“Oh my God,” I drawl, staring at Giovanni’s face in the mirror. I begin to smile in spite of my annoyance. “I’m only seventeen! How old could I possibly look?”
“Every minute counts, honey,” he snaps with a flick of his fingers. “Now shove over and let me do my job.” I dutifully make room on the white velvet bench I’ve had since I was ten. Giovanni sits down and picks up a tissue, saturating it with makeup remover, and wipes away the dark lines surrounding the wide eyes I think are my best feature. Right now they just look tired. The silver bracelets on Giovanni’s wrists tinkle as he moves, and I shut my eyes at the comforting feel of his hands on my skin. Tonight he is wearing a black Stephen Sprouse jacket covered in multicolored sequins that shines like an electric bulb, and black pants of his own design with a line of metal grommets climbing up one leg. His hair is impeccably coiffed, and his skin glows smooth and lineless in the light from the red lantern hanging overhead, making him look younger than his nineteen years.
I met Giovanni a year ago when I was first starting out in the scene, when I was still living with my mother. I had just begun working the ropes of the Tunnel basement, and already I’d become an expert at sizing up the crowd, my face a mask, eyes sweeping impassively over the bodies gathered in front of the velvet rope, their hungry gaze searching for signs of recognition or empathy. I liked the club kids who pushed through from the back of the line, the flurry of their double-cheeked kisses as they placed their hands on my shoulders and leaned in, their pupils spinning like disco balls. There was Mitzi, with her pink-and-black teapot hat and black ball gown. Roger in an aluminum space suit, waving his silver-clad hand jauntily as he stepped through the ropes. Maia in a dress of electric blue so bright that it seemed to pulsate under the lights, her face painted blue to match. Manny, in his signature white jumpsuit, a pair of gossamer wings strapped to his back. I liked the way I was envied by the other girls in the scene, how they depended on me to get in, for drink tickets, for recognition. When they looked at me, eyes shining with covetousness, it was the only time in my life I could remember feeling important.
Giovanni was known around the club scene for three things: his gift for fashion, and his appetite for cocaine and boys—not necessarily in that order. We bonded over getting high. It was one of those nights that never seem to end, when the blackness stretches on forever, the sun a distant memory hiding in the murky sky, stars like spilled glitter. I was in the VIP room at The World, seated on a long velvet bench, when Giovanni sat down next to me, tossing his curls and flashing me a smile. In the rose light he resembled a Spanish prince stranded on foreign soil. Weeks later when I told him as much, he shrieked in horror, tossing a pillow at my head for good measure. “I’m Puerto Rican! Not some fucking Spaniard!”
But that night all I knew was that he was beautiful, and that, for whatever reason, he had chosen me.
“I know you, you know.” Giovanni leered, leaning into me slightly, the heat from his body seeping into the space between us.
“Oh yeah?” I mused, eyebrow raised. I was bored, but not bored enough to have to sustain mindless conversation.
“You’re Caitlin,” Giovanni said, taking a sip of what looked and smelled like a rum and Coke. “I’m Giovanni.” He held out a hand bejeweled with silver rings, his fingers closing around mine. “I’d like to dress you.”
“You know, I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself,” I said with a smile, dropping his hand and pointing to my outfit.
Giovanni took in the black unitard, the black-and-white polka-dotted Betsey Johnson crinoline skirt that puffed around my waist like a cloud, the wide black elastic belt cinching my waist, and the high-heeled patent-leather booties on my feet with a disparaging glance, his mouth curled into a grimace. “Not in my opinion,” he answered, his lips relaxing into a grin. “Besides,” he said with a wave of his hand, “I’ve decided we should be best friends.”
My mouth fell open, my eyes bulging from their sockets. Was he drunk? (Definitely, I would learn later on.) High? Why else would anyone make that kind of a reckless declaration, flay themselves open, exposing a tender pink belly, a rapidly beating heart? This kind of effusiveness was unheard of in clubland, especially where I was concerned. People liked me in that saccharine, artificial way you pretend to like visiting relatives or distant acquaintances, but I never let anyone get too close. Close was scary and unpredictable. Close was a racing pulse, hiding under the bed while praying for footsteps to recede. Most of all, closeness, I knew, meant eventually disappointing the people you loved best. My mother, who always wanted a different daughter. Even Sara, who, as much as she loves me, cannot understand why I do the things I do, why the club has become such a huge part of my life. Without missing a beat, Giovanni reached into the interior pocket of his jacket, producing two white pills that glowed like moon rocks in the palm of his hand.
