by Jarett Kobek
I stood and gazed deep into the answering machine. The Mickey Mouse phone depicted the character as he existed in the black-and-white cartoons of his origin. Pie-cut eyes and two-button shorts.
The machine picked up. Jon. “Adeline, are you there?”
“Dear boy, here I am,” said I, lifting the receiver from the Mouse’s clutches. “Where are you?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Do you want to meet Wojnarowicz?”
Funny hearing the name pronounced aloud, radically different than how it read in my mind.
“Indubitably,” said I.
“Don’t say I never did nothing for you,” said Jon. “You can meet him tonight at 7 pm. He lives above the theater at 12th and Second.”
“I’m aware of his location,” I said. “Thankee kindly.”
Anxiety and wonderment. I had nothing to say. Would I simply sit and stare, hoping that the artist would perform like an animal desperate for a handful of peanuts? Worse yet, what to wear?
When the hour came, I’d passed through several sets of clothing before choosing a modest black ensemble. Of late, all of my outfits were modest black ensembles. I’d gone conservative, retiring the hair dye and ripped stockings. No longer did I dress like a psychedelic kaleidoscope. I could pass as a legal assistant, running from deposition to deposition, plagued by romantic anxieties that brimmed over whenever the senior partner failed to telephone after our latest indiscretion.
I walked up Second Avenue. I looked at Kevin’s building, attempting to peer with X-ray vision through the brick and mortar. Could he possibly have kept the same place? Did the collected works of Kilgore Trout remain his fixed point of reference?
It was only several weeks earlier that they’d reopened the Second Avenue Theater as a movie house. I somehow had convinced Baby and Erik to attend a screening of Scenes from a Mall in the main auditorium, a turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater with an unspeakably beautiful ceiling. I retained no memory of the film other than its action taking place in the monolithic Beverly Center, a mall in Los Angeles that looked as if it’d been designed by Albert Speer, and in the parking lot of which I’d once given George Whitney a handjob.
The marquee read: DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, FANTASIA, SUPERSTAR: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ANDY WARHOL, MR & MRS BRIDGE, MR JOHNSON, THE BRITISH ANIMATION FESTIVAL.
At the entrance to the apartments, a bespectacled older gentleman with brown hair stood before the door. I thought nothing of him until I examined the buzzers, attempting to figure out which button to press.
“Are you Adeline?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
“I’m sorry you had to come over like this,” he said, “but David’s too sick to see you. He’s really sorry but he just can’t do it.”
“I understand completely,” I said. “Tell him that I said hello. Tell him that he’s in my very deepest.”
“I will,” said the man. He let himself into the building. I stood, waiting, thinking that perhaps he’d come back down and inform me that it’d all been a gaudy prank, a test to see if I were worthy. Your patience, he might say, is indeed a virtue.
Five minutes expired. It was just about the worst feeling that I’ve ever had. The finality of it, I suppose, the sense that I would never be asked back. I hate being excluded.
I did what I’ve always done when there ain’t no place in this world for me anymore. I went to the movies. Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol.
Très cliché seeing a flicker about one New York artist after being rejected by another, but the other films were so dreadful. Even Fantasia. Nouveau riche Walt Disney meets Stravinsky. Bleeghh.
I watched the full hour and a half of Warhol, a collection of talking heads and contemporary footage, adding up to a beaucoup banal portrait of the man and his coterie of speed-freak drag queens.
I didn’t learn a single thing, but the shots of his digs invariably included imagery of 31 Union Square West, which jumpstarted a round of contemplation about our old Bank of the Metropolis, and the day that Warhol had died, standing outside in the street, crying about Mother. All of those people congregating outside of a building that the man hadn’t used for years. Human variety, says I to myself, will never cease to amaze you.
I walked back down Second Avenue, passing the Kiev, and then passing 6th Street. I couldn’t stomach going home and telling Baby my sorry tale, nor could I possibly telephone Jon and inform him that his efforts were for naught. That I’d been robbed by a disease.
