Rivington Was Ours

by Brendan Jay Sullivan

  The dancers and Gaga had planned an interlude around the Colby/Akon verse. As they started to strut around the stage I stepped up to the microphone and sang over the autotune of the track.

  Some of the cameras snapped photos but most stayed with Gaga as my verse wound down. Gaga looked over the shade of her sunglasses at me and smiled when she realized I was pulling it off. I came out on the other side of it alive, bolstered by a few cheers from the crowd on stage. The dancers wound themselves up for the interlude by pulling out the big disco ball for Gaga to ride around on during the breakdown.

  At the end of the show, a small circus put Gaga in the center ring. The dancers went off to the side to catch their breath and I had to take down the set. I noticed they looked a little winded so I grabbed two water bottles from one of the vendors and walked them over to the shade. “You guys okay?”

  “Just tired.”

  “Go take a nap. I’ll handle sound check.”

  Sheryl asked, “Are we going to get to sleep tonight? Our flight to LA is at like five in the morning for some reason.”

  “Probably not.”

  They looked sad, and I couldn’t stay long. Because I had a birthday cake to wrangle on the way to sound check.

  This time around for me baby, actions speak louder than words

  I can describe our next venue in three words:

  OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ.

  Score had a near-constant scene of slightly older gay dudes hanging out in what looked like a beach bar at an outdoor mall. The inside had cathedral ceilings with pulsating strobes that bounced off disco balls. The Pro Tools went in the back way with me and hid Gaga’s birthday cake in the kitchen so we could surprise her with it at midnight.

  I actually started to see myself as more of one of the Pro Tools. If there were a job for traveling around the country and making sure shows went well, I’d be all over it. The DJ booth had two CDJs on a balcony above the main dance floor, facing the stage below. They ignored our technical rider again. It was, thankfully, indoors and far from wind. I started to wonder if we should start putting CD turntables on our rider. They suck and I had way too much music on vinyl. But I wondered. I told myself to work on a permanent solution for next time.

  I didn’t know that this would be my last show as Lady Gaga’s DJ.

  “CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW WONDERFUL these are going to look for middle-aged gay men?” Gaga held up our first real piece of merch: a little disco ball on a keychain with a tag that read, LADY GAGA JUST DANCE.

  I loved merch. T-shirts, buttons, patches, printed bandanas, numbered posters. Merch is a scenester’s lifeblood. It helped opening bands pay for gas and separated the tried and tested scenester from a person who downloaded the greatest hits. Somehow I envisioned our first piece of merch to be those little buttons that we called Scenester Merit Badges, which you can only get at the show when you see the band yourself live and in person. But I could dream. I stuck a keychain in my record bag. This was all part of the new plan. Come out on top.

  Leah gave us each an envelope with our show pay at sound check and added a fifty-dollar per diem. With that fifty we were supposed to get meals and anything else we needed. I was in heaven. For this whole year I’d lived off of the food at work and canned tuna. I walked down the Lincoln Road Mall in the temperate early spring. South Beach didn’t have the grit and sirens that the rest of Miami did. Even the stores had the clean, user-friendly sterility of a hotel minibar.

  I peeked in the window of Café at Books & Books. Nothing presented the possibility of life like a bookstore. You could find records anywhere or read about an author, but where else could you stop, drop, and roll around in an author you’d never heard of? The bookstore looked like a dream, all the titles you wished you’d read all laid in pristine stacks on the tables. Why cock your neck at funny angles and read sideways? I had never been to Miami before. Passing this bookstore, for no reason, made me want to stay. It made me want to browse and sit down and take in the sights. I had to go, but I wanted to stay. Someday I’ll go back to Miami, I promised, and I’ll eat at this café and go into the bookstore. I will browse and sit down and take in the sights. I’d always made these promises to myself. Someday I won’t have to wait until tomorrow.

