Rivington Was Ours

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  “I’ve been thinking about what you wrote.” Gaga turned the camera off and sat with me.

  “Oh”— again with my stupid smile —“that.”

  “It’s really helping me to get in the heads of other characters.”

  I felt like the showoff who executes some kind of trick or backflip and then has to negotiate being impressive in real life. Mostly I just felt like a living disappointment.

  “We’ll take over the world together. I know we will because you inspire me.”

  “And you inspire me.”

  “Who could ask for anything more?”

  “I could ask for another drink.”

  GUY ORDERED ANOTHER ROUND OF Jameson shots. However, I only discovered that he ordered me one after I had already ordered a shot of something else myself. “Never waste good alcohol,” Pete the bow-tied bartender said, determined to mix them together. He made us a round of shots that would not have played anywhere else: Alizé, Wild Turkey, Bacardi 151, Malibu, blue curaçao, and pineapple juice. It tasted like your hangover.

  “Aren’t you working tonight?” Guy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “If I were your boss I would fire you,” Guy said.

  “You are my boss,” I said.

  “Then you’re lucky you’re working at another bar tonight.”

  Hope you guess my name

  That night I came into Pianos like a guilty husband. Instead of rushing in the door and busily getting about my work, I came early, sucking on too many Life Savers and maybe being a bit too familiar. Unlike the other bars in the neighborhood, Pianos actually had a functioning kitchen, and for half price you could get some pretty decent food. I hid in the downstairs office with a seared tuna sandwich and french fries that I ate like a teenager trying to sober up at an all night diner after his first house party.

  At one point I looked up and saw the booker, who had the overpriced job title of “talent buyer.” He looked up at me like he was waiting for me to finish a sentence.

  “What?”

  “I said, you look like you had fun last night. ”

  I was too drunk to panic, so instead I looked around at the tableau I had set on the conference table. Two bottles of water, a coffee cup, a “Revive” flavored Vitaminwater, half a giant tuna burger, and several roughed-up bottles of ketchup. “I thought I’d see you out last night. It was the last Misshapes party at Don Hill’s. You shoulda come. It was like a fun little 2004 reunion.”

  “Hmgh,” I grunted through my chewing.

  “I saw your ex in here the other day.”

  Chances of this being any amount of good news: low. “Oh, really . . .” and then just in case you haven’t offered anything completely useless, Brendan: “Good for her.”

  “She looks good. But she’s always looked good. I don’t really care about that other guy.”

  You are not going to freak out. You are going to wipe the ketchup off your face and go upstairs and do your job.

  There’s a story about Frank Sinatra, running late for a gig. Theater packed, musicians ready, instruments tuned. Frank is nowhere to be found. A cab speeds through the streets, stops at the back gate of the theater. Sinatra throws money in the front seat and tears off through the long alleyway, dodging puddles and stray trashcan lids. He skids to the stage door. Then he stops. He takes off his overcoat, straightens his tie, cocks his hat to one side, and casually opens the door, ready to step on stage.

  At the base of the stairs I did my gladiator routine. I liked to think of that basement office as our slave quarters and the wide stairwell as our vomitorium. I will go to battle upstairs to earn my freedom. I ball up my fists and mount the stairs like Rocky. Here he comes! The one! The only! The bartender!

  At the top of the stairs I see Heidi. Our weekly handoff ritual went as follows. I run up the stairs really enthusiastic and psyched up for the night. She looks at me like maybe she wants to die, and I say, “What’s the latest?” And she says, “Nothing. Just tired.” And I say, “Your hair looks cute like that.” And then she tells me how her boyfriend isn’t doing this or that.

  “You wanna do a shot?” she eventually asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said, feeling virtuous.

  “Rough night last night?”

  “Haha, no such thing for me, y’know! I just know it’s going to be a long night for me tonight.” Nowhere in that last sentence did I lie even in the slightest.

