by Dan Peres
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to be at a party at eight p.m.”
That was a lie. I needed to be home to get high. I’d taken my last handful of Vicodin at four p.m. and I was due for my evening feeding. As needed for pain every 4 hours. It was time.
Chickpea was wearing a clingy black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline in her photo on the Elegant Affairs home page. She had shoulder-length wavy blond hair. It was impossible to see her face, but I sat at the wooden desk in my small home office studying my computer screen, trying to identify features beneath the blur the same way I tried to decipher what was going on behind the Cinemax scramble when I was a kid.
I’m not sure why I did it. I wasn’t horny. I rarely was those days—the Vicodin had snuffed out nearly all sexual desire. But I was transfixed. Curious. Bored. And perhaps in that moment lonesome. Or maybe I did it simply because I could. I didn’t know, but I took out my American Express card and booked an appointment with Chickpea for later that night.
Steve Perry was belting out the chorus of “Be Good to Yourself” when she knocked on the door. I took a here-goes-nothing deep breath and let her in.
“Hey there, cutie,” she said, giving me a big hug as if we were college friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. “I’m so glad you called.”
She was completely at ease.
“I’m Emma,” she said, smiling. “Okay if I take my shoes off?”
She was wearing a pair of Nikes. When I booked our meeting, I had asked that she dress down. She had on a pair of tight dark jeans and a small gray cable-knit cashmere sweater that rose up to expose about an inch of her stomach when she took off her coat.
“I’m Dan,” I said.
I was about to give her a fake name, but then I remembered that I’d given the escort agency my full name and credit card info, which all of a sudden seemed like a pretty stupid thing to have done. Was I in some database now? Was Elegant Affairs going to bill me for $10,000 instead of $1,000? Was I going to get arrested? Oy, my poor mother.
She took me by the hand and led me over to the sofa. The living-room fireplace was roaring. She sat Indian style facing me. Steven had been right when he said “total beauties.” Chickpea was beautiful. She reminded me of Cameron Diaz from There’s Something About Mary. She looked like the prettiest girl from small-town America—the one who tossed the baton in the Memorial Day parade. The one who played Dorothy in the local production of The Wizard of Oz. The one who everyone was rooting for to make it big in the big city.
Chickpea couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four. She had soft blue eyes and hadn’t stopped smiling since she walked in. She was bubbly and nodded a lot whenever I said anything. The management at Elegant Affairs must have instructed the girls to ask lots of questions and make the men feel good about themselves and their accomplishments.
“You look like you’re in great shape,” she said. “Do you work out a lot?”
Really? I hadn’t been to a gym in ages and was starting to look as bloated as a body just fished out of the East River.
“Have you read all these books?” she asked as she got up from the sofa and made her way to one of the white built-in bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace.
I hadn’t.
“Yes,” I said.
“Did you take this beautiful picture of the Eiffel Tower?” she asked, pointing to a framed black-and-white photo leaning against the bookcase.
“Karl Lagerfeld took it,” I explained, trying to impress her, which seemed silly, as I was paying her to be there. She was a sure thing. Still, I wanted to be liked. And I liked feeling impressive. “Karl gave it to me as Christmas present a few years ago when I was still living in Paris,” I said. “Turn it around. He wrote a message on the back.”
“That’s so cool,” she said. “I was just there last year. My modeling agent sent me to live there for a couple of months with a few other girls.”
She sat back down on the sofa, held my hand again, and asked if I minded if she smoked some pot. I didn’t mind and even took a hit from the small blown-glass bowl she pulled from her purse. We talked for about forty minutes until she suggested we go into the bedroom. It was close to 12:30 a.m.
“You know what?” I said. “Do you just maybe want to hang out and get stoned and listen to music?”
“Um, sure,” she said. “I need to call the agency and tell them I’m leaving. It’s policy. They need to make sure I’m safe.”
