by Peter Gatien
Text copyright © 2020 by Joseph Jean Pierre Gatien
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Little A, New York
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ISBN-13: 9781542015318 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542015316 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542015301 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542015308 (paperback)
Cover design by Isaac Tobin
All photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.
First edition
This book is dedicated to the amazing community of inspired souls who helped create my clubs over the years, the designers, artists, musicians, security personnel, door people, sound techs, lighting wizards, bartenders, barbacks, DJs, bussers, legal advisors, hosts, managers, bookers, interns, promoters, floor sweepers, dishwashers, and everyone else who had a hand in making the magic happen. As Bob Dylan said, “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.”
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE Peruvian Tea at the Old Hindu Temple
PART ONE: CORNWALL TO CHELSEA
CHAPTER ONE Lilianne and Bernard
CHAPTER TWO Frog
CHAPTER THREE In My Little Pond
CHAPTER FOUR Florida
CHAPTER FIVE Atlanta
CHAPTER SIX I’ll Take Manhattan
CHAPTER SEVEN New York, London, and Chicago
CHAPTER EIGHT King of Clubs
CHAPTER NINE A Half-Pipe on the Dance Floor
CHAPTER TEN How Tunnel Reinvented Hip-Hop
CHAPTER ELEVEN Hypnotize
CHAPTER TWELVE Plate Spinning
PART TWO: BUSTED IN BROOKLYN
CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Three Fates
CHAPTER FOURTEEN When the Whip Comes Down
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Trial by Fire
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Up Against the Wall
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN All Yesterday’s Parties
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Peruvian Tea at the Old Hindu Temple
Word had it that ayahuasca ceremonies possessed the power of intensive therapy, a decade of it, crammed into a single weekend. The whole enterprise sounded exhausting. No wonder I resisted.
For years, my daughter Jennifer had been proposing that I attend a ceremony and drink the bitter tea, to experience the ancient Peruvian rite of self-renewal. She often participated in ayahuasca ceremonies herself, and she swore by them.
But I didn’t want to be transformed. I had endured enough changes in my life, enough forced renewal to last a lifetime. I’d grown accustomed to my rut, enjoying a peaceful existence in my downtown Toronto condo, living a private, serene, drama-free life, happy to be out of the limelight. But Jen was insistent. She began reserving spots for us at a secretive, invitation-only ayahuasca retreat. I would agree. Then, days before we were scheduled to leave, I’d back out. The cycle would repeat.
The thing about a rut is that, while limiting, it’s also comfortable. As I headed into my early sixties, my days and ways had acquired a “Do Not Disturb” sign. I felt that all my human potential had been realized long ago. There just wasn’t much left in my subconscious to uncover.
Don’t get me wrong—I always like to push boundaries. As a club owner I had helped foster some of the most influential cultural movements of the past decades, devoting my energies to sharpening the cutting edge of popular culture. I had heard about ayahuasca in the sixties, when we called it yagé, and psychedelia pioneers like Timothy Leary and William S. Burroughs endorsed its benefits. Both Leary and Burroughs had hosted parties at my clubs.
But I tended to be cynical about the entire New Age trip—EST, transcendental meditation, channeling past lives, Burning Man, going vegan, and all the other trendy obsessions. I self-identified as a nightlife entrepreneur. My energies had always been directed outward, not inward.
Jen, though, would not relent. “This time you’re going through with it, Dad,” she told me, after securing a retreat reservation for the umpteenth time.
“I’m busy that week,” I said.
“I haven’t told you when I booked it for yet,” she responded.
“I’ll think about it.”
In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, this stage of a transformative quest is known as “refusal of the call.” On a less grandiose level, I was rolling over and hitting the snooze button on my life.
“Dad,” Jen said to me, steel in her voice that I recognized well, “if you don’t come, if you don’t show up this time, I’m going to stop speaking to you.”
It was a threat that my daughter was perfectly capable of following through on. The Gatien family had a long-established tradition of the silent treatment. Jen and I had once gone two years without speaking to each other. It wasn’t a dynamic I was eager to revisit.
A couple of months later I found myself lying on a mat alongside nineteen other questing souls gathered in a dimly lit, high-ceilinged room at an undisclosed location. The place had formerly been used as a temple by the Hare Krishnas. The surroundings had leftover mystic vibes and a faint smell of palo santo that complemented the altar of freshly cut flowers.
Jen was beside me. She had abstained from the tea so she could monitor my progress, to see for herself what condition my condition was in.
“Just stay on your own journey,” Jen counseled me, “and don’t let anything else be a concern.”
I drank the tea, and, yeah, it was bitter and tasted like tar. The concoction, I knew, was prepared from sections of a kind of creeping vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, otherwise known as “the vine of death,” a fact that didn’t exactly flood me with optimism.
That was the last orderly thought I had for the next six hours. Our shaman guide, a medical doctor from Peru, conducted the entire ceremony in Spanish, a language I don’t speak. It didn’t matter. I understood everything.