Don’t you know that it was sheer selfishness? If I felt like this for no reason other than being told no, then what was life like for Wojnarowicz? He was thirty-three years old and every day inched him closer to the coffin.
Who knew how many were like him? Thousands? Millions? Tens of thousands withering across the five boroughs, driven insane by poison disguised as medicine consumed from a fear of doing nothing. We hid the sick in hospital beds, in sequestered apartments, in houses, in the poorest neighborhoods. I wanted to build a fire on the roof of every building where a hapless soul was consumed by the disease. The city would light up, ablaze, the funeral pyre of a culture.
All those sad people. I imagine that most are dead now.
I landed across the street from 84 Second Avenue. DRESS SUITS TO HIRE. Helen Sopolsky.
The humiliation of the human experience, of being trapped within a body. There was no good way to die. That filthy mannequin with its rotting tuxedo, the fashion getting more baroque with every year. The real artists of New York were not Warhol nor Wojnarowicz, but the unknown relatives of Helen Sopolsky.
I always imaginated that I would be one of the lucky few who received spiritual visitation from the building, one of the people who saw a ghost darting back and forth behind the mannequin. It didn’t happen. It still hasn’t.
JUNE 1991
Stacie Visits New York
Stacie had telephoned the morning after cessation of U.S. hostilities in the Persian Gulf. Operation Desert Storm was over.
Led by President George Herbert Walker Bush, this military escapade was directed against the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, who’d invaded the Arabian country of Kuwait.
Yours truly was one of the very first Americans to hear about Hussein’s invasion. I’d been up all night, working on a problematic illustration, with the television droning a rerun of Quincy Jones hosting Saturday Night Live when the screen went solid blue, reading only the words SPECIAL NEWS BULLETIN.
Coming in the middle of a comedy program known for its satire of contemporary affairs, I assumed that I was watching a very poor gag, but soon realized that this was legitimate product. No images, only the lone voice of whoever was hanging around the studio at 12:45 am, announcing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Stacie said that she had an empty month at the beginning of the summer and inquired whether she might not stay with us for a week. I said, why, yes, honey child, you may.
Televisions and radios and newspapers crowed about American military superiority, but it hadn’t been a Good War where all the citizens buckled down under the weight of collective sacrifice. It wasn’t even a Vietnam, with the American poor and dispossessed mangled by freedom fighters. The war was a video game in real time on a global scale, in which we unleashed billions of dollars of weaponry on a bunch of ill-educated Arabs.
These battles were massively unpopular around our neighborhood. Gutter punks and hippies ran in the streets, arms interlocked, shouting, “No blood for oil!” Other protests occurred, simultaneously, spontaneously. In New York, in the Bay Area, in cities across the country.
Each eruption demonstrated the hopeless delusions of the American political left.
In general, The Power Mongers paid zero mind to the shrill ululations of San Francisco faggots on the topics about which, it may be assumed, the San Francisco faggots possessed some degree of expertise. Like a decade of dead
gay men. Why then would our Dark Masters suddenly muster two fucks of a feather regarding a subject about which, it may be assumed, the San Francisco faggots knew nothing?
Outside of America’s liberal hotbeds, the country was transfixed by a creeping jingoism. The great unwashed masses proudly wore t-shirts that read DESERT STORM and BONK BONKS SADDAM HUSSEIN and IT’S NOT OVER TILL STORMING NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF SAYS IT’S OVER! and BE A PATRIOT, SUPPORT YOUR SCUDBUSTERS!
The bloody affair lasted four months before the military ran out of Arabs to turn into charred meat. By Stacie’s arrival, the Gulf War was as faint as memories of last Sunday’s dinner. The sole visible remnants were the tattered remnants of yellow ribbons, syphilitic chancres that had erupted when the fever ran its hottest, symbols of support for the troops that now frayed under the effects of weather and air pollution.
Stacie had never been to New York, a happenstance that she neglected to mention before her flight. Had I known, I would have met the lass at her terminal gate. As it was, I simply gave her directions regarding the subway, telling her which trains to take and to where.
