by David Adjmi
The manager was a diminutive, humorless Persian woman called Ziba who took fashion too seriously, even for me. Ziba looked a little like those women in Erté lithographs: she had a severe, cropped asymmetrical haircut and lustrous pallid skin—so pale it was almost blue. She was the kind of manager who liked to have lots of private, severe talks with her employees about their failings—these happened every couple of weeks. You’d be called into her office and she’d explain how disappointed she was. She didn’t want you to speak or explain anything, she just wanted you to feel the impress of her disappointment. Sometimes while repositioning skirts on hangers I’d feel the weight of a disapproving gaze and there she was: wraithlike and blinking at me with her gooey black eyelashes. I felt a compulsion to please Ziba. I viewed Emilio Cavallini as a sort of laboratory where I could produce myself day after day in this new European format.
The clothes we sold didn’t have a terribly pervasive appeal on the stodgy Upper East Side—the silhouettes were too avant garde, the palette of monochromes a little bit forced—but I was actually good at retail. My selling strategy—one I perfected at Jazz—was to tell the customers that they looked terrible in the first thing they tried on, then say they looked great in whatever they tried on next. Since I seemed so honest about them looking terrible in the first thing, they nearly always bought the second thing. Retail was like that; there was a lot of manipulation. It was tedious and crude. There was a lot of folding and stocking and unstocking and restocking. There were long, boring stretches where you had to be accountable for your time—you were on the clock, after all, bosses wanted to get the most from their money, so you had to look busy (Ziba would actually say this to my face, “Look busy!”) and refold sweaters even though they were perfectly folded the first time. You had to walk back and forth from the storeroom like you were actively searching for something, when in truth you were just walking in circles as people tried to extract some inexact demand for work. But my job was to perfect an appearance—and it wasn’t just a job, it was a way for me to perform myself. The job was theatre, and I was giving a stellar performance. I made more on commission than even some of the full-time people. I felt good about myself. I felt my life had value. It had value because other people valued me: they believed in me, they felt I belonged, and in the collective mirage of their belief I did belong. All that was required was their belief.
I maintained my French accent with varying degrees of success for the duration of my employment at Emilio Cavallini. No one bothered to ask where in France I was from—a relief, as I hadn’t developed my lie that far—but I definitely made an impression on my coworkers. The first couple of weeks everyone was curt and professional, but then they began to open up. When it was slow we’d all hide upstairs or in the stockroom and dish about Ziba and make one another laugh. Frankie was from Vietnam, she was trying to become a photographer. Ian was tall and gracious and sort of august. He had every new outfit; he was on the cutting edge of fashion all the time. He slavishly spent his meager salary on expensive suits he got at sample sales. To me, Ian seemed perfect, and I wondered how he achieved this perfection.
One afternoon he asked if I wanted to grab lunch, and we walked over to the Burger Heaven on Fifty-Third Street. I worried it might be awkward—we’d never spent time together outside the shop—but we talked easily. He talked about secret sample sales and models, new clubs, people in magazines. I listened in rapt anticipation and responded in my usual laconic suite of “ehhh”s and “uhhh”s. Ian told me he used to work at a high-end couture clothing store on the Upper West Side but hated it so much he had to quit. He talked a little about the woman who owned it who was so notorious for abusing her employees, he said, that they retaliated by starting a smuggling operation. They’d hide Matsuda and Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler in black trash bags, and at night, just before closing, carry them inconspicuously out with the rest of the trash, leaving them on a nearby corner with a newsstand owner to whom they paid a monthly sum. Once the manager was gone and the shop was closed, someone would pick the bags up from the newsstand owner. Then the salespeople would go off to nightclubs and convene with salespeople from Bergdorf’s and Saks and Barneys and strike up bargains and trades. Evidently this became a pandemic, everyone in high-end couture shops was stealing clothes from their bosses, but, Ian said, it wasn’t right, he wasn’t morally okay with any of it, and the environment at the store was generally toxic and abusive, and all of this led him to eventually quit. As we sat and talked I found I’d stopped listening to Ian. I was interested in what he was saying but was more interested in him, in the sort of person he was. He had a gentle girlish face, pale and joyless. He sipped his soda and picked at his french fries with perfectly manicured hands, his fingernails brushed faintly with gloss. When I first met him I found him intimidating but, sitting with him, I saw Ian was harmless; there was even something a little sad about him. He seemed like he was worried about something but had to fake insouciance—like he was a hostage, or had a bomb strapped to his chest. He looked straitjacketed in his fitted black Comme des Garçons suit—one I desperately coveted, but it was too expensive. The buttonholes in the jacket were each meticulously sewn with differently colored threads. Every stitch was perfect, every line in the fabric. But Ian looked mashed in the jacket, like a pressed flower. I could see the sadness in his eyes. It wasn’t that puzzled ambient sadness Stephanie Seymour had in the photo set on my wall, it was grimmer. I wondered if I too had that sadness, if people could read it in my eyes the way I could read it in his.
