At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  But as art flourished in France in the late nineteenth century above all, it depended on genius more than talent or skill—so that an amateur like Rousseau could hold his own in naïve poetry against any academician, and a master like Cézanne could depend more on the right placement of every touch than on the dexterity with which the touch was laid down. And so craft rose again in daily life; William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement blossomed around the same time to re-inspire lost technical skills (bookbinding and luthier work). When genius takes over our walls, craft takes over our tables. When virtuosic skill is onstage, we eat…whatever, with whatever kinds of plates and knives are at hand. (One of the last places where sheer skill, pure craft, counted for everything was in rock music, among electric guitarists—and, no surprise, rock musicians lived on fast food and M&M’s.) The multi-generational turn toward the artisanal—the raw milk cheese from a single cave, the bourbon from a single barrel—may have always been a reaction against the turn of our art away from craft.

  Was this perhaps the real argument? The argument, foundational to the time, which we could not see because, like all foundations, it was holding up our feet and all the furniture? SoHo in the eighties was the place where the final battle between the artistic and the artisanal began—between commodifying the acts of wild imagination and efforts at reviving lost craft tradition—the artisanal routed the artistic on the ground, the artistic routed the artisanal at the art auctions. (At a trivial level, it was reflected in the space between the handmade, signed artifacts across the street at Zona, an early Southwestern household-goods store where, for the first time, each craftsperson was named and credited.)

  Yet the art that “won” the decade economically was less the handmade, hard-wrought, soul-fought expressionist glimpse of the mysterious moment. It was the stuff that floated. It was the shopped-for, thought-through, ingeniously fabricated cold acts of the often cynical imagination. (Of course, being cynical was the point, as being ironic had been before.) It was Koons and Damien Hirst and Mike Kelley, and not David and Eric, who set the tone for what was to come. Yet the appetite for the awkwardly handmade could not be extinguished. Jeff Koons became the rich man’s bullion; microbrews became the daily currency. Starting in the SoHo eighties, we ended up with what we have today: art that no hand has touched that costs billions, and chocolate bars that boast of their handcrafted origins and cost ten. In between, life goes on, as it will. We lived within the doubleness. We live there still.

  One big question still lingered, unresolved: How did we get into this amazing village? Why had we been given the golden ticket of a small but beautiful loft, and with a stabilized rent, too?

  It took time to figure that out. We had been in the building for a year or two before Martha and I went with Petah, who had become a real friend, for dinner to a good Mexican place down the street. She ordered a burrito verde and the kind of Mexican beer you drink with lime, and began reminiscing about her first years as an artist in New York, back in the late seventies, and about all the people who had lived in our loft before us. She asked us if we had ever met someone called Jerome. We said no—who was Jerome? She looked genuinely surprised. Hadn’t we taken over the lease from Jerome? We said no, we hadn’t. Oh, she said. Then she leaned way back, took a sip of beer—a subaltern in a Kipling story, about to tell a tale—and at last we heard about Jerome.

  “This all began in the early 1980s, just after I started working with dead fish,” she said. “I used to go into Chinatown, and I would see all these beautiful dead fish—carp, I guess they were, gold and aquamarine, and they seemed sacred or holy, somehow. I was so drawn to them that I would spend all my money buying them, and then I would bring them home. I painted my walls black, so that the fish would show up better, and I hung the fish on the walls, like reliefs. Mrs. Franz used to invite me for tea sometimes—she was so sweet to me—and I could see that she was a little puzzled by something: the smell coming from my place, I guess, though from the outside you weren’t getting half the smell.

  “The bad part started when Lamar, my husband, seemed to be going blind. He woke up one morning with a horrible eye infection, and I persuaded somebody at the NYU clinic to look at him. The doctor asked us if there was anything unusual in our home environment, and I said yes, about two hundred dead fish. The doctor thought I was being fey, and he gave me one of those NYU-clinic smiles—you know, silvery—and then I had to insist that I was serious, there were two hundred dead fish in our home environment.

  “The chance that Lamar might lose his sight made me think a little about getting rid of all the fish. But the doctor wasn’t sure that my fish were responsible, so I didn’t do anything right away. It was just around then that Jerome began practicing with his punk-rock band every night downstairs. Jerome lived in the loft where you live now. He had been there for about five years, I guess, and he was the son of ——.” Here she named a man who, back in the early sixties, had been a very successful comedian. “I suppose he had some money from his father. Anyway, he was always searching for himself, going from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, and was living in a pretty squalid, interesting way down in your loft. The thing about Jerome was that he wasn’t just one of those people who pass from enthusiasm to enthusiasm. Jerome passed from enthusiasm to enthusiasm and was still enthusiastic about the previous enthusiasm. If you went down to visit him, you would find him smoking opium while doing tai chi, and at the same time he’d be singing Gershwin songs. By the early eighties, his enthusiasm was punk rock. Well, it was really punk-rock revival, but if you lived upstairs from it, it just sounded like punk rock. He would bring a pickup band home every night from one of the clubs, and they would play until four or five in the morning. I used to pound on the floor, to beg them to quiet down. They never did. I guess they thought we were joining in.

