I Shudder

by Paul Rudnick

  The lobby was filled with pop and abstract paintings, along with tilting mobiles and tortured statuary, because some of the hotel’s resident artists would exchange their work for rent. The night I got there, the lobby was also packed with a shouting, shoving mob of reporters and photographers, and I could barely push my way through. Then the elevator doors opened, and a gurney carrying the shrouded body of Nancy Spungen, the heroin-addicted girlfriend of punk idol Sid Vicious, was wheeled out, because Nancy had just been stabbed to death on an upper floor. Standing on tiptoe, I glimpsed ragged, bleached-blond hair and a pale knobby hand hanging out from beneath a sheet. This was all very tragic and, of course, thrilling.

  William would be late, so he’d left a key for me at the front desk. His fourth-floor, one-bedroom apartment was high-ceilinged, with a marble fireplace, pitted parquet floors, and the largest, most aggressive cockroaches I’d ever seen; they were like skittering Matchbox cars. The apartment faced Twenty-third Street and shared a balcony with whoever lived in the apartment next door. As I took a seat, the balcony’s French doors opened and a naked nineteen-year-old boy with self-inflicted, rust-colored hair appeared. He stared at me for almost a minute, with a look of intense dislocation, as if he’d crash-landed on the wrong planet, and then he left the same way he’d come in, without saying a word. As I settled into one of the plump armchairs that William had rescued from the street and slipcovered in a gardenia print, the French doors reopened, and the boy came back in, now wearing only a pair of completely see-through parachute nylon hot pants, with a large zipper that ran back to front.

  “Um, like, I am really sorry,” the boy said. “But, like, I din’t wantcha to think that I was, like, the kinda person who walked around naked.” This was such a heartfelt introduction that I tried to stop looking at the boy’s penis, although, thanks to his transparent shorts, he now seemed even more naked.

  “I’m like, Michael, and William said I could come over and borrow a beer. I’m waitin’ for this dude, he’s one of my regulars, he’s, like, on the Board of Directors of Time-Life.”

  Michael, William later explained, was a hustler who identified all of his clients as being on the Board of Directors of Time-Life. He wasn’t deliberately lying, because Michael’s drug use made reality a flexible concept. Over time, William and I would wait out on the balcony and watch as Michael’s many sugar daddies left their cabs and limos. They were almost always silver-haired and well-dressed, so it seemed possible that Michael was servicing the entire Board of Directors of Time-Life. Michael was also constantly changing his last name and no one could keep up, so for convenience William started calling him Michael Neighbor.

  William had chosen the Chelsea because his idol, Charles James, had been living in a suite on a higher floor for decades. Mr. James, as William reverently referred to him, was a mad genius. He’d been a visionary couturier since the 1930s, and if you ever want to know what that means, just check out a double-page spread in the December 1948 issue of Vogue. In this photo, twelve models all wear gaspingly beautiful, draped and cantilevered gowns. The dresses are lunatic and timeless, and the women look like some goddessy tribunal on Mount Olympus. Such impossible perfection could never be mass-produced, and few women could afford the cost, or the multiple fittings, required. Every time Mr. James tried for a commercial career, he’d be acclaimed, and then he’d get frustrated by his backers’ need for a saleable product, and then he’d quit in a rage and be institutionalized. He now lived on private commissions, and Anjelica Huston or Bianca Jagger were always stopping by for the eighteenth adjustment to the pilgrim collar of a majestically simple ivory silk blouse.

  Mr. James himself was under five feet tall, and his remaining hair was dyed with a black shoe polish that dripped onto his forehead. I first met Mr. James a few weeks later, in the elevator at the Chelsea, where he was walking Sputnik, his small, arthritic, incontinent dog. Mr. James eyeballed me and then, in a shaky but irrefutable tone, decreed, “Your nose is enormous. You must cut your hair and be proud of your nose! You must tell the world, look at my nose! Behold!” At that time I had shoulder-length hair that made me look like an unkempt Jewish pony, so I wisely listened to Mr. James and the very next day, I got myself a nice short haircut.

