Rivington Was Ours

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  “Are we done here? I have shit to do.”

  “You work two days a week. What the fuck do you have to do?”

  “I’m busy. I have writing and books to read and places to DJ. I’m not going to be a bartender for the rest of my life.”

  He didn’t understand that last part at all. Why wouldn’t someone want to be a bartender? Guy would bartend five nights a week here if the boss lady would let him.

  WHEN I STEPPED OUT OF the bar’s encapsulating shadows, I met the blinding afternoon. I realized for the first time that I didn’t have shit to do. It was towing day on the streets and when the sweeper passed it left a damp little trail like a slug cleaning an aquarium.

  Conrad had started school. My other friends all had real jobs. I didn’t have a girlfriend anymore.

  On my way over to my Vespa, I saw something wonderful. It deserved a perfect portrait like Nude Descending a Staircase. Only I would call it Gaga Returning from a Follow-Up Hair Appointment. A freshly swept Rivington Street guided her as she marched past the chain-linked court where kids from the projects played basketball. She wore high heels, fishnets, a leather jacket, and a small stark-white men’s hat.

  She didn’t see me. But I watched her march past me with a wonderfully smug grin on her face. She had worn the hat to the salon in shame to cover up that bad bleaching job. Now she wore it cocked with pride.

  Beneath it you could see her hair had now gone platinum. That’s what you call foreshadowing.

  Bleaching the surface of her hair made Gaga walk like a star. Her smug grin made it look like she caught you looking at her—and she knew. Most girls who worked all weekend would just plop around on Mondays in workout clothes and watch TV. But Gaga walked briskly down Rivington with a heavy bag. Like most of us, she worked a stop-off at St. J’s into her routine, magnetized away from her apartment one block up and over. She came by on Mondays to spend time with Guy. To watch him work, but without all the drunk girls surrounding him. When I saw the way they had their little afternoon routine, I could see that she really did love him. She wanted to be a part of his world, to double count the stacks of money, to help around the bar. To break for dinner when he got frustrated. Then she’d earned her night with him and knew he could relax once everything was battened down.

  They teased each other with inside jokes; they had a date rotation of dinner at home, movies, bowling on Sundays, visiting him at work, and band practice. I never mastered that with Nikki and it left us both unsettled, unsafe. No wonder the tiniest problem threw us into a tailspin.

  She walked purposefully, like a busy career girl. Gaga had a full-time job now. The boss, the manager, a stylist, and the publicist. And the client she worked for was Lady Gaga.

  I watched her walk past and noticed the sort of Lower East Side heads she turned as she marched down the still-wet streets. Hasidim shocked she wasn’t wearing pants, guys from the projects checking out the white girl with ass, busybody neighbors scowling that the girl might catch cold, scenesters trying to figure out where they’d seen her before. Nobody here knew who she was, but they all wanted to.

  Without turning her head she walked by me on the opposite side of Rivington and kept the same perfect 4/4 walking tempo. I saw the hat tilt just over her shoulder, “See you tonight, buster?”

  “Yeah . . .” Busted. You can add me to the list between ghetto boys and scenesters. I was gawking. “We’ll get dinner or something.”

  “Can’t wait.” She turned her head and gave me a devilish smile over the top of her shades.

  And I knew right then she would be a star.

  PART OF BEING A REGULAR or an employee of a certain kind of bar is feeling like a part of it. Beauty Bar always felt like home, but I never felt like a part of it. The bartenders and DJs had their own scene. Some of them had worked there for ten years even when I started playing there. St. Jerome’s would have disappeared if it weren’t for us. The year before we showed up, it was a failing wine-and-cheese shack called Belly. It failed miserably (bartenders were given forty dollars a shift and on most nights they didn’t bring in enough to pay themselves minimum wage). So they painted it black and added a DJ booth. We all worked hard to make it a special place. Maybe the neighborhood didn’t need one more dive. But we did.

  After years of jobs where I felt replaceable—where I felt like my anonymous uniform was just waiting for another anonymous candidate to fill it when I got canned—now I belonged.

  But not for long.

  Ask me I won’t say no, how could I?

  I met British Henry a few years earlier when he first came to visit from London. I hadn’t seen him since I started working downtown. Back then he worked for Martin McDonagh, the Irish playwright. Henry had a posh, privately educated accent and he always wore effortlessly matched outfits and took long, thoughtful drags of his American cigarettes. We sometimes sat in bars, making up stories about the people around us, rehearsing their lines of dialogue. Henry had a play produced when he was quite young and skipped university in order to get right to the business of playwriting. We both clung to minor successes, to one-acts and short stories published and performed where no one could find them.

  He signaled for the check as we finished dinner at Stanton Social. “Can I ask you something, Brendan? I’m hearing you. I like you. I think you’re a talented writer. What do these bands and singers and your friend’s relationship to her terrible boyfriend have to do with your work?”

  I actually had no idea. Usually I’m better at faking an answer.

  “You know I think you’re a genius,” he said.

  “That is a bit off topic, but thanks.”

