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

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  This scene was just us kids in the twelfth hour of this shoot. The sun went down on the mysterious western coast just outside while we all hid in the blacked-out location house. Now the fun began.

  We had the living room to ourselves—no props or lip-syncing to do. Just dance. They cranked up the music and we had our fun, passing Gaga around like the hostess of a party. Everything we did the director loved. “Yes. Interact with her,” she said when one girl pulled Gaga’s shirt off. “Let’s have some fun here.”

  One scene—with Gaga behind a keyboard and us all dancing to the beat—channeled the sort of parties we’d thrown before. I stood behind her for that scene and had my own lost moment. There comes a time when you’re out and find whatever it is you’re searching for in nightlife—in crowds of strangers, in the dark. You find that you’ve gotten lost. And then you feel like for once you are right where you need to be. It’s a wonderful feeling.

  Gaga picked up the disco ball and we started passing the heavy thing around the room as a team. Just us extras. Games at the company picnic for our whole department. We needed matching T-shirts that had our company logo on the front, and on the back, where our names would go, they’d all just say “Background.”

  We abandoned any pretense of acting or being in character or even being ourselves. Gaga ended one scene with a backbend that planted her face square in my crotch. I had become so lost in the scene that it didn’t occur to me until later how pissed Guy would get when he saw that on film.

  Just then the lights went out and the music stopped. Gaga sat up. “Did I hit someone?” She looked up and saw the cameraman checking his lip for blood and inspecting his camera for damage. “Ohmygod, are you okay?” Gaga had thrown a disco ball off camera. Only it hit him in the face.

  Keith put a hand on the cameraman’s shoulder. “You need a stunt double.”

  BY SOME SMALL MIRACLE WE finished in time to see Semi Precious Weapons play in Hollywood. I took Keith, my new best friend, with me to see the show. This had nothing to do with him having a car. He was actually trying to sleep with Sandy.

  Justin put us all on the guest list and we strutted in the door to the sleepy club like we were the stars of a Lady Gaga video.

  Keith asked me to stick around for Wednesday so I could DJ with him at a cavernous Hollywood club called Boardner’s, and I said yes in the name of raising up plane fare.

  Semi Precious Weapons took the stage in their usual epic roundup. I needed to get back to New York because I didn’t have enough money to idle around LA. Justin took the stage and helped me out a little bit. “We’re Semi Precious Weapons from New York City.” If I were alone and broken in the world I was at least in a kindling pile of lone and broke people. “I can’t pay my rent,” he screamed, “but I’m fucking gorgeous!”

  Seeing my favorite New York band broke the spell of Los Angeles for me.

  I was homesick.

  There’s no other word for it.

  I missed Leigh.

  I want to tell you something you’ve known all along

  In the morning, I woke up on the floor in Sandy’s mother’s studio apartment in East LA. I took a walk to a strip-mall coffee shop on the other side of the highway with the cool, damp whitenoise of LA traffic. I didn’t see another person on foot and it made me feel like Manhattan was not an island but a ship drifting out to sea. I needed to go home.

  My phone rang—actually rang—and it surprised me at first. Even the most industrious New Yorker would have only just woken up.

  It was Gaga. “I just want to thank you for coming out to the shoot.”

  “It was so much fun! I made some new friends with the extras, and one of them is going to have me DJ at Boardner’s with him on Wednesday.”

  “That’s great,” Gaga’s dry, early-morning voice said. I could tell she had been crying. “It was really great to have you there. You were good at getting the right spirit for the party. I really needed you there. So thank you.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  Gaga sounded distant. I felt closer to her on our transcontinental all-night yak sessions. Now we had so much to talk about and nothing to say. “I’m sorry I’m going to be so busy this week,” she began. When we hatched this trip on our phone calls months earlier, she had wanted me to come to LA early and just spend time with her. When you move to a new city you find yourself eating at places you want to share with people and going to bookstores you know just the friend to take to. I’d forgotten all about the hypothetical rental car we’d imagined on our first trip out here together.