The girl managed, arriving on 7th Street with jumbo-size luggage in tow, hollering my name from the pavement. I thrust my head out of our window.
“I’ll be right down,” I said.
“Hurry!” she cried. “I’ve got to pee!”
Some brute had left an empty cardboard box on the second flight of stairs. I tripped over it, but caught my balance before I brained myself against the wall. I threw open the front door. Stacie and I hugged.
“The toilet is the far closet,” I said. “You have to wash your hands in the kitchen sink.”
“Ew,” she said.
She asked if she might lie down. I stationed her in my boudoir. She promptly fell asleep.
*
I’d put Baby on notice that his presence was expected, demanding that he come home as soon as possible. I had no idea what to do with this creature who’d washed ashore. The reappearance of another old face from the Californy past was the absolute least of my desires.
I sat at our kitchen table, cobbling together work. The locks turned.
“Where’s Stacie?” Baby asked.
“Sleeping,” I said. “How’s life?”
“Classes, boyfriend, films, literature, writing. The five pillars.”
“As salaam alaikum.” I asked, “What do we do with her?”
“I have no idea. I’m practically a hermit. Ask what she wants when she wakes up.”
“Oh, Baby,” I said. “You’re no help at all.”
Not long after he closed his bedroom door, the melodic pounding of Baby’s typewriter filled the apartment. When first we met, Baby typed with two fingers, but over the years he’d developed fluidity on the keys. The sound was like horses running across sand, like an earthquake, like waves crashing, like a visitation of Neptune.
Stacie emerged, bleary eyed, yawning. “What’s that noise?”
“Baby,” I said.
“He’s home?”
“Through there,” I said, nodding at his door.
“Baby!” she cried, rushing into his room. Their shadows, on the wall, merged into an exaggerated hug. I wondered if Baby was happy to see Stacie, or if it were pantomime. That boy never could say no.
I reclaimed my bedroom and managed about twenty minutes of work before Baby and Stacie interrupted me.
“Change your clothes,” said Stacie. “We’re going out!”
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” I asked.
“We’re going to Limelight,” said Baby.
“Must we?”
“Baby says it’s, like, the best,” said Stacie.
If there was any obvious reason to applaud the influence of Erik, Baby’s new beau, it was how quickly he’d diminished Baby’s interest in Michael Alig. It’d been over eight months since the last foray into clubland.
Baby donned an uncouth approximation of what he thought the kids might be wearing, squeezing into a pair of silver pants and a shimmering shirt made from bargain-basement sequins.
I refused to change. My options were looking like a legal assistant or looking like a legal assistant desperate to assimilate within club culture.
We walked. I told Stacie about Jon. Baby told her about Erik. We asked Stacie if she had anyone in her life. “There was this one guy, but you know, he turned out to be a fucking jerk,” she said. Following the inevitable breakup, she’d applied to graduate school and entered the philosophy PhD program at UC Irvine. She’d spent the last two years reading.
The doorman at Limelight recognized Baby but turned up his nose at mi amigo’s reappearance. Baby’s outfit was hopelessly out of date, having left the fast lane. All the bright young ones now wore outfits of significant complexity and expense. Baby looked as relevant as a middle-aged man in a leisure suit.
Stacie had no problem. No capitalist ever turns down a half-naked woman. Only age devalues the currency of human flesh.
“Now I could let you in,” said the doorman to Baby, “on the basis of who you were. But the question is, who are you now? The distance between here and there can be very small or it can be the longest trip of your life. How should I know? And anyway, you’re shedding sequins.”
“My God,” I said, growing sick of the argument. “Let him in. You will in the end. What’s the point of this? Open the goddamned door.”
“Okay,” said the doorman. “He can go in, but you can’t. Not dressed like that.”
“Why the hell can’t she?” asked Baby.
“She looks like a cop,” said the doorman.
Baby turned to me. His eyes scanned over my outfit, focusing on the hem of my skirt.
“You two go,” I said. “I must work.”
