New York City in 1978 was $5 short of bankruptcy. The president told the mayor to tough it out. Budgets were slashed from every department and the embattled city turned for the worse. Arsonists torched the Bronx for fun and profit. Thousands of cars were stripped to the metal in Brooklyn. Harlem emergency wards were overwhelmed by shooting victims, while heroin ODs became the leading cause of teenager death for Queens. When Staten Island announced a referendum to secede from the city, no one accused the distant borough of treason, because the worst was yet to come.
Manhattan seemed immune to the decay ravishing the outer boroughs. Tourists visited the Empire State Building, executives dined at the Four Seasons, and matrons flocked to Sak’s Fifth Avenue. Those bastions of normalcy were patrolled by squad cars and foot patrols. The East Village was not so lucky.
The overstretched 9th precinct tiraged the streets beyond 1st Avenue. No patrols ventured farther than Tompkins Square Park. Shooting galleries outnumbered bodegas and hordes of thieves fearlessly prowled their new-won turf for victims. Nobody honest could survive in a neighborhood more burnt-out than a junkie’s vein and families of all races, colors, and creeds fled the outlaw DMZ for the suburbs.
City politicians launched countless projects to stem the tide of refugees. None of the abbreviated programs were a success and the Lower East Side’s population shrivelled from 120,000 to 60,000. It never hit zero, because the rent was cheap, the area was close to the subways, and no cops meant the East Village was freer than anywhere else in America. This last feature proved irresistible to those malcontents disenchanted with the GOP’s War on Crime and Poles, gays, drifters, artists, and addicts reversed the flow from the smouldering desolation.
Stutterers read poetry without ridicule. Bums squatted derelict buildings. Teenager girls denied cheerleader destinies were offered opiated dreams at go-go bars. Poets wrote verse with spray cans. Moviemakers filmed bad stories as art. Everyone was an artist, especially the derelict begging contributions to his research into intoxication.
“Save the winos.”
I toyed with the idea of moving out of my SRO hotel on East 11th Street, but couldn’t forget my Irish grandmother saying, “Better a shack on 5th Avenue than a mansion in Hell’s Kitchen.”
My hillbilly girlfriend had just finished college in Ohio. Her family was from West Virginia. She hated everything about the suburbs. Lying on my bed Alice held up a New York Dolls Album cover. The band stood in front of the Gem Spa and she said, “I want to live there.”
I put up no argument. My room was too small for the two of us.
Within a week Alice found a one-bedroom apartment on East 10th Street. The rent was $180 a month. The wooden floors leaned downhill and a tub rusted opposite the gas stove in the kitchen. Cockroaches brazenly crawl across the mattress. Whenever they crept onto our face, Alice screamed in high C and I flailed with open palms. Nothing could kill them. Not RAID, not poison, not prayers, but the rear windows looked over an alley filled with trees.
Birds sang during the day and lovesick cats crooned at night. Alice called it ‘the park’. She had a good sense of humor and looked a lot like Shirley MacLaine. Her gold-flecked eyes were different colors and her skin was whiter than skimmed milk. She didn’t drink or smoke weed or do drugs, but during her orgasms Alice cried out ‘god’. Later I discovered her divine evocation was derived more from strength of her climax rather than in the appreciation of my sexual ardor.
We were in love with each other and the East Village.
Punk rock was our opera. CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City served as its La Scalas. Graffiti transformed trains, walls, and trucks in mini-Guggenheims. The basketball court in Tompkins Square Park was my Madison Square Garden. Our friends were either geniuses or mad depending on the dosage. We lived the night by a moral code erased every dawn, however when Blondie hit the AM charts, every loser east of the Bowery discarded their vow of poverty to claim fame and fortune as a birthright.
Alice answered TV casting calls for ingénue roles. A pianist friend played with a funk band, angling to be the next KC. My upstairs neighbor starred in a biker movie and I recited detective poems to co-eds in local dives. I was convinced that I was a modern Henry Miller. The Tonight Show was bound to book us as the stars of tomorrow. Someone only had to give them our phone number.
An Upper East Side photographer asked me to write a photo-roman about a sadistic kidnapping. I cast Klaus Sperber as the black leather villain. The Gothic singer was the daytime pastry chef at Serendipity 3, a swishy ice cream shop of East 60th Street. Upon meeting Klaus at the Kiev Coffee Shop, the photographer was smitten by his ghostly gaunt face.
“You were made for the camera.” Anthony focused the camera.
“My voice was made for the opera.” Klaus loved to perform forgotten castrati role.
“Too bad this isn’t a movie.” Anthony started snapping pictures.