Whatever misgivings I had about the project of my self-creation, I was able to steamroll past them, because it was working: my past really was fading away. In our senior year, Vivian’s braces came off, and she started to mature into a very peculiar kind of beauty. That autumn she got a job at the same store where Ian had worked (she confirmed for me the existence of a couture black market) and her style became more rarefied. Her outfits got bolder and wilder and more European. She bought deconstructed suits by Gaultier that had slits near the breasts. She bought an Azzedine Alaïa taffeta pouf dress: it poufed at the sleeves and poufed around the neck; it was one big pouf. She even bought a dress from me at Emilio Cavallini. The dress was stretchy and bright red and flared into a hoop skirt ringed with an almost condom-like flexible wiring. The circumference of the hoop was about as wide as a Hula-Hoop; it was heavy and bounced up and down when she walked in it. I could tell it was supposed to be whimsical but it lacked the spirit of whimsy. I thought Vivian looked insane in it—but she wanted it, and in truth I was happy to get the commission. She wore the hoop dress one night to MK, but the club was so crowded, she had trouble moving around. When she danced people mashed up against it, causing her to wobble unattractively. The skirt was mashed into various concave shapes: tilted like a satellite dish, banged into a hard right angle. The dress was a kind of violence, a hatchet she took to the dance floor, but I could see her delighting in this—just as she delighted in cursing out people who cut her off when she was driving, or (as she did one afternoon) issuing a vivid threat to murder the entire family of some lady who took her parking spot. With her red dress she was in the process of inventing a character, like a character in a play—a woman who was odd and beautiful and powerful, who’d never been to Avenue J or tried the lunch special at Kosher Delight. I caught glimpses of people staring at Vivian on the dance floor, as though she’d always been this woman with a red dress, as though she’d never been anyone else.
Gaultier was doing a whole cowboy theme that season—they were selling a bunch of his luxe cowboy hats at Charivari. For two hundred dollars I decided on the one Keanu Reeves wore in that photo set from Rolling Stone, a simple black hat with black snaps on either side. I’d never worn a hat before, and I hated cowboy hats, but filtered through Gaultier’s optic it seemed European, and therefore more significant than American cowboy hats. I wore the cowboy hat to the Mary Boone Gallery and to Canastel’s and to Soho and Tribeca. I wore it to clubs, to Ne
ll’s and MK and Mars. My body was no longer a vulnerable piece of flesh; it was a blank slate capable of taking on adornments and decorations, capable of being reshaped and carrying disguises and masks. Now that I had the cowboy hat I started fake-smoking Marlboros to get myself more in character. On the way to some club one night, I lit a cigarette in the subway station, and a policeman stopped me. “New York isn’t like Texas,” he said. “You can’t smoke in the subway station.”
“Sorry ’bout that, office-ah,” I told him in my extempore Southern vernacular, like I was the Outlaw Josey Wales. As the words came out, I had no idea who was speaking them—my own voice shocked me. The police officer smiled and nodded as I put out my cigarette, and I walked up the stairs to Fourteenth Street. I knew that when I replied to the police officer something was working through me, like the Holy Ghost—but it was a secular power, a power galvanized through Jean Paul Gaultier and Kenzo and Dries Van Noten. With my new hat, I spoke and moved differently, I became a different person—the way models in magazines apparently became different people with different essences when they changed outfits. Maybe fashion didn’t just change how you were seen, maybe it could actually change who you were. The self was an endless burden, like a giant piece of luggage you were forced to haul around. But what if there was a way to remove the burden? What if you could just erase the self you had, as though it were a drawing in pencil, and start over?
