by Jake Shears
I grabbed my only two towels, moved the heavy furniture into the center of the room, and peeled the carpet back. The water just pooled outward. I tried to contain my tears and sponge up the mess with my bath towels: They were soaked in seconds.
I thought of my little studio apartment in Seattle and its homey, wooden smell. And now here I was, watching it rain in the middle of my room. I pulled myself together, dried my eyes, and walked into the front space to find my roommate Leonard. He was lying on his couch, watching a small TV, which was plugged in with an extension cord. Anaconda with Jennifer Lopez was on.
“It’s raining in my room,” I said.
He swiveled. “Oh shit, man. That’s right.”
“ ‘That’s right’? You know about it?”
“Yeah, there’s a little leak in there.”
“It’s kind of more than a little leak.”
“Let me see.” He pushed his burly body up off the chewed sofa, and I followed him to my room. “Ohhhh,” he said, as if he’d discovered a lost hat he’d been looking for. “Yeah, it’s definitely gotten worse. It’s puddling down there.” He laughed and poked my side. “It’s like your own water feature, man.”
I was out of towels. They were all wet. Leonard finger-motioned me to hang on and left the room, returning with a big pile of dirty drop cloths to line the wall with. “Hopefully they’ll keep it from turning into a lake,” he said.
I thought of the landlord. “Do you think Graham would come look at it?”
Leonard shook his head. “I heard a few months ago he was thinking about trying to patch up the roof with cement. Guess he didn’t do it.” He glanced at me from the side. “You can talk to him, but you’ll probably just have to live with it.”
Leonard walked out and I sat on my bed. The entire wall was leaking; it was like being under a bridge. Why the fuck couldn’t I get a break? At the very least I needed a room to sleep in that was dry, that wasn’t like some squat in an apocalypse. With the carpet peeled back, my plastic clothes bin of drawers and the low red velour couch looked like proper junk. My room was nothing more than a child’s fort. I curled up under my thin top sheet and tried to keep reading.
My parents tried to put a hundred bucks or so in my bank account every week for the train and some food. They weren’t going to allow me to starve, but they let it be known that it was necessary that I find a job. I did my best to think about what kinds of things I could do. Retail would be miserable: I was good with people, but folding clothes endlessly and pretending to know anything about fashion would have been a disaster. I wasn’t brave or savvy enough to attempt to wait tables. A bookstore job would have been cool, but it seemed like everybody wanted one of those. I didn’t feel ambitious enough to try.
I responded to a help-wanted ad on the bulletin board at my school. It was for the Association of American University Presses: They needed somebody in the mailroom. I arrived for the interview in a building at the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue, and rang the bell of the nondescript office. In the waiting room was seated a perspiring young man in a sopping-wet plaid oxford. He nervously held a bike helmet in his lap.
I wore blue jeans and a small short-sleeved, red-gingham snap-button collared shirt. My short hair was combed over and pasted down with tiny bangs sticking up like sports fans in the middle of doing a “wave.” I got the job.
It was pretty easy working in the mailroom, plus I got to take home all kinds of books after they were mailed back from their respective conferences. I was in for about three or four days every week, and there were only about eight people in the office. My boss was a handsome gay guy who seemed to like me. I wondered if at some point he would get flirty, but then I decided he was too professional for that. But not too professional to order two dirty vodka martinis when he took me to lunch. And besides, he went on and on about his boyfriend, some loaded guy he was in love with.
Around this time, Lucy’s boyfriend, Linas, tipped me off to some kids who were creating a show in the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU. They were writing it through improvisation and they needed one more person to join the ensemble. I was intimidated that I didn’t know any of them, and didn’t even go to NYU, but my curiosity was piqued.
When the day came to meet everybody, I chugged an obscene amount of coffee—I guess to ease my fears, but the caffeine just made me more nervous. By the time I arrived, my ears were ringing and my skin itched. The rehearsal space looked like an empty dance studio, a large mirror lining the length of the room. An attractive, baby-faced fellow named Ryan greeted me and we sat down cross-legged as a couple girls and another guy meandered in. They all seemed to know each other well and I felt shy as Ryan introduced me to each person. I was thinking, What am I doing here? I’m not an actor.
