Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “I’ll pay you back anyway.”

  “Take your time,” he said, fast. Mark spoke fast, giving the impression that nothing was new to him, putting you at a rhetorical disadvantage, giving his remarks the illusion of having been born of experience. “The longer it takes, the longer you stick around.”

  ——

  On November 4th, 1980, the night of the Reagan-Carter presidential election, I got a job. I was out because Ellen had turned off the television.

  “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to my life who wins,” she’d said. Her face was obscured by a layer of chamomile face cream, which made her mouth stand out, like the Joker’s mouth from Batman, or like Pagliacci’s. I was sitting on my bed in half darkness, fully dressed, and feeling weirdly ungoverned, kind of solo. “You can watch the results with the sound off if you want,” she offered.

  I started out looking for a coffee shop or some place with a radio. I ended up downtown, on the vast and virtually deserted Varick Street below Houston, in the printing district, where the only bodies I encountered were three men in the blackened doorway of a nightclub. I knew it was a club by the way the music thrashed against the doors from the inside, pleading like a prisoner.

  One guy looked south into lower Manhattan toward the Twin Towers. “Where you headed, doll?” He had white hair and a crew cut, which had the effect of making his head appear shiny and thick, like a nickel. “Hate to tell you, but there ain’t nothin’ down there.”

  A second guy said, “Better watch out you don’t get chucked in the backa some van.”

  The guy with the nickel-head asked where I lived.

  I said, “The Village.”

  “Aureole’s on MacDougal, right, Phil?” he confirmed. “She can cab up with Aureole.”

  Phil was boss—he had a clipboard. Anytime you saw a bouncer with a clipboard, he was boss. He jerked his head. “C’mon inside.”

  I stepped forward to the door and looked up to Phil. “Are they looking for help?”

  “Ask for Arthur,” Phil advised. With one bloated, I.D.-braceleted wrist, he waved me past the cashier and the second set of bouncers.

  Inside was purple, like a black-light basement or creepy fish tank. The main room was huge and hardly filled. The place must have been a cafeteria during the day, because breakfast special menus hung near the ceilings, and the deejay was set up on a grill. The decorations were vintage neon diner signs. Ten or twenty customers stood at the perimeter of the cement dance floor, shuffling experimentally to Patti Smith’s “Because the Night.” Another fifteen or so hung off the ledge of a mammoth bar like there was nothing happening in the nation of greater consequence than vodka and cocaine.

  “Where’s Arthur?” I asked a girl at the service bar.

  She gestured over a tattooed collarbone. “Try the kitchen.” The tattoo looked like a banana and a dot. “Algerian flag,” she said, noticing my interest. “It didn’t come out right.”

  “Are you Aureole?”

  “Frankie,” she replied. “Aureole’s around somewhere.”

  The enormous kitchen was spotless, as if it hadn’t been used for cooking in years, and vacant except for a guy leaning against one of several counters reading a folded newspaper. I could make out the granular sound of election results on his AM radio. The count was in: Reagan had won. I couldn’t help but think of Jack, where he was, what he was thinking. And my mother, and Powell, even Kate. I longed for the intellectual security of home. It felt wrong but somehow symbolic to find myself among strangers on such a night.

  “Arthur?”

  “Mike,” he said, swinging up, extending a hand. “Arthur’s the manager. I’m a bar-back.”

  “I’m here for a job,” I said.

  “Sure. I’ll get him.” Mike handed me his paper as he passed. It was the New York Times’ crossword puzzle. “Do me a favor. Help me out here. I’m too freaked out to finish.”

  I answered as many as I could in the time it took for him to return from the rear of the kitchen with a case of Heineken on one shoulder. In his back pocket was an application. “Fill it out while you’re waiting. Use my pen.”

  I marked Thursday through Saturday as my available days and gave the application to the elusive Arthur, a towering, sour-looking man in black leather and tinted glasses who appeared from nowhere and gave the impression of being dead or guilty.

  Arthur scanned it impassively. “References?”

  “None I feel like listing.” Our eyes met over the sheet. I couldn’t imagine him calling the Lobster Roll, which anyway was closed for the season. Besides, there is a trick to getting a job, which is not really needing it and only half-wanting it.