While Chickpea was outside on the back deck checking in with Elegant Affairs, I went to my closet to get another fifteen Vicodin. It was time. Again. When I came back from the kitchen with a glass of water, she was sitting on my bed.
“Does this fireplace work, too?” she asked. “Let’s hang out in here.”
I lit a fire.
She stayed till three a.m. and gave me her number before she left.
“Call me.”
I did the next day. And that night she came over again. I wasn’t sure if she was going to ask for $1,000, but I would have paid if she had. But she didn’t. Nor did she the following night or any other night.
On Friday night of that week, Adam called at around ten p.m. and said he was in the Village and asked me to come meet him and some friends for a drink. Chickpea was over and while I was on the phone asked me to pass her the lighter.
“Who is that?” Adam asked.
“I can’t really talk right now,” I said. “Call me tomorrow.”
He did, first thing in the morning. “Dude,” he said. “Who are you hanging out with?”
I considered just telling him the truth, but didn’t. I could sense that he was already worried about me. I’d been blowing him off for months, as the hold the addiction had on me tightened.
“You know that natural food store on University between 11th and 12th?” I asked. “I met her there.”
I was hoping that would be enough. It wasn’t.
“Go on,” he said.
“We were both standing over the salad bar and I asked her if there was a difference between garbanzo beans and chickpeas. We started talking and I ended up bringing her back to my place.”
It sounded like a bad script idea for some kind of vegan fetish porn. It was scary how easily I could lie to my oldest friend.
“You got laid because of a chickpea,” he said. “That’s awesome!”
From that moment on, whenever I would speak to Adam he would ask if I was still hanging out with Chickpea. And, more often than not, I was.
She would come over—sometimes late at night—and we would talk, smoke, watch TV, order a pizza, and occasionally have sex. I never asked any questions. And neither did she. Neither of us had to give any excuses. Neither of us had to justify anything.
She was a pretender, just like me.
We saw each other two or three nights a week for months.
It felt normal.
Tyson
Mike Tyson sounds so much like Mike Tyson that when someone calls you and says, “It’s Mike Tyson,” you think it’s someone pretending to be Mike Tyson.
“Hi, Dan. It’s Mike Tyson.”
“Bullshit.”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, sorry, Mike Tyson. Nice lisp, by the way.”
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“Wait. Who is this?”
It was Mike Tyson.
He was calling to set up a time for us to meet early the following week to talk about a profile and cover shoot we were doing on him at the magazine. He told me to meet him at the corner of 118th Street and Eighth Avenue at noon on Monday and gave me his cell in case I couldn’t find him.
When the time came a few days later, I couldn’t.
Maybe I wrote down the wrong number, but every time I tried calling him, there was a busy signal. I must have tried a dozen times as I sat in the back of a Town Car on 118th Street. Nothing.
“I guess I’ll just walk around the block an
d see if I can find him,” I told the driver.
“Okay, if you want, but I’d stay close if . . .” he said, pausing mid-sentence. “Actually, you should be fine. I think this neighborhood isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be.”
I should be fine? I thought. That’s just great.
It was far too hot to be searching the streets of Harlem for Mike Tyson, but that’s precisely where I found myself on that unseasonably warm September afternoon. And to make matters worse, I was overdressed. And high. Really high. The handful of Vicodin I’d taken in the car on the way uptown kicked in around the same time I started aimlessly wandering 118th Street trying to find the former heavyweight champion of the world.
By the time I made my way down the block—past a few boarded-up storefronts, a small beauty parlor, and a garage, that, according to the sign outside, fixed flat tires “quick and cheap”—I was soaked in sweat. Two older men sat on the front stoop of one of the buildings smoking cigarettes and listening to a small portable radio. I was wearing a dark gray wool suit I’d had made in London and a silky blue knit tie. Leave it the English to make a summer suit heavier than a midshipman’s pea coat. I had a gelled-up faux hawk, and despite the fact that summer had just come to an end, my skin was pasty.