  The DJ came late. I didn’t book any of the bands that night, so instead I was stuck dealing with the influx of terrified bands from other cities. Foreign exchange scenesters in tiny thrift-store outfits and too many scarves for the unusually mild weather. The one least involved in the band stayed with the van, nervously checking the rearview and wondering where to feed the meter. The rest of the van came in with a mix of guitars and backpacks full of strings and sticks. We don’t have a backstage or a band room or a closet. Bands have to load in their gear, then put it off to the side of the stage and watch it before they go on. Some went overboard. But a band with the basic Beatles/Stones/Killers/Zeppelin setup could probably bundle a guitar, bass, and keyboard into one heavy bag and entrust its safety in the office (but it was harder to keep a coveted theremin from being swiped). If you can plug into a quarter-inch jack and not steal our mics, you are welcome to play at Pianos. After their set they have to load it all up and hope the van doesn’t get broken into while they wait for the other bands in their set to finish to get paid.

  I didn’t notice The Devil when he came in the door, but I guess it always happens that way. There were drug dealers you’d see, and then were the ones you had to call. The code for blow was “the white devil” and then just “the devil”—as in “I just got paid, anybody know how to get the devil here?” This anthropomorphized into just calling the delivery dealer—whoever showed up—The Devil. For the sake of this story, let’s just say there was a guy we’ll never recognize from these details whom we called The Devil, and that person is free to join the chamber of commerce or run for mayor because we’re not going to describe him here. I will add that there was also a premium service at the time run by a guy whose name was not Adam. As I understand it, you would call up and ask for Adam, and then later a dealer would show up and whoever it was would introduce himself as Adam. Adam is also free to run for mayor. The Devil in the booth, somewhat annoying the DJ. “How’s it going, man?” he said to me.

  I know I shouldn’t talk to him and that he’ll just end up bothering me and keeping me away from other customers. But here’s the thing about The Devil: He tips well. The Devil knows what’s up. You give him a couple of Boddingtons and do a shot together and he gives you a twenty. Not bad, right?

  “You look like you had a rough night last night.”

  “Ha.”

  “Or maybe you’re having a rough day.”

  I clenched my jaw and gave him the eyebrow and went to get another girl a vodka soda. Despite all the complaining I do about my job and being a drink slave, it’s a great way to spend a night. I stand at a bar surrounded by beautiful women, and for all those hours I spend feeling worthless at home, I don’t feel that way here. I can make you a vodka soda with lime without moving my feet. In the magic of the workplace I can also reach for, pour, and replace any bottle of top-shelf liquor without looking. If you want a bottled beer from the fridge behind and below me, I can tell without looking which one of the eight doors to swing open. I spent four years in college to only make it this far, but how many people I went to college with could do that?

  The Devil had about an inch left in his Boddingtons. I pulled the lever on the pub ale and let it fill the glass while I helped another cute girl, using the patented Lower-East-Side Bartender Triage System. The LES BTS carved your crowd into the most important groups for your night, served in order: pretty girls, patient girls, assholes.

  I swooped over to bring The Devil a pint. I give him a little wink. He continued the conversation as if I’d left him on pause: “Or maybe you�
�ve just had a rough life?”

  Instead of getting into it with him I said something meaningless like, “Haven’t we all!” More than likely I just affirmed whatever the hell he said and started to help the asshole behind him.

  “Do you need a little help?” The Devil continued. I looked back at him. He had a window into hellfire in his eyes. He glanced down and offered me his hand. In it he had a bag of blow and a pen cap for administering cocaine into the nose in adverse bathroom situations.

  “Thanks,” I said to The Devil and nodded, “but I’m okay.” I turned back to the next customer. The Devil shrank away and went on to conscripting another’s soul. “What can I get you?”

  “G and T,” the asshole said. “Heavy on the G.”

  “Tanqueray good?” Without taking my eyes off him I filled a glass with ice with my right hand and reached over to the back shelf and got the green bottle of gin with my right hand. I fill the goddamn glass with gin and splash a little tonic on top.

