Sex in the City - New York

by Maxim Jakubowski

  It was almost like a slap in the face. If Meadow had let herself, she would have been pissed at that; instead, she just frowned sourly and said: ‘That is totally uncalled for.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I’m a meeting planner first, a whore second. I’m not leaving you until you get in that Towncar at three. What time is it?’

  Cosgrove kissed the tangled mop of blonde hair he had just all but ruined by pulling it repeatedly.

  He glanced at the softly glowing dial of his watch and said, ‘About eleven.’

  ‘Care to go to bed, then?’ she asked.

  ‘I never can sleep –’

  She put her finger across his lips.

  ‘Don’t insult me,’ she sighed.

  As they slid between the clean, starched sheets, naked bodies fitting together like pieces of a puzzle, Meadow mused to herself: That was a lie. I’m barely even a meeting planner. And I’m definitely a whore first.

  In fact, she was starting to think it might be time for another career change.

  About the Story

  I’ve always been fascinated by people with a secret life, an avocation or profession that presents a very different side to what people think of them. New York suggests such secret lives at every turn, perhaps because there are so many universes coexisting there: Wall Street, 42nd Street, the East Village, immigrant communities; it’s a city of hidden realities.

  Since I haven’t ever lived there, when I think of New York, I think of hotels and hostels, airports and redeyes, intercity trains, the subway and crashing on peoples’ couches. Put the irrepressible energy of the town into that mix, and it’s all a recipe for rampant misbehaviour.

  I always feel like I should be cautious when writing about call girls, because that profession has been misused in literature, film and made-for-Skinemax-movies to reflect the sexual fantasies of the voyeuristic bourgeoisie.

  But, that said, I know just enough call girls that I can’t not write about them. The ones who enjoy their work, at least, are among the most puzzling, fascinating, and erotic women I’ve ever known. When a call girl character suggests herself, I’m always aware that I’m writing a fantasy, not reflecting reality, but that’s true of whatever I’m writing unless it’s an essay or memoir. The best I can do is try to make her on some level a real person – to me, if not to anyone else. The best I can do is try to make her on some level a whole person, to the best of my meagre abilities, and to base what I write about her not entirely on stereotypes but at least partially on what I know about the real world. But that, too, is true of any character, whether she’s a call girl, cop or construction worker.

  Mojitos often seem to get thrown into the mix lately when I’m writing about misbehaviour; these were phenomenally trendy in San Francisco a few years back when I was going through a calculated promiscuous period, and so in fictional terms lime juice, mint and cane sugar will always show a natural affinity for me with round-heeled characters of several genders.

  All these things collided to build the fantasy in Manhattan Booty Call: a story about which I’m very fond, with characters I hope to see again.

  New York Electric

  by Cara Bruce

  I got my very first real job before I even graduated from college. I was excited, thrilled even. I was supposed to start right after school ended and I couldn’t wait. This was the way it was supposed to be: you went to school and got a job. I believed that my life was about to finally begin. I had new grown-up clothes which made me feel fabulously chic, even though looking back now they were cheap and plain, like playing dress up, and not even very well. That first job was in white-bred Connecticut, proofreading science journals. It was horrible, tedious work. I had to sit in a room, stark white and empty except for a single table which held an imposing stack of reference books, each of them thicker than the last. By the end of the day my head would be swimming with words, thousands and thousands of words, like tiny black ants, marching to a militant beat across my brain. It was boring, and I dreaded it more and more each day. After the first day my eyes were tired and after the first week I was depressed. I could hardly stand it. I felt trapped; walking into that blank white room was akin to suffocating. It didn’t take long until I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this wasn’t for me.

  Each new day sucked another piece of life from me. I couldn’t understand why people fought for jobs like this, how they could give forty hours of their lives each week to doing tasks that would only make someone else money. How they could give their lives to doing something they didn’t care about, to go through life not creating something, not feeling passionate about something, not loving every moment of every day. I watched them hurry to the bars as soon as five o’clock hit. I questioned a society where alcohol was the biggest thing people had to look forward to; a society where boredom and unhappiness were so accepted – even fought for and sought after.