Ryan started by thanking the six of us for being there and said we were going to begin with a warm-up. I followed along with their strange yelps and whooping. After a round of making weird bird noises at each other, Ryan announced that we were going to take the next hour for free improvisation. “You can do whatever you want,” he said. “Create characters, talk to each other, but listen and respond. Be specific with your body.”
Everyone immediately began to hunch and stretch. A couple girls started moaning and writhing like evangelicals possessed by the spirit. I bent over and walked on all fours, sweating caffeine and needing to pee. Everyone just tripped out: It was as if we were in a locked padded room and someone had taken our straitjackets off. I lost track of time, thrilled to be pretending with no one looking at me funny.
Ryan called the end of the session. I was covered in sweat and everyone snapped out of their trance as if nothing had happened. “I love what I’m seeing, lots of energy. One thing. Please no retarded people, thanks. On Tuesday we’re going to start playing with some characters and scenes.” Everyone gathered their stuff, said goodbye, and left the studio. I didn’t know if I’d see any of them again.
“Are you open to doing the show?” Ryan asked. “I know it probably feels weird, not knowing any of us. But I need one more guy. I think you’d be great.”
As I gripped the sticky handrails on the L train, headed back to Williamsburg, I was elated. Despite the rain in my room and being perpetually broke, this was my first opportunity to perform in New York. It wasn’t clear to me yet, but I was becoming more and more drawn to situations that made me uncomfortable, whether it was by jumping blindly into a show or even my strange living scenario. Being in over my head must have been an instinctual way to discover new parts of myself that I hadn’t even known were there.
When I got home to the Cake Factory, most of the lights were out, and the loft was silent. I walked down the hallway and turned the corner, threw my jacket on the couch, and gasped: Someone was standing still in the middle of the main room. It was my roommate Donavan’s dark silhouette backlit by a tiny lamp. I could see individual hairs that had come loose from his ponytail. He was upright, head resting on his chest, with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“Jesus, you scared me.” I forced a laugh. He didn’t move. “Donavan?” I took steps toward him and touched his shoulder. He raised his head up a couple inches, weaving, eyelids heavy. “You okay?” No recognition in his eyes. He said something unintelligible, lowered his head again, and the cigarette dropped to the concrete floor.
I stepped backward toward my room. “You should to go to bed, man. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll see you in the morning.” He was catatonic. I had never seen someone so fucked-up. In my doorway I looked at him for one more moment, perplexed by how someone could seem asleep but still be standing. I closed my door, turned my lock, and sat on the edge of my bed, scared. It felt like the Cake Factory was suddenly haunted. Who the hell were these people I was living with?
EAT ME was the name of the play we made. It was about a lesbian carpenter who lived next door to a manipulative, homophobic, grifting 7-Eleven checkout lady. My character, Joey, was her son, a gentle boy obsessed wi
th turkey and Thanksgiving. The play ended with a big dance number led by Cher, and for some reason, I was dressed as a giant hot dog for the curtain call.
My Joey had stiff, slow, and specific movements of his arms and his neck. He had a bow-legged gait and talked in a low voice, sounding something like a sweet cartoon tortoise. I’d practice him at night when I walked home from the subway, running my lines over and over. Joey would come out on the train, or while I was eating a sandwich at the diner. I was doing the character so much, sometimes I would slip into him without even realizing it.
On opening night, our two leads burst into an uncontrollable laughing fit and ruined the whole performance. I was so angry. I couldn’t understand; it seemed almost like they had done it on purpose. But that was the only incident in our six-show run. I loved my time working with those NYU kids, overcoming my initial fear and learning basic improvisation. Plus, I got to date the director, Ryan, for a month or so afterward.
