Rome wasn't burnt in a day. - James Steele
After the Fall of Vietnam, New York City teetered toward bankruptcy during America's post-war economic stagnation. On Oct. 29, 1975, the Daily News splashed the headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, after the GOP president refused to bail out Democratic New York. The Mayor Abraham "Abe" Beame, slashed the city budget to the bone and city collapsed into ruins rivaling Rome after the Huns pillaged the Eternal City.
Subways broke down from lack of repair. Muggers ruled the streets and roamed parks after dark. The landlord’s arsonists torched the Bronx and Lower East Side for fun and profit. Shooting victims overwhelmed Harlem emergency ward. Heroin ODs became Queen’s leading cause of teenager death. Staten Island announced a referendum to secede from Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. No one living in New York accused the distant borough of treason, because the worst seemed yet to come.
Some parts of Manhattan were immune to the decay. Tourists safely visited the Empire State Building and rode the boats to Statue of Liberty. Executives dined for lunch at the Four Seasons and uptown women shopped for luxury items at Sak's on Fifth Avenue, because extra squad cars and flatfoots patrolled the Upper East Side. The East Village and the Bronx were not so lucky.
The crime rate in Lausida or the LOwer Easts Side overstretched 9th precinct triaged the streets beyond 1st Avenue. The NYPD’s motto ‘To Serve and protect’ rarely ventured farther than the western border of Tompkins Square Park. Shooting galleries outnumbered bodegas in Alphabet City and hordes of thieves fearlessly prowled their newly won turf for hapless victims. The neighborhood was more burnt-out than a junkie's vein and families of all races, colors, and creeds fled the DMZ for the suburbs.
City politicians launched countless projects to stem the tide of 'white flight'. None of the high-minded programs achieved their goals and the population of the Lower East Side shriveled to 41,000, never hitting zero, because cheap rents, proximity to the subways, and minimal police presence proved irresistible to malcontents disenchanted with the morality of the Silent Majority of their native suburbs and a diverse gathering of gays, drifters, artists, musicians, and addicts reversed the exodus from the smoldering desolation.
Soon stutterers read poetry without ridicule to NYU coeds. Bums and punks squatted derelict buildings without fear of eviction notices from landlords. Teenager girls denied cheerleader destinies danced opiated ballerina gigs at sordid go-go bars. Graffiti artists spray-painted heaven on toppled tenement walls. Hell reincarnated itself without any artistic encouragement. One Bowery drunk was infected by the change in the neighborhood and begged contributions to his research into intoxication.
"Save the winos."
In the winter of 1977 I moved from Boston to live in a SRO hotel on East 11th Street. Off 5th Avenue. I had come to be with a young artist. Rose left that afternoon for Paris. To study art at Beaux Arts. I stayed and ended up in a single room with a linoleum floor and a sagging bed. A shared shower in the hallway. Horrible, but on a good street, following the words of my Irish grandmother.
"Better a shack on 5th Avenue than a mansion in Hell's Kitchen."
That spring my hillbilly girlfriend from West Virginia finished her last semester as an off-Broadway actress for a liberal college in Ohio. I romantically imagined her home as a trailer up a dead-end hollow. Her father was a lawyer and flew prop planes around the Mountaineer State. They lived in the suburbs. Alice wasn’t white trash. Only her accent sold that illusion.
After two weeks in a split-level ranch house in Charleston, West Virginia, the twenty-one year-old flew back to the city and moved into my SRO hotel. One small room, a full bed, linoleum floors, and a shared bathroom.
The good-humored actress resembled Shirley MacLaine, whom I had loved since her starring role as an executive’s mistress in Billy Wilder’s THE APARTMENT. I was Jack Lemmon’s sad-sack employee, whose boss used his apartment to have sex with the young elevator operator. He loved her too.
Alice’s eyes had different colors, due to heterochromia. Her skin was whiter than skim milk. She drank whiskey and smoked a little weed. No saint. No sinner either. During her orgasms, she cried out ‘god'. I later discovered her divine evocation came more from strength of her climax than appreciation of my sexual ardor.
At twenty-five, I had no intention of returning to Boston to teach school. We spent our nights at CBGBs on the Bowery. We were almost happy, but time to move was always on our minds.
“I want to make New York my home, but not here.” Alice said that often. I thought the same thing. The question was where.
As she lay on the SRO's single bed, she held up the New York Dolls' 1973 album. One of her few possessions to make the trip from West Virginia. On the LP’s back cover, the band posed in front of the Gem Spa, and she said, "I want to live there."
I offered no argument. The bed and room were too small for the two of us. Plus everyone we knew or wanted to be livied in the East Village.
Within a week Alice found a one-bedroom apartment on East 10th Street. The rent was $180 a month. We signed the lease from Jerome Goldman and moved east to an apartment with creaky wooden floors slanting east, and a tub lay opposite the gas stove in the kitchen.
A tenement railroad flat, but the rear windows overlooked an alley with a huge willow tree. Birds sang on the hanging limbs. Alice nicknamed the alley 'the park'.
I put my Corona Classic 12 typewriter on the table. My fingers usually ran riot over the keyboard. Somehow I would conquer my dyslexia. We were living a novel. We were in love. We were home in the East Village.
Punk rock was our opera. CBGBs and Max's Kansas City were our La Scalas. The basketball court in Tompkins Square Park was my Madison Square Garden. Our friends were either geniuses or mad fools depending on the dosage of their meds or narcotics. My writing was a testament to my dyslexia. Only comprehensible to me.
We lived the night by a moral code erased every dawn. No one cared about money, however when Blondie hit the AM charts, every loser east of the Bowery discarded their vow of poverty to seek fame and fortune.
Alice answered soap opera casting calls for ingénue roles. A pianist friend played with a funk band, angling to be the next KC AND THE SUNSHINE BAND. My upstairs neighbor starred in a biker movie. I recited detective poems to co-eds in local dives. All of us convinced that Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show might book us as the Stars of Tomorrow. Someone only had to give agents, producers, and directors our phone numbers. No someone gave them mine.
Late in the summer of 1978, an Upper East Side photographer asked me to write a photo-roman about a sadistic kidnapping, a visual story with captions accompanying photos and captions.
“Like a comic book
Only sexy.”. Anthony lived above Serendipity 3. Klaus Sperber worked days in the basement as the daytime pastry chef at the swishy ice cream shop of East 60th Street. I was a busboy at night.
On his off days, Klaus baked strudels and Black Forest cakes for various restaurants in the East Village on his off days from Serendipity 3. I loved watching him at the stove. He was a prima donna about cooking and singing, but I proposed that he star in Anthony’s photo-roman.
"My voice was opera-trained in Germany."
The gaunt German performed castrati arias from obscure 18th Century Italian operas to his friends in his St. Mark’s apartment. We also came for the strudel and coffee. He deserved a bigger audience.
”I don't believe movies. Too many frames showing the imitsations of life, thing when only one needs to show the true emotion. I believe in life. Live."
“This is different. You can show the real you.”
“I was born to be a star.”
I told Anthony about Klaus and the three of us met at the Kiev Coffee Shop on Second Avenue to discuss the project. Upon seeing Klaus, Anthony, a native New Yorker was smitten by his spectral aura. He was sinester too.
"You are perfect for the role of a criminal mastermind." Anthony snapped pictures with Klaus’ permission. He tol us, “Clover, the female lead, will be meeting us here shortly. She is on the run from Texas.”
I had never heard her name before.
"How American. I loved Billy Wilder films.“ cooed Klaus. “Gloria Swanson at the end of SUNSET BOULEVARD. I see myself strolling down her mansion’s stairs in slow motion milking every step.”
Klaus deftly raised his hands to imitate the great actress making her entrance to the last scene. He was a natural mimic.
"Who is the leading man?"
"No one yet." Anthony's eye hadn't left the viewfinder.
"What about Bam-Bam?" Klaus pointed my direction.
“Bam-Bam?” asked Clover.
“Everyone working at Serendipity 3 has a drag name. Mine was Eva. His is Bam-Bam after some stupid American TV show. THE FLINTSTONES."
"He’s a little brutish." Anthony swung the camera and focused the lens on my face.
"Like a caveman." Klaus snidely commented about my hard-boned features. "You know
"I'm not an actor." I trembled like LA in an earthquake. I had never shared Alice’s desire to be on stage or the silver screen.
“This is not a movie or a play. You don't have to act in a photo roman. All you have to do is pose like Rock Hudson." Anthony shifted his camera to the entrance.
The second coming of Veronica Lake entered the diner. Every man at the counter followed the click of the blonde's stiletto heels. Her knee-length black skirt slit to a vee revealed a pale upper thigh and her black polka-dot shirt was unbuttoned to a vanilla navel. No one was tanned on the punk scene.
"This is Clover." Anthony invited her to sit down. "We met at Club 82.”