The music began to guide me. I didn’t know where the musicians came from and hadn’t known what a pool of incredible talent they had in Peru, but it felt like the best concert I’d ever experienced. The reverberating pulse of the drums rose to match the beat of my heart.
I had approached the ceremony expecting a five-minute Six Flags fun ride and instead found myself shot into orbit. Moments from my past floated vividly into my mind, taking me over, to the point that I seemed to become my memories. My thought-dreams were real—more real than the former Hindu temple where my body lay in the dark, paralyzed by time. Scenes from my childhood rose and vanished. I felt, incredibly vibrantly, the moment on the parochial-school playground when I lost my eye—the violence of the blow, the wet blood on my cheek. I was with my parents as they sat by my hospital bed. My memories of the trauma had always revolved around my own feelings of pain and confusion, but in that moment, under the influence of the ayahuasca, I’d gained access to my mother’s and father’s emotions—their agony, their sense of loss. I stood in that room with my mother as she wept tears of regret for her son’s injury. I wasn’t visualizing her as a younger woman, I was seeing her that way beside me. I’d never experienced the moment so fully, understood the totality of it. A part of me wanted to stay, to witness all I could there by my mother and father, but the ayahua
sca moved me on, through my first loves, the years I spent running popular nightclubs, the monumental crash-and-burn that happened later. On and on rumbled the caravan of my life, one image after another. I experienced trauma, success, excitement, trials and tribulations.
I stood posted at the entrance of the Tunnel during one of the club’s groundbreaking Sunday-night hip-hop parties. It wasn’t as if I were there—I felt like I really had been transported back in time and space. I could smell the wind off the river on Manhattan’s West Side, the rain that had earlier washed the sidewalks clean of grunge, freshening the nighttime darkness. I checked out the eager club-goers waiting to get in, a line of a thousand-plus hopefuls that ran down the block and disappeared around the corner.
A solitary, ghostly presence, I glided inside. Young Biggie Smalls was onstage, debuting a new track in front of an audience crammed shoulder to shoulder, appearing to dance as a single ecstatic organism. Behind Biggie, skateboarders performed their hypnotic fall-and-rise moves on a half-pipe I’d had installed to the rear of the stage. Sunday-night regular Jay-Z was present, and Hova’s rival, Puffy, as well as Lil’ Kim, 50 Cent, and members of the Wu-Tang Clan—so many young artists who would go on to become rap royalty and together would revolutionize popular music. Making my way through the crowd of club-goers to the coed bathroom, I picked up the heady scent of sex mingled with champagne.
Then the scene changed and I was abruptly thrust into another of my clubs, Limelight, flashing through seminal moments there. I watched Whitney Houston give a flawless solo performance, her first public appearance in New York City. I saw Pearl Jam absolutely kill it with a crowd that had never before seen anything like the grunge band. A group of hired performers danced by, recreating surreal scenes from the movies of Federico Fellini. As soon as those visions faded, Prince emerged, remaining stubbornly apart, walled off from everyone by his security crew in the VIP room, talking to no one, solitary even as he let loose for hours on the dance floor.
The ayahuasca led me through a series of much less glamorous moments. There were the cocaine-fueled binges, being shut off in a hotel room for days, indulging in decadent parties, and degenerating into bouts of drug paranoia, when I was convinced there were interstellar aliens all around me. I stood in court, awaiting a verdict on charges that could send me away for twenty years. Throughout, I felt myself beset by conflicted waves of joy, longing, and regret. Beyond shattered moments of indulgence and freedom, there was a looming sense of darkness and danger, waiting to engulf me.
During the entire ceremony I left my shades on and attempted to keep it together. I remained stoic even though my thoughts were rattling around the universe like exploding stars. I was aware of Jen nearby, monitoring me, and felt desperately that I had to maintain an equilibrium in front of my child.
“You OK, Dad?” Jen asked as that first six-hour session finished up and we trailed out into the parking lot for some fresh air.
I nodded, mumbling that I was fine.
“So tell me, really, how was it for you?”
“Oh, you know me,” I said weakly. “No high is too high.”
Then my knees buckled and I blacked out.
I snapped to minutes later, with Jen leaning over me and people gathered around us.
“Mother Aya showed you who’s boss,” someone said, chuckling.
“I’m fine,” I repeated.
I wasn’t fine. I was cored out. “Mother Aya” had shattered my armor. The tea, the chants of the shaman, and the music penetrated my ego to a degree I had never before experienced. The ceremony threatened to break me wide open, forcing me to take stock and finally, at long last, come to terms with the truth of my life.
PART ONE: CORNWALL TO CHELSEA
CHAPTER ONE
Lilianne and Bernard
Long before I was ushering hip-hop stars like Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, the Notorious B.I.G., and Mary J. Blige into the Tunnel, or surveying the undulating crowd of club kids from the balcony of Limelight, I was just a provincial boy from the little Canadian town of Cornwall, Ontario. The first time my wife, Alessandra, visited the place where I was born and raised, we drove north across the US-Canada border and the Saint Lawrence River on the now-demolished Seaway International Bridge.