  Heroin, hustlers, and hairstyling tips from an inspired dwarf; plus, as William gleefully added, “There’s a deli on the corner!”

  2.

  A few months later, William was depressed. I had graduated and was now living in the West Village, and he called me up: “I can’t pay my rent, no one wants to hire me, and I’m getting as fat as a pig. If I jump off the roof of the Chelsea, will I die?”

  “No, it’s only eight stories, so you’ll probably just be crippled for life. And if you keep whining, no one will want to push your wheelchair.”

  “Well, what if I spray Raid right into my mouth and then jump off the roof, then will I die?”

  “No, then you’ll be crippled for life and you’ll have no esophagus, and because you brought it on yourself, no one will want to liquefy a hamburger in the blender and squeeze it into your feeding tube.”

  “Fine, well, what if I cut my throat with a razor, jump off the roof, and when I hit the street a truck runs over me, then will I die?”

  “Worth a shot.”

  William’s suicidal tendencies were matched by his highly original hypochondria, and late one night I got a tearful call: “Rudnick, I don’t know what to do! I was walking down Twenty-third Street and my colon fell out!”

  “Your colon fell out? Onto the street? Like a carburetor?”

  “Yes! I was walking down the street and I could feel something moving in my pants! Something dropping! And when I got home, I looked in my boxer shorts, and there were all these strange pieces of skin! It was my colon! What should I do?”

  “Do you have pinking shears?”

  “Yes…”

  “Do you have a needle and thread?”

  “Of course!”

  “Do you have any light-colored fabric, maybe just a muslin?”

  “I think so…”

  “Do you have a pattern for a new colon?”

  William slammed down the phone, but he called me back twenty seconds later. “All right, I get it. All I’m doing is whining and complaining. I have no money, I have no career, I have no life, boo hoo hoo, poor little William. Well, there’s only one thing I can do.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to have a party.”

  William decided to cheer himself up by cheering everyone up. He scheduled his party for Valentine’s Day, and the handwritten pink-and-gold invitations promised “A Night of Liberty and Love,” because the evening was in honor of two of William’s favorite historical figures, Abraham Lincoln and Cupid. “Lincoln freed the slaves,” William told me, “and then Cupid made them fall in love.” “Cool,” said Michael Neighbor, “can I come?” “Of course,” William replied, “and I need your help.”

  For the week before the party, William rented an extra room down the hall, to store all of his furniture. He then called in every possible favor, and recruited an army of florists, scenic artists, carpenters, and unskilled labor, like me. First we repainted his entire apartment a pale, flattering pink—“Because this is New York in February,” William explained, “so people need all the help they can get.” Then several hundred strands of white Christmas twinkle lights were dipped in pink glaze, and William teetered atop a high ladder, stapling the lights in snaking patterns across the ceiling. “Oh no!” he wailed, trying to reach a far corner, “My arm’s too short to box with God!” This last phrase was the title of a popular, touring gospel musical, and I had once seen a poster for a similar show, which listed “Executive Producer—Jesus Christ.”

  After the lights were up, we inflated hundreds of pink helium balloons, which flew to the ceiling and filtered the glow. Every balloon trailed yards of golden ribbon, with each ribbon knotted at the opposite end with a pink carnation dangling in midair. The floor was drenched
with glossy white enamel, and a professional portraitist created a mural over the fireplace, with the profiles of Lincoln and Cupid, gazing longingly into each other’s eyes. The room looked like an enchanted rain forest, or the inside of a priceless Fabergé egg, as dreamt by a feverish twelve-year-old girl.

  On the night of the party, William clustered hundreds more balloons on his balcony, and dumped pounds of glitter marking a path from the street, up four flights of stairs, and down the hall to his apartment. He’d invited over 300 people, including most of the hotel’s residents, especially Neon Leon, who lived across the hall. “I’m not quite sure what Neon Leon does, or why he’s called Neon Leon,” William said, “but he’s very nice, even if he likes to set his apartment on fire almost every day. So if we invite him, maybe he’ll just let the fire wait until the next day.” William wasn’t kidding, as the hall would frequently fill with smoke, and William would just stuff wet towels under his own door, wait for the fire trucks, and comment, “Neon Leon. I think he just smokes things and falls asleep.”