  As the sun went down, Miami started to hear the call of the wild. Some of the boutiques locked up for the night, leaving the lights on in the big picture windows, making them look like little dollhouses with lifeless, perfect furniture and alphabetized books. The cafés bustled with the tense excitement of people on vacation. Several of them had saran-wrapped plates of demo food and artificial approximations of mojitos with plastic ice cubes in a one-to-one scale replica of glass roughly the size of upturned parasols. I walked down Ocean Drive to get back to the hotel and stopped off at a Johnny Rockets. I’d never eaten in one before and I had in fact not eaten once on this trip.

  I emerged one burger, chocolate shake, and fries later. The weight felt good on me and I promised myself I would eat again.

  Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick

  Somehow in the magic of WMC every single thing we had done at sound check came undone before we went on. Aptly named Nervous Nitetlife had packed the club. Someone on the roster of DJs had unhooked my equipment and worked off of two CD players. I never learn. This was what you get for leaving a nightclub and eating dinner once. Some enterprising little joker also went to the soundboard and turned everything off except for the DJ booth, meaning the vocals we had perfected that afternoon were gone. It didn’t occur to me that the DJ who probably worked there every Friday night came into work and robotically checked the booth and put it back the way it needed to be.

  Something else I didn’t realize that afternoon: The club had an elevated booth opposite the stage. Everyone would have their backs to me. That part I didn’t mind. But it would make no sense once I went to sing the male vocal of “Just Dance.”

  My phone rang. “We’re changing the set list,” Leah said. She went into a long explanation that would have probably made a lot of sense if I weren’t standing in the balcony of a thundering gay club.

  OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ.

  She continued to explain her carefully discovered opinion.

  And over din I yelled, “What?!”

  Gaga grabbed the phone from Leah as I made my way down the ladder to go outside. “Here’s the deal. We’re going to cut the intro down. So instead of having the audience stare at us wondering, ‘What movie is that song from?’ we will just have it on at the beginning.”

  “Okay. Thirty seconds or so.”

  “Yes. And this time let’s leave more space between the songs, none of that overlap.”

  “Okay. We got this.”

  “And we’re not going to do ‘Just Dance.’”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,’ ‘Paparazzi,’ and ‘Disco Stick.’” The song that was to become “Lovegame” was still then known only as “Disco Stick.” “We can play ‘Just Dance’ at the end like on Valentine’s Day.”

  “Good. I think people should hear it, but it is weird having a verse with that guy on it without him on stage.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Gaga?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re gonna be great.”

  THAT NIGHT GAGA CAME OUT onstage with a new persona. She acted utterly sexual with a drawling speech like her Marilyn Monroe at Beauty Bar. She took all those years of being an outcast and rolled them into the ultimate out-of-place: a young, hyper-sexualized woman from New York in a Miami gay club. They ate her up.

  She grabbed shirtless boys out of the crowd and danced with them, sometimes on top of them, as they lay on the stage floor. An amazing performance for a girl who wouldn’t even look at another man in front of her boyfriend. At the finale she froze in position mid-dance, and the crowd screamed the self-tanner out of their pores. I cued up “Just Dance” and loved how the lead-in of the synth created the perfect anticipation before the beat.
/>   Go Shorty. It’s your birthday.

  Troy did not. “Yo! You’re going to lose this crowd.” He waved angrily at the DJ booth from out on the dance floor. He looked ridiculous. A corny older guy trying to make requests to a DJ twenty feet in the air.

  Maybe it was the lack of sleep but after a year of working with Gaga one on one, I didn’t really care to have all these Pro Tools telling us what to do. Especially so late in the game. When I checked my phone, I saw that I had a text from Leah asking me to adjust the vocals. It didn’t come through until after the show. It just seemed amateurish that the vocals wouldn’t be taken care of at sound check or that someone couldn’t come up in the booth and tell me to adjust them.

