by Jaime Lowe
Mike and I had met once before. Mike worked downstairs in a tech start-up. He had a goatee and a sweet smile that extended to his eyes. I didn’t have a cell phone; I had a strong argument against them. I didn’t want brain cancer, to be tracked, or to be reached at all times. But now I needed one—the catastrophe I had been preparing for had happened. Mike scrawled his landline on a piece of paper and gave me his cell phone. Hana came over to make sure I was okay and we took pictures, making hand shadow puppets against the burnt walls. She held out a dress tiered with melted sequins. All of my hand-me-downs from my aunt Carrie were charred. I didn’t care.
I spent the first night after the fire sleeping on a futon that belonged to my extremely generous downstairs neighbors (animators) on the second floor. They let me sleep on the couch and we drank whiskey and felt burnt inside and out. One of them let me borrow clothes and I slept under his painting of Ray Charles. It said Grace. That night I went back upstairs in the dark, where people were rummaging through the mess—pickers, they’re called—salvaging anything worth stealing. I had a fancy watch from my aunt and tiny diamond earrings from my grandmother, and I saw one soot-covered man holding them. I could only see the whites of his eyes. I told him to take them. I didn’t care. I told everyone to take whatever they wanted. I did not need things.
Mike called his own phone to check on me but I didn’t know how to answer, so it stayed blinking in my bag through the night. I woke up the next day and ordered seven hundred dollars’ worth of butternut squash and lavender hand cream and healing balms to be delivered to my second-floor neighbors. After that, they—and everyone in the building—decided it would be best for me to stay elsewhere, farther from the fire. Hana called my dad and my mom, telling them I was not acting normal. My dad got on a plane; Matt booked a ticket on Amtrak from Washington, D.C., where he was in graduate school. The landlord and firefighters were saying that they found a lot of candles in my apartment, a potential cause for the fire. My neighbors and roommates were blaming me, and that made sense. Jeremy never blamed me because he is the most chill human ever and the most forgiving person, even though I burned half his record collection. By the time my dad arrived, he and my brother tried to mitigate the chaos. I stayed with them at the Chelsea Savoy Hotel on Twenty-Third and Seventh Avenue next to the Chelsea Hotel, where I imagined, once I explained my circumstances, I would be immediately given an artist residency. (This did not happen.)
Two days after the fire, I went to see Dr. Schwartz and told him that yes I had candles but that they weren’t the cause of the fire. My landlord thought otherwise; so did the fire department, though they did not officially pinpoint an exact cause. I was convinced it was shitty electrical wiring, since nothing had been updated in decades. Evidence in my favor: loose wires. Evidence against me: the week before I found dozens of large table candles in a box on the street and I took them up to the loft for a potential future party. There were other candles (including a couple from the blizzard of ’98) that I lit for my makeshift yoga and exercise routine. Unlit candles and lit candles look the same after a fire—melted as if they had been in use. Dr. Schwartz wrote that I was “sedate and unruffled and spoke in an overly calm manner.” I had taken rolls and rolls of film of the fire aftermath, and I shared them with him. I told Dr. Schwartz that I had solved a complex math problem involving prime numbers. He suggested I resume taking the lithium. I refused.
Mania began again. (Or maybe something closer to hypomania, when a patient is ramping up toward the inevitable flourish.) I sat in the brown leather wingback chair and I was calm because I had determined the answer to a difficult algebra equation. I had connected with the mysteries of infinity and the ever-enduring unknowability of the number zero. They were one and the same—a philosophy, a future, an unknown that only I knew, another grand delusion. I was up all night thinking about numbers and equations and solving problems and I walked, lit from within, knowing that I—and only I—could solve those problems. And so I calmly explained this new piece of information to Dr. Schwartz.
I had also been at the apartment the night before with Mike. We went back to shoot footage of what was left. And I knew I wasn’t fully manic because I felt sad. In this moment, I did care. I felt sad that this weird nest of art and music and debauchery and people had been torched. After some documentation of the carnage, Mike and I sat in the stairwell, on top of charcoal footsteps over torn cardboard. We huddled in the corner under our jackets. We kissed for the first time and lay in the hollowed-out burn.
ME, PHOTOGRAPHING EVERYTHING BEFORE AND AFTER THE FIRE.
My dad and Matt moved my charred belongings into a storage locker. (My vision of the fire had changed after the initial shock wore off. I would not let things go—everything that was left was an artifact.) I took half-burned sweaters and wore them, walking furiously through the streets of Manhattan wrapped in a cloak of smoke. I always had some charcoal streak on my cheek or hands like a warrior or a coal miner. Black ashy residue collected under my nails. I was getting thinner and thinner, dipping below 100 pounds and only buying clothes at flea markets or used-clothing shops. My outfits were gilded, bedazzled, fluorescent, multipatterned, multitiered, lovingly very 1980s. My look: if Cher swallowed Mick Jagger who had eaten Cyndi Lauper and Madonna with a touch of righteous Michael Jackson and Liza Minnelli sprinkled on top. And cowboy. And Indian. And shaman. And God. I clasped about a thousand necklaces all at once across my upper breast, again like a warrior. A breastplate. My dad came to my next Dr. Schwartz appointment, and they both tried to convince me that I should take the lithium again before it was too late. I refused, saying that lithium changed me. It took me away from my true self. I could not allow that to happen again. We (my dad and Matt) finished putting everything in storage, and my dad was trying to convince me to go to LA. I wanted to throw a party. My dad, exasperated, bought stacks of pizza and had them delivered to the Village Idiot. Hana came, colleagues came, we gave pizza to pool-playing strangers. We gave pizza to everyone. Dave was there, and so was Mike.