Club 82 was an infamous drag show and dance club on Second Avenue a few blocks south of the Kiev. Klaus and I were more into the rough gay bars on the West Side Highway.
"I like dancing with transvestites. They don't hassle me like straight men." Clover pushed the sheet of blonde hair from her face. Her breasts were small as cupcakes. She wasn't wearing a bra. Anthony lifted his Leica. Clover dropped her head and the curtain of hair covered half an eye.
"Are you the hero?"
"Yes." There was no telling her no.
"My sponsor likes me to treat him as a slave. I prefer tough men like you.” Her Texan accent slurred her preference for submission.
"Bam-Bam is also the writer of this photo roman,” Klaus said, not hiding a keen interest in his acting partner. He was into the receiving end of rough.
"So what's the story?" The young blonde arched an eyebrow. "Something sexy I hope."
"It's about the three of us.” I wondered, if she was a legal age.
She read my mind and handed me her ID. Texas Driver’s license. Just nineteen. I gave it back.
“So what’s the story?”
"I haven't written a word," I confessed with a shrug.
"The story will write itself with you three in it." Anthony pressed the shutter button. The camera swiveled from Klaus to Clover to me. Its aperture clicked open and shut like a robot attempting to wake from a long sleep. “We'll make it up as we go."
"Like life. Like Art."
Over the next week I constructed a simple story around a rich man kidnapping Clover's character to finance an opera about the last castrati on Earth. On the first day of shooting at Anthony’s apartment over Serendipity 3, we huffed poppers for one scene. Clover stripped near-naked in Klaus’ flat on St. Mark’s Place. Klaus sliced my eyes in another. Bandages transformed me into a blind mummy. Clover lay on my bare flesh wearing lingerie and the scent of another man.
Not me.
"My sponsor thinks I’m too old. Nineteen isn't old, is it?"
"No."
When I was nineteen, Clover had been twelve. Two years ago, I had hitchhiked across the Lone Star State in the dead of winter. Straight roads through farmlands and cattle ranges, then twisted into the high desert covered with snow. Strange people live between Beaumont and El Paso. I met more than a few crossing that expanse. Even more in the East Village.
“You were lucky to escape Texas."
"I never looked back." Clover was destined for Hollywood’s bright lights. Nothing was pretend with her.
Our shoots ran late all over Manhattan. Tenement fires blazed as our lighting. Sirens backed our sound. My girlfriend accused me of having an affair. I wished that Alice were right, except Clover only slept with men for money.
"I don't tell the oilman about the others. He thinks he's the only one, but his friends pay me $1000 a night, and I'm worth every penny."
A grand a night was out of my price range. 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 shoot was on 42nd Street. Times Square.
After midnight, Times Square was awash with wickedness. We posed on 42nd Street with the pimps, whores, and drug dealers. Clover looked the part of a rich man's mistress, and I passed for a detective in my pinstriped English suit. The final scene was in a XXX shop. The clerk allowed anything for $20 and a handful of quarters.
Anthony set up his tripod before the open doors of a porno booth. The voyeurs watched us for free. Clover demanded quarters. They gave handfuls. Behind us, the booth's 8 mm loop repeated the ravishing of a young blonde by an older man.
I imitated the on-screen action in a PG version and Clover whispered, "On my fourteenth birthday the oilman attacked me. He bought my parents a new house. He's been taking care of me ever since. You ever taken anyone?"
"No." “No.” It was against my only commandment.
"Do you think you could? If it was me?" Five years as the oilman's mistress had introduced a perverse desire to Clover, and she teasingly shut the booth door. "If it was a game?"
"No." I released at her arm.
"Too bad. You'll never know what you're missing." She pushed open the door, and the strobe caught her escape with a strobe flash.
"Next scene." Anthony put away his camera. The shoot wrapped past 3 AM. Klaus, Clover, and Anthony asked for the story line.
"I'm a detective protecting your mistress from harm, but she wanted to be hurt to hurt you, which is why we were here."
"I love it." Clover hugged me. "This will make us famous."
"Famous?" Fame was asking a lot, but I envisioned the two of us with Johnny Carson on THE TONIGHT SHOW. No Anthony. No Klaus. Just us. Clover and me.
"She's right." Klaus had been pleased with the contact sheets. "We don't have to be famous forever. Just for now."
Anthony proposed that we celebrate the photo-roman’s completion with a late meal. My girlfriend waited in bed. I accompanied everyone to the Kiev Diner on 2nd Avenue. We sat at a front table. The restaurant expected the usual hungry horde from the bar closings within the next half-hour.
The waitress wrote down our orders of bacon-and-eggs over easy. Antony displayed a series of grainy black & white prints on the table under the diner's bright lights. Anthony had captured our best and worse. He handed me a set of prints, as the waitress delivered our early morning breakfasts.
"Write something good."
"It won't be hard."
Each shot inspired its own detective story in fifty words or less. Clover held out her hand, and I passed her the shot of us leaning against a steel pole on a Lexington Avenue subway platform. The conductor looked into Anthony's camera, as if he belonged to another world.
"Anthony brought you and me to life. I see us. ” She reached out for a photo of Klaus bandaging my head. Our teenage starlet faced her other co-star and asked with the ambition of turning a gay man straight, “Has anyone ever tell you look like Josef Goebbels?"
"All the time." Klaus looked at me. His leather jacket and close-cropped hair heightened his resemblance to Hitler's Propaganda Minister. I had told him the same thing upon meeting him at Max’s Kansas City.
"The resemblance is uncanny."
"I am not his illegitimate son. My father disappeared on the Russian front. He was no war criminal. Just another victim of that war.” Klaus was a survivor of that war. He had nothing to do with Nazis. Their crimes were not his. He only sinned in the West Street backrooms.
"Es tut mir lied fur dich," I apologized in my high school German.
"Fur was? You Americans think all Germans are Nazis." His face warped with a misogynistic smirk aimed at Clover.
"I love Germans." Clover was speaking to Klaus. “I want to move to Berlin.”
"You have a Nazi fetish, nicht war?"
"No, Germany more like it. I want to flee to East Berlin." She shut her eyes and then said, as if she was in a dream that wouldn’t go away. , "Away from my sponsor."
"She's so dramatic."
Enthralled by her performance, I whispered a dirty German phrase in her ear.
“I will dich ficken.”
A floating hand grazed my thigh. Her apartment was only around the corner. The waitress brought our orders. I wasn’t hungry anymore. A young black boy with short Rasta dreads entered the diner. He wore an oversized thrift store wool coat. Its pockets were crammed with spray cans. Klaus asked him to join us.
"This is Jean Michel. He's a graffiti artist."
"You're SAMO." I knew the name. His messages dotted the Lower Manhattan. Some were funny. Others preached cryptic nihilism. I thought them timeless.
"No, that was something with someone else. It meant 'same old same old', Now I’m solo and painting a primitive protest against racism. Something no one has ever seen before. I want people to see the blackness of us. I hadn’t happened yet, but I will.” He positioned a tape recorder on the table and pressed ON. The other diners watched his every move with interest. I couldn't figure out why. He was barely twenty and I said, "Turn off the tape recorder."
"Andy Warhol records his phone conversations." Jean-Michel clicked off the device. "I decided to tape real life."
"Warhol's a has-been!" No icon was sacred to a punk, and especially not the Pop Messiah. I had painted his Campbell Soup can at age ten. My father said I had no talent. I had believed him.
"You're jealous, because he's a genius!" Klaus leaned forward and clicked on the tape recorder, as if Warhol might later listen to this conversation.
"Genius?" Warhol manipulated the desire for fame like a sculptor. Everyone wanted to be famous. Even me. I just couldn’t see how.
"And so is Jean-Michel!" Klaus harbored a soft spot for pretty boys.
“I love your work.” The young painter's enigmatic messages stretched along the crumbling walls of the Lower East Side. My girlfriend thought his mysterious message was a new language of glyphs and words.
She wasn’t wrong.
"I've seen your paintings." Clover admitted with awe. "They're so street. More truth than anything else on the walls of this crazy city."
"Craziness has its own genus. I've witnessed its beauty in my last year of university. I lived in a commune with the head engineer from Bose Speakers, his wife, and their family. The girls were wild. I had been 22. My affair with the eighteen year-old didn't last long. She left me for a car thief, but I didn't move out of their commune. One afternoon I entered the house to find water flowing down the walls. In the upstairs bathroom, the mother stood naked in an overflowing bathtub and her hand madly scrambled over the wall writing a fuck poem. I would have joined her writing, except the daughter and stepfather entered the bathroom."
"They probably thought that you were after more than a bath." Klaus squirmed with sexual sarcasm.
"No, they knew me better than that. 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. The daughter and I are still friends."
"You don't remember any of those poems, do you?" Clover hushed with a voyeur's envy.
"I pray for my tongue to grow so long I can lick myself, while you fill me." Nothing in Times Square's XXX stroke books approached the lucidity of her blue prose. "When she was released from the madhouse, her mind was blank for months. She got better later."