  “Fine,” he said. “Start Thursday. Stick around and have a drink if you want. It’s been a rough night.” Without another word he left as he’d arrived, vanishing into concrete and neon.

  I finished the crossword with Mike and had a Beck’s while we listened to Reagan’s acceptance speech. Reagan said he was “not frightened of what lies ahead.”

  Mike chucked my empty bottle into a trash can, where it smacked the rim and broke. “Great. In a country of two hundred million, that makes one of us. He’ll reinstitute the draft. He’ll ban abortion. He’ll clear-cut forests. He’ll set us back thirty years. I mean, he’s nostalgic for the 1940s. We were at war in the 1940s! We were dropping atom bombs in the 1940s! I’m getting the hell out,” he confided, and he pulled out an accordion strip of wallet photos. “I’m taking my wife and kids to Australia.”

  The club filled considerably after the results were in. I couldn’t imagine where all the people were coming from. Mike dropped me at the deejay booth while he restocked the bar.

  A sign on the glass grill barrier said, D.J. JEROME. “Jim Jerome,” he clarified, extending a hand. He sounded Midwestern and sincere, like Mr. Rogers. “The sign is supposed to say ‘D.J. Jim Jerome,’ but they printed it wrong. Now everybody calls me Jerry.”

  I introduced myself, and he said my name twice. “Eveline, Eveline,” he mused thoughtfully, as if imagining a place, trying to recall if he’d ever been there.

  Mike returned with Aureole. He’d found her locked in the basement bathroom drinking Dewar’s. “I’m sick,” she said, regarding the election. “I don’t know what to do except drink.” Aureole blew her nose hard. Her hair was a swervy bob the color of Darjeeling tea, situated wiggishly over a pair of violet doe eyes ringed red from tears. On her left cheek was a mole. She looked like a young Liz Taylor, only not such an absolute knockout. “Sure, I’ll share a cab with you. I’d leave now, but I don’t feel like being alone.”

  Jim pulled a new album and tucked one headphone cup between his ear and shoulder. He engrossed himself in the mix, fingering the album back and forth. Underneath the song that was already playing came the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden.” The absence of interruption in music as he went from one song to the next was nice; it was symbolic of cohesion in rough and fast times. It was as if no one could bear a second of silence.

  As soon as the song became recognizable to the crowd, people peeled away from the bar. Their faces were familiar to me; they belonged to people my mother might have befriended, rebels and outcasts. Only I noticed a new lameness about them, an increased lack of relevance. They looked off message. It was as if within a matter of minutes, the avant-garde had become the periphery. The bodies crept to the edge of the dance floor, sitting on tables or standing next to them, swaying, nodding, soothed for the moment by the injection of the Stones’ familiar antiestablishment voices, though, as Jack would have said, The moment was bound to be brief.

  “How’d it go?” Phil inquired when I left. He was alone outside, just standing there, staring thoughtfully toward the street.

  “Okay, I guess. I start Thursday.”

  He nodded. “Work out all right with Aureole?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She’s getting her stuff.”

  Phil had bad skin and bulky wrists. I suspected that he was self-con
scious about that, that he was sort of a lost gentleman, so when he offered a cigarette, I took it. I didn’t smoke, but Phil didn’t deserve a no, and sometimes that’s all a yes needs to be. We stood there for a while—actually, I leaned. Cigarettes make me dizzy.

  “So, Reagan won,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Phil evacuated the smoke from his lungs and flicked his butt to the curb. “The actor.”

  Heartbreak was not a great club, it was an okay club, a dive actually, but an enduring sort of dive popular among idiosyncratic losers and peripheral celebrities, iffy brokers and borderline musicians, those haggard, nicotine-types in creased leather and reedy denim who sleep all day but somehow manage to earn livings. I worked three nights, eleven to four, earning shift plus tips. I did more dancing than drink-serving, but no one seemed to care.