  “But here’s the thing with genius: It still gets confused.” The check came and I discovered, thankfully, that the drinks had managed to fall off the total. “I know what you want to do here. With your bands and your parties and your music and your writing. You want to create something for yourselves. You will be the one who writes about it. But you’re getting in the way of your story. Right now you’re in the thick of it and you can’t see out.”

  “Come to our show next week. I’m DJ’ing and she’s go-go dancing, but we’re going to slip in some of her music this time. People are bored of bands—it’s such a chore. Why stop the music? I’m going to play and then she’ll go on and sing. It’ll be different.”

  “Is something going on with you two?”

  “No. Why would you ask that?”

  “She’s just the part of your life that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe she’s the only part that makes sense to me.”

  “Interesting,” the playwright mused.

  WE WALKED DOWN STANTON TO Ludlow while large groups of people our age tried to figure out where to make bad decisions. They swarmed together in the cold autumn night. As you passed every venue it was the roar of voices, not music, that marked their vital signs. Everyone always looking for everyone in the uncertainty of night. I caught a girl’s eyes, thinking she might be Nikki, and when she looked into mine I knew she wasn’t. The strange girl looked back at me and wished that I was who she thought I was. I wished that Nikki thought I was who she thought I was when we met.

  “All I’m saying is that it would work as a play,” Henry said.

  “What would?” I looked over at British Henry, who had carried on our conversation and didn’t seem to mind when I disappeared.

  “Mercutio. We are supposed to be talking about your writing. Correct? All the feedback you’re getting and all the difficulties you’re having just point to the fact that it would really only work on stage. And I don’t have to tell you that English audiences wou—”

  “Get out of my way! I’m going to fucking kill somebody!” Just then a young screaming woman in a red flannel shirt burst through the smoking herd outside of Pianos, swinging her purse. She shoved everyone out of her way, kicking the doors of parked cars and slinging her leather purse at terrified strangers. “I hate you! I hate all of you!”

  The over
sized wool button-down hung off one side, revealing a bare shoulder. The red of her eyes matched the shirt. She swiped the purse at a girl in front of her, but she missed and it whipped her around, spinning her on the spiked heel of her shoe. The other girls stepped away as if from a wild animal woken from hibernation. The street went silent as she turned to them, her shirt fell open, and her left breast glared at the speechless crowd. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate your fucking face!”

  She turned her back on the gathering crowd and started trying to hail cabs, kicking their plastic taillights as they sped away from her. Part of my job was making sure drunk girls didn’t do anything stupid, so I went to hail one for her and I finally got her in, screaming. She kicked the partition and screamed at the Nigerian man at the wheel, “Fucking drive! Get me out of here!”

  The car sped off.

  Henry never lost the thread: “You want to write about a world in which the Montagues and Capulets are real. At the same time, Dante is exiled from Florence in Verona.”

  “Which did happen. All of it happened. But no one’s writing about it.”

  “I agree with you. I’m surprised this hasn’t been written.” Henry nodded with sincerity. “Put some pages together for me and I’ll show it ’round in London. But do it for the stage. You really have this dynamite lead, the setting—you just need the story. I mean, you have the ending and then you have this catalyst, this time bomb. And—”

  “I hate you! I fucking hate you! Fuuuck!” At the corner of Ludlow and Rivington we turned and saw that same girl screaming and getting thrown out of another cab. Bodily. She landed on the street in a pile of flannel and purse shrapnel. Plastic palettes of makeup clattered onto the chilly sidewalk. The open shirt hung off the right shoulder this time, buttoned only at the belly.

  I picked her up again and she started screaming at me. For the sake of brevity, I will have to paraphrase her argument: Fuck you, I hate all of you, you all make me sick, fuck you. It is similar to how I felt when I walked down Rivington Street on weekends.

  “Sweetie, just get off the street and put your coat on. Relax. Breathe.” I let go of her and she tore down Rivington towards Essex. A cab that had a green light came screeching in front of her. The driver’s eyes widened as he tightened his brakes. It stopped so close that it banged her purse.

  She gripped the strap to punctuate her disgust and slammed it against the hood of the honking cab. “I. Hate. You!” The wild woman kicked the grill of the cab that almost killed her. Her boot got stuck and she fell backward into the intersection. The cab honked. British Henry and I were crossing that way as it happened. I picked her up for the third time, which was easy because she weighed maybe ninety pounds. She looked me in the eyes, tears spreading to the corners of hers, and wimped, “I hate you—”

  “Shut the fuck up. I hate you too, just so you know.” I put her down in a pile on the street. “Fucking breathe or you’re going to pass out. Breathe through your stomach. No. Your stomach. Like me, ready?”

  I crouched down and wrapped my jacket around her icy skin, holding her elbows with mine. “Why is everyone so awful?” she asked, as if taking a survey.

  “Because you fucking hate them. Now breathe. Just fill your lungs as much as you can.” I ran my fingernails in her hair. “Shhh . . . just breathe.”

  British Henry looked nervous, like we’d found a bear cub. “Maybe we should leave her alone, Brendan. We should go.”

  What was really odd was that the only word for what I was doing with this stranger is “cuddling.” I also have to admit that it felt marvelous, but in the least creepy way possible. Then she whimpered, “I’m not on drugs.”

