I ran upstairs. Javier stood in the hall, shirtless, flexing his ropy biceps and bellowing gusts of stinking liquor-breath into the stairwell. In the bathroom behind him, the toilet lay on its side next to a hole in the floor with water gushing out of it. Javier inflated his skinny torso, roared victoriously, and placed a foot on the defeated toilet, a lion exulting over its prey. I shrieked and fled back downstairs.
“Javier ripped the whole toilet right out of the floor!” I cried. “How? He’s sixty-five years old. He’s got skinny little-girl arms.”
“Booze gives him power,” Carmen said. “He told me that.”
I went to find Mrs. Lisiewicz. She cursed in Polish and said she would turn off the water and get someone to fix it in the morning. “Glupek Javier,” she muttered. “He lives here twenty-three years! One of these days I’ll kick him out.”
Back in the apartment, the floor was sopping. The place was a wreck. The radiators were cold. Carmen and I piled our coats on top of the comforter and climbed into bed, snuggling together for warmth.
“I still don’t feel poor,” I said. She nipped the tip of my nose. “Ow.” It hurt in a good way.
* * *
I got my hair cut by a Japanese guy named Akira, who only charged twenty-five dollars. He shaved it off on one side and let it fall to my chin on the other. Then he bleached it white. If I didn’t put on makeup I looked washed-out and ghostly. Carmen said I looked like an alien. Zu suggested if I wore silver and white, and only silver and white, no one would doubt I was psychic.
The next afternoon, around two, I went to have breakfast and hang out with Carmen while she worked at Café Lethe, near the corner of Fourth and A. I sat at the counter with Bix and Wesley Temple, who edited the Underground. Wes was lean and brown-skinned, handsome, disheveled, and tweedy, his long rockabilly sideburns prematurely touched with gray. Bix schmoozed everyone, patting them on the back and joking around, presiding over the counter as if he were the godfather of the East Village. He was famous, in a way. He acted in indie films, and was best-known for playing a bookie in Weird Garden, the art-house hit of 1983.
Carmen poured me a cup of coffee and hustled away to clear tables, no time to talk. Bix added a dash of bourbon to his coffee and offered me his flask.
I waved it away. “I just woke up.”
“Wes?”
Wes was engrossed in that day’s Post. “Put that thing away.”
Bix assessed my new hair. “It suits you, dollbaby.”
Wes tapped a photo in the Post of Prince Charles and Princess Diana skiing in Liechtenstein. “Remember when they got married? Only a couple of years ago. Now they look bored.”
“I remember,” I said. “I was waitressing in a bar in Baltimore that summer. I had the lunch shift that day, and when I got to work in the morning the wedding was playing on TV. The ceremony was over by then, but the networks repeated the highlights all day long, and the cook refused to turn it off. She was a short lady in her sixties who wore her hair in a hairnet.”
“Was her name Gladys?” Bix asked.
“No, it was Rhonda.”
“She sounds like a Gladys.”
“I remember thinking, That could be me, you know, in theory, because Diana and I are the same age. I said to Rhonda, ‘Maybe I could be marrying the Prince of Wales, enveloped in a white fog of a dress and waving at people from a golden coach, instead of stirring industrial-grade mustard into a plastic vat of oil to pour over rotting spinach leaves.’ And Rhonda looked at me in my waitress outfit with a dirty rag in my hand and said, ‘Don’t blame me for the spinach, hon. The boss forces me to economize.’ ”
“Maybe Charles will get tired of Di and send her to the guillotine,” Bix said. “Like Henry the Eighth.”
“I love Henry the Eighth,” I said. “When I was little I had paper dolls of him and his wives.” The six wives and their executions had held an almost erotic fascination for me, but I couldn’t have said why.
“Did you cut off their heads?” Bix asked.
“I just dressed them and undressed them.”
Someone banged on the café’s plate-glass window. There was Atti waving from the sidewalk, his leather jacket unzipped despite the February cold and his bandaged foot propped on a skateboard. Carmen looked up from clearing a table and frowned.
“Mr. Pilkvist.” Bix waved him in. “Come in off the street.” Atti hobbled in and propped himself on a counter stool.