  The atmosphere was remarkably wholesome. Dad and Marilyn stopped by sometimes to see me. Like everyone working there—gentlemanly bouncers, family-minded bar-backs, timid deejays, law school waitresses—I was in it for the money. And like everyone else, I had a complicated past that made me insusceptible to entanglements and indifferent to wild times. If only the loneliness there could have alleviated the loneliness in me, if only a nightclub were not such an institute of longing, maybe I would have gotten better.

  At two-thirty in the morning one Friday in December, Mark came in. I hadn’t seen him since the procedure in October. Every week I mailed him a money order for twenty-five dollars, which he always acknowledged with a phone call, and when he called, we would speak at length. I didn’t have to force myself—I liked talking to him. It was like a window open, small as a needle’s eye. But I never called him, no matter how reckless I felt.

  “I can’t stay,” he reported. “I have a car waiting.”

  I was holding a freshly loaded tray. “Okay. Let me get rid of this.”

  I crossed the suddenly packed dance floor to deliver drinks to the guy who’d ordered them. He wiggled his blubbery ass and sang along as he fished leisurely through his pocket for a wallet.

  He kept trying to dance with me, and I almost spilled the drinks before he finally handed me a twenty. It wasn’t good to think of where his hands had been, such as shaking himself over a urinal. When people say, Don’t put that money in your mouth, they basically mean someone like him had been holding it. Denny was always telling me to be careful because guys masturbate in bathroom stalls. And worse. The guy waited until I got the change together, then just told me to keep it. Six bucks, which was a lot, but somehow still inadequate compensation for having to deal with him. Good tippers are frequently the most despicable citizens—they pay you for tolerating them.

  It’d been a nice night before Mark had arrived. Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame him, but nightclubs are places of explicit laws. It takes just one body to transform a benign gathering into an intolerable mob.

  “Who’s the suit?” Mike shouted, meaning Mark. I was waiting for an opening to cross the floor.

  “Just a guy I know,” I shouted back.

  Aureole joined us. “He’s cute. Like, totally undone. It looks like he ran here.”

  It was true. Mark’s tie was loose and his jacket unbuttoned and his hair made Caesar bangs on his brow. He’d obviously been drinking.

  Mike leaned forward. “What the fuck’s he doing?”

  “Is he busing tables?” Aureole asked, leaning as well, squinting. “Oh, my God, he is.”

  Mark was emptying ashtrays into a gray plastic bucket, wiping them with cocktail napkins. All the tables around him had been cleared.

  When I got over to him, I said, “What are you doing?”

  He said, “I hate to have you touch filth.”

  “We have a busboy,” I informed him.

  “Obviously not a competent one. There’s shit everywhere.”

  “Anyway,” I yelled. “What’s up?”

  “I want to borrow you. For New Year’s Eve.”

  “I’m working New Year’s Eve.”

  “Take off,” he declared emphatically. “How much will you make?”

  I didn’t know. I’d never worked on New Year’s before.

  “Take a guess—a hundred, a hundred fifty?”

  I shrugged. I’d never made more than fifty a night. “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “I’ll double it,” he proposed. “I’ll give you three hundred.”

  “That’s prostitution.”

  “It’s not if we don’t have sex.” He kissed me and ran out.

  36

  The dorm on New Year’s Eve had a cinematic emptiness that called to my mind the evacuated ministries in European wartime movies or the hospital where they put Don Corleone in The Godfather. Most everyone had gone home for the holiday break; only a handful of students remained—me, some resident advisers, a few internationals.

  Anselm from Berlin was on my bed. He and Mark had met at Harvard, though he was at Columbia now, earning his doctorate in American history. His burgundy shirt was unbuttoned beneath an orangutan-orange leather coat, and his chest was bare. He was not so much a man as a symbol of one, like a dictionary illustration or a figure on a lavatory door. He was a gorgeous unfortunate, one of those people in whom vanity overwhelms sexuality to become a preoccupying sort of project. He was a little tragic overall, a little east-west, a little male-female, childishly divided, like the city he’d come from.

  We made a champagne toast. “To 1981,” Mark said.

  “1981,” Anselm repeated with a nod.

  I told him that I liked his jacket. “You look good.”

  “Looking good is what he does best,” Mark said, taking out his credit card to cut a pile of coke.