  I patted her hair. “Who said you were on drugs?”

  “You’re thinking it. You think I’m crazy.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I have schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”

  “I’d like to hear more about that sometime. Sounds awesome.”

  “Why do you think that’s awesome?” She eked out the words from deep in her diaphragm, like someone trying to get a word in before the tears took over.

  “Because you can be on vacation from yourself. Do you have your medicine on you?” For the twelfth creepiest thing I did to her that night, I started searching through her purse. It was full of makeup, headphones, sparkly underwear, titty tassels, and prescription bottles. Only later would this reporter deduce that she was a dancer uptown in a place where people go to see strippers. “Honey, these are all empty.”

  “I just want to go home. Can you take me home?”

  “I can’t take you home like this—can we get a refill somewhere?”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “You can’t. You just offended half the Middle East. Allah forbids you from getting in another cab right now.”

  “He’s following me.”

  “Who’s following you?”

  “I saw him at work. He’s not supposed to be there. And then as soon as I got downtown I saw him again.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  SHE STARTED SCREAMING AGAIN WHEN the ambulance pulled up. “Don’t put me in there! I don’t have any money! Don’t put me in there!”

  “What a crazy girl,” Henry said. “Why on earth wouldn’t she want to go into an ambulance?”

  “Henry, you’re being too English right now. I have a standing agreement with all of my friends where unless I am bleeding directly from an aorta, put me in a cab.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Henry didn’t quite understand American health care.

  We watched them load the girl into the ambulance, her screams muffled first by the oxygen mask and then by the closed doors. You could still hear her screams over the lights and sirens as they took her up Essex Street to Bellevue. We stood there in the street until she disappeared.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if you met your wife this way?” Henry asked.

  “You can use that in a play. I don’t think it would be very believable.”

  “I can see it now, Brendan. Everywhere else in you life you never mattered. But down here, these people need you. And you need them too. Or at least they want something from you and you want them to.”

  I took that in for a second. The only question I asked was, Is that believable? The answer was yes. “That’s good playwriting, Henry,” I said.

  “And a really awful way to live your life,” he replied.

  AND SCENE.

  I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when

  What makes the bars on Rivington different from all others in the city is that the bartenders are expected to plan, manage, and run their nights in competition with each other to see who gets the best shifts. Literally every other bartender in the city shows up for a job like every other hardworking person. But on Rivington you have to advertise: you beg bands to do after-parties and you text your soon-to-be-ex friends.

  In the fall of 2007 President Bush was having problems with that country he had invaded. The transition of power hadn’t gone smoothly. Those in charge didn’t understand the people they were in charge of. Handing over authority seemed a disaster. And on this side of the world I took over for Brent, the LES’s most beloved bartender. I prepared to stay the course, even hiring his regular DJs instead of mine. That Thursday night I got there early, dimmed the lights, cleaned the bar, and popped in an old silent-film version of Dante’s Inferno on the projection screen. And within an hour I was in hell.

  Getting jumped on my first night left me a wreck. Every time the music got distorted, I worried that the DJ couldn’t hear me scream if I got attacked. When people at the end of the bar shouted out my name for drinks, I flinched. Everyone still came by after their bands played or after they waitressed uptown, only now, instead of requesting songs and asking for drugs, they demanded free drinks.

  The following types of people, however, were completely perplexed as to why I would not automatically give them a free two-dollar beer:


  DJs who spun on other nights in the area

  Drummers from bands that also contain members of Rivington Street bartenders

  Girlfriends of on-duty bartenders up the street who don’t want to watch them flirt with other girls all night for tips

  Former barbacks

  People I had met one time before

  The only people who didn’t expect free drinks were the drug dealers. They respected that you both had a job maintaining an expensive supply of poisons. Only once did one ask me for a Bacardi and Coke. And he paid. Otherwise, they were content to sit in the corner, sometimes three or more of them coming in and out. You couldn’t really fault them for hanging around. It’s their neighborhood too. I wished more gangsters would hang around because the ones I knew were really great guys with young kids. One of them was trying to drum up the capital to get a bodega started. Another had his eyes on a barbershop. I would trade one dealer for ten flakey scenesters on the day I got jumped. Two or three of them would have torn those eight guys apart. More than I can say for my so-called friends.

  WHEN SHE WALKED IN WEARING the red flannel shirt I couldn’t believe it. She had an unstable clarity in her eyes as she scanned the room for her friends. The girl I’d put into an ambulance the Monday before reminded me of an old car I had once. It had a lot of miles on it, but if you tightened the brakes and checked the tire pressure, it would run smooth. The shirt slipped from her bare shoulder again.

  She plopped her purse on the bar and rooted through its shiftless, unstable contents as she sat down on another girl’s stool. Finally she came up with a rattle of a pill bottle and read the tiny instructions by candlelight before looking up at me. “Could I just get a glass of water?”

  “Sure.” I placed it down in front of her. And waited.

  She popped something into her mouth and went for the glass. When she saw me looking at her she stopped, the pill cradled in her curled tongue as she held water just inches from her lips. “Sorry. Is there a charge?”