  “Can you get me out of this? It’s in 119.” I turned to the house DJ and we talked like airline pilots as I flipped the switches on the board. It would be meaningless to try and write it down verbatim, but here’s how it would sound to pretty much anyone else:

  DJ1: Peanut butter taxicab washout?

  DJ2: Yeah. And tax the pope.

  DJ1: Colony water tower on Mars?

  DJ2: With bacon.

  DJ1: Got it.

  The other DJ kept the floor packed with the same excitement that Gaga brought. It was funny. I followed a Lady Gaga performance with a Lady Gaga song and it wasn’t big enough to fill the void. You had to take the music up a notch to its most basic and sonic form just to keep the air of excitement in the room.

  I found Gaga and Leah in an upstairs balcony. They had a magnum of cheap white wine. After three years in nightlife I had been looking forward to having a stiffer drink after the show. But I made do with the white wine.

  Gaga gave me a big hug as she scanned the room for any new fans or media. “By the way,” I said as I held my sweaty friend, “Happy birthday.”

  She gave me a great big smile and we hugged again.

  My friend Igor had come down from the city for WMC on his own dime to take pictures for the Village Voice. I told him that I wouldn’t have time to sleep and he could have my hotel room. After a minute of bullshitting together, some of the Pro Tools brought out the cake that we’d spent all day shielding from the Miami sunshine. It was the kind of cake with a little ball you’d have decorated for your kid’s soccer or basketball team, only we had it done up as a disco ball. “Happy Birthday, Gaga,” it read. “Cheers to you and The Fame!”

  There was Gaga and her disco ball bloomers and her disco tie and her disco ball cake. She blew out the candles. More pictures! Gaga reached out to me and sat me down on the couch next to the cake. “I want to put it into your mouth.”

  The hired guns went flashing. Most of them were either friends or people from the label. But it didn’t matter. We were a young act at Winter Music Conference and to all appearances we had just played a sold-out show and gotten mobbed by the paparazzi. And it was someone’s birthday! Gaga planted me in the banquette and we took turns stuffing cake in each other’s mouths. We were the prom king and queen of Winter Music.

  The hard work and the travel and the six 6:00 A.M. flights would begin again tomorrow. We would have a series of very long days ahead. But for now we would just sit in our balcony and have our cake and our white wine like Marie Antoinette.

  SIX 5:00 A.M. FLIGHTS. DID I say 6:00 A.M.? It’s really 5:00 A.M. I went back to my room with Igor and got him a copy of the key. The dancers split after the show and I agreed to go get them at 5:00. On the walk home I went by all of the café tables from before, now gathered around in wicker bouquets of stacked chairs all locked to the same chain. The restaurants had all closed and in the distance you could hear the tinny pulse of house music, but then it seemed to drive off in some Polar Bear’s Lamborghini.

  With the ocean snoozing away on the other side of the grass dunes I knew this would be the perfect night of sleep. Far away there were people having after-after-parties and negotiating small sales of local drugs and discussing its relative virtues with strangers they would never see again. I would not.

  I went back to my room, completely exhausted, and packed up my record bag and suitcase, carefully laying in my new headphones and needles. The spoils of Winter Music. In the bathroom I splashed some water on my face and idly checked out the unused soaps and shower caps. I got dressed in another outfit and set my alarm for fifteen minutes. That’s all I would have time for on this day.

  The alarm went off at pretty much the same time I picked up the girls for the airport that same day. I started that day at Beauty Bar, played two shows in Miami, and now every single thing we’d worked for would happen all at once.

  LOS ANGELES

  Pedal to the floor, thinkin’ of the roar, gotta get us to the show

  The obnoxious sunshine gleamed off of stark white airplanes and airport windows. Just glass and sky for miles with the puniest palm trees sticking out of the dusty landscape like unplucked hairs. The dancers had the sour look of unrested beauty. On the shuttle to the rental car place I got a message: “Hey, I have some great news for you. The casting director would like to feature you in a new music video filming this Monday. Call us back today for more details.”

