“You’re back!” Justin said to me with his usual candy-necklace smirk.
“I’m back for good, actually.”
“Then let’s get into trouble this summer.”
THE NEXT DAY WE WENT back to do it for real. This time the studio provided us with props inspired by the Lady Gaga video—plastic tiaras, toy necklaces, a cheap Indian headdress someone found. They kept us in a conference room on the twentieth floor, where everyone discussed dance technique.
I tried to listen as much as I could. Hearing someone else discuss the nuance of a profession always interested me. Everyone has their little tricks. One thing that universally bothers all small groups of people is when a movie comes out that’s supposed to tell the story of their profession. I wished Katie were here because this time many of the dancers made fun of the genre-atrocity Step Up 2: The Streets, which Katie had danced in. Like many “montage-in-the-life-of-” movies, it glossed over too many details. It left out the important moments. Things always seem too easy and Hollywood also adds a bit of story or a touch of CGI to take something real and cram it into two hours. Nothing is pure joy, but if you want to tell it right you have to get right to the heart of it.
Just then Leah walked into the room while we waited to get called. I hadn’t spoken with her since she called to tell me I’d been replaced as DJ in the video. She wanted to make sure everyone got paid in cash before the show. We lined up and she checked off our names.
“Didn’t think I’d see you here,” she said.
“Glad I could make it in. Very proud of our girl. This is going to be great.”
“Yes.”
Leah paid me for the day of rehearsal and the show. She also honored my cab receipts from Miami (she had ignored an earlier email from me about them), and she asked me if I had change. I gave her a ten and she gave me a hundred. Keep the change. And with that I never worked for her ever again.
BEFORE THE SHOW, GAGA LEFT her dressing room in TRL and took the elevator up to see us. She needed to prepare for the show, and this was how she prepared. Like a hostess who didn’t want to spend all day getting ready for a party if no one was going to show up. She entered the conference room and the other dancers fawned over her outfit. Instead of coming out in her underwear (like we planned to last year over pint glasses of red wine) she wore an enigma. The black lacquered catsuit had pronounced shoulder pads, a black hijab headdress, and leather gloves. She had on the good old Gaga chain belt.
The dancers all quieted down with her in the room. She got them to act natural by complimenting their outfits. “You look great. You guys all look great. This is going to be great.” Her infectious positivity spread through the room. The slouched dancers started to grow taller. They had seen her march into the room, and slowly they stood up. They were here for her. Gaga walked into a room and everyone gravitated toward her, ready to dance. They in fact inadvertently ended up reenacting the video for “Just Dance.”
When Gaga came to me she took off her sunglasses for the first time and turned her back on the room. She didn’t look like a pop star about to make her television debut. She looked like the curious girl I’d met while killing time at a bar over a year ago.
“How are you?”
“Good,” I said, which was true.
“I missed your birthday.”
“It’s okay. I had fun.”
“Still dating the same girl?”
“Yeah, uhm . . . I got a new job.”
“Oh? Where?”
“Just in a bar, uptown. A rooftop bar. It’s good. Steady.”
“Good.” She nodded and swallowed.
I caught the look in her eye. It’s the same look that exes give when they run into each other years down the line. It looks like the guilt of broken promises. But if you look deep inside it looks more like the comradely look of someone you’d gone through hell with before. I was supposed to be here with you, it says.
But that promise didn’t matter as much as the one she’d kept to me.
I looked her square in the eye and reminded her what I had made her promise so long ago, after we’d already cried as much as we ever could about people who didn’t get us. 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.
And making it to that moment was just as good as getting there in the first place.
TELEVISION TAPING ROOMS WERE NOTORIOUSLY frigid. Some say it’s to keep the lights from overheating, some say it’s to keep the audience attentive. This awards show had a small audience at makeshift cocktail tables. The dancers and I spread out on the stage and among the crowd. I went to put my foot up on a table and pass out on another and this knocked over a drink. “Fuckin’ freezing!” someone shrieked as he stood up, away from the spill. A PA came by to refill the martini glasses with Vitaminwater. “Can we have a break to warm up? It’s freezing in here.”
The PA turned his headset microphone aside and brushed them off. “This is the last act. We’re done in five.”
Lights. Camera. Action.
Michelle Williams—who was another third of Destiny’s Child alongside a young Beyoncé—strutted through the icy room. “Just when you thought the show was over, think again boys and girls. That’s right. The NewNowNext awards are not over, until the Gaga lady sings,” she said, reading the teleprompter. The shivering bodies in the room hung on her words. The dancers froze in place. The audience was just frozen. Even then, with the crew pushing overtime, she stopped. And then broke away. She looked around the crowd and paused again. The AD of this shoot craned his neck around the VTR screen, trying to see what the holdup was. A PA double-checked the teleprompter, but she went off script: “Get ready for an amazing performance of a song that I swear you won’t be able to get out of your head. Nominated for the online award Brink of Fame song and performing for the first time on television. It’s a pleasure for me to present her. I love this young lady. She’s gonna do big things. Give it up, y’all! Get on your mothereffin’ feet!” She turned to the teleprompter, lost when Gaga entered the room. “Give it up for Lady Gaga!” The frigid crowd warmed to the moment. The lights followed her to the stage. The applause died down. The music started. We counted to fourteen. And nothing was ever the same again.