“Everyone thought I was crazy when I was young, but I refused to get treatment. Like your friend’s mother, I was scared to lose me. Do I hear voices? Everyone hears themselves. Now I carry this recorder waiting for the voices to speak. And then I will know what they say" Jean-Michel held up his tape recorder to my mouth. "You have other stories?"
"Shut it off."
"I'm recording this for Art." His face was mystified by my resistance to his tape recorder.
"Warhol said Art is a good name for a man." It was the only Warhol quote locked in my brain and I flicked off the machine.
"Don't touch my shit!" Jean-Michel whipped out a six-inch-long switchblade. I slapped the knife out of his hand. It clattered across the dining room’s tile floor. Jean-Michel asked with wet eyes, "Why did you do that?"
"I told you to shut it off."
"I only wanted to save your voice." The wet-eyed teenager ran from the diner. Clover chased him with the tape recorder. Anthony followed her, snapping shots with his Leica. I picked up the switchblade. Embarrassed and wanting to cry too.
"Jean-Michel is going to be famous and you act like ein Assloch." Klaus was spitting mad. I had failed German in high school, but I knew what an Assloch was.
Me, but I offered an excuse. I thought it clever.
"One of the great things about good manners is knowing when not to use them."
"If you think violence is good manners, then you're crazier than him!" The German stormed out of the diner and I gathered Anthony's photos, vowing to show them my genius with my writing. On the way to a shadowy East 10th Street, I rewound the scene with Jean-Michel.
From every angle, my actions were seen a negative light. I entered my dark apartment with larcenous stealth. Alice lay awake on the couch.
"Another late shoot?" Her arms were folded over her chest.
"The last." I handed her the envelope with the photos. "We ate at the Kiev. This kid sat with us. Jean-Michel."
"Samo?" She had yet to open the envelope.
"One and the same."
I told Alice about the scene with Jean-Michel. She agreed with Klaus about my temper. We went to bed without her looking at the photos and I fell asleep intent on apologizing to Jean-Michel. After all, he was only a kid.
Over the next two days, I clobbered together a story to accompany Anthony’s photos. Strangely, I was no dyslexic with the pen.
Several nights later Jean attended a performance of my one-act play about homosexual cannibalism at Alice's club on St. Mark's Place. I had been one of the leads. The crowd's laughter surpassed my expectations for THE HUNGER THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME. Afterwards, Jean-Michel stood at the bar. I approached him. He frowned for a second and I lifted my hands.
"I want to apologize about the other night." I handed over his switchblade. "I get a little crazy sometimes. I don't know why."
"If anyone understands crazy, it's me. No bad feelings." Jean-Michel pocketed the knife and smiled with childish satisfaction. "I liked your play. It was funny. It should be on Broadway."
"I have to grind out another seventy minutes for three acts."
"That's a lot of time for the audience to chew on people-eating."
Oil splattered his 1950s suit. His eyes were pinned. Heroin was his mistress. He smiled at my recognition of his state.
"Maybe you should write a book."
"Probably I have some living to do before I wrote something that long.” An learning how to type.
"Don’t wait too long. We aren’t young forever. Andy said I should concentrate on my painting." He pulled a sheaf of drawings out of a leather bag. His work combined the simple finger paintings of autistic children with Asmat headhunters' tribal spirituality. I loved their work gathered in the Michael C. Rockeller Wing at the Met. Jean-Michel knew all about them.
"Your mentor is right." No other East Village painter approached his multi-level complexity and my writing to accompany Anthony's photos felt like the words had been written by a dyslexic zombie.
"I don't know whether to call him mentor or Svengali.” Jean-Michel was street-savvy enough to be wary of everyone in the art world. “I'll figure it out. You mind if I speak with your girlfriend?"
"Not at all."
Alice loved his work and their conversation created a diversion for me to visit Clover. I want her to hear my voice. I tucked the envelope under my arm and ran the distance to her apartment in twenty seconds, then climbed the two flights of stairs in less than ten. I stopped in the corridor.
A painting covered the door. The style was unmistakably that of Jean-Michel. The young painter had shackled the chains of slavery to the glory of tribal Africa. Clover opened the door with tousled hair.
A Chinese silk robe hung off her shoulder.
“I thought you might come. I heard your steps. I waited for you to come in.”
“I had to look at this.
"Do you like the painting?"
"I've never seen anything like it."
"He did it this afternoon." She pulled me inside the apartment.
"Did you have sex with him?" The bed in the back room was unmade.
"He paid with this painting. Debbie Harry bought one for a couple of hundred.” 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."
It was more than an invitation. I dropped the photos on the floor, and I threw Clover on the bed. The night gown slipped over her shoulder and the belt came loose. She slashed at my face with her nails and kneed my upper thigh. Her target was higher.
"Don't stop. Not now, Daddy." Clover clasped my arms.
Other men had played in this role and I rose from the bed. I was not them.
"Sorry, I can't do this." I was many things, but not a rapist. She sat up to close her bathrobe.
"So violence is only a show"
"No, it's real, but for real situations, not play."
"Coward." She had practiced her pout from childhood. It worked on most men. Not me. Not in this situation.
"I guess so." I went to the door. "But I can live with that."
An empty perfume bottle broke near my head and splattered the dregs of Chanel onto my leather jacket.
"You'll never be anything other than a failure." Clover’s words were a curse. I gathered the photos from the floor and slammed the door shut before she threw anything else with a better aim.
I walked back to St Mark's Place and checked my face in a car mirror. There were no scratches and I entered the basement of Alice’s club. I hoped for the cigarette smoke to cover the scent of the thrown perfume.
"Where were you?" Alice stood at the bar with Jean-Michel. Her noses wrinkled like Samantha in the TV show BEWITCHED.
"Out to show Clover the photos." I held up the envelope and turned to Jean-Michel. "I saw your painting on the door. It was great."
"Thanks." He smiled in naive triumph and he turned to Alice. "I'm playing at the Mudd Club tomorrow. I'll put you on the list."
"Plus one." Her smile belonged on a girl who had jumped out of a cake to discover it was her birthday. She never got into clubs free. I always did, because I worked at some.
“Bring another friend. Your boyfriend can get in for free."
"Yeah." Richard, the doorman, was a friend.
"I look forward to the show." Alice touched his hand and Jean-Michel walked us to East 10th Street. The pot dealers on the corner knew his name. He was famous for more than his art. On the steps he gave Alice a drawing of a skull filled with cryptic scrawls.
"Keep it. One day it might pay your rent."
"Thanks." Alice rolled up the drawing and watched Jean-Michel head farther east. This time of night only shooting galleries were open in that direction.
"You're not jealous, are you?" My girlfriend asked, as she showered in the bathtub.
"Jealous of what? He's a great painter. I'm an unknown writer. You're living with me. What more could I want from life?" Not much, but I didn't mention that I had heard gossip that Jean-Michel got off on sleeping with other men's girlfriends. Alice was faithful. We were in no danger.
After sex I lay in bed answering that question about what I wanted from life. My upstairs neighbor's movie had been released in New York. Strangers asked for his autograph. Debby Harry, the singer of Blondie, had bought Jean-Michel's paintings. Alice had booked Klaus to appear at Irving Plaza with the B52s, a break-through band from Athens, Georgia.
Nobody famous knew my name. I was no one.
In the morning the willow in the alley swayed languidly with a wisp of a breeze. I sat at the kitchen table, typing a a fifty words or less paragraphs for each shot of the photo-roman on my Olivetti 35L. The future materialized with every word. I envisioned my reading this tale before an audience. Alice entered the kitchen and put on her plastic raincoat, even though it was sunny outside.
"I have to get out of here before that typing drives me crazy. It sounds like rain on a tin roof.”
"I can stop." Anthony wanted to see my prose this afternoon. The pages typing was filled with typos. Even my hands suffered from dyslexia. Splotches of Tipe-X embarrassingly marred every paragraph.
"No, you have to finish that. I'll see you later." Alice kissed me on the cheek. Her make-up and perfume wasn't for me. The door closed before I asked any questions.
Three minutes later the telephone rang.
Anthony.
"The East Village Eye hired me for a photo session this afternoon with Jean-Michel. We’ll have to cancel our meeting.”
"Great." Our photo-roman dropped down a few notches in importance for today.
"You're not angry, are you?"
"No, you can't pass up this opportunity." Nothing was more important for a writer or photographer than getting their work in print. All my writing lay in the closet. Journals and short stories and a screenplay about a hang glider who robs a penthouse in New York.
"We'll meet tomorrow."
"I'll tell Clover." Her feigned struggle reincarnated in my head.
"You do that." Anthony hung up and I rose from the table.
I dressed in a pinstriped suit, a black shirt with a silver tie, and pointy-toed black suede shoes. Clover liked businessmen.