“I can always pretend.” Klaus grimaced with a toothy smile stolen from Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD. The native of Essen, Germany pursed his black-painted lip and cooed, “Who is the leading man?”
“No one yet.” Anthony’s eye hadn’t left the viewfinder.
“What about him?” Klaus displayed natural lack of stage fright from his years of training to sing a castrato opera.
“He’s a little brutish.” Anthony swung the camera to me and focused the lens.
“Like a caveman.” My working name at Serendipity 3 had been Pebbles.
“I’m not an actor.” I trembled during my poetry readings like LA in an earthquake.
“You don’t have to act. All you have to do is pose.” Anthony swung his camera to the entrance.
The second coming of Veronica Lake entered the diner. Every man at the counter followed the click of her stiletto heels. The knee-length black skirt was slit to her upper thigh and her red polka-dot shirt was unbuttoned to her navel. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Neither is Clover.” Anthony invited her to sit down. “We met at Club 82.”
“I like dancing.” Clover pushed a sheet of blonde hair from her face.
“You should be a model.” Anthony was always searching for a muse.
“I’m too short.” Clover sighed, as if she had heard that line a thousand times. “Plus I don’t have the time.”
“Shame.” Anthony lifted his Leica. Clover didn’t have to pose. She dropped her head and the curtain of hair covered half an eye. “Are you the hero?”
“Yes.” There was no saying no.
“Good. I like men rough.” Her voice slurred this preference with a sultry surrender.
“He’s also the writer.”
“Writer.” The 19 year-old arched an eyebrow. She was an actress.
“But I haven’t written the story.”
“No need. The story writes itself. It’s about the three of you.” Anthony pressed the shutter button. The camera swivelled from Klaus to Clover to me. The camera clicked open and shut like a robot trying to wake up from a long recharge. “We can make it up as we go.”
Improvisation was easy with Klaus and Clover. I built a story around his kidnapping her character to finance an opera. My girlfriend accused me of having an affair.
I wished Alice were right, except Clover slept with men for money. One night at $1000 was out of my price range and I had to be satisfied with pretending that I was sleeping with her. Alice was not pleased with the illusion and neither was I.
Our last scene was on 42nd Street.
After midnight Times Square was awash with wickedness. Anthony had arranged a shoot in a XXX shop. He set up his tripod before the open doors of a porno booth. The voyeurs watched us for free. Clover wanted their quarters. Behind us an 8mm loop repeated the ravishing of a young blonde by an older man.
When I imitated the on-screen action, Clover whispered, “On my 14th birthday the oilman raped me. He bought my parents a new house. He’s been taking care of me ever since. You ever rape anyone?”
“No.” I was a soldier of the Sexual Revolution. We raped no one.
“Think you could? If it was me?” Five years as the oilman’s mistress had created a special game for Clover and she teasingly opened the booth. “If it was a game?”
“No.” I snatched at her arm.
“Too bad.” She pushed open the door and the camera strobe caught our struggle.
The voyeurs called for more. Clover was an expert at faking the real. We posed on 42nd Street with the pimps, whores, and dealers. The shoot wrapped past 3am. My girlfriend was waiting in bed, but I accompanied everyone to the Kiev diner for a late-night breakfast, where Antony showed us a series of grainy black & white shots. Klaus’ skeletal sneers portrayed a Nazi malevolence in the over-stylistic pictures. Clover and I looked like stars.
“Anyone ever tell you look like Josef Goebbels?” Our teenage starlet asked with the ambition of turning a gay man straight.
“I am not his illegitimate son.” Klaus’ leather jacket and close-cropped hair heightened his resemblance to Hitler’s Propaganda Minister.
“The resemblance is uncanny.” Clover sieg-heiled with a laugh.
“My father disappeared on the Russian front. He was no war criminal.”
“Es tut mir lied fur dich.” I apologized in my high school German.
“Fur was? You all think we are Nazis.” His face warped with a misogynistic smirk aimed at Clover.
“I love hearing you speak German.” Clover was speaking to Klaus.”
“You have a Nazi fetish, nicht war?”
“No, I have this dream to rip-off my oilman and flee to Berlin. East Berlin.” She shut her eyes. “Away from all this.”
“She’s so dramatic.” Klaus was enthralled by her performance and I whispered a dirty German phrase in her ear. A floating hand wandered my thigh. Her apartment was only around the corner. The waitress brought the check, as a young black boy with a Rasta ragtop entered the diner. Klaus asked him to join us. “This is Jean Michel. He’s a graffiti artist.”