  “Stiff pour. Thanks.”

  “If you want it any stiffer I’ll have to mix some Cialis in there!”

  “Ha!”

  “Ha!”

  There may be some things that I wouldn’t miss

  As I was packing up my record bag for my next show with Gaga, Guy called to say that I was fired from St. Jerome’s. He wouldn’t say why.

  “Uhm . . .” he said, searching for the right answer when I asked why. “I don’t know exactly why. Look. Be a man. Handle it. That’s how life works. Okay? You gotta know how to handle things.”

  A mere six months earlier I had a very decent, steady job with health insurance, sick days, workers comp, perquisite meals at other restaurants every month. I had a beautiful girlfriend who loved every little awful thing about me. Back then I worked six days a week and loved it. I think. Now look at me, I thought. That’s how life works, indeed.

  “I’m gonna be late,” Gaga texted.

  “Me too,” I texted back from my pile of misery and records.

  “Storms in paradise,” she texted.

  “No problem. I’ll be late because I think a bridge just got washed out on the Road to Success.”

  “See? We’re the perfect team.”

  ON THE WAY TO THE club I got a call from Gaga. “Are you ready to rock this?”

  “You know it!” I said, trying to fool myself with enthusiasm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just got fired from St. Jerome’s.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “Wait. When?”

  “I don’t know. Eight fifteen. Right after I got off the phone with you.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “What?”

  “You’re gonna kill me.”

  “What?”

  “He’s such a fuck.”

  “Stef”—I never used her real name—“tell me what’s going on.”

  “I left some things at his house and when I realized I forgot them I called him to bring it to me and he said, ‘Why do you need it?’ And I told him the truth. I said, ‘Brendan and I have a show to do tonight.’” She never called me Brendan, but the way she leaned on the notes of my name made me think she’d used it against him. It resonated from her mouth to his ears to mine. Something else was going on here. “Then he started grumbling about us always doing something while he’s working and I yelled at him because this is my work.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I said, ‘When you go to work tonight I want you to bring my disco bra, my lipstick, and my self-tanner because I have a show to do. And we are through.’”

  “Didn’t you guys just get back from vacation? Shouldn’t you be all lovey-dovey?” I said. “And tan?”

  Silence on her end. But I could hear the cloven heels of a busy New York City girl clomping through sidewalk traffic.

  “Stef. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “No.”

  “Gaga.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Her voice broke down at the end and she started crying. My heart stopped.

  “Do you want to cancel?”

  “No,” she stammered. “I want to rock tonight.”

  A WIDE SIDEWALK-AND-ROPE SYSTEM AT the single entrance/exit kept people in line and errant smokers away from the empty sidewalk. From the outside, Don Hill’s looked like a container ship docked in West Soho. This old distribution center was now a hub of imported music from all five boroughs and beyond. At the front door a trusted cast of bouncers and door guys checked IDs and names on the guest list. Like at Pianos, they ask who you came to see—what band or DJ or a promoter, all of whose paychecks depended on that tally. If you ever had a problem or you needed a favor, you could always find the actual Don Hill himself, a gray-haired sixty-four-year-old man in cowboy boots and pressed jeans. He stood at the end of the bar or wandered around playing video poker and erotic photo hunt.

  The girl who had been crying on the phone stayed home. And a very different girl came to meet me. Her name was Lady Gaga.

  At the corner of Greenwich she strutted out of the cab wielding a handheld video camera. “Look who it is! That my DJ! Hello, world. Say hi to DJ VH1. We have a show tonight at Don Hill’s and I’m going to sing DJ VH1’s new favorite song, ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich.’ Say hi, VH1!” The video camera was her new thing. Her management wanted to try something new to get Interscope’s attention. They wanted to see her downtown, where she belonged. If only they had any idea what happened downtown when she stepped off stage.