  “You know what I’ve always said. It’s your thing. You do your thing. No worries or judgments from me. Ever.”

  “I just thought you should know. . . . We broke up the morning of the shoot.” Her voice had that beautiful husk to it.

  “Ohmygod. Really? Oh, wow.”

  “That’s it. We live in two different worlds.”

  “Well good for you. Good for you for knowing it’s for real, right?”

  “Take care of him for me when you get back to New York.”

  “Okay. I’m not leaving for a while.”

  “But when you do, keep an eye on him. I really wanted it to work out.”

  “Now you can write about it.” I felt kind of corny saying that. “What was it you said before when you guys broke up in December? You didn’t want to write about it because it would be like sealing the envelope.”

  “Yeah . . .” Things felt very unsettled.

  “I think it’s more like what you told me in November,” I said. “Remember what you said to me that day? When I was all stressed out? You wrote it on the pages I brought to your house. Do you remember what you said?”

  “No. What did I say?”

  “I found it the other day when I was packing. You wrote: ‘No story should ever end in resolution.’”

  NEW YORK

  They’ll hurt me bad, but I won’t mind

  A week later I gathered up all the sunshine from Miami and California and brought it back to New York. It was spring, an early spring that sneaked up on everyone one delightful morning in early April.

  I went straight to see Leigh from the airport.

  She stood at the door to her apartment with her arms crossed over her chest. “Nice of you to visit.”

  “I’m back!” I smiled.

  “Not for long.” She told me that a friend of hers had asked if she could score her a pair of tickets to the Lady Gaga show the next night in San Francisco. “Then I look it up and there’s a whole West Coast tour. Were you going to even tell me that you—”

  “Hey.” I had more to say, but I didn’t know about the tour. “I’m not going back. I want to be here. With you.”

  “I know you. It’s always the same. Always running off to the next adventure.”

  “Hey.” I stepped in and looked into her eyes. Our arms hadn’t felt so free together in too long. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. This is the next adventure.”

  I GOT A NEW FULL-TIME job and paid off every one of my bills. I stayed away from my beloved downtown and worked twelve and fourteen hours slinging drinks in midtown at a new rooftop bar. On my first day there I made more than I ever made behind the bar at St. J’s. Total. When I knew I could afford to breath again I took Leigh out to dinner. We started talking about the future: where we would go, what we would do. Not what we would do that night, or quickly together before work, but in life. Together.

  SOMEWHERE AROUND MY TWENTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY in May, I got a call from Sheryl, the tough-talking backup dancer from tour. “How’s tricks?” I said.

  “Ehh,” she said in her husky voice. “They decided to go with a new look so we got canned.”

  “Who are the skinny bitches they hired?”

  “I don’t know. But the good news is they’re keeping me on to choreograph Gaga’s first TV performance. So it’s like one door closes, one door opens.”

  “That sounds like fun. Gaga has been planning her first TV appearance fo
r years.”

  “Do you wanna be in it?”

  “Uhm . . .” I couldn’t take any time off. She said the taping would be in the afternoon on my day off. Whatever. “Do I need to bring turntables or anything?”

  “I actually need you as a dancer.”

  “Oh,” said the guy who never thought of himself as a dancer. “I mean, I—”

  “I actually thought about it in rehearsals on Valentine’s Day. I wish I had thought to work more with you. You’re very expressive and you have good timing, which is all you need to be a dancer.”

  “Okay . . . I mean—”

  “I’ll train you. Come meet me early. There are no dancers your age with your look. You’ll be great.”

  “Uhm . . .” I hadn’t said yes to something so adventuresome in a long time. I used to say yes to everything. I used to like that about me. Fuck it. “All right. I’m in.”

  “TRL studios tomorrow.”