  Because the party was a celebration of romance, William asked Michael Neighbor to recommend a male prostitute whose favors could be raffled off at midnight. A good-looking, sandy-haired guy arrived, and William gave him a tight red T-shirt that said “Mr. Valentine” across the chest. Mr. Valentine then circulated affably as the apartment filled to bursting, because everyone William invited had shown up, and they’d brought friends. There was pink champagne, heart-shaped sugar cookies, and hors d’oeuvres laid out in the shape of Lincoln’s stovepipe hat. There was a shoe box on the mantel that had been découpaged with doilies and construction-paper hearts, and beside it was a ribbed glass tray stacked with children’s dime-store valentines. If guests wanted to bid for Mr. Valentine, they had to write their names on one of the cards, and then tuck it into a slot in the shoe box. William had made sure that Mr. Valentine was equally able to pleasure men and women, and while all sorts of people submitted their cards, one actress in particular bid at least fifty times.

  Like any near-virginal, sheltered boy from the suburbs, I was fascinated by prostitutes. It was less about sex than sheer confidence, because imagine being so hot that people would pay you. This seemed like a far greater accomplishment than, say, a merit badge in forestry or decent SAT scores. I was far too intimidated, and way too broke, to ever hire a prostitute; I’d be more likely to ask for their autograph. Over my years in New York, I’ve met many prostitutes, and I’ve stopped generalizing, because as with anyone in a service profession, hookers vary. There was a tough call girl who was being kept by three rich men, and she seemed damaged and defiant. There was a sunny guy from Arkansas, who only complained about having to load up on beer before visiting a casting director who liked to be peed on. And there was Michael Neighbor, for whom hustling was a natural fit, because he was too easily distracted to keep a day job; he loved attention, and he spent most of his earnings on high-tech video games and gadgets.

  Many of the guests at William’s party had gone to the Yale School of Drama, and as Mr. Valentine socialized, he noticed a recently graduated playwright and asked, “Ed?” Peering through the throng, Ed replied, “Dan?”

  “Is that Dan?” asked a woman who’d graduated two years back, with her degree in theater administration. “Becky! You look fabulous!” declared Mr. Valentine. It soon became evident that almost half the party knew Mr. Valentine, since he’d graduated three years earlier, from the directing program.

  “I haven’t seen you in forever!” exclaimed a woman who was currently an assistant dramaturg at a regional theater. “What have you been doing?”

  “I’m Mr. Valentine!” said Dan, without a trace of embarrassment. “Do you know how hard it is to break into directing? You can’t get a job until someone can come and see a show you did, and you can’t get a show without a previous credit. It sucks!”

  Most of the guests were pretty much unemployed, so everyone hugged Dan and congratulated him, for at least being able to take home a tax-free paycheck. The music blasted, everyone danced, all of the designers paid homage to Mr. James, and Mr. Valentine eventually went home with another aspiring director. I suspect that while they probably had sex, they really got off on bitching about how tough it was to land even an assistant directing gig.

  “So, do you feel better?” I asked William, as we collapsed at six a.m., onto his furniture in the room down the hall.

  “So much better,” he said. “But do you think people had a good time?”

  “Fuck, yeah!” said Michael Neighbor. “Your party was hot! Shit, I’m goin’ to drama school!”

  3.

  William at last began to get design work Off-Broadway—specifically, on a show called Earthworms, which was a lacerating attack on the playwright’s Catholic boyhood. It was about to star a very young Richard Gere, who left during rehearsals when he was cast in a movie. William was impressed by Gere’s sullen good looks, but more by the fact that, even as a union-minimum performer, Gere had his jeans custom made. “So right there I knew he was going to be a big star,” William predicted.

  A scene called for two vicious nuns to carry a twelve-year-old boy across the stage, slung from a rail by his bound wrists and ankles, so William needed to find two nuns’ habits. To save money, he phoned a Brooklyn convent and told them that Playwrights Horizons was doing a revival of The Sound of Music. The nuns were naturally delighted, and soon two complimentary habits were lying across William’s bed at the Chelsea.