  Inside, Gaga marveled at the colored interior. She loved the Sailor-Jerry-tattoo wallpaper. She loved the disco balls leading up to the stage, and the series of stripper poles that jutted out like teeth from the gaping whale’s jaw of a bar. “This place is very Lady Gaga,” she said, smiling at the lighting booth and sound system. “She’s going to love it.”

  I introduced her to Don Hill and he walked us over to the bar to get a drink. Since the departure of weekly party Misshapes, the fate of Don Hill’s started to wear on Don Hill. His cheeks hung long, gaunt, and thin.

  Don introduced me to Andrew, the bartender. I introduced myself using my proper Irish name. “That’s my brother’s name!” he said with a smile that reached all the way to his ginger sideburns.

  “WHAT HAPPENED TONIGHT, STEF?”

  She took a deep breath and sipped a Bud Light. “It’s not about tonight.”

  “Start from the beginning,” I said in the half-empty venue. “I’ve got time.”

  They had been fighting. Or there had been fights. She felt like he didn’t support her. He felt like she was always off somewhere else. They were unhappy. They made each other happy. They could make each other miserable. She said please just stick by me through this rough part. They left this island for another island. Everything was wonderful in a way it never felt like at home. Their phones didn’t work, but their relationship did. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just be like this all the time? Guy was the one who proposed that. Sweet, right? He knew of one way to keep them together and happy all the time. She would never give up on music, but maybe music would give up on her. And the next night he had too much to drink. “And he said, ‘I hope you fail.’”

  “Wait. Let me wrap my head around this. You told me that you wrote ‘Paparazzi’ about how you’re his biggest fan and you’ll chase him everywhere and how when you’re away from him a single photo of him is priceless to you,” I said. She nodded. “But like you said at your apartment last month, you wrote the song and worked really hard on it to impress him so that you’d keep his interest. But you know that the more you impressed him with your music the more the music is going to take you away from him. More time in LA.”

  She nodded. “And he figured that out.”

  “So because he likes your song it’s actually worse than when he didn’t respect your music.”

  “Because now he feels like the music actually is going to take me away from him.”
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  “But why doesn’t he get that you love him anyway?”

  Gaga was already in the anger stage. “Because he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get that this is my job. The first time he came over to my apartment he looked around—you know he has that drafty place with a roommate in Red Hook—and when he saw that I had my own place the first thing he thought was it was because of Daddy.” She mentioned her father not in the patrician manner of girls who never grow up, but rather in the manner of looking down on those types.

  “And it wasn’t?”

  “No. I’ve had two record deals and gotten booed off stage and passed out demos and done back-to-back auditions and he doesn’t see that. He just thinks it’s Daddy. You know that if someone called him and said, here is nine hundred thousand dollars, I want you to fly to Vegas and open up a rock ’n’ roll bar, he’d be on the next flight. Or you,” she said. “If someone said to you, here’s six figures and we want you to give us a bestseller, you’d be home right now working on it.”

  “I usually write in the mornings, actually.”

  “So tonight I came into the bar with my hair done perfect and completely composed because I had to show him, This is what I do. And I told him, ‘One day you’re not going to be able to get a coffee in a fucking deli without seeing or hearing about me.’ And I walked the fuck out.”

  Joey Nova came around the corner. “Yo! You ready to go on?”

  “Okay.” Gaga smiled and started to follow Joey to the go-go platform. “Remember, I don’t like dancing for anyone but you. When you’re done: We’re gonna party.”

  “Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m fine. Let’s have some fun.”

  “Okay.”

  “No,” she said in a low tone and raised her eyebrows. “I mean let’s have some fun tonight. Can you call anyone?”

  I HAD ANSWERED WITHOUT THINKING about it. I just agreed to score drugs for us both and spend our entire night smoking too many cigarettes and talking way too fast about ourselves. Then I started to worry. She had a recording session in LA the next week. What if it ruined her voice?