In my senior year, some of the cliquey students at school began to accept me. They’d begun to invite me after school to Mama’s Pizza, a daily ritual. I got invitations to weekend parties in the Hamptons, and hangouts at Nell’s and Dorrian’s Red Hand. Harper Goldfarb invited me to her birthday party at Mezzaluna, and I tried gnocchi for the first time and drank a peach Bellini. I felt sophisticated. I was in my element. My grades were good. I was in the process of applying to colleges. I thought, as per Weinberger, that I should go to USC and make movies, but Mrs. Stewart (the college guidance counselor) gently nudged me to apply to a place called Sarah Lawrence. It was a place for people “who are a little . . . different,” she said, with the hushed and rueful circumspection of a nurse ministering over a terminally ill patient. I didn’t like her tone. And what sort of name for a school was “Sarah Lawrence”? It sounded unaccredited.
I blew off the guidance counselor and finished up my applications to USC and my safety schools, but the weekend before the application was due Vivian urged me to apply to Sarah Lawrence. Mrs. Stewart said she was “a little different” too, and Vivian looked into it and got excited. She insisted it was the right school for me. It was highly ranked in the Fiske Guide to Colleges; it was artsy and modish and all the things I wanted to be.
It wasn’t until a drive down to Soho to meet Gladys Abadi one afternoon that she finally convinced me to apply—but the deadline was in three days. Vivian said if we hurried we could drive up to Bronxville to snag an application before the office closed for the weekend.
“Do you feel like driving all the way up there?” I asked.
“Let’s just do it, Adj!” said Vivian.
Gladys’s face wound into a tiny compressed knot. “But we’re going shopping-UH!”
“It won’t take long,” I said.
“It will take lawng!”
“We just gotta drive over really quick.”
“WHAAYY!?”
“Because,” I said coldly, “the application is due on Monday.”
Gladys’s expression ignited as if by solar flares.
“WHO CAAAHES ABOUT YA APPLICATION?!”
“Gladys,” said Vivian, in a semimaternal intervention, “this is about David’s future.”
“SO MY FRIDAY IS RUINED BECAUSE OF HIS FUTCHAA?!”
Gladys was appalled by the notion of a future. Futures were things to be avoided until they happened—and even then, even when they became the present, you had to push that away; everything was intolerable unless it could be sublimated into little digestible bytes of distraction. Vivian didn’t try to soothe or mollify Gladys, she just kept driving. I could feel almost a literal break or split between the two of them, as if over the course of the drive they’d broken into separate continents and were now floating in opposite directions.
We made it to Bronxville, and I was able to get my application. But as I got back in the car, Gladys began waving her arms as if signaling for help. Her mouth hung in a sudden oval, her pudding face melting into teary blobs and spatters. “It’s not faih,” she cried. “IT’S NOT FAIH!” A minute or so later her loud sobs decelerated to low sputtering noises. I could hear her take small wavering breaths, but didn’t dare turn around or speak. I didn’t make a move. I could tell from Vivian’s silence that Gladys had effectively depleted whatever reservoir of goodwill she’d managed to accrue up to then. We glided in silence down the Saw Mill and toward the Henry Hudson Parkway. After a few minutes, I sneaked a glance at Gladys through the side rearview mirror. She was a phantasm, a terrifying reflection of who I could have become. She stared out her window at the flux of cars and trees. Her forehead was beaded with droplets of sweat. Her mouth hung slightly open, baring the tips of her yellowed teeth. She didn’t appear to be contemplating anything, not even her pathless future. Her expression was blank and slightly electrified; a kitten licking itself clean.
Frames Within Frames
BOLT WAS FROM Camarillo and wanted to party and get hammered. That first week at USC he joined a second-rate fraternity and was drunk and doing beer-bong hits all the time. His fraternity brothers were always over getting wasted and playing poker. Their roistering kept James and me up—we shared one of the two double rooms in the suite in the Century Apartments with Bolt and someone whose name we never learned, whom everyone called Fish-Eater because of his predilection for cooking fish in a toaster oven. James and I would toss around in our beds moaning and cursing Bolt and his fraternity brothers under our breath at one, two, sometimes three in the morning. I could hear James’s mattress creaking unhappily under his thin and slightly pubescent body, the rising and dipping notes of his voice cascading in quiet torment as he whimpered exhaustedly for them to “shut uuppp.” I once mustered the courage to go out into the kitchen in the middle of the night to ask the fraternity people to quiet down. They were drinking from a beer bong and playing poker and throwing darts at a poster of a woman in a bikini. “Hey, guys,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes for emphasis, “it’s kind of loud.” When they saw me, the fraternity people all traded smirks. “Uh . . . yeah,” said Bolt, rushing me out of the room. “Okay, man, take care now.”