It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and my roommate Donavan gave me a pill, saying it would give me some energy. We went to Vinyl in TriBeCa for Body and Soul, a beloved afternoon house-music party. It felt decadent being inside a dark club, knowing that it was a warm, sunny day outside. The crowd was mixed and the dance floor comfortably snug. The smell of fresh sweat in the air wasn’t unpleasant.
Donavan’s eyes were wild as he let his hair free from its ponytail and started dancing, all elbows and knees. “Dude, this shit is just like Chicago in the eighties!” He was slack-jawed, as if he’d never set foot in a club before. Whatever upper he had given me kicked in. I felt its initial rush of effervescence, but I still felt like a stranger. It seemed everyone was smiling only at each other, like they all knew something that I didn’t.
I took a break from dancing and wandered through one of the side rooms. Ernesto, a gay guy I knew from Seattle, was leaned up against a wall. We used to hang out and get dinner, had slept together on occasion. Now, his clothes were tighter, his body had grown since I’d seen it last, his hair was shorter. I threw my arms open and gave him a hug, so happy was I to see a familiar face. He was a little stiff.
“Oh my God! How cool to see you here!” I said.
Ernesto glanced around me, like there was someone else he was expecting to see. “Who are you here with?” he asked.
“My roommate is in there somewhere, I think he’s grabbing a drink. I can’t believe this. What are you doing in New York?”
“Working for Wilhelmina,” he said, his voice flat.
“I don’t know her. What kind of work?”
He looked as if he felt sorry for me. “It’s a modeling agency, babe. Good to see you.” He turned and left me standing alone. I felt sick to my stomach. He seemed embarrassed that he knew me. As I watched him reenter his circle of friends, the atmosphere in the room became distorted. People’s faces looked waxy. Was it just me, or had the music taken a dark turn? I became suddenly self-conscious about my plain jeans and Hanes tank top. I found Donavan and we took the L train back to Williamsburg, staring at our own reflections in the glass.
When we returned to the Cake Factory, Leonard was waiting for us on his mangled sofa-island. “We’re getting another roommate!” he said. I didn’t even know we were looking for one. She showed up later that night and I knew right away why we had a new addition to our rotting concrete palace: She was stunning.
Leonard had met her while she was shooting a music video with a crew at our place the week before. When he found out she was looking for somewhere to live, he offered to build her a room. She was a film student from Texas named Anne Marie and looked like a ravishing raven-haired villainess in a Disney movie. She was tall and floated through the room, her eyebrows arched, her smile disarming. I listened as she and Leonard discussed the dimensions of the bedroom he was building her. She walked around, looking up in the corners, arms folded, heels clicking on the dirty floor. Leonard said he would start construction the next day. And Donavan, between earnest mouthfuls of weed smoke, said he would love to give it a special paint job. I didn’t quite know what to think, other than that it would be nice to have a woman around.
Leonard spent the following weeks nailing Anne Marie’s room together in the front corner just beside the main entryway. His dedication on display was unparalleled with anything I’d seen him do, and I wondered if he thought he was building their love nest. Anne Marie dropped in to check on the work between shifts bartending at Black Betty down the street, giving directions on the job that Leonard was doing. She became a cool girlfriend and would visit me in my room to talk about guys, or different movie projects she was working on.
“Okay, we are mixing the colors, right now!” Donavan called out, a cigarette dangling precariously from his lips. Wearing a kimono, he was crouched over a big white bucket with Anne Marie towering at his side. “It’s definitely going to be red!” Like a witch with her wand, he swizzled his mixing stick in a noxious brew of pigment and God knows what else he’d whipped together.
Anne Marie pulled me aside a few minutes later, concerned. “He said he ‘blessed’ my room? And he put a piece of coral from the Dead Sea into the wall and sealed it. Also, he just spat in the paint.”
“It’s cool,” I reassured her. “I think he just takes this kind of thing very seriously.” And serious was the only way to describe the finished job. When Donavan was done, the room looked like an explosion of gore and guts. The shades of red could have been called Afterbirth and Crimson Grit. Anne Marie seemed pleased enough, but I couldn’t have even slept in that bloody box. She then convinced Leonard to build her a loft bed as well.