I'd pound on her door. She'd open up. Drawn curtains would provide the cover of night. The rest of the scene would be financed by the $100 in my wallet. The C-note was from a drug deal. Alice knew nothing about my illegal money-making and asked no questions about the source of my share of the rent.
Outside on 1st Street the sky was cloudless. I passed the sinse dealers with a nod and head south to St. Mark’s Place. Halfway own the block I entered her building and climbed the stairs to her flat. The door was gone and a suitcase lay on the living floor.
"What's with the door?" Thieves overran the East Village.
"An art dealer bought Jean-Michel's door for $1000."
"You're joking."
"I thought he was, but he paid me in cash. With all my savings, I have enough to go to East Germany.” Clover lifted a Pan-Am airline ticket. JFK-Frankfurt-Berlin. "I'm leaving America to be free from that Texan once and for all. A one-way ticket too.“
"What about our photo-roman?" I was thinking of more than the photographs.
"With a wig, your girlfriend can double for me." She handed me the bag. "Help me to a cab. I’m heading to JFK.”
"And your stuff?" Her apartment was fully furnished in early street refuse.
"Whatever you want, take. I'm starting a new life.”
“What are you going to do over there?”
“
Whatever it takes and you?”
“The same.” I had no plans other than to have no plans.
On St. Mark’s the first taxi stopped for her upraised hand. She kissed me on the lips.
"I didn't mean anything the other day. Like you I'm a little crazy." She pulled open the door and sat in the back of the Checker taxi.
"When are you coming back?"
"Hopefully never." She shut the door and the taxi sped down the street to burn the red light at 1st Avenue and turn north.
I plundered her apartment for books and cooking utensils, leaving behind her clothing. They weren't Alice's style.
That evening we saw Jean-Michel's band. Gray with Michael Holman on drums, Nick Taylor on guitar, and Wayne Clifford on keyboards. Jean played a abstract clarinet. The ensemble had nothing to do with punk and more atmosphere bordering on chaos. The Mudd Club crowd loved them. Alice too. I as well, having lived through the Loft Jazz scene in Soho following Cecil Taylor, a jazz pianist with melodies seeking the order of chaos.
The next afternoon I reviewed the shots with Anthony. We had enough to cover the storyline. I just had to finish writing the story. A Hamptons gallery had offered a show. Alice was my date and Clover’s replacement.
No one mistook her for Clover or read my text. The guests demanded to meet the girl in the photos and only bought the photos with Clover in them.
On the train ride back to the city Alice asked, "Did you sleep with her?"
"No."
"Did you fuck her?” There was a difference.
"No, but I thought about it." I should have said nothing.
"That's almost as bad as doing it, but I'm glad you didn't." She believed me, but didn't trust me either. She spent more time at her club than our apartment. Jean-Michel's band played the basement twice. She hung out with his artist friends. I was on the outs.
On a night of feminist comedy, I heckled a man-hating lesbian icon. My country-western poem about a man leaving a woman stilled the audience's boos. Despite their applause, Alice claimed that I had ruined the night.
The living room sofa became my bed. I wasn’t welcome in the bedroom.
An uptown punk disco hired me to work security. The Damned, Ramones, and Klaus performed on the stage of Hurrah on West 62nd Street. I met a blonde model from Buffalo the night the Romantics concert.
The place was packed with fans of their hit WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU. The blonde backed into me. My hips to her ass. I had never seen her before. Alice and I hadn’t had sex in a month. Not even a kiss. An imaginary porno director orchestrated first sex in her Lexington Avenue apartment on the Upper East Side. Not luxury. A one-bedroom in a tenement. Each time I attempted to leave, she begged for more and I gave more, however the guilt prevented my spending the night.
At 5AM the Lexington Line ran empty to Astor Place and I walked slowly across St. Mark's Place to East 10th Street. I took my time entering the building on East 10th Street and five minutes later I opened the apartment door with a litany of prepared excuses.
Alice was not alone.
Jean-Michel stood in the kitchen with magic markers in his hand. A stick-figure nude crisscrossing Klimt with Munch and madness had been sketched on the refrigerator.
"What are you doing?" I tried hard not to sound too awed by its psychotic majesty
"Drawing a picture." He wrote 'crown of mania' with a magic marker atop the refrigerator.
"He's going to be in the next Whitney Biennial." Alice was fully clothed, but her eyes refused to meet mine. His increasing success bestowed a power over women. They fell into bed with the power of his fame and the amgic of his art. Our bed showed no sign of lovemaking. I had either been too early or too late. Either way I knew how to take my revenge.
"Thanks, you mind if we call it a night."
"Not at all." He wrote his name at the bottom. "See you around."
Alice’s sleeping in the bed and me on the sofa was not his fault. In the morning I had her remove the drawing. My madness belonged all to me.
The next night I stayed on East 77th Street with the model from Buffalo and the following morning returned to an empty apartment. My girlfriend had moved to a friend's loft. The women in the East Village pilloried my betrayal. They considered any model as shallow as an evaporation stain on tenement roof.
I tried to prove them wrong.
Lisa moved into my apartment. A few months later her agency sent her to London and I followed her to stay at a studio behind the Chelsea football pitch. She tested with various photographers. David Bailey shot her for Vogue. Every night Lisa attended industry dinners at fancy restaurants. She brought me home the doggie bag.
My days were divided between writing a screenplay about a homosexual falling in love with a fat woman and wandering through the capitol of the former British Empire. We saw the Psychedelic Furs in Fulham and caught the Damned at the Marquee. Lisa's won a campaign for a lingerie ad. I finished the script and returned to New York. Lisa came back for Christmas. She gave me a leather coat from a King’s Road thrift store and I bought her gold earrings. We spent New Year's Eve dancing at Studio 54. It was our last happy time.
To jumpstart her modeling career, her booker arranged dates with famous men. Movie stars called my apartment. Her photo with a tennis player appeared in the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column.
“It’s just business.”
Lisa came home late.
I told myself it was just business.
In late January, a French modeling agency invited Lisa to Paris.
"I'll call every day."
She kissed goodbye at the gate of her JFK flight. I returned to the East Village by the A train. Within a week she stopped answering the phone at the model’s apartment on Rue de Seine. I wrote scores of letters to her agency. Hers never appeared in my mailbox and drugs softened my descent from grace.
In the next year Jean-Michel appeared on numerous magazine covers. Throughout the 80s his earnings approached the hundreds of thousands. Alice acted in several movies. My upstairs neighbor was nominated for an Oscar. Klaus sang with David Bowie. Clover sent two postcards from East Germany, writing that she lived with a commissar who resembled an older me only with more scars.
I forgot why I came to New York. Not for fame. Not for fortune. Other things.
In the summer of 1981 I worked construction to build an illegal nightclub in Chelsea. The owner ran short of funds in August. Arthur found a new source of cash from a Russian counterfeiter.
"He has this girlfriend from Buffalo. They met in Milan." Arthur was telling me something without my connecting the dots.
Lisa walked into the Continental on opening night to round out the coincidence. I was the doorman and had the DJ spin 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 than an unknown poet with a stutter.
The club's clientele came from the movies, voices on LPs, and faces 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.
We closed at dawn.
I was lucky to wake the next day before dusk.
Arthur, the owner, bribed the precinct cops every week for the Continental to stay open till dawn. In the back of the patrol car I handed the officers a brown paper bag. They never counted the money.
Every insane incident was written into my journal. John Belushi climbing the wall and anyone mistreating women were shown the door by Benji, the huge Jamaican bouncer from the Palladium Theater on East 14th Street. Arthur had been attacked by the 20th Precinct’s enforcer. The editor from Heavy Metal Magazine said the tales had the makings of a great novel. I never changed the names to protect the innocent or the guilty or me.
One night the Russian investor ODed on heroin in the bathroom. Dope was taking over from cocaine. I had revived several celebrities from the border between life and death. Letting Vadim die seemed in my best interest, but I saved him with a flurry of slaps, thinking Lisa would thank me.
Nothing.
She stood at the bar with Jean-Michel and they watched me drop the gangster from Odessa on a sofa. The two were drinking Moet. I joined them. They gave me a glass.
"Whatever happened to that photo-roman with Klaus?" Jean-Michel struggled with the cork.
"The exhibition was a flop. We only sold a couple of photos. All of Clover. I saw none of the money."
"I know. I bought one. Visitors to my place loved the photo of Clover and you walking down 42nd Street in Times Square. You still have my drawing on your refrigerator."
"I never saw it." Lisa had arrived at East 10th Street too late. The drawing had only existed for a day. I couldn’t recollect anything about it.
"You got rid of it?” Jean-Michel happily thought that I had sold his artwork and poured me a glass of Moet.
"I tried to chop ice out of the freezer and punctured the Freon." This drunken search for ice cubes wasn't the only stupid thing that I did with that fridge.
"Oh." Jean-Michel poured two glasses of champagne. "Why did you stop writing? I mean I haven't seen anything from you."