  I pulled on a pair of gray jeans and a peach T-shirt with a lazy ruffled neckline. I dressed in front of them because modesty seemed solemn and unnecessary, because sometimes a night has a natural drive, and you are transported past the conceit of your despair. Sometimes you can’t help it—your constitution is strong despite yourself.

  The three of us stayed in my room for a few hours, with them talking and me dancing, half-listening, always agreeing. It didn’t matter what they were saying, or what anyone said anymore—everyone kept conversation light. Days were different without people like Jack in them. No one was smart enough to take exception, no one dared to object or go too deep; if you tried, you would encounter walls in the faces of your friends. And anyway, life moved faster than expostulation would allow.

  Earlier that day, I’d picked up some classic Motown albums at Bleecker Street Records. We were listening to “Love Child” by the Supremes.

  “Psychedelic soul,” Anselm remarked above the music, examining the album cover—it was a picture of Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Cindy Birdsong waltzing in flowing pink caftans.

  “Not exactly Parliament,” Mark said, “but an attempt at a social statement nonetheless.”

  “C’mon,” Anselm said. “‘Love Child’ knocked ‘Hey Jude’ off the number one spot on the charts. Parliament couldn’t have done that. The masses move in baby steps.”

  “Okay, since you’re the expert on American culture, what’s your prediction for the eighties?” Mark asked.

  “Disempowerment of youth, dismantling of liberalism,” Anselm said without hesitation. “In order to restore the right, which has suffered repeated blows since the fifties, Reagan has to destroy the legitimacy of the left. Alternative thinking and living will become synonymous with failure. It is a big ideology.”

  “I guess it worked for Hitler,” Mark said.

  Anselm said, “Precisely.”

  “Luckily, Reagan’s no mastermind.”

  “Unluckily, it’s all too simple. Look at any totalitarian regime. They succeed by feeding greed, inspiring terror, rewarding complicity. By eradicating shades of gray, by promoting contrasts—black-white, good-evil, in-out, us-them. For those who play, there is wealth, security, respect. For those who do not, there is the pathetic echo of their own enlightened but impoverished voices. It’s all theat
er, which is why there’s no better messenger for the moment than an actor.”

  “No uprisings?”

  Anselm shrugged. “Drugs will silence us.”

  “In the sixties,” Mark said, “drugs provided impetus for change.”

  Anselm toyed casually with the radio. With his right wrist he spun the receiver dial while his body leaned left. I was not sure if he knew what he was saying, but it sounded good when he said it. In all the gum and whoosh of his German accent, everything he said sounded jurisdictional.

  “I would not say change. I’d say review. Nothing changed, per se, otherwise, how could we find ourselves here, at the mercy of a conservative regime? The difference is that drugs were once in the service of creating common ground. Now they are in the service of narcissism. In the sixties people were emboldened by the draft—not drugs. Reagan would have to reinstate the draft,” Anselm said, adding, “which is why it’s nonsense to think that he will. He won’t risk activating people. He wants us to sleep.”

  Mark noticed I had stopped dancing. He spoke my name abruptly, as though I were a child eavesdropping on an adult conversation. “Eveline. Put on some lipstick; it’s a holiday.”

  I looked to him, startled, for an instant unable to recall how we’d met, how he’d come to know me. I felt myself on unfamiliar ground. And yet, I knew that in order to come through, I needed to conform, regardless of the calling of my heart to the contrary.

  I applied lipstick. Mark was behind me, sharing my mirror. “Good girl,” he said.

  There were no cars in SoHo. We walked down the middle of the street, and Mark greeted everyone—huddled couples, dog walkers, lost and rambling revelers—saying “Happy New Year” with great congeniality. Mark was congenial. It was hard to despise him for it when affability is a skill of survival. He took my hand, I took Anselm’s, and we walked, united by darkness and dope. If you tried, you could almost feel the newness; you could turn susceptible, the way you can relax and sense a phone about to ring. It truly was the eve of an almost something, something not yours perhaps, but connected to you nonetheless. If what Anselm said was correct, and change was inevitable, I wished it would come already, even if it meant change for the worse.