“Maybe you’ve seen my work around town. Samo.” He positioned a tape recorder on the table. The other diners were watched his every move with interest. I couldn’t figure out why. He was just a kid. “Turn off the tape recorder.”
“Andy Warhol records his phone conversations.” Jean-Michel sounded like a devotee to the Pop Messiah. “I decided to tape real life.”
“Warhol’s a has-been!” No icon was sacred to a punk.
“You’re jealous, because he’s a genius!” Klaus leaned forward to the tape recorder like Warhol might listen to this conversation.
“Genius.” Warhol only manipulated the desire for fame.
“And so is Jean-Michel!” Klaus harbored a soft spot for pretty boys.
“All he does is spray-paints walls.” The young painter’s enigmatic messages stretched along the crumbling walls of the Lower East Side. His audience was mostly junkies, although my girlfriend found his paintings clever.
“I’ve seen your paintings.” Clover admitted with interest. “They’re weird.”
“More crazy than weird.” His voice shrank to a Thorazine whisper.
“Craziness has its own genus.” I had witnessed its beauty. “In my last year of university I was living in a commune with an engineer from Bose Speakers, his wife, and their family. The girls were wild. My affair with the 17 year-old didn’t last long, but I didn’t move out either. One afternoon I entered the house to find water flowing down the walls. In the upstairs bathroom the teenager stood naked in an overflowing bathtub and her hand madly scrambled over the wall writing a fuck poem. I would have joined her, except her mother and stepfather entered the bathroom.”
“They probably thought you wanted more than a bath.” Klaus squirmed with sexual sarcasm.
“That’s what it looked like, but they recognized she was mad. We brought her to the hospital. The doctors medicated her and the family erased the poems. I told them it was a sacrilege. They ordered me out of the house.”
”You don’t remember any, do you?” Clover hushed with a voyeur’s envy.
“I pray for my tongue to grow thick so I can lick myself, while you fill me.” Nothing in Times Square’s XXX shops approached the lucidity of her blue prose. “When she was released from the madhouse, her mind was blank for months. She got better later.”
“I spent several months in the hospital. They had drugs to quiet the voices in my mind. Now I carry this waiting for them to speak again.” Jean-Michel held up his tape recorder. “You have other stories?”
“Shut it off.” My words were meant to be thrown away.
“I’m doing this for Art.”
“Warhol said Art is a good name for a man.” It was the only Warhol quote I knew and I reached to flick off the tape recorder.
“Don’t touch my shit!” Jean-Michel whipped out a switchblade. The blade was about eight inches long. My hand slapped the knife out of his hand. It clattered on the table. Jean-Michel asked with wet eyes, “Why did you do that?”
“I told you to shut it off.”
“I only wanted to hear your voice.” The nappy-haired teenager ran from the diner. Clover chased him with the tape recorder. Anthony followed her exit. His Leica snapped off shots. I picked up the switchblade.
“Jean-Michel is going to be famous and you act like ein Assloch.” Klaus was spitting mad.
“One of the great things about good manners is knowing when not to use them.” I stated like the words could right my wrong.
“If you think violence is good manners, then you’re crazier than him!” The German stormed out of the diner. His accusation stung with the accuracy of the truth and I rewound the scene with Jean-Michel a hundred times on the walk to East 10th Street. From every angle my actions were tainted with a negative light.
I entered my apartment with larcenous stealth, but my girlfriend lay awake on the couch.
“Why are you so late?” Her arms were folded over her chest.
I told Alice about the scene with Jean-Michel. She agreed with Klaus and I intended on apologizing to Jean-Michel. After all he was only a kid.
Several nights later he attended a performance of my one-act play about homosexual cannibalism. The crowd’s laughter surpassed my expectations for THE HUNGER THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME. Afterwards Jean-Michel was at the bar by himself. He frowned for a second seeing me coming. I lifted my hands to show I was sorry.
“I want to apologize about the other night.” I humbly gave back his switchblade. “I get a little crazy sometimes. I don’t know why.”
“I understand crazy. No bad feelings.” Jean-Michel smiled with satisfaction. “I liked your play. It was funny. It should be on Broadway.”
“I have to blow it out another seventy minutes for three acts.”
“That’s a lot of time for the audience to chew on people-eating. Maybe you should write something new. Andy said I should concentrate on turning these into paintings.” He pulled out a sheaf of drawings out of a leather bag. “What do you think?”
His work combined the simple finger-paintings of autistic children with Asmat headhunters’ tribalism. No other painter in the East Village approached his multi-level skills. “Your mentor is right. You should forget the subway paintings and pursue this.”