"I went into a bookstore and saw thousands of novels, histories, poetry. Someone from my hometown had published a book. We shared the same name. First and last. My mother called to complain that she had to hear from a stranger about me being published. She said the book was good, but asked why I changed the middle initial in my name. I told her it wasn't me."
"And you stopped?"
"Around then." Losing Lisa shared some of the blame with cocaine, although writers will use any excuse not to write. "Guess I'm saving up life experiences for a later date. I mean there is no failure like premature success."
"Wrong, there is no failure like giving up. I liked your story about the crazy woman in the bathtub." Jean-Michel sipped his champagne glass like he might want a straw. "She really write on the walls?"
"She covered the walls. It was better than anything I have written”. Her last word to me were. “You
the ne’er-do-well. I’ve lived those words, as if they were a curse.”
"Kandinsky was better than me. Many painnters are, but I keep painting."
"Maybe I'll start writing again some day."
I mentioned nothing about my journals. At least my handwriting had no typos. Arthur signaled that the 20th Precinct cops were outside on the street waiting for their money. I took the envelope to the door. Lisa came along.
"That story about the crazy girlfriend wasn't about me?" Lisa had once walked barefoot through the Village for a week according to Vinnie Gallo from Basquiat’s band Gary
"Someone long before you." I looked over to the couch. Vadim nodded in a stupor. "Shouldn't you be taking care of your boyfriend?"
"This isn't the first OD. Probably it won't be the last." The neon light bounced a halo off her silvery hair. She touched my hand holding the bribe. "I wanted you to know that I read all your letters. Maybe you can't spell and your grammar is awful, but you can write. One more thing. Tell the DJ to stop playing that song."
"Don't you love me, baby?"
"Yes." She went to the coat-check.
The brown paper bag in my hand contained enough cash for two flights to Paris. Before I offered my dream, Jean-Michel arrived with a fur coat. Hers.
"We're going to another club." She slid into the coat like a snake regaining its skin. "Take care of my boyfriend."
They rode off in a limousine and I sat in the patrol car. The cop in the passenger seat took the brown bag without counting the cash. Even they knew Jean-Michel.
"We got him on possession coming out of the Chelsea Hotel and shook him down for some money. He gave us each a hundred. Didn't blink. I don't like arresting famous people. Or rich ones. Fucking pains in the ass."
Right after New Year 1982, the Russian's partner was murdered in front of the club. The FBI was involved in the investigation. So were Internal Affairs. Arthur said that my name had been mentioned in connection to the murder/payoff scandal. I almost knew nothing. The previous week a trendy Paris nightclub had offered me a doorman position. I fled New York with my journal.
The French welcomed outlaws on the run with open arms. I asked the nightclub owner how I should treat his clientele. The owner told me, “Treat them like the shit they are.”
And like that I became the most powerful American after dark in Paris. Not famous. More infamous. I threw out Brigitte Bardot and asked Thierry Mugler to leave the place, but treated the 60s YeYe singer Francoise Hardy with utmost respect. No American had a better job in the City of Lights.
I traveled around Europe. A trip to Berlin ended without finding a trace of Clover. Upon my return, I moved in with Candia, a beautiful Puerto Rican/Jewish singer. She was almost less than half my age.
I picked up spare jobs. One translating a script about a junkie nymphette and her android. It was science fiction. A mistranslation of one word about a drug as heroin led to the screenplay being dropped by the Hollywood moneymen. Another failure.
Lesson learned I wrote a version of FAUST set in a Paris nightclub, because the surest path to success is to copy someone else's triumph. My typing was a little better.Almost legible. A French production house promised to fund GO-GO GIRLS FROM HELL. The three models cast in the leads recorded my song TAKE ME HIGHER. My upstairs neighbor from the East Village agreed to play the lead and I hit New York to break the record at the city's most popular disco.
The bouncers welcomed me as a conquering hero. Over two thousand people crowded the club. A gigantic painting stretched across the wall of the old theater blending the elements of slavery, struggle, illiteracy, and innocence. It was unmistakably a Basquiat.
The 33 RPM record in my hand shrank in size, then my ears remembered three girls singing 'Take me higher'. The partygoers had come to dance not look at Art and I hurried to the sound booth.
Richard, the DJ, was a friend. He slipped the record onto the turntable without a listen. His hands let the needle fly over the vinyl. The stylus leapt over a bump on its first turn and repeated the jump on every revolution. The record was warped beyond playability. The dance floor stopped its movement.
"Bring me another copy and I'll play it." The DJ cued up RIDE THE WHITE HORSE.
The other two records were also potato chips. More failure. Deeper into the unknown.
Back in Paris the three starlets announced their pregnancy. Their boyfriends were the culprits, but the women accused me of semi-immaculate conception. A film about the Devil frightened the movie company into withdrawing their backing and my tempestuous teenage girlfriend deserted me for an Italian. I wrote a poem on a wall across the street from her workplace. The police arrested me for vandalizing the UK Embassy. My East Village upstairs neighbor went to Morocco to film a movie about God.
TAKE ME HIGHER became a jingle for French OJ.
Not a failure, but not success.
The money bought a ticket to the States. The East Village had changed during my absence. Not my apartment. Still a bathroom in the kitchen and the willow tree in the back alley, but people had moved from the Lower East Side.
Alice had migrated to pursue a LA movie career. Klaus had succumbed to AIDS. Restaurants dotted Avenue A and bars opened in old dope dens. Brash stockbrokers purchased Jean-Michel's paintings for enormous sums of money. Their investment covered a lot of wall.
Art Forum decreed him as the promise of the future. His friends mentioned their connection to Jean-Michel to lend validity to their projects. A kid from the city making good was a fairy tale come true. Mine was simply a repetition of failures.
In 1986 the Red Sox lost the World Series on an error by the first baseman. An albino producer hired me to write a script about a man and woman who fall in love during a hurricane. A 1964 Triumph motorcycle was my bonus for typing THE END. A pothole on Park Avenue swallowed the front wheel and the classic English bike skid into a parked car. It never rode the same.
WHERE THE HIGHWAY ENDS disappeared into the Hollywood slush piles. My knee popped out of joint on the basketball court. When I ended a relationship with a Spanish dancer, the old Puerto Rican woman across the hallway laid a chicken bones curse on my doorstep.
Sex remained a stranger for two years.
I did drugs enough for people to greet me with a shocked expression, as if they had heard of my death. I had come close more than twice.
Nearing forty, my dreams of fame and fortune were lies not even I believed anymore. I transitioned from nightclubs to selling diamonds on 47th Street. My boss, Richie Boy, was a long-time friend. We knew each other from the clubs.We still went to them. His father, Manny, hated our behavior. He couldn't fire either of us. We made big sales, but I hated me too.
One September night I straggled home at dawn. Work started in two hours. A taxi stopped by the curb. The back window rolled down and a woman called out my name. It was Clover.
"Get in the car," She ordered and I obeyed, because my feet were failing their task.
"How long have you been in town?" I settled into the seat.
"I’ve been back in the States about three years." This older version of Clover had red hair. Tattoos covered her flesh like an art fungus. A designer dress with combat boots was a popular look with women not wanting any trouble from straight men.
"What happened to Berlin?"
"The commissar betrayed the revolution and escaped to the West. I joined him in Frankfurt for a few more months. He was a bore as a capitalist. You know he looked like you. Only more scars."
“Yeah, you had written that in a postcard.”
“You were the only one I sent a card to.”
“Are you okay?" Her body was no longer willowy and she wasn't able to find a comfortable position.
“I had a motorcycle accident in Texas. A county cop ran a red light late for a date with his donuts.
The crash broke my back. I'm lucky to be alive. Anyway I'm suing them for a million. My lawyer says I have a good case." Clover instructed the driver to stop at her old St. Mark's Place address. "What about you? I saw your name on a book?"
"That was someone else from my hometown. I remain a nobody."
"Better than being a dead someone." Her face grimaced with pain, as she turned to stop my assisting her from the cab. "I have to learn how to do this on my own. It’ll get better with time."
"I even traveled to East Berlin to look for you."
"Nobody could find me there.”
“Were you hiding from the oilman?"
"Yeah, but I'm a creature of habits and returned to his golden cage. He was driving the motorcycle in that crash. He's dead now, but he left me a little money and this apartment. He wasn't as bad as I thought." She leaned over and kissed me. "I wanted to do that then, but I was too crazy. Too late for us now. I like men in uniform and something tells me you never got any further than Boy Scouts. But that doesn't mean we can't be friends. I'm opening a bar on Avenue B. Come and see me some time.”
I did.
The best and worst of the East Village filled her bar. Everyone was welcome. Her fascination with cops and firemen rivaled my nights holding hands with a bottle of beer.
"
You're getting too old for this." Clover disapproved of my being alone. "You should have a wife and kids."
"You're one to talk." Friends didn't have to be nice to each other. "You have a clock ticking and one day your fertility timer is going to shut off. You ever think about that?"