“What the hell happened to you?” Wes asked.
“My girlfriend bit off one of my toes.”
Carmen popped up behind the counter.
“Carmen! My love.”
“Atti, what are you doing here?”
“I’m bored! And I’m hungry. Can you give me a bagel or something?”
She sighed and reached for a poppy-seed bagel. “I was going to bring over pierogies later.”
“Toasted,” he added. “With lots of butter.”
We were quiet while Carmen sliced the bagel and put it into the toaster, while she poured a cup of coffee and slid it over the counter to Atti, while he lightened the coffee with milk and let his spoon tingaling against the side of the cup. He was cadaverously thin, the whites of his eyes veined with red. I forced myself to breathe steadily, to keep breathing.
“You been writing, Atti?” Wes asked. “Or playing somewhere?”
“Trying. Hope to have a new song or two to play at the Ear next week.”
Carmen kept her eyes on her knife as she slathered butter on the bagel.
“The thing to do is turn everything that happens to you into something beautiful,” Wes said. “Even the horrors.”
“Horrors, yeah, I got plenty of those to work with.”
Carmen’s knife scraped across the bagel.
“There’s some bad shit going around, Attila,” Biz said. “They found a girl dead in the park the other day.”
“One of the Amelias?” Wes asked. “Not the one with the Farrah Fawcett hair?”
“I don’t know,” Bix said. “She didn’t have Farrah Fawcett hair when they found her.”
“Who are the Amelias?” I asked.
“That’s what Wes calls the girls on those ‘Missing’ flyers you see all over the place,” Bix said.
“After Amelia Earhart,” Wes said. “The most famous missing person in history.”
“This century, anyway,” Carmen said.
“That’s the first Amelia they’ve found,” Wes said. “That I’ve heard about. When I see a new flyer I stare at it for a long time, and then I look for the girl as I walk around the neighborhood. But I haven’t spotted one yet.”
“They probably look nothing like those high school yearbook pictures their parents give to the police,” Bix said.
“How many girls have gone missing?” I asked.
“I count five so far,” Wes said.
“So where are the other ones?”
“Maybe they went home,” Carmen said. “To Ohio and West Virginia.”
When Carmen’s shift ended, I helped her take Atti back to his squat. He stood on the skateboard and let us tow him along. As we skirted the park, the rooster leered at us from his lookout on Samuel Sullivan Cox’s head.
“Whose rooster is that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Carmen said. “He’s always been there.”
The skin around my ribs started tingling, little fishhooks of anxiety gnawing at me. “What does he eat—rats?”
Atti twitched his fingers at me and hissed, “He eats human souls.”
“Shut up, Atti,” Carmen said.
As we got closer to Atti’s building, I said, “Okay, see you guys later, I have to get ready for work.”
“Phoebe—”
We let go of Atti’s hands and he rolled ahead of us to his front door. I stopped on the sidewalk, drawing short breaths with effort. The air suddenly felt thick as water.
“You coming?” Carmen asked.
“I just can’t,” I said.
She
frowned, and I felt her judgment: a coward. Weak. I tried to defend myself.
“How can you stand it? The sores and the vomit and his neediness… Why do you put up with him?”
She glanced at Atti a few yards away. He sat down on the skateboard to wait for us.
“You ever see that movie Fat City? About two boxers, Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges?”
“I think so, on TV once maybe, late at night…” I started to breathe easier, talking about movies instead of Atti.
“Remember that barfly character, Oma? And she has this lover, I think his name is Earl. Stacy Keach lives with her for a while when Earl is in jail. But she’s an annoying drunk, she drives Stacy Keach crazy, and finally he leaves her. One night when he’s feeling down he goes back to her place and Earl opens the door. He’s out of jail. Oma is drunk and shouting curses at Stacy Keach, and Earl says, ‘Don’t listen to her, she’s drunk,’ and Stacy says, ‘I know.’ And Earl says, ‘The thing you gotta know about Oma is she’s a juicehead.’ He just accepts that about her. ‘She’s a juicehead, so don’t pay her no mind.’ She’s a juicehead, and he loves her, and that’s all.”
Atti picked up a bottle cap and flicked it at us. It landed in the gutter.