Anne Marie was friendliest with me. She knew I didn’t want anything from her, like I’m sure a lot of men did. We’d stay up after she was done bartending and gossip about our weird roommates. When she was working at Black Betty and it wasn’t too crowded, I’d sit and gab with her at the bar, eating chicken kebab. It was a scene loaded with artists and musicians, and some nights bands played.
Our dynamic as roommates was relaxed and cordial. Sometimes there would be extra characters hanging around, like Donavan’s emaciated girlfriend. We’d smoke from a bong and the girlfriend would tell me stories of all-night parties with magical sunrises and DJ sets. She was obsessed with Kruder & Dorfmeister, and claimed that one of them had saved her during a time of emotional distress. (“It was like . . . he really understood me, you know?”) As the night wore on, Donavan and his girlfriend would grow quieter. I’d take one last hit of weed and excuse myself to let them go about their business. I had deduced by this point that Donavan was shooting up again.
MY HEAD WAS ALWAYS FISHING. Wherever I went, I was casting an invisible net, trying to capture some idea that I could bring home with me. I yearned for a sensation that I couldn’t quite name. But I believed if I just kept my eyes open, the true reason I was in New York was going to rear its head. I had an inkling now it was going to be performance-based, yet when I tried to visualize how I would do it, I drew a blank.
I got a ticket to see Beck on the Midnite Vultures tour at Radio City Music Hall. Not being able to afford two tickets, I went alone and ended up with a great seat, very close to the stage. Beck’s performance was assured, and the absurd world he created around him was specific and fully formed. There were zombified backup dancers dressed as football players with spare limbs coming out of their crotches. He sang “Debra” writhing around on a bed with satin sheets, a midnight cowboy with blond ambition. It was ridiculous and free. For him, sex was something to poke fun at and celebrate. I kept turning around during the performance to look at all the people in Radio City, out of their seats. It was arguably the better view.
Kiki and Herb at the Fez was an act that everyone was talking about. They were a duo played by Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman—respectively, Kiki, an old, washed-up lounge singer; and Herb, her “gay, Jew, ’tard” piano player. Kiki belted out left-field covers and monologued about her long-departed good old days. She got progressively drunker and surlie
r, walking on tables, harassing the audience, throwing drinks around. As the show continued, the lines blurred, a magic trick where the character became very real. The darkness was unexpectedly moving. When the show ended, I was shell-shocked, never having seen a performance with so many layers. I turned to my friend, the playwright Tom Donaghy, and surprised myself by saying, “This is what I want to do.”
“Then you have to just do it,” he replied. That sentence I uttered was a pivotal moment. I realized I wanted to make people feel how I was feeling right then, at the end of a show. The simplicity of Tom’s response was nothing but the truth.
I saw Fischerspooner play the Warm Up, a Saturday-afternoon outdoor party at the PS1 museum in Queens. The “band” was four singers and dancers wearing warped beige tunics, wrapped around them like tumors. They played no instruments; the music was automated and prerecorded, their lip-syncing skills immaculate. It was as if Kraftwerk had scored a Bob Fosse musical. Casey Spooner, the lead “singer,” kept stopping the numbers midway because of wrong dance moves or “sound issues.” His prima-donna act was convincing, leaving the crowd wondering if what they were seeing was for real.
It was at this performance that I met a handsome black man with muscles, short shorts, and a skimpy top, who proceeded to tell me I had a piece of corn stuck on my cheek, from a cob I’d just devoured. I wiped the remnants off and we both agreed we’d never seen anything like Fischerspooner. His full name was Seth Sharp and I was drawn to his cutting magnetism right away. He had a demented glee; everything he said came across like a private joke just between you and him.
The music stopped, the show was over, people clapped. The singer, Casey, brushed past us, sweaty and glowing. “I fucking loved that!” I called to him as he walked by. He politely thanked me and kept moving.