  THAT SAME DAY THE VIDEO came out. It looked great and very professional. Watching it was like meeting up with your friends after a lost weekend and exchanging stories over a late breakfast on Sunday. There was the American Apparel kid bonking his head on the coffee table and Gaga stepping over me to get to the dining room in the beginning (“There’s my leg!”). Leigh and I watched it together, squealing with laughter every time I danced on camera. The first time Gaga sings “Just dance” all you can see is me, pogoing around the anonymous living room like I’m having the greatest time in the world at a party where I wasn’t invited. The images flashed around the screen like you would page through the photos in your camera in the cab on the way home. I loved it. They kept in every golden moment. When Gaga tossed a disco ball and accidentally wailed the camera, you saw it. An extra peeled off her T-shirt, exposing her disco bra. At the end of one take, she reached down to fix her bra and the editors synced it up with the music. Gaga came across as the perfect debut star. No one is going to know who I am. But they are going to want to know who I am. Keith roamed around in the background in his drum-major jacket, talking to girls and saying hi to people. Sandy had a scene where she sneaked behind a chair and came up, jolted and sniffing her nostrils. The timid girl who lay on the floor with me, checking her lipstick, seemed to hide in the bathroom for half the party. I got not one but two flamingo-riding scenes and plus a shot of me, on camera, sitting on the arm of that location house’s precious, precious sofa. All the jokes and details came through. You can see the Best of Blondie records next to New Kids on the Block. When you see the girl on my lap you can tell that I am nervous about getting caught. For the most part, though, I just danced along to the Gaga song in the background with my good friend and maybe she’s the only one I knew at the party. And that’s not a bad way to be remembered.

  Georgie called me twice the day the video came out. “Loved it! Just had a meeting with Gaga. I want to book you guys. Do the whole thing. You DJ, performance by her. Go-go dancers. Let’s make it happen.”

  “Great!” When I hung up I decided to just let him find out on his own that it wasn’t going to happen.

  THIS WAS PART OF THE plan we’d dreamed out on the floor of her bare apartment months earlier over pint glasses of cheap red wine. I’m going to come out on stage at an awards show where no one has every heard of me. I’m going to blow away the entire crowd and all everyone is going to say is, “Who is that girl?” And I’m going to come out on stage and sing the song for the first time in front of everyone. And I’m going to be in my underwear just to let everybody know that I don’t give a ffffuck what anybody else thinks.

  I smiled. Everyone has hopes and goals. Most of us just dream. But Gaga had a way of holding onto her dreams until they became a reality. For her these goals never had an end. She planned a lifelong career in music for herself and she saw this as a way of gaining street cred, of building up a resume for that day when she would be a producer and bring in new talent and become the grandmother of pop she had always talked about.

  This day would begin the battle that would make that career possible. The people she was up against would fail slowly because they would see it as a contest. They would want to be adored or to have a hit song or sell a platinum record. Gaga wanted to do all those things on her way to somewhere else. This puts great and even pressure on every step. A lesser star might focus so hard on making a record go platinum that she either fails or can’t produce anything after that. Another star might micromanage an awards show performance. Gaga nailed that record in order for it to go platinum so that she could nail an awards show on her way to promoting the next single.

  Laurieann Gibson had told us that anyone could be a dancer if they could count to eight. Gaga just knew the right steps that made up the dance.

  TRL STUDIOS SAT IN THAT mythic New York where you would think all transactions took place if you only knew about New York from watching MTV. You went into a door right off Times Square at the MTV building on 1515 Broadway and went up the escalator to a series of semi-manned desks.

  My occupation was listed as “Backup Dancer.” They pulled us into a multi-use rehearsal space for our 2:45 call time. That’s when I met the crew. I was the only straight white guy in the room. The rest of them acted exactly like the rehearsal-space mean kids in one of those teen dance movies. Everyone wore sleeveless layers, fingerless gloves, sweat bands. I felt like I was going to get jumped by the crew in the subway station in the beginning of the video for “Bad.” Most of them taught at the same dance studio and I was the only unfamiliar face.

  They yelled at each other, counting off for people who miscounted. I could just imagine what they’d do to me when I went up.