  “That’s funny,” I said out loud as we all squinted our way through the sandy white parking lot. “The director just called saying that I have been cast in our video.”

  We laughed about it as if we were just coworkers on a business trip, bitching about other people from work. Those boobs! I imagined them as a bunch of listless actors, slumming it as casting directors and texting their friends.

  That day the dancers pulled rank. To keep the video under budget the Pro Tools had sent us out here early to avoid any more hotel fees or airline costs of sending us all the way home for two days and then back out to LA. But between the show and the video the dancers called their manager. They were tired of being treated the way they were. They were professionals. They had rehearsed. They were willing to fly directly to LA from WMC to defray costs. But they were not going to wait it out in Gaga’s empty bachelorette pad while everyone else schmoozed around Miami.

  By crowning myself the ad hoc tour manager, I now had the great task of making sure the dancers got settled at the Grafton Hotel on Sunset. But there would be no room for me. I wanted to be there for Stef the whole way, even if they didn’t technically need me for the video. They could probably pay some LA scenester to stand behind the turntables in the video, but I wanted it to be me.

  Sheryl and Katie went into the rental car place and I called the casting director back. “So we’d really love it if you could show up camera-ready. We want everyone to dress themselves, very Lower East Side, hipster, heroin chic.” I heard the penultimate word as heroine, so my tired brain wondered if I were supposed to dress like Wonder Woman or Amelia Earhart. Then I realized a casting director from Los Angeles was going to tell this Lower East Side badass how to dress hip. Something I’d never get over was the way people from outside your scene talked about it. They always jumbled words and mangled their cadence for no reason. (There’s probably no un-obnoxious way to say this: They throw that meaningless word—“hip”—around so much. It’s one of those words like “amazing” or “douche bag.” And I’ve always believed that “douche bag” is in the eye of the beholder. That would be like the original test pilots in the space program going, “Gee, I like this jumpsuit. Let me see what the other astronauts think.” Or Johnny Rotten going to a show and exclaiming out loud, “Lucky for me I’ve worn my punk pants to the club!”)

  “Okay, but I’m not one of the extras. I’m the DJ.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, I’m here to be in the video. I’ll dress like I did on stage. But I just thought I’d let you know. In case you need to get more extras.”

  “Okay. Either way. Same deal.”

  I quoted her delightful phrasing and assumed she meant we should dress like the in-color version of those black-and-white Partnership for-a-Drug-Free-America ads.

  Just then the girls pulled up in a black Mustang.

&nbs
p; THE GRAFTON ON SUNSET WAS the visiting New Yorker’s dream. It had just enough restaurants and shops for you to walk to from your room. And the room itself had enough hilarious LA things to keep your allegiance up. Aside from the health-spa minibar in the fridge, the bathroom had a separate minibar of personal beauty projects for you to try. Everything was part avocado. That or the carrot-ginger hair treatment or dried-cucumber exfoliating soap. I was hungry and still hadn’t eaten since Miami and wondered if the new diet in California was to just put food on your face.

  Fifteen dollars would get you a sex kit with three condoms, cherry-flavored lube, a personal massager, and a vibrating cock ring. Out of my unending curiosity I slipped the package open and noticed that some other enterprising visitor had found a way to get one of the condoms out of the package without getting charged for the whole sex kit. Bravo. To make it more confusing, the hotel had arranged a basket of various bottles as if you were going on a picnic with moisturizers and dried-blueberry foot scrub. Tucked in among it all was a pink mask with a can attached to it—a sixteen-dollar bottle of “personal oxygen.”

  While the girls lay out by the pool, I sat down at their desk and tried to get some work done. Finishing the adaptation of Mercutio would prove difficult. Everyone knew how he died. I wanted the ending to be dynamite. Academics theorize on how he gets cut down in the middle of the story. I sat down to think on this for a second. It can be done. But only I can do it. Who else could better know the psyche of the long-winded drunk more that me?