"Every time I see a mother with a kid. What about you?"
"Every time I see a father." I couldn't be angry at Clover. We were too much alike. That summer we traveled to the Yucatan. I wrote a collection of short stories. She criticized my grammar, syntax, metaphors, and allegories, although not until each story had been completed.
"It's like time-shifting through the years of your youth." The sun shined brightly on the dreamy Caribbean Sea. "Almost like you're trying to correct your mistakes."
"More like I'm reliving them." Everyone on Isla de la Mujeres thought that we were lovers. We were better suited as friends.
"You know I used to always dream about warning that fourteen year-old girl not to go with the oilman. Life would have been so different. You probably should go to that kid staring out the window in English class and slap him in the head."
“I told you that story?”
“Yes.”
"I'm not sure a slap would help with my spelling." My fingers still suffered dyslexia on the typewriter.
"You could always go back to grammar school." Clover half-joked and I spent the rest of my stay in Yucatan combing my manuscript for errors.
Getting back to New York, Clover introduced me to an agent. He might sell my book, if I corrected the typos. They were hundreds and I went over the manuscript one last time. The agent hand-delivered THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE IN-BETWEEN to a publisher. The middle fifty pages were missing from the collection of short stories. Both the agent and publisher correctly considered me unprofessional. I have lost count of my failures.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE IN-BETWEEN joined the photo-roman and three warped copies of TAKE ME HIGHER in my great-grandfather's sailing trunk. Charles Smith II had died at sea after his ship burned to the waterline.
Clover was right.
I was lucky to be alive.
On a July evening in 1988, I exited from my apartment to buy beer from the corner bodega. Young people hurried to 10th Street bars in expectation of romance or a phone number to call. The men wore khakis and blue button down shirts and the women wore clothes worth a week's salary. They shouted out a language of the young and I turned to walk to 1st Avenue.
Jean-Michel loomed from the night. His skin a tobacco ash grey and blood stains on his shirt sleeves. He was no longer young. Not old, but not any age.
"You can’t walk around like that!" I pulled him to my steps.
"Why not?" He was as listless as a Voodoo puppet. "I'm famous. I have money. I can do what I want."
"No, you can't. The cops target blacks for anything. You know that."
"Yeah, to make it all safe for these newcomers. I remember when this used to be our city."
"Not anymore. C'mon, upstairs, I'll give you a new shirt."
"Thanks, I guess I could use a cleanup."
He struggled pitifully up the stairs. Inside my apartment, I sat him on a kitchen chair.
"I remember coming here," he slurred with a thick tongue. "I painted your refrigerator. I once painted a door and the girl got $1000 from a dealer. Now it’s worth a million. You were lucky too, right?"
"Something like that.” I didn’t see any reason to mention Clover.
He took off his shirt and scratched his needle-tortured arms.
"What the fuck are you doing to yourself?"
"You don't understand what it's like to be famous. When I was young, I dreamt about being Jimi Hendrix or Charlie Parker. I might be as famous as them now. And even worse is being famous me. Journalists write, as if I was a Rosetta Stone to creativity. Dealers acclaim my work like I was the Second Coming of the Avant Garde, but I was just some kid whose craziness is marketable, only now I'm not a kid anymore. Twenty-seven isn’t young.”
“I’m thirty-six. Everyone stops being young after thirty.”
“He cleaned his arms with a paper towel and then gazed at the hundreds of books in the wall shelves. None were mine.
”You write any more?"
"Not really." I handed him a white t-shirt, which he tugged over his head.
"That's too bad, I liked your stories."
"You told me that before." Plot schemes floated around my skull like airplanes waiting out a snow storm's end before a landing. "Woody Allen said everyone has a book in them and it's a good idea to keep it in them too."
"Woody Allen never painted an IRA poem on the British embassy in Paris."
"It was a love poem to a girlfriend." I was surprised that anyone in New York had heard about this episode on the Rue St. Honore. "She worked across the street.”
He laughed. More a cough.
"I've met Woody Allen. He isn't so funny in person. What about your girlfriend. The hillbilly?"
"She left me."
"Not the first time and not the last. For me either."
"I guess not." I wondered if he had ever met Candia. Paris was a six-hour flight from New York. He was famous. She was beautiful. She had been my girlfriend. I was sure Jean still like hitting on other men’s girlfriends. His real love was something else.
"You mind if I shoot up?" He pulled a wad of cash, a pencil, a needle, and two crystalline packets from his pocket.
"Go right ahead."
"You want some?"
I shook my head and drank a glass of water, while he fixed up in the bathroom. Four minutes later Jean-Michel emerged from the WC off the living room. He gazed at the Polaroids on my kitchen wall. Many of the faces dated back to the Seventies. I took one of him in the clean white tee-shirt.
"You should come to my next opening. There are people to meet. Maybe even a literary agent and I'll tout you as the next great Hemingway.”
"It's too late to say that, but thanks for the offer." I lifted my camera and pointed to the wall of Polaroids. "Can I add you to my collection?”
"Sure, as long as it's not for Art. Andy said it was a good name for a man. It was a joke.” He had forgiven that confrontation at the Kiev.
"No, only for my wall." I wished I had known him better. It wasn't too late. "No one else will see it."
"Then no one can steal my soul." He posed with his arms behind his back. His face was an aged mirror of that young boy in the Kiev. I pressed the button and the Polaroid popped out.
"I left you something in the bathroom." Jean-Michel wasn't interested in the result.
"Thanks."
As soon as the door shut, I searched the bathroom without finding any dope. He had left somethiing more lasting. A drawing.
A few weeks later he died of an overdose. His passing was rightfully mourned as a great loss to the art world. I always defended him, since legends only protect a dead man so far.
Clover opened another bar on 14th Street. She instructed the bartenders to serve whatever I wanted to drink. Mostly gin and tonics. We almost slept together on several occasions. I worked six months selling diamonds for Richie Boy and wrote six months in Asia. A vagabond around the world passing as a wraith through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Himalayas and Europe. Always coming back to work in the Diamond District.
In 1991 the store was robbed for $500,000 the day after I returned from Bali. Being a non-family member the police designated me suspect # 1, until I passed the lie detector test.
I started writing again.
A film producer declared my novel about pornography 'seventeen sex scenes searching a plot' and later financed a film about teenage masturbation calling it ‘Art'. A literary agent declared another novel about a Hamburg pimp as too fast a read.
Her husband was so aroused by the book that he had sex with his wife for the first time in years. They divorced shortly afterwards. Two scripts were advanced through the gauntlet of 'Nos' only to be rejected as too European for the American public.
The diamond market of 47th Street grew saturated with émigrés from the old Soviet Union. Financed by black money they undercut the wholesale diamond price. My commissions shrank year by year, but I still could afford my seasonal writing trip to the Orient.
Throughout the winter of 2001, I dated a go-go girl in Pattaya, the last Babylon. After six months, my friends voted me the dubious honor of having the worst girlfriend in Pattaya. It was time to go. I had $100 in the bank and a ticket to New York. I could get back my job at the diamond exchange for the Christmas season. September 1 I called Clover from Bangkok airport. Collect.
“I’m coming back. I’ll be at Newark in twenty-four hours.”
"I'll meet you at the airport."
Each time I shut my eyes on the 747 crossing the globe, Koh Lann floated on the silvery Gulf of Siam. My fiendish girlfriend danced a rattlesnake shimmy atop towering stiletto heels. Mem's long hair swayed across boyish breasts. A stranger's hands groped her skinny legs. Sleep had been almost impossible in economy class.
Landing at Newark Airport, the passengers shuffled from the aircraft into a cool jetway. It was autumn and I put on a leather jacket for the first time in eight months. The INS agent swiped my passport’s bar-code page through the computer scanner and stamped my passport.
"Welcome to the States."
The greeting gauntlet searched my face. Their yearning stares evaporated to a dull glare upon recognizing I was not a lover, family or friend. I trudged into the terminal like an exile, until a buxom redhead in the flimsy cotton shift broke from the anonymous scrum.
"Welcome to the Land of the Free."
Heads swung on rubbernecks, as Clover lifted a battered straw cowboy hat. A tight red dress squished her body neck-to-ankles. Tattoos covered her arms. The breasts were new.
”Thanks for coming" I grinned at my long-time friend, hoping she couldn't recognize my words as phony. I was used to traveling alone. Living alone too. "I didn't expect you to be here.'
“Hey, you asked for a ride and who am I to refuse a legend."
"Legend?" My upstairs neighbor from East 10th Street was playing the villain in a major comic-book movie. My hillbilly girlfriend was in a hot TV sit-com. Several friends were millionaires. I was more like a forgotten rumor.
"Who else hit a home run in a softball game for CBGBs to beat the Hell's Angels, dove off the cliff at Lake Minnewaska, or threw Brigitte Bardot out of a Paris nightclub?" Clover looked at my bag, dying to comment on my traveling light.