“Want a hit of X?”
I hesitated, but only for a moment before I popped the capsule into my mouth, picturing the white powder coating my stomach, my intestines, the very tissues of my body. Before that night, I had done coke a few times, and basically drank my weight in booze, but this was the first time I’d tried anything that came in a pill, the first time I’d surrendered to what the universe offered me, hands outstretched. As the X made its long, arduous journey down my throat, I shivered once hard, my shoulders shaking as the capsule dropped into my stomach.
Thirty minutes later, the drug began its slow seep into my bloodstream, my limbs loose and pliant. A wave of nausea bent me in two, sudden light flashing behind closed eyes. I raced to the bathroom and sank to my knees, one hand on the cold white porcelain of the toilet, shoulders hunched. I returned to the VIP room, sheepish and spacey. As soon as I sat back down, Giovanni grabbed one of my hands and began tracing designs on my palm with his long, pointed pinky nail. From a faraway distance, looking down at myself, I knew that it was madness, letting someone I didn’t even know touch me, sit this close, take my hand in his own and cradle my flesh as if it were a newly born child. I braced myself for the familiar feeling of panic, that need to get up and run until the breath came ragged in my chest, until I was light once more and clear of all attachment. Maybe it was the drugs racing through my body, lighting up my limbs like a pinball machine. Maybe it was Giovanni himself, his soft chuckle in my ear, the purr of his voice telling me, Slow down. Stay for a while and stay with me. So for once I did.
“Did you puke?” he murmured with a soft giggle.
“Well, yeah,” I answered, grabbing his rum and Coke and taking a swig, the frothy bubbles clearing the scum and bitterness from my mouth. My head warm and light, as if it just might uncork itself from my neck and float away. “But you haven’t. Why is that?”
“Honey,” Giovanni said, smiling, “I’m a professional.”
* * *
I blink rapidly, jolting myself back into the present. A thick layer of mascara now coats my lashes, and I stare at the girl reflected in the glass, her dark eyes shadowed and mysterious, a beauty mark penciled on her right cheek, her lips coated in a film as shiny and red as plastic.
“Let’s get you dressed, dollface.” Giovanni steps back to survey his work, squinting critically at my freshly painted face before throwing the eyeliner pencil down and wiping his hands on a tissue. I stand up and pull my dress over my head, kicking my tights off until I am standing there in my bra and underpants, my skin rising into goose bumps. I don’t know much about Giovanni’s daytime world—he told me once that he’s studying fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology or, as he puts it, Fags in Training, but he never talks about school or assignments, or has to wake up for anything during the day, so I highly doubt it’s the truth. Even I, pathetic excuse for a student that I am, have to adhere to deadlines every so often. All I really know about Giovanni is that he lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea with four slightly psychotic drag queens who sometimes steal the clothing he makes, selling it to secondhand stores in the East Village. I
don’t ask questions, just let him crash when he needs to. In this way, Giovanni and I understand each other without ever exchanging a word. Our lives exist for each other only at night, when the air is charged with shadows. But even with all I don’t know about him, Giovanni is my closest friend in the scene, and for some strange reason, I trust him. Maybe it’s because of our nightly ritual of satin and lace, the glittering pins placed next to my flesh, points sharp enough to draw blood. Giovanni watches over me, protective and paternal without being overbearing. Each night he turns me gently under his hands, his fingers light on my waist. For Giovanni, every night is a blank slate, a chance to begin again.
Giovanni pulls a mass of white tulle from his bulging overnight bag and begins carefully draping it around and across my body, his mouth full of pins that glint in the light. I think of piranhas, of reptiles with sharp teeth as the frothy material swirls around me, pulling me under.