  “I don’t think I would really have gone downstairs to make a fuss, though, if Lamar hadn’t hurt his back. This was while he was recovering from the eye infection. One day, he was just walking across the floor and he collapsed. We know now that it was a ruptured disk, but then all we could afford to do was call up the clinic again. They told me not to move him. I think now that they meant don’t move him a lot, but I thought then that they meant don’t move him at all. I left him there, right where he had fallen, like a warrior. So Lamar was lying there on the floor, and the big thump, thump, of the bass guitar coming from downstairs bothered him. I went downstairs to talk to Jerome about it, but as soon as he let me in I sort of got distracted, because all over your loft there were these cages full of rats.”

  Seeing our reaction, she said, “Oh, they weren’t from the loft. He had brought them all there. He got them from some laboratory supply or something. Not black rats or anything. White rats. They still made me uneasy, but Jerome was very cheerful about it all, and he told me he had become convinced that it was his vocation to become the…I don’t know, sort of the rat savior of New York. He explained to me that he wanted to perform a magic ritual of some kind that would summon all the rats of New York into your loft—bring them cascading in from the sewers and the warehouses and the refuse piles. He showed me a book he had been reading—something about Javanese ritual—that had a rat invocation in it. He had made some kind of altar, and he showed me where he had pounded holes through the baseboards under the front window, so that the rats could all rush in and be welcomed.

  “I went back to my loft, and it suddenly occurred to me that Jerome was crazy. It came over me like a hard, simple fact: This is not some sort of interesting Beuysian performance. Jerome is crazy. So I went down and told our landlady, Mrs. Franz, and she let herself into his place while Jerome was out at the club. She saw the whole scene—the rats in cages, the holes in the baseboards, the altar—and somehow she got an emergency eviction order, or whatever they call it, and stuck it on his door.

  “About four-thirty that morning, I heard a sound that wasn’t so much a scamper as a kind of low whoosh with gravel in it, like water breaking on
pebbles. At first I thought it was the radiators, but then I remembered that it was the middle of July. It was a terribly hot night, and I didn’t have anything on, but I went to the back door and opened it, and there, pouring up the stairs in this white wave, were all Jerome’s rats, coming to eat my fish. Apparently, Jerome got home at about four—back from CBGB, or wherever—and he saw the eviction notice, and I guess he thought, Well, okay, they want me out, they want my stuff out.

  “The first thing I did was to slam the door, and then I ran to the closet and put on a pair of stiletto heels that I hadn’t worn since high school back home. My husband couldn’t get up, of course, and a lot of the fish were on the floor. I realized that the rats must be attracted to the smell. I didn’t know what to do. I started throwing dead fish out the window. One at a time at first, and then more and more. I’ve often wondered what everyone down below must have thought, being rained on by all those beautiful fish.

  “Well, of course, all the commotion woke up Mrs. Franz, and she came out in her nightgown and saw those white rats flooding out of your loft and racing up the stairs. Naturally, she thought of me, and she ran up the front stairs and let herself into my apartment. She was sort of thrown back by the smell, as if she’d been punched, but she recovered and came on in, and saw me standing nude in red stiletto heels, over Richard’s body, throwing carp out of the window onto the street.

  “It took almost a week before things were back to normal—before all the rats were trapped and everything. I decided that I really had to find some other material to work with than dead fish, so I took the fish that were left and went uptown on the subway and put them in the trees in Central Park. They looked very beautiful there, too. The next week, I started working with hay. And a week later, when I bumped into Mrs. Franz, she said she was going to rent the loft to the most normal, meekest married couple she could find. And a week later you two moved into Jerome’s loft.”

  Now we knew that, too.

  A few months ago, I went back to see the Judd house—the one on Mercer and Spring that I always passed by on Saturday mornings on my way into SoHo. Now it is the “Judd House,” kept up by a foundation as a sort of domestic museum of the period, with a small portion of Donald Judd’s scintillating collection of objects—his own and the other Minimalists’—kept within a solemnly enshrined and maintained home, left just as it was in 1984, with parental beds and kids’ puppet theaters and kitchen counters.

  Stunningly beautiful—even the windows have been restored to give them nineteenth century irregularity and waterfall shimmer—it was a reminder of the absurd good fortune artists had, falling into these inherently beautiful spaces: there are still the high ceilings and the broad windows and the unbroken views of SoHo, looking out onto decorative cornices, so unlike the normal hedged-in quality of Manhattan streets. What was stunning to us, though, was that everything within it, though warily watched by the twentysomething guide to be sure that nothing was touched or even microscopically dislodged from its place, were simply the things that had been unthinkingly part of a normal SoHo household in 1984. By the sink there were Dean & DeLuca copper pots, of the same kind that we had owned, and there were Wüsthof knives from Broadway Panhandler, and almost round off-white plates from Ad Hoc Housewares, and empty but still piously conserved bottles of wine from SoHo Wine, where you stepped past a large, sleepy dog.