"Things get blown out of proportion with time." The homer had been a double to tie the score before a game-ending brawl, the dive was a feet-first leap, and the Brigitte Bardot had been a dowdy blonde woman in a well-worn down coat. I didn’t recognize her until it was too late. My boss had said nothing. To him she was a fascist.
"Now we're saints like everyone here." The emergence of other passengers collapsed her audience's attention span like a gorilla sitting on lawn furniture. It was only 10 pm and New York lay across the river.
"Saints would be pushing it." I led the way through the exit. A state trooper eyed me with suspicion.
"Reformed sinners then." Flat footsteps echoed into chrome-lit parking lot. The night had to be slow, if the State Trooper considered a forty-nine years old man a threat.
"Don't say a word, I'm holding." Clover grabbed my arm. Marijuana possession was a class B felony in the Garden State and we walked like two old lovers giving a forgotten romance one last shot.
Reaching a Cadillac ragtop, Clover treated the state trooper to a smile that he hadn’t seen in a long time and the officer commented, "Nice ride!”
"1964 De Ville." She chuckled in a breathy whisper. "But I'm not sure, he's talking about the car."
"Think you'll ever lose that soft spot for men in uniform."
"Naw, I'm a sucker for a rut." She hesitated before getting behind the wheel. "You want to drive?"
"I've been driving on the wrong side of the road for too long." My driving habits from Thailand were probably lethal on an American highway and I sat in the passenger seat.
"Suit yourself." Clover stomped on the gas and the tires squealed on the misted pavement. Merle Haggard’s TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT boomed from the dashboard and I buckled my seat belt.
"You scared of my driving?"
"You don't drive big cars for nothing." A truck’s front wheel was within reach.
"Old cars get respect, if you drive them right." The Caddy accelerated onto the highway. The flaming red hair suited a single woman in her forties. "Women too. I was beginning to think that you weren't coming back."
"I decided to get my novel published." Today's youth would buy my novel about punk rock in the 1970s. The New York Times would place MAYBE TOMORROW on the bestseller list. All my failures trumped by a book about a gay hustler forming a punk band to rip off a rich kid only to fail by succeeding at CBGBs for one night.
"That the only reason?" Twenty years of friendship poured acid on my deception.
There was always more than one reason. I told the least embarrassing.
"My internet venture crashed and burned like a 747 slamming into an Iowa cornfield. Our investor absconded with the company funds. Only my partner's connection with a Thai admiral had prevented our incarceration in the monkey house for embezzlement. I failed one more time."
"Are you keeping count?"
"Lost count more like it." Manhattan's backwash illuminated the Meadowlands. Twenty-five years ago my best friend and I had wagered whom of us would first appear on the Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. His having played at a wedding for Jay Leno hadn’t won the bet and no one young remembered Johnny Carson. I was getting old. Almost fifty.
"You okay?" Headlight painted a dappled mask on her face.
"Two years in Thailand seem more like two seconds once I got off the plane."
Clover asked the right questions.
"What about your 'girlfriend'?"
"Mem and I were having bad times. I wanted to leave her, but didn't know how." The abridged version lasted less than two minutes.”A month ago Mem left to tell an old boyfriend good-bye. She didn't return that night or that week. I thought we were finished for good and I was off the hook, but hadn't counted on her giving me a love potion. I couldn't get rid of her."
Clover winced, "Is there a cure for the love potion?"
“None other than drink.” Actually the old women in Pattaya gave me a cure. Its ingredients had to stay a secret. Having a virgin spinster stand over a pot of steaming rice with whiskey and then eat the rice. It had worked almost.”
"Well, I got plenty of whiskey back at my bar, but you got what you deserved from your girlfriend."
"How so?"
"You were the one who wanted it to end, then changed your mind."
"I was kind of stupid, but all the gold I touch turns to mud."
"Maybe because it was fool's gold in the first place?" We crested the Jersey Palisades and descended into the Holland Tunnel. The majesty of Manhattan rising from the black Hudson. Traffic steered clear of the lane-drifting Cadillac.
"I saw your old upstairs neighbor at an art opening the other day."
"He's a big movie star now.
“People came up to him, as if they knew him all his life. He had to escape in a cab. You can't tell me you really want to be famous?"
"Not famous, but at least well-known enough for someone to have read what I've written."
"Good thing you're not a baseball player. None of them get to the majors after forty." Clover realized this 'bad cop' routine was not exactly the welcome wagon treatment and patted my hand. The tenderness helped salve the wounds.
"You feel like doing anything special?"
"You mean other than flying back to Thailand?" Tribeca's empty sidewalks harkened back to the bankrupt New York of 1976.
"You really like it that much?"
"The only things I missed about America were my family, friends, and pizza. Pattaya was like New York in the 1970s."
"Edgy?"
"Go-go girls, rent boys, and transvestites."
"Nice to reminisce about, but tough to live through again." After a few blocks of silence, Clover said,
"Sorry, sometimes it feels like I'm the only one left from those days."
“Now there's two of us."
We stopped at Clover's bar on East 14th Street. She ordered the bartender to get me stupid drunk and then chatted up an overweight stripper. I drank a lot of beers and eavesdropped on conversations. The pierced men boasted about sex and the punky women moaned about love, as if it were a lost art form. Any attempt to bridge this communication gap between the sexes had been doomed by cell phones.
By 2am the bartender hesitated serving me another beer and I staggered from the bar to my apartment guided by a full moon. Never in danger of falling.
Plan A was a four-month stint at the diamond exchange on 47th Street. Labor Day was less than a week away. By Christmas my earnings might afford another six months in Thailand. I was already counting the days till December 24th.
The next morning the phone rang in my East Village apartment. It was Mem. She was in a hotel room overlooking the Beach Road.
"I look at moon and think of you."
"It's day here. No moon. Why are you calling me?" There was a twelve-hour difference between here and Pattaya.
"You angry me?"
"You left me for another man." She was probably wearing something sexy to hit the Marine Disco.
"Sorry, I no angel. He only friend. Not same you. He gone now. Can't stop thinking about you, teelat."
The dawn broke on the alleyway and the eastern sky shone a brilliant blue. It was a beautiful day to travel north to see my family in Boston, but I was sick and said, "You gave me a love potion and now I'm having withdrawal symptoms. Can't sleep. Can't eat."
"I never poison you." Twenty-six was old for the farang game in Pattaya and she needed to settle down with someone. Even me. "I can't sleep same. When you come back?"
"Soon as I can." I barely had bus fare to Boston.
"I wait for you." She had said the same words to a hundred men, hoping one of them would make it the last time she had to say those words.
"Maybe I'll come back next week." The love potion antidote was losing strength.
"Rak khun!" Mem almost sounded like she loved me.
Labor Day weekend I caught the Chinatown express bus to Boston. My rent was paid and I had a job on 47th Street starting next week.
My father and I drove to my sister's camp on Watchic Pond. The pine trees taller than I remembered. I swam across the lake. My nephew, Buddy, rowed alongside to my uncle's camp. Under the whispering pines, we ate lobster. Everyone asked about Thailand. My stories about drinking contests with elephants diverted their questions about Mem. For the first time since I left Pattaya, I felt like I was home. Same as in the East Village. Same same as in Pattaya.
That evening the stars numbered in the millions, as my brother-in-law drove his speedboat around Watchic Pond. Hearing about Thailand, the career headhunter groaned, "Going back would be a big mistake."
"Nothing bad's going to happen."
"I read in the papers that western guys commit suicide there a lot."
"Some." I had seen two.
"Why?" He refilled our glasses with vodka-lemonade.
"Because they don't want to come back home." There was nothing for them here.
"And you?"
"This camp is more home than my apartment in New York and it belongs to you. By the way don't tell your wife these stories. I don’t want them to know how stupid I am." A loon cried out from the black waters and David shoved the outboard full out for the run to the camp.
"There's nothing wrong with being a fool as long as you're the only person you hurt."
The next morning my father and I headed south to beat the holiday traffic. At South Station, he asked, if I needed money. He had already lent me more than was wise for a man in his eighties. I thanked him for the check and got on the train.
Four hours later I was in my apartment. I have lived there for over twenty-five years. Still a bathtub in the kitchen and the old Trinitron on an elephant foot. At least the willow was bigger. The city on a holiday weekend was almost empty. Clover invited me to dinner. After dessert, she offered a jmanager’s position at her bar.
"Thanks, but working nights had nearly been the death of me. I have my old job back. WQorking days. And maybe I’ll get an advance for my novel."
"I can't say the world has been waiting for a book about punk rock kidnappers. Why don't you write something people want?"
"I wish I knew what that was."
"So what's the real plan?"
"Rob a bank."
"First-time bank robbers have a funny way of getting killed or sent to prison. Don't you have anything to sell?"
My TV was worth maybe $100. CD player another hundred. The cartoonish portrait on Clover's wall had been painted by Jean-Michel during the Eighties' art bubble. Recently he had been showcased at a MOMA show.