  Sheryl marched right up to me when she saw me and brought me in for my dance tutorial.

  “So did you do any of the shows that I saw listed?” I asked. Lady Gaga had played a half dozen shows on the West Coast between the video shoot and this TV appearance.

  “No. Just this for now.”

  “Huh,” I said. And then I just had to ask. “Who’s, uhm . . . who’s the DJ?”

  “I think Space Cowboy has been doing that.” It amazes me how I can always be the last one to know about these things. It was so obvious that I should have just suggested it.

  A group of the male dancers had challenged each other to a break- dancing competition. Some of the other dancers got in an argument about how to count off in break dancing. “Five, six, seven, eight!”

  Sheryl pulled the group together. The shoot was very simple but we needed to be on point. Had everyone seen the video? Okay, good. Just like that we’re going to stay completely still. Everybody’s passed out on tables and on the stage. The music will start but don’t go until fourteen. It’s got to be crisp.

  I pulled Sheryl aside. “What’s fourteen? Fourteen of what?”

  “Y’know. Fourteen. Of eight.”

  “To be a backup dancer you only have to count to eight?” I did the math and realized that we had to start two-thirds through a particular verse.

  She nodded. I smiled. That’s all there is to DJ’ing too.

  We did a few run-throughs, everybody in their movement clothes and wifebeaters. They needed the whole ensemble to do the dance scenes from the video in one take. We looked funny, lying out on the floor and getting ready to turn into dancers, but this time the video wouldn’t get pieced together. All of us—including Gaga—had to do the whole thing in one shot. We rehearsed it several times with a boom box.

  You’re probably saying to yourself, “Now how did they get along without a masterful DJ pressing play?” I’d answer that, but right when we did the blocking for the camera Space Cowboy showed up with his gray PC laptop. My life had always been so awkward that I felt like it might be awkward not to speak to him. “Hey, champ.”

  “Oh, hey,” he responded. Hey. There’s that fellow I replaced.

  “Excited for the show?”

  “Yeah. Definitely.”

  “Good.”

  “How long are you in New York?” />
  “Looks like it will be a couple of days.”

  “You should have me show you around. We can get lunch and I’ll show you around the vintage clothing stores and record shops.”

  He looked up with a smile that clocked in at about one degree centigrade. “Wonderful.” He took a seat on a folding chair and opened his laptop. He mapped out the show in a music software program with all of the songs on one track. During the show he would stand behind a pair of unplugged CD players and act the part of the DJ, with the principal job getting handled backstage by a sound tech.

  Sheryl and the other dancers marched over then. One of them said, “So you’re the DJ?”

  “He is Space Cowboy,” Sheryl said. “You know? Remember that song? ‘My Egyptian Lover’?”

  Space Cowboy had some minor dance hits here and in London. “My Egyptian Lover” came out the year before and made a minor splash, but it would also go on his album the next year.

  “I don’t know that one,” the dancer said.

  “You know it. You’ve gotta know it.” Then Sheryl did the best thing you can do in a situation like that. She sang the incessant chorus. “My Egyptian lover (there is no other). My Egyptian lover (there is no other).” The other dancers, activated by boredom, counted off and sang along, dancing, their shoes squeaking out the beat. Just having a gay old time.

  Space Cowboy stood up while they all sang along, slammed his laptop shut, and quietly exited the room. They danced him to the door, giggling.

  SUDDENLY THE MANAGEMENT COMPANY PEOPLE came in to tell us we were about to hear from Lady Gaga herself. She strutted in at a regal pace, wearing what can only be described as couture business, never removing her sunglasses. She spoke with a Buckingham realness and sat down in a chair, and everyone waiting for her to speak. “I know you all are capable of many things, and you haven’t been waiting your whole lives just to be on TV for an eighteen count, but that’s what I need from everybody today. This is my first time on television and everyone has to be ready, perfect in position on fourteen, or it just won’t work. Everybody got it?”