I found my way to a room that looked like a dance studio all the way in the back. The speakers in the room were blaring “Just Dance,” and inside I saw Gaga rehearsing with the same two dancers we had on Valentine’s Day.

  Choreographer Laurieann Gibson was there. I really liked her outlook. She was upbeat, supportive, enthusiastic, but specific. Her feet tapped out the beat and drove her hips into a swivel every time she heard a sound she liked. Laurieann heard music with every part of her body. When she saw me walk into the room—heated to avoid injuries this close to showtime—I took off my jacket and she appraised my body like a chef always on the lookout for new ingredients. “I’m gonna get you dancing in this video.” She was convinced I would become a dancer one day and told me I’d make it as long as I could count to eight. She walked me through a few of the steps. We looked in on Gaga doing a run-through in the next room.

  Something clicked in my brain—actually, in my body first. I didn’t quite know it at the time, but these new people in Gaga’s life had opened her up to new things, things that our narrow little music scene didn’t allow. That made them off-limits. Which made them hot.

  At the next break Gaga came out wearing short shorts, a sports bra, and a loose-fitting gray shirt. She had the smear of old eye makeup on, most of it sweated off during rehearsal. She greeted me with fresh energy. “Oh, I’m so disgusting,” she said, like a college athlete coming fresh from practice.

  But the Gaga I knew seemed erratic and lost, milling about the room like someone in the kitchen preparing a big dinner. In one room they rehearsed dance steps for the upcoming “Just Dance” video with Laurieann Gibson. They played a low-quality version of “Just Dance” on repeat from a burned CD.

  I watched as they ran through the video once. It seemed completely different
from anything we’d seen before. But in a good way. The dancers added gravitas to Gaga’s leading movements and they followed her with an obedience that anticipated every turn. When she would pop they would bow down and exalt her as a living god. Towards the middle Gaga perfected a perfectly choreographed trust- fall with the dancers, where she did a pop and then faded away from center stage by falling backwards into the dancers, who then caught her. I really loved knowing that the four of us would do this together and it made us feel like a band the way we would need each other in the show.

  “What did you think?”

  “Great!” I said.

  “Aaron will get you set up,” Gaga said, presenting me with a young bearded guy in a flannel, who set me up in another rehearsal space. Aaron fit the bill of a studio kid, the kind of shiftless, quiet sort that would maybe hang around on the couch while bands recorded even if he didn’t work there. He wore faded black jeans and never offered any unprovoked response. Harmless as a bodega cat.

  Aaron and I negotiated the proper machine. I would jack directly into a single amp that piped into the house system.

  Gaga had a spring wound too tight that day. She came out in smudged sunglasses. I saw her in leotards six nights a week, but today she wore the off-the-shoulder movement clothes of a backup dancer.

  That day she switched gears fast, rapidly catching her breath before pounding into her BlackBerry between rounds. She spoke to everyone with clipped frustration, as if they had made her late for something and she had to catch them up on it. Time, which had crept by all year, now sped up for Gaga and she went off to chase it. “Do you remember, Aaron?” she said. “Do you remember when I’d bring label execs in here and they would just have no reaction?” Gaga had a special fondness for the space and for him. She acted as if this were a battlefield where she had suffered an early defeat. She rented it today to restore her honor. “Do you remember what they’d say? ‘Uhm, I don’t really get it.’” She put on the affected voice of an uncool label exec: “‘Maybe we could come see you downtown sometime.’”

  Gaga was buzzing, her tongue quicker than usual. The tentative sing-songy tone of her voice had disappeared. I didn’t like it.

  THE DANCERS HELD THEIR FINAL pose at the end of the next breathless run-through. By then her mother Cynthia had joined me in the booth. Before they could take a sip of water, Gaga ran over to us.

  “So?”

  We had both forgotten that we were supposed to be the supportive and impressed people in her life. And Gaga noticed. I had a girlfriend to apologize to later. Gaga’s professionalism, however, made us both realize that we had no say in the matter and no opinion that really mattered. But she still needed us. “What did you think?”

  “Good, honey,” her mother said.

  “That’s it?” She spoke in quiet, exasperated tones, saving her voice for the road and livid she had to waste any of it on us. She turned to her mother. “Where’s my cheering section?” Then she turned to me. “And where’s my enthusiastic DJ?”

  “It’s great,” I said, weaker than I could muster. Although it really didn’t matter. Gaga did not look like herself. She had a robotic demeanor, and her mouth hung open in a new way that I hadn’t seen in the quiet, shy girl who came over and introduced herself to me only a year earlier. Her humorless eyes were pools that hovered just below thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit. When she did speak, it came out in a rapid-fire checklist of divergent thoughts that would all coalesce around our upcoming show. Very businesslike. A pair of Doc Martens would need to be purchased. The dancers and the DJ needed to go in the same cabs at the airport and one would be reimbursed. Bags were not going to pack themselves. We had time for one more run-through.

  She got up, and her dance moves were so refined, so exact, it was as if you could hear the hydraulic tendons of her muscles pumping away, executing a program. That’s when I first noticed her body. In the months that she had dated Guy, I never bothered to look. But Gaga now had the firm texture of a sculptured animal. Her California tan and bronzer provided just the right amount of shading to her newfound marble features.