  We looked at the habits. We did what we had to do. We put them on. I defy anyone, male or female, Jew or Gentile, gay or straight, if left alone with a nun’s habit, not to try it on. And model it.

  The body-skimming, summer-weight, slimmingly black wool habit was shockingly sensual. The slits at the hips weren’t pockets, but went right through to the skin. The wimple was more confining, first the snug white under-bonnet and then the heavy black veil, but soon William and I were swirling around his two rooms.

  Somehow we became convinced that we had sailed far beyond drag. We were nuns. To test this conviction, we left the apartment. We took small, swift steps, like devout geishas. We kept our chins down, humbly. As we moved through the lobby, there was a wild burst of cheering and applause.

  “Did everyone clap because they’d never seen nuns at the Chelsea Hotel?” William wondered, once we were out on the street.

  “They were probably clapping because they’d never seen nuns with five-o’clock shadow and Adam’s apples,” I said.

  “Well, I’m a nun,” William insisted, as he shook the coffee can he’d brought along at passersby. We’d already dropped some coins into the can, to make some noise and encourage donations. “Won’t you help?” William asked a young mom who was pushing her infant in a stroller and clutching her four-year-old’s hand. “We’re building a new convent,” William told her, “in—Ohio.”

  “We need hymnals,” I added.

  “All of our old hymnals are falling to pieces.”

  “It’s because we can’t stop praying. It’s like a drug.”

  “Don’t talk to them,” the woman warned her toddlers, yanking them away.

  “Selfish,” William muttered. “I hope that God makes her children into serial killers. With thick ankles. With piano legs.”

  “You need to be more spiritual,” I told him as we approached a businessman getting out of a cab.

  “It’s for the children,” William begged the man, shaking his coffee can. “The children who can’t walk.”

  “The lazy children,” I added.

  “What are you?” the man asked, aghast.

  “Michael Neighbor is on the fourth floor,” William said.

  “Thank you,” the businessman replied, scurrying into the Chelsea.

  “He’s going to hell,” I decided.

  “Unless he buys Michael Neighbor a new Walkman.”

  We weren’t making any money, so we walked into a nearby apartment building lobby, where we sang “Climb Ev’ry Mountai
n.”

  “Welcome, brothers and sisters,” William began, to the doorman and the guy behind the desk and the tenants waiting for the elevator. “We are the Little Sisters…the Little Sisters…”

  “We are the Little Sisters of The Swollen Colon,” I declared, “and when was the last time any of you went to church? Or said a novena? Or enjoyed a truly cleansing bowel movement?”

  “Amen, Sister!” cried William.

  “This city is filled with evil, and false emotion, and bad performance art!”

  “Sing it, Sister!”

  “In fact, this city has become so clogged with sin, so jammed with heathen heartache, so blocked with wrongdoing, on every street corner, and in every downtown apartment building lobby with sad flocked wallpaper, this city has become so backlogged with bile, that poor Sister Chloe Hypatia, the nun standing right beside me now, Sister Chloe Hypatia has not experienced a successful bowel movement in over two long years!”

  “It’s true,” Sister Chloe Hypatia confessed, “but it’s God’s will!”

  “Can you imagine what that feels like? Chloe Hypatia spends her days kneeling and scrubbing and teaching oral hygiene at St. Bartholomew’s, and yet at any second she knows that she just might explode, and that parts of her body, and not the pretty parts, those body parts might maim or injure or even murder hundreds of innocent people within a five-block radius!”

  “I’m a powder keg!”

  “So if you won’t give, if you won’t dig deep, if you don’t cry out, ‘Yes Jesus, I want Sister Chloe Hypatia to find release, in an empty, tiled chamber!’ well then, we cannot be responsible! It’s up to you!”

  “I feel it! It’s coming! I can’t stop it!”

  “Run, everyone! Run for your lives! Run and pray!”

  With that, we hiked up our skirts and ran for home, bursting through the front doors of the Chelsea, where we smacked right into Mr. James, who was taking Sputnik out for a stroll. Mr. James glanced at our habits and then finally asked, in a slightly bored tone, “Chanel?”