“That’s your definition of love?”
“Do you know another one?”
“What about loving someone because they’re good to you? Because they’re worthy?”
“What about it? If they’re worthy, I guess you’re lucky. But that’s not love.”
She loved who she loved. Once she loved you, you couldn’t shake her. But you couldn’t earn your way into her heart, either. So if she loved you, it made you a kind of royalty.
“Hey girls!” Atti called. “Hurry up. My foot’s about to fall off.”
“Sorry, Carmen.” I ran home, leaving her to help Atti on her own. The club didn’t open for hours, but I couldn’t wait to get there and hide in the darkness, at least for a little while.
13 SO BORED OF HAVING MY PICTURE TAKEN
Toby’s sister, Shan, had set up a new space for me in a corner of the ladies’ lounge, with a red velvet curtain, a little Moroccan table, a crystal ball, and a stuffed panther as my familiar. I could close the curtain if my customer wanted privacy. I arrived at ten and sat at the table in my turban, smoking and shooting the breeze with Ruby until the club heated up—not till after midnight, usually. Ruby manned the concession stand. She was Hungarian and didn’t speak English well. I told her fortune to pass the time, even though she said she didn’t believe in it. She believed in auras, and told me mine was blue, which meant I was coolheaded in a crisis. I wished that were true. She supplied me with Teaberry gum whenever I wanted some, but I couldn’t convince her to comp me cigarettes.
I wandered out to the shark bar. A kind of burlesque show was taking place on the small curtained stage at the back. Two women dressed in kimonos and white geisha makeup tried to walk with bowling balls strapped to their feet. They kept falling down, to the amusement of the five men watching.
A gang of artists rolled into the bar with a rowdy hoot, five or so scruffy guys, three wild-haired women, a few sleek dealer types, and some young and pretty art groupies. They were riled up, ordering vodka and champagne and toasting each other. One of them was Jem, in jeans and a T-shirt, a pack of Marlboros rolled up in one sleeve.
“Where are you coming from?” I asked.
“Group show at International,” he said. I knew he meant International With Monument, a gallery on Seventh Street—and this gave me a little thrill of pleasure. I was beginning, at last, to know things. He had three paintings in the show, he told me, cityscapes of the Lower East Side: brick walls, apartment windows, graffiti, iron gates, empty lots, bums. Realism, but highly stylized and dreamy.
“I’d like to see them sometime,” I said.
“You can. They’re at International.”
“I will then.”
“Where’s Carmen?” he asked.
“She’s taking care of her boyfriend. He’s sick.”
A sleek woman in her thirties came over to congratulate Jem. Compared to the artists, she looked restrained and adult. She would have faded into the background in her black skirt suit, but the large gold cuff around her neck acted as a sort of reverse halo, floating under her head rather than over it and making her bobbed chestnut hair gleam in the dark. She said the Times reviewer had asked about Jem’s paintings, calling them the standouts of the show. She took his chin in her hand and gave it a little shake. “Get ready. You’re about to become a feeding frenzy.” She stepped away to order a martini.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Esphyr Collins. Collins Gallery?”
“Are you going to have a solo show?”
“I hope so.” His eyes kept drifting toward Esphyr, keeping track of where she was and who she was talking to.
“Hey, dollbaby.” Bix tipped his tiny hat at us. “You’ve got customers waiting.”
“I’ll be in my office,” I said to Jem.
A mod Cleopatra waited at my table. She had black hair with very short bangs, a gold band around her forehead, and a short gold dress decorated with green snakes.
“Somebody burned my sleeve.” She held out her butterfly sleeve to display a perfect round cigarette hole. “Are you the fortune-teller?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Goody. Tell my fortune.”
“It’s five dollars.”
She pouted. “I don’t carry money. Can’t you just do it for free?”
I looked into her eyes, black under silver-shadowed lids, and realized that she was Aviva B., NYU student turned It Girl. Her picture was in Details a lot, and on Page Six, documenting her attendance at celebrity birthday parties and nightclubs and openings with her best friend, a blond boy named Jacky St. Jennifer.
“Okay. Think about your question and shake up the box.”