Epilogue
My debts at the time were just silly little promises I’d made to myself. Tomorrow you’ll have enough money for these things. Tomorrow you won’t have to worry about them. Tomorrow you won’t have to wait until tomorrow. That summer I put poor Mercutio away for good and I picked up shifts instead. I wore a uniform again, slinging drinks for tourists. Every night the entire staff went out. And I went home. After three weeks I’d paid off my electric bill, then the gas. Then every credit card and every debt I ever owed.
It was on this rooftop one muggy night in the shadow of the Empire State Building that I first heard a DJ who wasn’t me play a Lady Gaga song. The crowd had squeezed onto the roof to watch the Fourth of July fireworks over the greatest city lights in the world. I ran from my station, through the narrow service area where dozens of bartenders coursed between their customers and the registers behind them. Everyone had seen the video in the office one day, laughing at Brendan the service bartender in his tight pants that he now wore as workpants. This time everyone on the clock stopped and grabbed for me, happy for their coworker. I ran downstairs through the kitchen and the chef looked up, smiling over the sound coming through the door. I came to the DJ booth and hugged the very confused man I found in there. It was on, it was real. And no one could ever take that away.
Afterwards I came down to St. J’s to celebrate. I saw Guy when he walked out. He strutted out the door in full summer regalia, a little bit too drunk in a pair of girls’ jeans, cowboy boots, feathered hair, and a leather vest.
When he saw me in front of him he threw a shoulder into me like a high school bully and ran to the nearest cab. It was then that I began to pity him.
I c
ame back to work the next day and the next day after that. And I didn’t stop even when I’d finally made good on all my debts. Gaga’s first record was what you called a “slow burn,” which I loved because I knew that was how you build up heat. She caught on over time, like the Killers had. First the single came out, then the video; the record followed almost six months later. Then the second single started to pick up. It didn’t even hit its peak in the first year, but it didn’t take long for her to have the number-one record in the country. She broke all-time records with her debut and followed it up again and again.
AN ASTOUNDING CAST OF PERSONALITIES turned up to Don Hill’s funeral service at Saint Patrick’s Basilica on Mulberry Street. No one saw it coming—not his staff, not his new business partners, not even the cab driver who brought him to the hospital where he died of heart failure.
Everyone was civil to each other as if we had shared the same recently deceased grandfather (and as if we each thought we were the favorite). Michael T. was in the church with generations and generations of scenesters. I saw him and Georgie make up. Rows upon rows. Grown up club kids. Go-go dancers, waitresses, bassists, DJs, drag queens, bartenders, sound techs, performers, artists. We don’t all get along and we don’t really need to. But if Don was so good to us, you’d think we could afford to be good to each other.
We went back to Don Hill’s after the funeral. We didn’t know it at the time but the club wouldn’t stay open another month and I’m glad Don didn’t have to see it close.
Gaga and I played our worst gig ever at Don Hill’s. We made no money, we drank too much, and Gaga couldn’t remember where she put what clothes when she went from the go-go stage back to dance in the booth with me. It was in that booth where we shared a mistake together and never told anyone. Where we rode out a terrible night for both of us. Where we had to believe in ourselves because we didn’t have anything else. And that’s the night that became “Just Dance.”
I still think of Don Hill’s every time I hear that song. I hear “Boys Boys Boys” in my head whenever I walk into Motor City. “Vanity” whenever I walk into Pianos. “Lovegame” sounds like Le Royale. “Money Honey” when I’m in LA. I think of bare apartments and red wine in pint glasses when I hear “Papparazzi.” Sneaking around while Guy was at work sounds like “Again Again.” And I hear Gaga bluffing with him when I hear “Poker Face.” Great songs have always reminded me of great times and great people in my life and I’ll always have this.
The kicker of living in New York is that everything you love about the city changes, and you have to learn to love even that. A lot of the places we used to go to have gone. Even my beloved Chelsea Hotel isn’t the same any more. But the thing about the city is that it’s constant and you don’t watch the places disappear, you watch as they become something else. It is the same with people in your life.
Georgie told me about his new three-story venue downtown and I wanted to show my support when they had their friends-and-family-only opening. It sounded wild. Room for live music, a restaurant, even a roof deck. It was the most ambitious space downtown and I couldn’t wait to see what it would look like. I’d already heard that they were pulling talent from St. Jerome’s, so I knew I would feel at home.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Georgie said when he saw me walk in.
“It’s been a while.” I figured he’d meant that I hadn’t been around. Which was true. I’d left our tiny scene for a new life on the road, DJ’ing in big clubs every night. No hassles with management. Just pure, raw music. And wherever I went I found myself inadvertently counting to eight like the dancers taught me. My foot tapped it out whether I wanted it to or not. I really loved music and soon I found myself working with young bands.