Those first weeks of school I found myself comparing myself to Bolt endlessly, just as I compared myself to everyone, for I only understood myself in relation to my surroundings. He represented an aspect of California that felt slightly unreal to me, and a kind of manliness I’d never encountered. He looked a little like Tom Cruise, but a degraded inferior copy. The resemblance actually hurt him; it made him slightly grotesque. He had a big square face and huge white teeth and wore a retainer. His hair was glued in place with Dippity-do. His biceps were compactly formed like golf balls. He’d gaze at himself in the bathroom mirror for what seemed like hours at a time, mesmerized by his reflection as he inspected his acne, fixed his hair, checked to see if his muscles were getting any bigger. He was one of those men whose vanity was functional, instrumental—like barbell squats and dead lifts. He didn’t seem at all bothered when one of us had to brush our teeth while he flexed and posed and gazed.
Bolt was striving toward a kind of masculinity, but the effort and attention he gave the masculinity felt feminine. Wasn’t the whole point of masculinity that it just sort of fell off you, like sweat? At the same time, I knew these attempts to gild his masculinity were premised on real desires. He really did harbor lust for the bikini-clad girl in the poster that was covered with phallic darts. He really did want to take out his aggression on other men wrestling and roughhousing. Men wanted things, and that was part of masculinity. The authenticity of one’s nee
ds, if they were the right needs, if they were manly and rugged enough, could situate one in the world. The correct urges tendered status. My urges were the wrong ones—I didn’t want a girl in a bikini, or to drink from a keg—but I was in the process of reforming myself. This was why I turned down my acceptance to Sarah Lawrence: it seemed too female. I wanted to become macho somehow.
When high school ended I came to feel the haircut Randi gave me was too desexing and fussy and decided to have it matted into dreadlocks. I found a place on Nostrand Avenue in Lefferts and got my hair braided. The braids were so tight they turned my scalp pink for a week. I stopped washing my hair so the oils would make the braids mat up. They were loose and malformed, but it was good enough to be a look—slovenly in just the right way. I had no real affinity for Rastafarian culture, but did not see this as an impediment to my fashion statement. The hairstyle was, more than anything, a way to project male power. But, studying Bolt, I realized if I genuinely wanted to acquire this power I had to change my insides, my core desires. Desiring things men were meant to desire was work; it would take effort, like posture. But eventually the effort would vanish, and it would become second nature.
My first afternoon at the Century dorm, there was an RA meeting in the lobby downstairs where we were admonished about drugs and STDs by a girl from a place called Montecito. The girl had a kind of optimism that felt unearthly, almost unhealthy. She had terrible cystic acne and plasticky sun-bleached hair and wore a “Go Trojans” sun visor. I came to the meeting wearing sunglasses and a tam knit in the colors of the Jamaican flag. I was trying to project sexuality and noblesse oblige—and it seemed to be working. During the meeting I noticed people sneaking intrigued glances my way. After the meeting adjourned the RA passed around a basket of condoms, and a small group clustered around me. I disbursed chocolate-covered espresso beans from a tiny linen sachet—I’d gotten them at McNulty’s in the West Village the week before, thinking I could use them as a lure. The girl from Montecito swung her hair around: “Yummy,” she said, “I love coffee anything!” When people asked where I was from, I replied “New York” with a perfectly rounded R. I conveniently elided my yeshiva background and made up some lie that I was a model and had done a bunch of runway shows. When people asked my name, I said it was “Dread.” I’d changed it the week before. Some Rastafarian guy biking down Bleecker Street shouted it to me as a salute, which I promptly took as a sign. I could tell the Californians hadn’t ever met a person called Dread. I could tell they’d never tried anything so gourmet and esoteric as chocolate-covered espresso beans. The whole thing went off without a hitch. I beamed inwardly with success.