“Shake shake shake! Am I ever going to be a movie star?”
I closed my eyes, and to my surprise, I had a vision, clear as a TV show. I saw Aviva sleeping in a narrow bed, illuminated by the green glow of a digital alarm clock. Another girl, wearing a nightgown, stood over her, watching her sleep.
I reported this vision to Aviva.
“Oh my God! That happened! You’re amazing!”
She told me that her freshman roommate had been crazy, “like, literally insane.” She used to sleepwalk with a Swiss Army knife in her hand, and sometimes Aviva would wake up to find the roommate staring at her while she slept. Aviva’s parents feared for her safety, so they bought her a studio apartment near Washington Square Park. It was so much better than living in a dorm, especially since she hardly bothered with classes anymore, except for her acting class.
“Did you really see that in a vision?”
In the back of my mind I wondered if I’d read it somewhere, that maybe Aviva had told a reporter this story of how she got her apartment. Other than the largesse of her parents she had no real source of income, but people offered her clothes and food and drinks for free wherever she went. She expected it.
“What about my question? Am I going to be a movie star?”
I pulled out three ticket stubs: Flashdance. Network. The Day of the Dolphin.
“Oh my God! I am! I am! That’s so amazing. Can I do another one?”
I wouldn’t necessarily have interpreted the stubs that way, but I wanted her to be happy. “Sure. Ask another question.”
A flash startled me—a photographer taking our picture. Aviva turned and posed for him, leaning back in her chair, tossing her head, kicking her legs in the air and laughing. She moved her body fluidly from one pose to another, click click click.
The photographer moved on, and Aviva turned her attention back to me. She bounced in her seat.
“You have a lot of energy,” I said.
“I do! I don’t even do coke! I don’t drink or take any drugs.”
“How do you stay up all night without drugs?”
“I hav
e energy!”
“You have to sit still or I can’t tell your future.”
She froze like a statue, making King Tut angles with her hands and neck. Then she broke the pose and laughed.
“Did you have another question?”
“Yes! Hmmm… what should I ask… hmm… How about: Is my father cheating on my mother?”
That surprised me; hardly anybody asked questions about other people. She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated while she shook the box.
Shoot the Moon. Caddyshack. The 400 Blows.
“Do you really want to know the answer?” I hated to deliver bad news, but I also wanted to interpret the stubs as accurately as possible.
“Give it to me straight, Astrid baby.”
“Then yes. I’m afraid he’s cheating on her.”
My reasoning: Shoot the Moon is about a disintegrating marriage, Caddyshack has the word cad in the title, and, even though I’d seen The 400 Blows twice and knew perfectly well that it was about a French boy’s difficult childhood, in this context the title suddenly sounded like porn.
“Wow. Okay. That sucks. But why did I ask, right? I mean, something must have made me wonder what was going on.”
Andy Warhol walked in with one of the artists from Jem’s gang, a handsome Asian James Dean type. The guy took off his T-shirt and posed against the red wall next to the sinks while Andy took pictures of him with a large, boxy camera. Aviva brightened.
“Andy’s shooting Polaroids! I’m going to ask him to take my picture.”
She was distracted by the entrance of a fashion designer and his entourage, including a pouting blond boy in a plaid dress. “Jacky!” She hopped up to greet him. “Jacky is here finally! Jacky, let’s get our picture taken together!”
“Do it without me,” Jacky said. “I’m so bored of having my picture taken.”
* * *
It was a slow night. I sat on the couch and did a bump from a vial I’d bought from Bix. Then I wandered around the club, wondering where Jem had gone. I passed a live goat with a unicorn horn pasted to its head and a man in a stewardess uniform with the letters T-W-A-T on the cap. A very thin girl in a dress made of chain mail danced by herself beside the pool. She looked like a ballerina—long strawberry blond hair, a turned-up nose, and sharply arched feet—and her dancing was precise and skilled. “Dance vis me,” she ordered in a German accent. Her pupils were dilated and I wondered if she was tripping. I swayed self-consciously beside her. She grabbed me by both shoulders and tried to push me into the pool. “Into ze Jell-O!” she shouted. I spun away and accidentally knocked her into the pool instead.
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