“But I came here to see you,” said Stacie.
“We’ll reminisce on the morrow,” I said. “Baby is a much better choice for nightlife. I’m simply boring after dark.”
One hopes that others will protest when one asks to be left behind. Yet it was but a single strophe and antistrophe before Baby and Stacie disappeared within the church walls.
The doorman said, “You’re really very pretty, you know, but you’ve got to do something about those clothes. You look like you’re from Staten Island.”
“Dear boy, what a coincidence,” I said. “I am from Staten Island.”
“Too bad,” he said. “The worst scumbags come from Staten Island.”
“You know what they say, don’t you?”
“No,” said the doorman.
“And you never will,” I said, twisting on my heels and sauntering off into the night.
I hailed a cab. The driver was Armenian. It was like being back in Los Angeles.
In the humble experience of yours truly, cabdrivers the world over make a habit of flirting with the hapless young women who pour themselves into taxis. I was waiting for it.
Yet Papik Topalian expressed no interest. I gave him my address. We traveled in silence, catching a Zen moment of Manhattan traffic, one of the beautiful bursts that occur only under the cloud of darkness, when the streets are empty of cars and a vehicle can pass through multiple intersections with nary a hesitation. The green lights are like beacons that call one forward. Faster! Faster!
New York appears its best when one is in transit. Leaving the city, entering it, or simply riding within its confines. These are its best moments.
Our apartment came as purest relief. What had happened over these years? Why was I dressing like a legal assistant? Why was I so pleased to avoid a party?
Perhaps, said I to meself, you should cultivate stupidity as your new hobby. Perhaps you should become one of those horrible people trapped in perpetual adolescence, delighted to bounce up and down in dingy spaces, clapping your hands, listening to atrocious music and smiling like an infant feas
ting on applesauce. Wouldn’t that be the bee’s knees? Wouldn’t that be divine?
I checked Baby’s room to see if he had any cannabis. He hadn’t. How boring he’d become! Almost as bad as yours truly. Perhaps the common denominator was being in a relationship.
I collapsed into my bed. The Captain sat on my chest, purring with the full force of his oversized body. I fixated upon the ceiling, stared beyond it, thinking about Stacie. Her urchin face ripped me right back to Los Angeles. Of all my friends from home, only she had met Emil. I couldn’t think of a single soul besides Stacie and blood relations who could testify that my brother too lived. I imagined his life if he hadn’t destroyed himself by leaping into the Arroyo Seco. He could have been happy, I was sure, if only he’d let himself. It wasn’t that my own life was a crucible of joy. The only important thing I’d learned from New York City was to shape one’s perceptions of life’s inevitable cruelty. People with blazing disabilities lived reasonably pleasant lives. Cripples who loved every day of their existence. Why not me? Why not Emil?
Stacie roused me from sleep at 5 am, crawling into my bed. She stank of bitter stale sweat and cigarettes and alcohol. A human perfume permeating every square inch of Limelight. The scent of depravity. “Ugh,” I moaned, “comport yourself with some decency.”
“Push over,” she said, shoving me.
“Where’s Baby?” I asked.
“Passed out in, like, his room, I guess,” said Stacie. “He did a lot of drugs. Me too.”
“No after-hours party?”
“Too tired,” she said. “So much jetlag. So much cocaine. Have you ever done Special K?”
“No,” I said.
“We did it tonight,” she said.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Interesting,” she said. “God, you know, we don’t have anything, like, you know, Disco 2000 or Limelight in California. I thought we were sophisticated because we grew up on the streets of Hollywood, but shit, we aren’t, like, anything, you know? Nothing we have back home is like Disco 2000. You know they have a human freak show at the end of the night, where people get naked for fifty dollars and then this one dude pisses into a bottle and drinks his own pee? And there’s this amputee woman who takes off her leg and starts dancing around with it? I was like, ‘Baby, how is this fun?’ and he was like, ‘Stacie, just do another bump and you’ll figure it out,’ and you know, he was right. It got really fun.”