SIX
THREE A.M., the room spinning under the flashing colored lights, tulle banked like a snowdrift behind me, making it impossible to sit down. If midnight is the witching hour, three a.m. is the dark, fathomless abyss of the soul. If I were home by myself right now, I’d probably be completely freaked out, the clock ticking loudly in my ear, every rumble of the pipes or creak in the floor making me jump with uneasiness and fear. A pile of unopened textbooks heaped on the bed, a makeshift barricade. The covers pulled over my head and the television tuned to a late-night talk show, the murmur of voices providing the illusion that I am not alone. But instead I’m on top of a large speaker on the main dance floor, hands raised over my head, the sounds of Soul II Soul pumping through the air. The bass hits me squarely in the solar plexus, making my entire body vibrate. Keep on movin’, keep on movin’, don’t stop, no . . . It’s my favorite part of the night, when I can just lose myself in the melody streaming through the speakers like hot honey, reality off in the distance, hazy as a half-forgotten dream.
The first time I went to a club, I was a few months shy of sixteen and still living at home. I scuffed my feet against the pavement outside Tunnel on a warm spring night, the kind where everything seems full of possibility, buds hanging in the trees like earrings. Sara had gotten an invite for a party in the Chandelier Room from some senior she knew whose brother went to NYU—freshmen playing at being promoters for a night. Sara sighed loudly as the doorman’s eyes passed over our ripped jeans and black coats, his passive gaze gliding past the invite she held above her head like a flag. We went because we’d never been to a club before, because we were bored. Mostly we went because Sara thought it was a good idea, which was pretty much the reason I did anything in those days.
Earlier in the afternoon, we’d ridden the train down to Times Square, swaying as the car rocked us from side to side, grunting occasionally as we fell against the tangle of arms and legs that surrounded us. Forty-Second Street was a fever dream, the smell of roasting nuts mixed with the wail of sirens as an ambulance hurried down the street, the neon façades of XXX theaters and strip clubs floating against the sky. We’d just started to wear black, to line our eyes in broad swaths of charcoal. Sara paused momentarily, kicking her new motorcycle boots against the curb to dirty them, to break them in. I’d stopped wearing the clothes my mother bought me at Nieman Marcus, leaving them in my closet with the tags still on. I’d begun to rip my T-shirts, spray paint my boots, to shop in thrift stores for long skirts and vintage leather jackets. Sara’s mother never cared about what she wore, but my mother’s expression got tighter and tighter each time she looked at me, a wire coiling beneath the perfect bones of her face. Surface tension.
A man near the subway entrance had set up a metal table littered with stuffed animals, and as we passed, he yelled out something incomprehensible, holding a blue dinosaur triumphantly above his head. Pimps strolled along the pavement, their pastel suits bright as candy. Hookers stood on street corners, their taut abdomens bare, legs extending from miniskirts so tiny, they were more like bandages stanching a wound, their eyes shadowed and hard.
Sara grabbed my arm, pulling me into a store with a bright yellow awning that read KODAK: PHOTOS, IDS, SOUVENIRS. We walked past rows of I NY T-shirts, miniature plastic models of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, plastic globes that imprisoned the deco opulence of the Chrysler Building, its metal frame surrounded by flakes of falling snow. A glass counter at the back of the store held various kinds of identification: driver’s licenses and state IDs. The rows of identically laminated smiles looked back at me smugly, as if they could somehow foretell my future, as if they knew what might happen next.
“Why do we need IDs anyway?” I asked, looking around the store as a burly guy dressed in a blue Adidas tracksuit came striding toward us.
“In case we get carded,” Sara mumbled under her breath. “Dumbo.”
Sara was terrified of getting carded. I was more terrified of being humiliated in public, which is why I went along with the whole thing in the first place.
Thirty minutes and one trip to the photo booth later, where we tried to look both older and serious behind a yellow plastic curtain as the camera clicked and whirled, we held in our grasp the IDs, still warm from the lamination machine, IDs that said we were, laughably, twenty-one years old.
“Even if we DO get carded,” I pointed out as we made our way back toward the subway, “no one will ever believe we’re twenty-one. Not in a million years.”
“Look.” Sara pushed her mop of blond curls away from her face in exasperation. “Think of this as insurance.” She held her ID out in front of her for emphasis. “We’ll probably never even have to take them out of our wallets.”
Scarily enough, she was right.