“Thanks for the advice.” He went off to speak with my girlfriend. Their conversation provided a diversion to visit Clover. Her apartment was less than a minute’s walk away. I ran it in twenty seconds.
A painting was on her door. The oil was wet. The style was unmistakable. Clover opened the door. Her hair was tousled and the bed was unmade. A Chinese silk robe hung off her shoulder.
“Do you like the painting? Jean-Michel did it this afternoon.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
“He paid with this painting.” Her hands clutched at the robe, as if to indicate I had nothing equal to offer. “You know I don’t do it for free, unless someone takes it. Are you willing to fight me for it?”
The bathrobe fell to the floor and I threw the naked blonde on the bed. She slashed at my face with her nails. A knee fiercely thumped into my upper thigh. I almost gave up, but Clover grabbed my arms. “Don’t stop. Not now.”
There was no penetration, only domination. She called me daddy. Other men had played this role. I was not an apparition of the man in her mind and rose from the bed. I was many things, but not a rapist.
“Sorry, I can’t do it this way.”
“Sorry, I’m more disappointed. You’re not who you think you are.” She pulled on her bathrobe. “I thought you were violent. It’s only a show.”
“Sorry.”
“Weakling.” Her pout dated from childhood.
“I guess so.” I had to get to the club. “But I can live with that.”
I went to the door. She threw an empty perfume bottle at my head. It broke and splattered Chanel on my leather jacket. The scent was strong, but I figured the cigarette smoke in the club would cover it.
Rain drenched the sidewalks of St. Mark’s Place. I checked my face in a car mirror. There were no scratches and I entered the basement. Alice was at the bar with Jean-Michel.
“I’m playing at the Mudd Club. I’ll put you on the list.”
“Plus 1.” Her smile belonged on a girl who had jumped out of a cake to discover it was her birthday. I didn’t see the attraction, but then I was a straight man.
“Your boyfriend can get in for free.”
“Yeah.” I knew the doorman.
“I can’t wait.”
Jean-Michel walked us home to East 10th Street. At the steps he gave my girlfriend a drawing.
“Keep it. One day it might pay your rent.”
“You’re not jealous, are you?” My girlfriend asked, as she showered in the bathtub.
“Jealous of what? He’s a painter. I’m a writer. You’re living with me. What else could I ask for in life?”
After sex I lay in bed answering that question. My upstairs neighbor’s movie had been released in New York. Strangers asked for his autograph. Jean-Michel’s paintings were bought by Andy Warhol. Alice had scheduled Klaus to appear at Irving Plaza. Nobody famous knew my name.
In the morning the willows in the alley bent slightly with a wisp of a breeze. I sat at the kitchen table, typing a paragraph for each shot of the photo-roman. The future materialized with every word. Alice entered the kitchen, putting on her coat.
“I have to get out of here before that typing drives me crazy.”
“I can stop.” Anthony wanted the accompanying prose, so we could shoot an ending.
“No, you have to finish that. I’ll see you later.” Alice kissed me on the cheek. She was wearing make-up and perfume. It wasn’t for me. The door closed before I could ask any questions.
Three minutes later the telephone rang. It was Anthony.
“We have to cancel today’s session. Art Forum had hired me for a session with Jean-Michel.”
“Great.”
“You’re not angry, are you?”
“No, you should pass up this opportunity.”
“We’ll finish the photo-roman tomorrow night.”
“I’ll tell Clover.” Her feigned struggle was trapped in my head. She liked businessmen. I dressed in a pinstriped suit, a black shirt with a silver tie, and pointy shoe black suede shoes. I’d pound on her door. She’d open up. Drawn curtains would provide the cover of night. The rest of the scene was financed by the $100 in my wallet.
The sky was cloudless over 1st Avenue. I climbed the stairs to her flat. The door was gone and a suitcase was on the living floor.
“I’m leaving for Berlin.” Clover held an airline ticket. “An art dealer bought Jean-Michel’s door for $10,000.”
“You’re joking.” I had never seen that much money in my life.
“”I thought he was, but he paid me in cash.”
“What about the photo-roman?”
“Ask your girlfriend to help you. With a wig she could pass for me.” A horn blew on the street. “That’s my taxi.”
The star of my photo-roman vanished after a kiss on the lips.
Alice refused to stand-in for Clover. She went to see Jean-Michel’s band. They played out of time. The crowd loved them. I reviewed the shots with the photographer. We had enough to cover the storyline. A Hamptons gallery was offering a show. My girlfriend was my date. The guests demanded to meet the girl in the photos. None of them read my text. Only five photos were sold. I stored the rest under my bed.