Normally, I was underdressed for everything. It was my thing. I was just arrogant enough to turn up to a meeting with the CEO of a luxury goods company wearing faded jeans, sneakers, and a V-neck sweater with holes at the elbows. I liked the idea of the fashion community thinking I didn’t care—that I was cool and confident enough to pull off wearing tattered Chuck Taylors to a gala dinner or a well-worn Patagonia fleece pullover in the front row at a Versace runway show in Milan.
The day of my Harlem adventure, however, I felt the need for a little extra polish. I had a print order meeting that morning where I had to present the latest issue of Details to Condé Nast’s famously enigmatic and quirky owner, Si Newhouse, and the rest of the corporate management team. Every Condé editor in chief did this once a month, but I still got nervous for my turn. Despite having the job for a few years, I wasn’t terribly confident in my relationship with Si.
My last feeding had been the night before and I knew that my body would be demanding opiates and on the verge of revolt by the time the print order meeting started at 9:30 a.m. Chickpea barely stirred when the alarm clock sounded at 8:00 a.m. She’d spent the night, as she often did at this point. Her glass bowl was on the nightstand next to her small black purse. While I never looked inside, I always imagined it held an array of condoms, a small bag of pot, and her keys.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a suit,” she said as I emerged from the walk-in closet and headed for the door. Her head was still on the pillow and her eyes were barely visible behind a mop of tousled blond hair. “You look handsome.”
I felt weak. I was craving my morning feeding.
Nothing a $2,000 gray bespoke English two-piece suit couldn’t fix. Either way, I couldn’t show up loaded. These meetings were sobering enough sober. I would definitely have to wait until afterward to get high. This wasn’t an ideal start to the day. I’ve never been a coffee drinker, but I imagine I needed a handful of pills in the morning the way most people needed a latte.
“Don’t talk to me, I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
I knew the feeling.
“Why are you all dressed up?” Si asked as soon as he walked into the room. There was a large round wooden table with six chairs and a blue-and-white-striped sofa. The rubber soles of his shoes dragged against the plush carpet as he walked, making it sound like he was shuffling his feet. He was wearing a pair of tan khakis and a gray sweatshirt with The New Yorker printed in small black letters above his heart.
“I just felt like wearing a suit today,” I said. He shrugged and sat down. I just smiled and put my hands in my pockets, which were loaded with the Vicodin I planned to take after the meeting.
These meetings tended to last less than an hour. Each page of the issue we were about to print was put into an individual plastic sleeve in a large leather book resting on an easel. I would describe the contents on each as I flipped through. Si was a quiet man, but if there was something he didn’t like, he was vocal about it. We were doing some great work at Details. I was present just enough to see to it that we were. Still, I longed for Si’s approval. It must have been obvious.
“Stay back for a second, Dan,” he said after the meeting. Once everybody had left the room, he walked over and put his hands on the leather book, which sat closed on the table in front of us.
“This is great issue,” he said. “You don’t need to convince me of that. Stop worrying about me. I’m not your audience. Focus on making a magazine your audience wants—not one that you think I want.”
It meant more to me than he’d ever know.
He walked out of the room, his shoes rubbing the carpet as he went.
“Excuse me. Would you by any chance know where I could find Mike Tyson?” On my second trip down 118th Street, I decided to stop and ask the men on the stoop if they could help me.
“Follow the birds,” one of the men told me.
It felt like some kind of riddle. Like a Raiders of the Lost Ark clue. Was this code? Maybe they were protecting his privacy, I thought, like I’d heard the residents of Cornish, New Hampshire, used to do when some outsider came to town and asked for J. D. Salinger.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“The pigeons, son,” he said, pointing above my head. “He’s up there on the roof with the pigeons.”
I crossed the street and stood in front of what appeared to be a derelict redbrick building that looked as if it was being held together by the wrought-iron fire escape zigzagging along its facade like a rusty zipper. I could hear the collective flutter of the birds flying overhead.
“Hello!” I yelled toward the roof, six stories above the sidewalk. “Hello! Anyone up there?”