  I suffered through it for almost a full month. I longed to be back in school and missed the freedom of being encouraged to follow creative and artistic pursuits. I already knew that parts of me would die if I continued along this route. And then one glorious day, my friend Dee called. She had been my film partner in college. We had made three movies together, two narratives and a documentary. She called to tell me that she had gotten a job as a Production Assistant on a movie set and she was sure that if I came to New York to join her that I could get one too. It sounded like a great idea and even though I wouldn’t be paid I had some money saved and Dee and I would share a room and all of our costs. But the best part was that it was outside. It might not have been the most intellectual work, at least not on paper, but I had already discovered intellectual work that looked good on paper could be incredibly boring. And more than anything, that monotonous month had shown me that I hated to be bored.

  So I told her I was coming and I quickly gave my notice and packed my things. The next day I took the train back to my parent’s house in Virginia to drop off my work clothes and get clothes proper for unpaid grunt work. Dee and I didn’t have a place to live yet, but we did have a few weeks until the movie started. I borrowed my parent’s car, a crappy Chevy Celebrity, and drove by myself into New York City. This time I was convinced that my life was finally going to begin. No more false starts, even if this didn’t work out at least it would be something worth remembering.

  Dee and I got every paper and made call after call, searching for a suitable place to live. We walked for miles, up and down the city, checking out each and every room, of which there were few. We talked up bartenders and waitresses, college students and professors; we woke up at 5 a.m. to be on the street when the Village Voice was dropped off, we tried begging and bribery, and we finally got a few leads on possible places for rent. We saw an efficiency apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that had the bathtub in the kitchen. It wasn’t even big enough for us to be in the same room at the same time. To get any privacy one of us would have to stay in the bathroom, a tiny room with just a toilet, to wash your hands you also had to use the kitchen. But even in the bathroom you weren’t actually alone, cockroaches scattered each time the single yellow light bulb was turned on and something scurried across the floor each time it was shut off.

  We saw a five floor walk up railroad apartment in the Lower East Side. Our lungs and sides stabbing with pain by the time we reached the top floor apartment but we still considered taking it. At least until we went out that night, walking out of the building we were caught in a fluid stream of junkies. It was like a zombie film, but instead of brains they were searching for dope. Winding lines formed at burned out buildings. A burly man in a worn leather jacket stood guard at every corner; crossing guards directing the dope fiends to the proper spot, to their own personal place of safety. You got into line, then when you made it to the front you handed one guy your money and he passed it off to another kid, then he would jerk a hanging rope, the amount of yanks told th
e boy above what you were supposed to receive. The rope was attached to a can which was hoisted up to the second or third floor, they put the glassine baggies of dope, marked with stamps or skulls or names like Redrum, into the can and lowered it back down. Even the drug dealers understood branding. They were marketers as savvy as Pepsi or Coca-Cola, an old drug for a new generation.

  We watched as the drug addicts pushed up their sleeves to show their track marks, proof that they weren’t cops, desperate badges of tainted honour. We also watched them scatter like rats in the light whenever the cops did appear. Rumour was that once in a while the police would load up all of the junkies into a wagon and drive them around until they were sick or drop them far uptown in Harlem or the Bronx. It was probably true; there wouldn’t have been enough room in the Tombs to hold them all.

  We watched them slink into abandoned, boarded-up buildings after they scored in dirty shooting galleries where diseases spread like rumours in a high school. It was a bit scary and depressing but it was also strangely thrilling. Simply walking through those night-time streets was a rush of crazy adrenaline, a drug in itself. I remembered books like Burroughs Junkie and I wondered if he too had walked these streets, scored in these same buildings, and in a sad, twisted way, it was almost glamorous to me. Of course I didn’t know the truth, couldn’t know the truth. That would come years later.