That night when the bouncer finally lifted the velvet ropes high, the door girl, her nose in a clipboard, barely looked up as we approached the entrance, giving us a cursory glance as she plucked the invite from Sara’s fingers. Suddenly, we were inside, and the pounding beat of the music rushed through me, starting at the soles of my feet and tingling up the length of my body. All around us were kids our own age, some a bit older, silver glitter on their faces and exposed limbs, bright red lips, dressed in clothing that seemed to function more as a costume than anything else. There was a feeling in the air, a kind of adrenaline that went beyond the insistent beat of the music driving me onward, pulling me deeper inside. I moved as if in a trance, needing to get to the core of it.
Three of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen passed by, their bodies swaying gently beneath tight black dresses. Drag queens, I knew immediately, the most gorgeous of illusions. I watched them, transfixed by their delicate, feline features as they pushed through the crowd, their skin shining under the colored lights, their long-limbed bodies that seemed so much more well developed than my own achingly flat chest. The music bubbled, screams of jubilation rising from the dance floor as the DJ segued into the next track. I was spellbound, glued to the floor. This was a world that bloomed at night like a black orchid, its petals unfurling luxuriously, a place that had nothing to do with the tight smiles and expectations I’d left behind on the Upper East Side. If this was tumbling down the rabbit hole, my senses stunned with blinking neon, then I wanted to keep falling at breakneck speed, never hitting bottom.
A guy ran by, a pacifier hung around his neck like a whistle, his bare legs exposed in short, billowing bloomers, black suspenders crossing his bare chest. He pushed through the crowds as if the room was his, as if he belonged there, his childlike limbs belying his real age, which must have been around nineteen or twenty. As he moved, the pointy nub of his elbow dug into my side, and I yelped in pain. He turned around, his impish, quizzical face opening, a penciled black star outlining one eye, his hands full of drink tickets. He ripped off a sheet of ten or fifteen and held them out.
“Here,” he said with a grin. “I’m Sebastian. Come and hang out for a while.”
He nodded toward the set of red ropes just off the bar up ahead, a series of large crys
tal chandeliers dripping from the ceiling like melting icicles. I was stunned, mouth open. No one had ever picked me out of a crowd before. As if I were special. As if I could somehow belong.
Once we’d made it inside, the objective of the evening was pretty much over—at least for Sara, who smiled thinly, yawning into one hand. I couldn’t have been less tired. After Sebastian had dragged me out on the dance floor a few times, where I moved stiffly, a marionette with wooden limbs, we made our way back to the couch. He refilled our plastic cups of champagne, but I wasn’t drunk. My blood frothed and bubbled with excitement, the possibility of a new world unfurling before me like a magic carpet. The room spun with chatter, music and laughter, and I wanted to be a part of it, to belong here and nowhere else. The pain, the mix of regret and determination in my father’s eyes as he walked out of our apartment for the last time, my mother’s bottomless rage: I wanted to leave it all behind me, the past as dry and useless as dust.
Sebastian leaned in to me and said, under his breath, “You should come to my next party—but only if you leave your boring friend at home.” One blue eye closed slowly in a wink, his mouth ruby red. And at that moment, my fate was sealed.
* * *
Giovanni appears below me, shaking his fist in the air to get my attention, and climbs up onto the speaker, spilling half of his whiskey sour on my white patent-leather boots in the process. There was an open bar earlier in the night, and Giovanni has clearly taken full advantage—he looks as though the slightest breeze will send him toppling off of the speaker and into the teeming crowd below—and I grab on to his wrist, steadying his movements. I take his drink and perch it near the edge of the speaker, then take his hands in mine and raise them above our heads. Our torsos touch, bodies grinding in time to the synth beat as New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” begins, eliciting a manic shout from the packed floor as sweat begins to run in rivulets down my sides. It’s times like these when I feel at one with the world, part of the universe in a way I rarely, if ever, do during the daylight hours. I am connected to each person in this crowded, overheated room by an invisible gossamer rope, my chest tightening with happiness. I can see the sweat shining on the smooth skin of Giovanni’s forehead, and I watch as he throws his head back, howling into the darkness. When he looks back at me, raising one eyebrow in a kind of dare, I mirror his ecstasy, tilting my head back until the lights blur my vision, and release a scream into the waiting night. My voice sounds free and loose above the pulse of the music, and when the song segues into Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two,” chaos erupts from the dance floor once again, and I feel like I could scream forever, Giovanni’s palms sweating against mine, head filled with an electric current of joy, a happiness so pure, it feels almost like love itself.
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