After I called up a few more times, someone came to the ledge. “Dan, is that you?” It was Tyson.
I squinted into the blazing sun, trying to zero in on the source of the famously high-pitched voice above. A feathery cyclone of pigeons whirled over his head like some Hitchcockian nightmare. It was mesmerizing. Hypnotic, almost. It made me dizzy.
“Yes,” I called back. “Where do I go? How do I get up there?”
He didn’t respond. I figured maybe he didn’t hear me.
“How do I get up there?” I shouted once more.
From where I was standing, it appeared that Tyson was dangerously close to the edge of the roof. It took everything I had to stop myself from yelling, “Hey, Mike Tyson, please be careful or you might get hurt.”
Tyson, meanwhile, thought it might be a good idea to welcome me to the neighborhood. “Look, everyone,’’ he yelled from the roof, “there’s a white man up here.”
Maybe this was payback for the whole “nice lisp” thing. I’d read somewhere that he got his start fighting when he was a boy by beating up neighborhood kids who made fun of his voice.
“Very funny,” I said.
He’s just fucking with me, right? I thought.
The fifteen Vicodin I’d taken in the car were now in full effect. I was feeling no pain, and for a brief moment began to wonder if I could actually take a punch from Mike Tyson.
“Don’t be such a pussy,” he said. “I’m sending Jimmy to get you.”
I’m not sure if it was the heat or the pills or both, but by the time the door to the building was flung open a few minutes later, I was swaying back and forth like a rabbinical student at the Wailing Wall. The man standing in front of me appeared as run-down as the building he just stepped out of. He was missing a few important teeth and was rail-thin—his Just Do It Nike T-shirt was huge and hung on his frame like a sheet on a clothesline. We stood there studying each other.
Yo, Mike, there’s a junkie down here on the sidewalk, man, I thought about yelling toward the roof.
/> “You Dan?” the man asked. It was Jimmy. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t speak much as we slowly climbed six flights of alarmingly creaky stairs. It was hot and dark, and I was sure that one of my size 11, shiny black cap-toe Church’s shoes was going to bust right through one of the stairs and I was going to plunge into the building’s basement.
This isn’t going to end well, I thought. What am I doing here?
I was there at the suggestion of Tyson’s publicist. She called me a few weeks before to ask me if I wouldn’t mind meeting Mike in person and spending some time with him.
“I think it would be good for him,” she said. “He needs a positive influence in his life. He had a great relationship with John Kennedy Jr., and I think he needs people like that around him. Someone like you.”
Done.
Nothing fluffs a fragile ego quite like being compared to John Kennedy Jr. I’d been bullshitting everyone for years at this point. Surely I could convince a train wreck like Mike Tyson that I was a stable and guiding presence.
Light poured in from the open door as Jimmy and I made our way up the final flight of stairs. The entire roof was a Jackson Pollock canvas of bird shit. There was a coop built of plywood and chicken wire toward the center. Tyson was wearing shorts and a white T-shirt. He was heavier than I thought he’d be, but who was I to judge—I’d been bulking up a bit myself. I walked over to say hello. He smiled as he came toward me.
The last time I’d seen Mike Tyson in person, he wasn’t smiling. It was the summer of 1989. I was seventeen and about to head off for my freshman year at NYU, when I saw him fight Carl “The Truth” Williams in Atlantic City. It was the first time I’d ever been to a professional fight. My stepfather, Jerry, got tickets and took the whole family. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
The fight was held in Boardwalk Hall just next to the Trump Hotel where we were staying. I felt like an extra in a big Hollywood production. There were tan fat men in tuxedoes chomping on cigars, with bosomy women in shimmering slinky dresses on their arms. There was a man walking around talking on a cell phone—I’d only ever seen one in a movie—the size of a baguette. LeRoy Neiman, with his giant mustache and slicked-backed hair, was up front talking to a guy in a fedora. Don King was there. So was Donald Trump. Both men easily identifiable from twenty rows back by their hair.