  But when we went to look at our apartment we saw rats, large and fierce, crawling out of a gigantic hole in the foundation of the building. We saw a woman, skinny as a rail, her jutting hipbones and pointed elbows poking out of her, squatting on the sidewalk and taking a shit right in front of our front door. We hesitated, but after speaking to a weathered man who perched like a gargoyle on the front steps and learning that the apartments were robbed almost weekly, we finally decided against renting it.

  We were staying at Dee’s grandmother’s apartment, all the way up the east side at 90th and York. It was a typical older woman’s apartment. The plastic-covered couch folded out and we shared it, by morning we both had rolled into the crack, stuck together in the heat. She had a window air conditioner unit that she refused to use; instead she preferred shaking her head and complaining about those crooks at Con Ed. We stayed there for a few weeks until a friend of mine from back home called and said she’d heard I needed a place to stay. She lived in a studio apartment in the East Village, right on St. Mark’s Place between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. We walked all the way downtown and met her that evening. An hour later we had signed her sublet lease and made plans to move in. For almost two weeks we shared a studio apartment on St. Marks. It was a very close fit. Lou Reed used to live in our building and every Saturday morning tour buses would pull up out front and the entire bus would empty, necks tilting, cameras clicking and the entire crowd collectively oohing and aahing, between asking each other who this Lou Reed had been, and if he was famous.

  We would sit on the balcony and throw extra eggrolls at the punk rock bouncer of Coney Island High. I loved that apartment. New York in the early 1990s was a much different place to what it is now. It was dirty, gritty, real. Today you will see well-dressed people eating at chic cafes, but back then it was homeless kids and heroin addicts, artists and beautiful androgynous boys and girls. It was alive; the very streets pulsed with danger. Every night was like dipping your toe in quicksand, a little too far and you could feel how easy it would be for it to suck you in, warm and smooth, enveloping you like a fleece blanket, seducing you deeper and deeper. We weren’t there long. During that second week her other roommate came back from her European vacation months early and we were, once again, homeless.

  Finally, we lucked into a two-bedroom apartment on 7th and D when two junkies overdosed and died, their bodies undiscovered and decomposing around the stained vinyl kitchen table. At one point it had been a bright and cheery yellow, the top was now nicked and scarred, gouges had been violently spooned out of it. We got the apartment for a great price, an amazing price actually, and all we had to do was clean out all the shit they left behind; including a drawer full of used hypodermic needles and a closet floor of clothes that stuck together and smelled as if they had never been washed.

  Dee and I moved in before the place was completely clean. We found old letters, photographs, and a large, brown spatter of old blood behind the bed. Underneath the bed frame was a collection of dried boogers. Rotting food made opening the refrigerator more a dare than a domestic event. It was depressing and disgusting; I had done heroin but not like this. I had snorted a bit here and there, but I had never shot up and didn’t understand what really being a junkie actually meant. This apartment was my first taste of the reality of that lifestyle, and even with the evidence surrounding me I still neglected to accept it.

  Dee and I had already started working on our first film set. Not Hollywood film sets, but independent guerrilla-style film sets, the kind with no money. These are the people you see running from transit cops and using stolen shopping carts as dollies. It was guerilla film-making at its finest. To a girl fresh out of college, not yet skilled in the ways of the world or the ways of men or love, it was incredibly romantic.

  Just as Dee had promised, the first job we got was as Production Assistants or P.A.s. We worked our asses off for no money, just paper plates groaning under the weight of all the carb-heavy food from the craft services table. But we had an idea, we would specialize, learn a skill. So Dee attached herself to the Grips, putting together scaffolding, and building things, and I began training as an electrician. I loved it. There was a beautiful, tall, thin, mulatto boy named John who wore T-shirts boasting little-known punk bands and shorts with combat boots. It took me just a week to convince him that I was worth keeping around, that I could do the job. Finally, he took me under his wing.