  All of them were now locked and held, solemnly and in proper place, as though domestic artifacts from dynastic Egypt. There was a mattress on the floor, on a floating platform—albeit one only three inches or so from the floor. I couldn’t help think of how every loft building of the period was infested with mice and rats, and how they must have dealt with it. (Martha noticed a box with knives right by the edge; but it was Lucas Samaras art object. Maybe it played a double role.)

  The line between the improvised and the institutional is so rapidly breached in New York! All the things that were just part of the commonplace civilization of 1980 were now part of a tightly conserved archival past. What was just the way life was thirty years ago had become….The Way Life Was, to be archived forever, with that young guide tumidly instructed in the dogma of the house, watching warily lest a visitor pick up one of the Wüsthof knives, touch a paperbound copy of The Shape of Time microscopically dislodge a pot.

  I noticed at last, on a low shelf, in a nook, a Russian rabbit-fur hat, of exactly the kind that they sold around the corner on Prince near Elizabeth at a little import bazaar, and which everyone wore in the winter of 1985—even John Gotti’s thugs wore them, I suddenly remembered, when they shot Paul Castellano outside of Sparks Steak House that winter, wearing the hats above white trench coats to confuse witnesses. (Gotti’s clubhouse, the Ravenite, had been only a couple of blocks farther east. They must have bought them at the same little store.) We produce a constellation of objects made from haphazard decisions—we buy this knife, this hat, this pot—and before we know it, we turn back and see ourselves as part of a fixed era in time.

  The Biblical story has it wrong: it wasn’t Lot’s wife who, turning back to look longingly at her home, turned into a column of salt; it was the city that turned to salt when she turned back to look at it. Look back at SoHo or Sodom and what you see is a frozen fossil of what was. We had hoped the past would stay labile in memory at least, that you would still be able to go back and see it bouncing. But it doesn’t. Facing front, looking back—it’s all hard, whichever way you look.

  9

  Writing

  Though I spent my nights in SoHo writing about art, I spent my days in midtown thinking about words. After two years at GQ, I had been hired, in a fit of generosity on the part of its editor-in-chief, to work at a publishing house, a good one—the very same one, in fact, that has its name on the spine of this book. (I was happy at GQ and anyway still working on my Ph.D., so I might never have left, even for so tempting an offer, had my good father not come to town and told me that I was crazy not to take it. The insecurity I was underestimating, he pointed out, in this case was my own. I was ready for a bigger stage than cuffs and moisturizers.)

  Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, I was as ill-suited to the fine-detail work of book publishing as I was good at the fine-detail work of fashion journalism. But, then, fashion copy is instant and ironic; it needs only the brisk cooperation of a handful of conspirators to appear. Books are serious, sincere. Someone’s life is at stake each time a book is published. And books are big. They take time and the intersection of many schedules, whereas I can barely keep track of my own.

  I was good at all the smaller writerly tasks—writing flap copy and catalogue copy for the sales force—that publishing demanded. Here I found that the trick was to reach not for the note of alliterative insider’s swagger that had helped “sell” at the fashion magazine. Instead, one learned to cultivate a note of high sentience, of plangent urgency, that would suggest to merchants and salesmen, not to mention readers, that this book, despite the tedium of its subject and its author’s long history of disappointing reviews and unearned advances, was not just a good book, but an essential book, one of the books that would be talked of and argued over when it, at last, appeared. You achieved this effect with a small roster of imperative-sounding adjectives: “urgent,” “taut,” “intense,” “unforgettable,” “delightful,” “galvanizing,” “important.” (Good writing is done with verbs and nouns; “copy”—advertising, of whatever kind—with adjectives alone.)

  I was lucky to spend time in publishing, too, because there was a small boom in books in the eighties. Not perhaps for the first time, but certainly for the first time with so much, well, oomph, young writers with a first novel or a book of short stories enjoyed a shower of celebrity, even glamour. It was almost the last moment when writers not specially blessed by fortune or Pulitzer Prizes could still somewhat realistically hope for upward mobility. Since then, writing has retreated into the colleges and universities, and become a kind of perpetual self-help program, rooted in weekly “works
hops” and summer seminars. (When I have “taught” them, my primitive bleats about form and structure and sentence shapes were drowned out by the intelligent and unconditional support each student gave to all the others—the point of taking a writing class, I had to learn, is to be in the writing class, to be lifted up by—or to—the common identity.)

  Writing for a little money and some fame was not a new thing, of course. One of the editors I got to know best in that building was the legendary Joe Fox of Random House, who would take me out to dinner (he had his eye on a book about American art, my very own Anatomy of Art, eventually signed up, though still undelivered as of this writing). Over martinis (!) and a bottle of red wine and a porterhouse (!) he would—and here’s a chance to use that odd verb properly—regale me with stories of writers from the fifties, some of them “his.” Ellison and Capote and Salinger and Baldwin…The heft of what they did was obvious to the world, and, as he believed, not so much against the evidence as alongside it, proof that that world continued on. An “important” book on a significant subject was destined not just to sell but to end up on the cover of Time magazine, to become the subject of heated dinner table conversation, to matter, to count.