  “Have you been working out?” I said, mostly to change the subject.

  She turned, pleased. “Damn right.” She held up one of her tiny arms and flexed a bicep. “Three hours a day.”

  “It shows.”

  The real Gaga floated to the surface and for a quick second we looked like two friends catching up at the gym. She looked at me as if for the first time and let out a breath. “You look great, by the way. You’re going to be great in Miami. The second club we’re playing is a big gay party and the gay boys are going to eat you up.”

  “Laurieann said you have a great body,” Sheryl, a dancer, chimed in.

  I nodded and looked over at Gaga and then realized that Sheryl was looking at me. Although I don’t work out or anything I had trimmed down that winter. Truth is: I couldn’t really afford to eat. The jazz club fed me on the weekends, and the rest of the week I ate canned tuna and peanut butter. Sheryl remarked, “Are you a dancer?”

  “No,” I said, my ribs visible through my last clean wifebeater. “I mean. Not like you guys. I like to dance.”

  “See? I told you.” Laurieann floated back into the room with the enthusiasm of a great teacher and that candy-counter smile.

  OVER ON THE OTHER SIDE of the room, the dancers talked technique and kept up with their stretches while Gaga made a phone call. Their movement clothes reminded me of something. They wore calf-length leggings, gym shoes, and the kind of loose, off-the-shoulder clothes torn from other clothes. They looked like dancers to anyone familiar with the background scenes in the straight-to-VHS smash hit The Making of “Thriller.”

  “Just Dance” started up with an unmistakably clear sound, firm vocals, and stark reverb. The girls took their positions as Gaga made her usual acknowledgements.

  And then everything fell apart at once. I cut the music

  “This is all wrong,” Gaga yelled at no one in particular.

  Laurieann made some last-minute adjustments to the routine and snapped her fingers in an eight count to show them where to switch. “I need to remind you now,” Gaga said, flashing a scowl at me. “You cannot let those tracks out of your sight. I can’t have this record leak.”

  “I already mislabeled the tracks.”

  “What?”

  “Even if someone steals my laptop in Miami they’ll never find it.” Once upon a time, DJs were so territorial about their set that they would tear the labels off their records, sometimes number them or give them nicknames.

  “You did?” Gaga squinted at my screen.

  “Yes,” I said, a bit short, grumpy from my perpetually empty stomach. “I’m a real DJ.”

  “Ha! I like that,” Laurieann snorted. “‘I’m a real DJ.’”

  We went through “Just Dance” one more time. The end devolved into a less-than-perfect finale. The dancers were tired, the room had heated up, and they were in danger of overpreparing.

  “Where’s my count-off? Where’s my team? And where’s my supportive DJ?”

  YOU ARE NOW ABOUT TO discover why I have gotten fired from every job I have ever had. Gaga whipped her hair around to make me get on point and I, instead, played Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Gaga stopped dead. Then she got impatient. This is studio time we’re wasting. Gaga worked for years to get this far and this wasn’t time to fuck around. But I wasn’t playing.

  The girls had their backs to me, and Laurieann—facing us—clapped along. As if on perfect cue, the dancers both pointed their toes and moved their arms to the right in the zombie pose. Laurieann got into it.

  My favorite part about being a DJ is how emotionally invested into their music people get. You can play the latest and hottest anytime, but if you really sit down and try to find ways to bring back old songs, you will end up bringing back old memories. I loved working in Beauty Bar and having some rapturous girl run over to the booth because I’d just played a song she used to love as
a kid and never heard again. Beneath that small smile on her face was a giant iceberg of memories, moments, and happiness. The song was just the part of it that surfaced.

  Laurieann Gibson was that girl. I walked out from behind the booth, clapping along. She lit up like a kid in front of a birthday cake. With effortless grace she counted off the steps, her head bob-bing. “ . . . five, six, seven, eight!” Switch. The dancers smiled and glanced briefly behind them to smile at me. Everybody shifted effortlessly into song as if we were in a musical. They drowned in their dance, dragging their zombie feet to the beat. Only instead of following Gaga, Laurieann led the group. “This was the first dance I ever choreographed!” She threw her hands around to the beat, telling us a bit of the story. “I wasn’t even in school yet and my older sister needed to do a dance routine for gym. I put the whole thing together and I knew then that I wanted to be a choreographer.” She looked back at me and smiled at the switch.

  “We had to learn the entire thing for a job once!” Sheryl shrieked and clapped along, telling everyone about this job they had once done where they had to do the Bollywood “Thriller” dance for some TV commercial. It was hard to hear. But that broke the rehearsal. It turned from the drudge of practice into joy. We didn’t have to rehearse, we got to dance. Gaga smiled as she looked back at me, shaking her head and clapping helplessly along, putting her new dance steps to the beat.

  After that we ran through the Miami live show. It went perfect.

  ON THE WAY OUT THE door Gaga pulled me aside and apologized for earlier. “I’m sorry. I just want this to go right.”

  “I’m going to be there with you at your best and I can put up with your worst.”

  “It’s just they’re grumbling about my weight. I’ve exhausted myself working out and”—she took her sunglasses off—“it’s the stress. I get chatty and cranky at the same time.”