"How much you think a drawing by Jean-Michel is worth? He once painted my refrigerator. Not for me, but Alice. I thought she slept with him."
“I know. You had Alice erase it. He slept with a lot of girls then, but never Alice as far as I know. I did. Once."
"Was he any good?" It shouldn't have mattered twenty years after the fact.
"Better than he was a painter." She refilled our tequila glasses. "But there's no accounting for taste. A friend of mine recently sold a small painting for $200,000."
"How small?”
Jean-Michel had been dead thirteen years. He was more famous now than then. His painting on the refrigerator would have been worth at least a million. It was gone, but not the drawing.
"It was on a breadbox, but works of art by dead artist are like beachfront property. No one's making any more of it, unless it’s a fake."
"No, what I have is real."
"Then you got nothing to worry about." Clover wrote down a telephone number. "Call this guy. He's a collector of East Village art. That sale should cover the flight to your precious Thailand and more."
I stuck the number in my pocket. The money would smooth over my problems with Mem. I would write the greatest novel in history. I clinked glasses with Clover.
"Nothing like a friend who’s familiar with all your bad habits."
"And shares a few of them. Let's go to the bar."
At her bar we played pinball and listened to the Ataris, the Damned and the Dead Boys on the stereo. Two skinny blondes from NYU listened to my tale about a haunted schoolhouse in Ireland, where ponies dance on rainy barrens and the conversations of Europe died as half-whispers in the primitive bogs.
Clover evicted us at 4 am and the co-eds walked me home. Neither was drunk enough to accept my half-hearted offer to come upstairs and truthfully I didn't want to sleep with me either. I just didn’t want to be alone.
I woke to the telephone ringing and the September sunlight flooded my eyes like a river of gravel.
The art dealer was speaking to the answering machine. Clover must have given him my number. He hung up before my reaching the phone. I would call him back, but first I had to find the drawing.
My great-grandfather's sailing trunk held piles of childhood photos. I threw postcards from friends' vacations and my mother's birthday cards on the floor. Forgotten manuscripts cascaded under the couch. I momentarily feared my subleasee might have stolen the object of my search, however the sketch fell from a manila envelope along with a crinkled Polaroid.
Jean Michel's smile was a true smile. His memento from the bathroom had been a small drawing. If I hadn't known any better, I would have guessed that my nephew had drawn the crude image of a cat, but his distinct scrawl of 'three-eared cat' had once been sprayed across the Lower East Side.
I called the art dealer and he asked about ‘provenance', "There are a lot of fakes on the market."
"Mine's the real thing. Come over and see for yourself."
He set an appointment and I walked over to St. Mark's bookstore, where I examined a Basquiat catalogue. The handwriting matched the drawing.
I returned to my apartment to tell Mem the news. The phone rang for a long time. It was 5 in the morning in Pattaya. She should have been home. I was about to hang up, when she answered in Thai. She only spoke her language, if the Italian boyfriend was present.
"I'll be there in a few days." Any delay risked losing her.
A nearby picture framer completed the rush job for an extra $20. I hung the drawing at eye-level on my living room wall. It didn't look worth more than the price of the frame, but it was a Jean-Michel Basquiat. The art dealer arrived on time. Tall and thin as an extraterrestrial he surveyed my apartment. Nothing had really changed since the night Jean-Michel came here in 1988. Thirteen years ago.
The bathtub in the kitchen. A pull chain-toilet in a water closet. The plaster walls were originals, Thomas Edison might have installed the electrical system. I had moved here in 1978 and In truth the East Village was my only home and nowhere else.
"I like how you’ve done your place in Una-bomber fashion."
"I'm trying to maintain its historical authenticity."
"Where's the Basquiat?"
"It's on the wall." I pointed to the drawing.
“What about the painting on the refrigerator?”
"I had my girlfriend wipe it off the door."
"Wiped off? Where's the refrigerator now?"
"I chipped at the solid block of ice in the freezer for cubes. The knife pierced the coil. I threw it in the street." Nothing of the image had remained on the door.
"You have any idea what that was worth!"
"Yeah." Anyone who had heard the story had priced of my jealousy in the hundreds of thousands. Maybe more now. ”So what about the drawing?"
The art dealer examined the image of a demented cat.
"Last year you could have gotten about $10,000, but the best price for the moment would be $2500."
A round-trip ticket to Bangkok cost $800. $1700 lasted six-weeks in Pattaya. As an expert failurologist I recognized my options were limited. I was going nowhere, but back to work in the diamond trade.
"Thanks for the offer, but I'll keep the drawing."
"If you change your mind, call me." He dropped his card on the table.
After he left, the card went in the trash and I wondered what I was trying to prove by saving an ex-go-go dancer better cast in THE BLUE ANGEL than MR FAIR LADY. My role as a foolish professor could only be dispelled on the basketball courts of Tompkins Square and I put on my sneakers and Celtics gear for a long afternoon playing a small power forward. Someone knocked on the door, as I was pulling on my knee guards. It was Clover.
"That dealer wanted the refrigerator."
"He must have been disappointed to hear what happened to it."
"Yeah, he was about the hundredth person to comment on the cost of my jealousy."
"I told Jean-Michel how you had your girlfriend wipe off his painting."
"What did he say?" He had known all about it the last time he came to my apartment.
"He had a good laugh."
"Yeah, I'm a real comedian and it looks like Mr. Funny Man is staying here."
"That's good news." She caressed my new fridge like she wished she hadn’t sold her door for such a small price.
"Yeah, if you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere."
"You are too hard on yourself."
"No, I'm living under a curse."
"Not the Thai girlfriend kind?"
"No, homegrown, remember that story about that woman going nuts in Boston.” I had told it to all my friends. She was in my mind as was Jean-Michel and Mem and countless other ghosts living and not living.
"The writing on the bathroom wall?"
"Yes, but before that the mad woman had once wandered out into a snowstorm. I had found her hugging a tree. She had pointed her finger at me and said, "You, the ne'er-do-well."
"From 1974 to now."
"That's not a curse. Just her opinion and in her madness you could have been any man. You've done bad things. So have I, but at least now we try and be good."
"The key to triumph is in the first syllable."
"I'm old enough to remember reading that off a Salada tea bag." Clover stopped a second, as if the tea bag might have said something else. "You know I hear people say Jean-Michel wasn't a great artist. They never saw how beautiful he was in those first years. Or how powerful his paintings remain, because fame is a fat juggernaut crushing anyone who stands in its way. Fifteen seconds and next in line, but he was successful. He was famous. Now he's dead and until someone comes back from the dead and tells me they're serving rum Peach Melbas on lawn chairs in Hell, then I'm happy right where I am and you should be too. Life isn't about being on TV, but living, so you can fail right up to the time of your death as long as you don't give up. Van Gogh didn't sell any paintings, while he was alive.”
"Thanks for another curse."
"One more curse can’t hurt a failure like you." Clover laughed with the ruthlessness of a woman whose beauty has become a memory, except for sometimes in the right light, and I joined her, because failure is not a game of inches, but yards. "Darwin promoted survival of the fittest, yet I look at successful people and think it's more survival of the luckiest."
"And now?" Clover picked up my basketball and threw the ball at my chest. I caught it with both hands.
"And now I'm happy to be here."
"And I'm glad you're here too. Alive." Clover invited me to dinner at Florence in my Meat Packing District. I promised to be on time. We walked out of my apartment together. Me. Basketball in hand. She headed across the street to buy raviolis. I was a nobody, but so was most of everyone else. Jimmie the Pasta Guy smoked a cigarette in front of his store and shouted out, "Gonna put another L in the loss column."
"I got a few more wins left in me." I bounced the ball on the sidewalk and lifted my eyes. The yam pla duk foo would have to wait as well as my sleeping with Mem, but the early September sky was changing color to an early evening shade of autumn and the passing mailman joked about exacting revenge for his last losses. The tribe of nobodies was numberless.
The Russian masseur on the steps of the Baths asked, if I was renewing my membership. The bells in St. Nicholas' red brick tower chimed out the hour and a pair of my old sneakers hung from the traffic light on Avenue A.
Reaching the Park, the long-time players greeted me like the Knicks’ Willis Reed limping from the dressing room for the final game of the 1970 championship. My shot from the top of the key missed the hoop by two feet.
The court-side crowd joked I hadn't lost my touch. I rebounded the carom and launched the ball with both hands. My first attempt hit the rim. So did my third try. Sooner or later one had to go in and I wasn't leaving until the ball was all net. September 8, 2001 was a good day to be in New York or anywhere else in the world. Famous or not famous. Famous or famous for never. All the same to me and Jean-Michel, because he lives forever with me and immortality is always better than fame.
THE END
THREE-EARRED DOG
BY
JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT
JULY 1988
Jean-Michel’s last Polaroid shot before his passing
It is on my wall__
