Back in the 1970s crime and arson had depopulated the Lower East Side. Rebellious young white people fled their suburban hometowns to find freedom in the East Village. I escaped Boston in a stolen car and my hillbilly girlfriend joined me from West Virginia in Spring of 1977. Her best friend, was another scrawny brunette from Louisiana. Mine was Anthony a photographer from Long Island. We didn’t go out on double dates, since the southern fame-seeker lived with a film maker in a Chinatown loft.
My girlfriend, Alice, was funny and pretty. She looked like Shirley MacLaine in THE APARTMENT. I tried to be faithful, but working at a punk nightclub, I ended up being a philanderer like Fred McMurray, te villain of that him. I pretended that she didn’t notice the perfume and lipstick on my shirts. The best lies are those we tell ourselves.
With the coming of warm weather in 1978 Susan and Alice decided to run a movie night atop the four-story building on Chrystie Street. The evening featured FROM HELL IT CAME and TWO THOUSAND MANIACS. I thought that the event would be a flop, but the two women attracted men like snakes to a hot rock, plus entry and popcorn was free with cans of Schlitz $1 each.
Her foppish emcee David dressed like a carney barker and welcomed each guest with a biting diatribe.
“And here’s Steven Kramer with a fabulous movie star.”
The albino blonde was the darling of the B movie set and he played naked with his band the Wallets.
By show time over a hundred people were crowded onto the roof of Tom’s loft. They represented the high society at the downtown art scene and drank with an abandon reserved for an Irish wake. <>FROM HELL IT CAME was screened against the back of billboard on the neighboring building white-washed wall.
It was like a drive-in without cars.
Pithe comments and screams enlivened the night as the scrawny brunette and Alice dressing as vampish zombies for the occasion. David kept up a running commentary over the movie’s dialogue. He was very funny. After THE END Tom spun records for the crowd. My pseudo-sister Kim danced with her beau Amos to James Brown’s SEX MACHINE and Alice pranced across the tarred roof with the scrawny brunette. This was their evening and I sulked against the wall with Anthony, who said, “Let them have their fun.”
“Why not?” I grabbed another two beers and dropped $2 in the donation bucket.
Handing Anthony a beer I noticed a round-headed man get up on the retaining wall.
It was Steven Kramer.
.
He danced on the narrow wall. The roof law in front of him. Behind a thirty-foot drop. Anthony looked at me and I grabbed him off his perch.
“Leave me alone. I do this all the time.” The man looked a little like a thin Orson Welles.
“Stay off the wall.” I like his band The Wallets. They were a fun, but Steven’s dancing on the edge of the abyss was not my idea of fun.
Alice came over to join us. Her hazel hair was damp around her angelic face and skin glowed with breathlessness. The evening was a big success. Se whispered that my friend Klaus had agreed to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, another one of her and the scrawny brnette's projects. The B52s and Blondie were scheduled to headline the event. I was going to be security with Anthony.
Tom segued from Sly’s SEX MACHINE to Otis Reading’S SATISFACTION. The roof wavered under the feet of the dancers. New York spread beyond this building, but this moment had become the center of our universe and that cosmos shrunk the moment Steven got back up on the wall. He was drunker than before and Alice said to Anthony, “He’s going to fall.”
Her last word nudge him over the brink and he disappeared from sight.
None of us heard the thud of his body's impact.
“Damn.”
Anthony, Alice, and I rushed to the wall.
Down below a man was sprawled facedown on the roof. His leg was twisted away from his body.
Blood pooled around his head.
A woman screamed.
It was her wife.
The blonde actress.
She hit hysteria quick.
The emcee joined us as did Tom.
“Shit.”
This wasn’t good.
“Call the police,” I told Tom.
“What are you going to do?” Alice asked shivering with fright.
“I’m going to help him.” I wasn’t a hero, but there was a chance the fallen man might drowned in his blood.
The scaffolding behind the billboard was six feet from the roof. I had leapt nineteen feet to win a AAU meet in Boston. That had been eight years ago. Six feet should still be within my reach.
“I’m coming with you.” David stood beside me. He was wearing white bucks. They had good traction. “He’s my friend.”
“I’ll go first.”
I ran across the roof and leaped in the air. My hands caught hold of the struts and swung onto a plank of wood, then stretched out my hand to David.
He might have been a little timid in real life, but he fearlessly flew across the gap between safety and danger. I caught his arm and he said, “Thanks.”
We had an audience and above the applause Steven’s wife screame like a pig with an electric prod up its ass. David regarded me and said, “Women.”
Ww descended to the roof and hurried to Steven.
“Damn.” David hugged himself to fight off his queasiness. His friend was fucked up.
Steven’s face was flatter than Kansas. Blood blocked his breathing. Sirens neared Chinatown. EMS knew how to handle this, but they wouldn’t be here fast enough.
We crouched over Steven.
He breathed bubbles into his blood.
“Steven, can you hear me. It’s David.”
A painful grunt was his answer.
“We can’t leave him like this or else he’ll drown.” My paternal grandfather had been a surgeon in WWI. I had read his medical books. “Steven, can you move your feet?”
That got a feeble wiggle from him.
“His back isn’t broken, so we have to turn him over to keep from suffocating in his blood.” I wasn’t asking, but telling and David nodded before grabbing hold on his friend’s crimson-stained shirt.
“One, two, three.”
The two of us turned Steven onto his back.
“Steven, move your feet,” David begged with tears in his eyes.
The organist obeyed the command. He twitched his toes with a groan, then swooned into unconsciousness.
Flashing lights splattered against the walls. The FD and PD were here.
A woman screamed above.
The movie starlet. Steven’s wife.
“Do you need anything?” Anthony yelled from Tom’s roof.
I looked at David.
“Beer?”
He nodded in agreement.
“Two beers and tell that woman to shut her hole.”
A minute later the police took control of the scene.
The firemen strapped Steven to a gurney.
EMS said he would live.
David and I climbed up the billboard back to the roof. Tom and the scrawny brunette were relieved to not have a death on their hands. Anthony and I drank more beer.
Alice wasn’t much of a drinker and never said anything about Steven’s fall. Monster Movie Club became a monthly event at Club 57 and New Wave Vaudeville was a big success for everyone, but I was banned from the shows, since I fought with the band members of Blondie. They were even more of an asshole than me.
Alice and I broke up at the end of 1979.
I was at fault for not knowing what I had.
I ran into Steven Kramer several times. He stared at me with distrust. He couldn’t place me in his universe.
One night at the Mudd Club he hobbled up to me. The fall had been bad enough that Steven resembled more Truman Capote than Orson Welles, mostly because he never gained Orson’s weight.
“I know you from someplace.”
“No, not really.”
“No, I want to know.”
I refused to answer him, but he grabbed my leather jacket and repeated, “I want to know.”
“I was the person who turned you on my back.”
He looked in my face and walked back to his wife without a backward glance.
I related the story to Anthony.
“Just goes to show you that all good deeds will go to be punished.”
And that’s the damned truth.
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