Welcome to my world, honey, I thought as I rolled up the car windows. Cornwall is a mill town, or at least it still was when I brought Alessandra there. One of the mills produced paper, and, as anyone familiar with a paper mill knows, the process gives off a god-awful stench—a sulfurous, rotten-egg fog. The stink, which was seeping its way in through the car windows and vents, comes from the kraft pulping process that employs “white liquor,” a chemical brew that breaks up the cellulose in wood.
When you live near a paper mill, your sense of smell gets accustomed to the odor, until you don’t notice it much. But newcomers like Alessandra get hit immediately. I had been away for long enough that I thought I’d have a similar reaction, but it’s funny how something like that can work its way into your bones, into the fabric of your being. Cornwall isn’t unique, and other towns are well known for their sulfur bouquet—the infamous “aroma of Tacoma” in Washington State, for example. Mayors of paper-mill towns are fond of grandly pronouncing “That’s the smell of money” whenever anyone points out the odor.
My father, Joseph Bernard Maurice Gatien, managed to avoid working in the mill, but my uncles weren’t so lucky, and my brothers eventually held summer jobs there. Most of the people in town were connected to the mills on the Saint Lawrence River somehow, punching their time cards at factories that pungently polluted the air and more insidiously polluted the water. The area’s whole economy was based on the meager pay that mill owners doled out. But that’s not all the local industry was responsible for: people always say Cornwall has one of the highest cancer rates in Canada.
Into this polluted world I was born in August 1951: Joseph Jean Pierre Gatien, a postwar boomer baby like so many others. In a lot of ways I had an idyllic small-town childhood. I came of age in the Canadian version of 1950s Eisenhower America—safe, sleepy, and boring. It was maybe a little rougher around the edges than life on the other side of the border, but it wasn’t exactly Calcutta, either.
I grew up as Pierre, the middle child in a house full of brothers. The oldest was Maurice, who took on the nickname Moe as we headed into our teens. He was three years ahead of me and our clear leader. Ray was just a year and a half older, while the twins, Mark and Paul, completed the Gatien quintet a couple of years after I was born. There was always a lot of loose testosterone floating around the house.
We were all supercompetitive, sports minded, and rambunctious. Though they were only a bit older than me, Moe and Ray seemed to belong to a different generation. They were more serious, less infected with the rebellious spirit of the sixties. And on the other side, the twins were more or less removed from my sphere, just a pair of dismissible kids. Whether by circumstance or choice, I stood alone in the midst of the five.
My mother, Lilianne Annette Gatien (née Henri), proved more than equal to handling the family’s masculine majority, and she did it with unfailing cheerfulness, warmth, and generosity of heart. While my father clerked at the local post office for forty years, my mother worked as hard or harder on the home front. She was the most industrious soul I have ever met, the standard against which I measure all other people.
Looking back, I can hardly conceive of the number of household tasks she took on. She sewed all our family’s clothes, and when I say all, I am including our winter coats, our Halloween costumes, and whatever superhero cape was popular at the moment. She had mastered the art of the invisible stitch. Every year, she would start knitting in the fall and wouldn’t stop until spring, churning out scarves, hats, gloves, anything and everything for her boys and husband.
But it would be wrong to pigeonhole my mother as the stereotypical doting housewife, waiting quietly at the door for my father to come home and take charge. My mother painted the house when nec
essary, inside and out, and maintained our family accounts. She learned the difficult craft of upholstery in order to refurbish our furniture. One year, when the family car rusted out from the heavy salt on Canadian roads, my father refused to spend the money we needed for the repair. So Lilianne found a body shop that was willing to let her use their facilities, and she enlisted all five of us sons to sand and patch the steel body. Then she spray-painted the car herself.
Maman was so adept and industrious because she had grown up a country girl, accustomed to hard work, born on a farm twenty-eight miles east of Ottawa in a backwoods hamlet called Clarence Creek. Her mother, my grandmother Francine, had Algonquin blood running in her veins, and her father was one of the last of the voyageurs, hunters and trappers who spent months in the wild.
Fred Henri, my grandfather, was pretty rough-hewn. He worked as a butcher, collecting game from area hunters, processing it, and transporting the meat to Ottawa for sale—in the early days by horse and cart, and later by truck. He met Francine at a dance in the small town of Pendleton, Ontario. The two married soon after, a native girl and her French Canadian beau, wedding young, as most people did in those days, their parents eager to get them out of the house to make room for the younger siblings. Fred and Francine settled in Clarence Creek, had eight children—among them Lilianne—and raised their family on country values, tough and resilient. Maman modeled those uncompromising ethics for us Gatien boys.
We lived in wartime housing, units that had been slapped together by the government for WWII veterans. With two bedrooms upstairs and one down, all seven of us in the household were served by a single bathroom. As Bob Hope reportedly joked, that’s how I learned to dance, living in a house with a big family and one john. My penny-pinching father kept the hot-water heater off every day except Saturdays, our weekly bath time. I usually had to wash in leftover water from my brothers, just like I dressed in Moe’s and Ray’s hand-me-down clothes.