  He taught me how to put up scaffolding, how to adjust lights, how to create shadows. He taught me how to tie in to live power lines and steal electricity. This was the biggest rush. You attached metal alligator clips onto live electric wires. You were supposed to stand on a rubber mat while someone stood behind you with a thick, heavy wooden board. If you were sucked into the power current they would have to hit you really hard and knock you out of it. I got shocked a few times, but I never had to be whacked across the back with that impending piece of plywood.

  My hands were small and I was unafraid. Back then I wasn’t afraid of anything. I would walk into the heart of Alphabet City at any time by myself and buy whatever illegal substance I wanted or thought that I needed. I did things that now make me cringe with fear and self-awareness. I climbed down an elevator shaft to lay cables, mice and rats crawling over my feet. I hung off of a broken statue with one hand twenty feet in the air to hide the thick, black cable. I didn’t care. Every day was an adventure, and every new experience a dare to be accomplished.

  Strangers pointed at the tiny girl buckling under the weight of the bulky, heavy lights. I squeezed through chained doors and cracked windows to get into locked rooms with beckoning electrical boxes. Often I was the only one who could fit. People were impressed by my fearlessness, my ability to take everything in stride. I used to have dreams, night after night, about winding cable, feet and feet of black cable, rolling it around my arm until it was a huge, thick roll of dead power.

  There was something thrilling about working with electricity. It was alive, dangerous. Electricity always has to be balanced. You have to measure, to make sure that one part of the set wasn’t using more than the other. That meant you had to lay cable evenly, plug the right paddle cords into the right boxes. If the balance was off you could end up with a power overload, and either no power at all or a fire: the type of fire that wasn’t even afraid of water.

  Making a movie is all about light. It’s about capturing light, manipulating light. You use light to suggest what time of day it is, to set ambiance and feeling. Lights on a film set are huge and bulky. They’re heavy; you put them on stands and point them at anything that nee
ds to be illuminated, uncovered. Once they are set you can place barn doors on them, a metal box with doors so you can close them to cut the light, or keep it from shining on a certain part of the set. Scrims are also used to cut the light, different size scrims allow you to control how much light you cut. Gels are used to change the colours, blues and oranges to create day and night. I’d put on my heavy, insulated work gloves and eagerly climb up the metal scaffolding. I’d be sitting on top, queen of the city, waiting to make the adjustments to my big light as soon as the Director of Photography, or John, was ready to instruct me.

  I also drove the film truck, packed with expensive equipment because no one else wanted to. It was hard driving a big rig through a crowded city, making wide right turns and avoiding pedestrians. Road construction was an especially irritating and terrifying event.

  I was the only girl electrician most of the other Grips, Gaffers, and crew hands had seen. They laughed at me, running around making sure everything was in place, but they stopped laughing when I lifted 40 pound lights and placed them expertly on top of a stand the size of my finger, or moved around a hundred degree light with my bare hands because the Director couldn’t wait. I impressed them all, but the only one I really cared about was John.

  On a typical film we’d work three weeks of days and one week of nights. Each day was twelve to sixteen hours of work. We worked all summer, sweating under the hot sun and even hotter lamps. I’d get home and wash off a thick, black layer of dirt and grime, the city itself having transferred to my skin. I hated getting stuck sitting on a set when the cameras started rolling because you’d have to be perfectly quiet. It sounds glamorous but it was horrible. If you were stuck in a squat, then in a squat you’d stay, whether your legs began to ache before falling asleep or not. We’d stumble home, backs bent and shoulders burning, shuffling our feet all the way to our beds. Then we’d wake up at 4 or 5 a.m. and do it all over again. Leaving our apartment in the thin darkness of the morning and returning in the thicker, blacker darkness of night. Our lives were nothing but the film. Films we would never see, films almost no one would ever see. The crew members became family, the actors distant cousins that made you slightly uncomfortable every time they walked into the room.