“No, I mean. You know who’s managing, right?”
That’s when I looked up and saw Guy. He and Georgie had opened this place together, which would have been good to know three minutes earlier when I’d opened a tab at the very crowded bar. Before I lost my nerve I went right up to him. Right in front of everyone. He wasn’t ready for this. Four years had past.
I said, “I wanted to tell you that you were in my dream the other night.”
“Of course I was.” He smirked and looked away.
But I didn’t flinch. “I don’t remember anything about it. But I do remember that you and me were cool with each other and it wasn’t a big deal. And it wasn’t that hard. And I was happy about that.”
“Really?”
“Well,” I said with a smile, “a guy can dream.”
A month into the opening, the community board found out he was operating the top two floors without a liquor license and shut them down. He left the bar business entirely.
I DON’T SEE MUCH OF that crowd anymore. Conrad married the girl whose shift I was covering the night I got jumped. DJ AM never worked with Gaga and he died of a drug overdose. Space Cowboy did a promo tour with Gaga and then with LMFAO, who broke up shortly after. Leah left the management company. I put Dino in rehab. Laurieann choreographed the next few Gaga videos and then they parted ways. Sheryl and Katie moved to LA. Nikki did a lingerie line for Urban Outfitters. Gaga executive-produced the next Semi Precious Weapons record with Interscope. The boys later moved to Epic Records. Nothing lasts forever, and that’s what I remember most about the scene. Every night was different and it had to be and always would. Once upon a time I loved nothing more than staying out all night, and now I loved coming home to Leigh.
Remembering these things now feels like hanging out with old friends again. It’s like we had a fun weekend out and all met up on Sunday for breakfast to piece together the chaos. Memories of those days come back to me now and they are always happy ones. I have to be reminded that it was stressful and hard. One day it all came back to me when I rode through Central Park and tunneled from east to west through a city of possibilities, looking for which one was mine.
You have moments like this, moments where everything afterward will change forever. But wherever you go for the rest of your life, you will go there with this moment tucked into your back pocket, reminding you that things happen. And being there while they happen matters more than whatever happens.
You have moments like this. And you have them to keep for as long as you live.
MY NAME IS BRENDAN AND this is what I did with the prime of my life.
Acknowledgments
When I talk about what makes a record great, I am invariably referring to its “third thing,” which is often a single chord. When I was younger, I did not do well in school or make friends because I didn’t know what my third thing was. And then one year I had a teacher. Only one. He’s retired now, running the night shift at a liquor store back home. All the extra hours after school, all the grammar lessons, and all the patient hours he put in will never be enough to put into words how much that meant to the shy little kid in the back of the class. Mr. Provost, your third thing is not listening when the other teachers say a student is hopeless.
Before he came along, the closest thing I had to a role model was the late Raymond “Raybeez” Barbieri. From Raybeez my interest in music became a passion for the scene, which was a gift we were to care for before passing it on to another generation. This book is my humble attempt to fulfill the promise I made to him when I was fourteen, just because he died. It is because of Raybeez that I can stand back and see any crowd with the same starry eyes as the man who first spotted the northern lights. You’d say, “It may be different but in our hearts it’s all the same.” I’d give everything in this story just to hear your accent say the word “hearts” one more time.
Everything else I know about writing as a vocation I learned from columnists Susan Campbell and Jim Shea, as the animatronic presses roared beneath our desks at the Hartford Courant. From them I learned that when you’re a reporter people get upset with you for getting things wrong, but when you’re a journalist they get upset with you for getting things right. Later I had patient guidance from the American poe
t Janet McAdams and the Australian poet John Kinsella, who both employed me in college when I was broke and still woefully undereducated. Also to the patience and generosity of Harold Bloom. Thanks also to the writers David Lynn, Lewis Hyde, and Alan Shapiro. The rest was supplied by the late Barry Unsworth, a first-rate novelist whose soul is with me, on loan from the rolling vineyards of the Italian countryside, where it can still be heard quoting Homer in hexameter and opening another bottle of wine. Every visual image in this book is just a mirage of that great master’s technique.
When I set out to find my story, I had the fortune of learning from DJ World in Chicago, who showed me how nightlife becomes culture. Shouts to A-Trak, ?uestlove, Mixmaster Mike, Omri S. Quire, Alex English, and Grandmaster Flash. Learning with you was like taking woodshop from Jesus. Also to the late Don Hill, who did not make it out of this story alive. Through Don I learned that we can either turn all of New York City into a playground for wealthy people or we can take people’s thirst for life and use it to feed the hungry furnace that burns inside of every musician.
God’s gift to writers is Meg Thompson at Einstein Thompson Agency. Those who toil in the void without her in their lives may consider themselves cursed. Meg’s third thing is her grace, which springs from within and which I have tried for two years to exhaust. Meg was with me for every move, only she had to do it backwards and in heels. I can bring flowers to your office and thank you at readings, but the most honest thing I can say here is that I am so proud of you, Meg Thompson. Every day in New York City I feel like I am an extra in the movie of your life. Proud of that, too.
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