My girlfriend spent more time at her club than our apartment. Jean-Michel played the basement twice. She hung out with his artist friends. On a night of feminist comedy I heckled a lesbian icon. Their boos were stilled by my country-western poem about a man leaving a woman for good. Despite the man-haters’ applause Alice argued that I had ruined the night. The sofa became my bed.
A punk disco hired me to work security. The Damned, Ramones, and Klaus performed on stage. I started an affair with a model from Buffalo. Our first sex was orchestrated by a bodiless porno director. Each time I attempted to leave, she begged for more. My body and mind was weak. I gave more, however the guilt prevented my spending the night.
It was already 4AM. The Lexington Line ran empty. St. Mark’s was deserted. Only a few pot dealers stood on my corner. I opened the apartment door with a litany of prepared excuses. Alice was not alone. Jean-Michel sat at the kitchen table. A stick-figure nude had been painted on the refrigerator. My girlfriend was fully clothed, but her eyes couldn’t meet mine.
“What are you doing?” I tried hard not to sound hypocritical.
“Painting a picture.” He wrote ‘three-eared cat’ with a magic marker. The Whitney had asked him to enter in their next biennial. This success bestowed a power over women. They fell into bed with him. Ours showed no sign of lovemaking. I had either been too early or too late. Either way I knew how to take my revenge. I told him to leave.
Alice’s sleeping in the bed and my on the sofa was his fault. The next night I stayed with the model from Buffalo. I returned to an empty apartment. My girlfriend had moved to a friend’s loft. The women in the East Village pilloried my betrayal, for they considered any model was as shallow as an evaporation stain on tenement roof.
I tried to prove them wrong. Lisa shared my apartment. We went to England together. We stayed at a studio behind the Chelsea football pitch. She visited various photographers, while I wrote a screenplay about a homosexual falling in love with a fat woman. We should have been happy, except London in the autumn was closer to a Soviet slum than capitol of the British Empire and the tiny car engines on the Fulham Road were maddeningly mosquitoes at night.
Lisa suggested a return to New York would cure my insomnia. She stayed a month longer. We celebrated Christmas at her parents in Buffalo. She gave me a leather coat from a Soho thrift store. I bought her gold earrings. New Year’s Eve was spent dancing at Studio 54. It was our last happy time.
To jumpstart her career her booker arranged dates with famous men. Movie stars called for dates. These disco excursions got her pictures in the newspaper.
An agency invited Lisa to Paris. She said she would call everyday.
Within a week she stopped answering the phone. I wrote scores of letters to her agency. They went unanswered and drugs softened my descent from grace.
Jean-Michel appeared on TV and magazine covers. His earnings for a painting approached the ten of thousands. By 1981 the figure added a zero. Alice acted in several movies. My upstairs neighbor was nominated for an Oscar. Klaus sang with David Bowie. His masochistic antics in gay backrooms of the West Village caused as much a sensation as his castrato’s performance of Lou Christie’s hit LIGHTNING STRIKES AGAIN.
Clover sent a postcard from East Germany. She was living with a commissar who resembled an older me with more scars.
My evenings were spent as a doorman at an after-hours club. Our investor was a Russian counterfeiter. He said his girlfriend was from Buffalo. They had met in Milan. Lisa walked into the Continental on opening night to round out the coincidence.
I had the DJ play Human League’s DON’T YOU LOVE ME every time she walked through the door. Lisa never seemed to notice. I refrained from asking her reason for leaving. It was obvious she had found a better deal.
The club’s clientele were faces from the movies, voices on LPs, and bodies from Vogue. Photos were forbidden, since rock stars puking on their shoes and cover girls making out with balding millionaires were ugly images in the light of day. I was lucky to wake before sunset.
Arthur, the owner, bribed the precinct cops every week. They never counted how much money it cost for the Continental stay open till dawn. Every insane incident was written into my journal. The editor from Heavy Metal said it would make a great book. I never changed the names to protect the innocent or the guilty.
One night the Russian investor ODed on heroin in the bathroom. Letting him die would have been so easy, but I revived him thinking Lisa would thank me. She was at the bar with Jean-Michel. He had ordered Moet.
“Whatever happened to that photo-roman with Klaus?” Jean-Michel was struggling with the cork.
“The exhibition was a flop. We only sold a couple. One of the pictures is on my wall. Visitors to my apartment loved the photo of Clover and you walking down 42nd Street.
“And you have my painting on your refrigerator.”
“I never saw it.” Lisa had arrived at East 10th Street too late.
“You got rid of it.” Jean-Michel thought I sold his artwork.
“I tried to chop ice out of the