By then, Mike and I were yoked to each other. We disappeared around the corner to “shoot more important camcorder footage for the censorship project,” which at this point had come to include a second documentary about my burnt apartment. On the sidewalk, we kissed again, which seemed to be the real point. He returned me back to the Chelsea Savoy at five a.m. and we kissed, again, good-bye. “See ya,” he said in a tone so casual it belied what was clear to me. I had met my soul mate. I was going to LA the next day to visit, but not to stay, and he was my fire neighbor. He was intrigued, addicted to the mania, and devoted, following me around with his video camera, recording impromptu dance recitals and monologues. Mania or even the beginnings of mania will do this. There’s a magnetism to that kind of high, and I knew I could draw people to me. I had drawn in Mike.
I had plans. I had a concept of myself as an anarchistic cult leader in a gold tutu. If Mike wanted to be part of that, fine. If not, I would find another Mike. On camera, I talked about a utopia I planned to build and rule. A place where inhibition was not welcome, a place where creativity reigned. To get there, we had to break through the norms of society, to end censorship to make free speech, freer than water. To be naked in body and soul. I yelled about the people I admired, like Chris Ofili, like NWA, like Eminem. I thought about Eminem’s lyrics constantly, on loop, I am whatever you say I am . . . or even more direct arguments against censorship like his lyrics from “Who Knew?”: “There must be a mix-up/You want me to fix up lyrics while the president gets his dick sucked?”
Eminem, the number zero, living in a utopia in the trees and morphing into fairy creatures: I could see the next steps past the pizza party, and so, while clomping through the meatpacking district, passing transgender prostitutes and Florent, I could feel my luminous future and Mike was tangled in it. As Sylvia Plath wrote, “When you are insane, you are busy being insane—all the time.” Mike had a camera;
he could document it all. I asked him to film everything and he obliged. Mike was new to the city; he went to school in Vermont and grew up in Chicago and had this perfect all-American face. He looked like the Gerber baby grown up, perfect, spherical, and Aryan. Big blue eyes and tousled blond hair; he fucked with his face by growing that awful goatee but I didn’t care. I felt like he was an extension of my Peace Corps man, maybe even the same person—someone I was drawn to and who was drawn to me. It was a new feeling, heightened by being an all-powerful magic fairy creature, one hundred percent clad in gold lamé and gilded medallions. My dad was desperate to get me on a plane home. I realized the Grammys were being held in Los Angeles later that week and that I could start recruiting rock stars and rappers for ENDING CENSORSHIP FOREVER, and so I said yes. I was amped to start with Eminem since I thought I could get an audience with his PR dude. I told Dave that I could do an interview with Marilyn Manson or Eminem or the South Park guys for Maxim, and tried to sell him on assigning it to me. He agreed, tentatively, to a short interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They had a live-action show—“That’s My Bush!”—scheduled for debut, and Dave thought I might be able to get an interview that he couldn’t get through regular PR channels. He thought this because I told him my mom’s house was across the street from their production offices and that I used to see them shooting hoops in the parking lot. I could just show up and ask, I said. Unusual ambush technique, but Dave agreed. So I decided to go back to LA. Dr. Schwartz and I struck a deal—he prescribed me Klonopin and Risperdal and said I should fill the prescriptions and that I could decide if I needed to take them, if I felt “edgy.”
Yeah, right.
I was in Los Angeles between January 26 and February 13, 2001. I saw Dr. DeAntonio for several appointments and he recommended I go back on lithium; I didn’t. I bought clothes and bartered for clothes. My aunt gave me a metallic gold swing skirt that paired perfectly with one hundred thousand necklaces. I did not stop “freelance writing.” I called Dave several times to inform him of my progress on the “That’s My Bush!” profile, which in fact did not exist. We got into a screaming fight on the phone. He was uncertain of what the fuck I was doing on behalf of the magazine, and I felt certain that he was spineless and did not belong in my revolution. I went to the LA Weekly to visit my mentors, editors Tom Christie and Pam Klein. Tom remembered “the necklaces and glitter—the day you showed up at the Weekly wearing more of that than I’ve ever seen on anyone, your mom in tow.” I called up the skateboard company Sector 9 and told them I was a pro skater. I also said I was looking for sponsorship and new boards since my decks had burned in the fire. My mom got on the other landline during this particular call and said loudly and firmly to ignore me. She spoke over my voice even though the nice gentleman was actually hearing me out and concerned, and had offered to send me a new board. “Do not send her a skateboard. She does not skateboard. She is having a manic episode,” my mom said.
The thing about mania is that all the hippie, glitter, and glow comes with an aggressive intensity that could make a planet reverse rotation. Maniacs breathe fire. I literally had started smoking a pack of American Spirits a day, having barely smoked before. My mom hated smoking but put out an ashtray and made me sit on the curb in my gold lamé, looking like a Dumpster pixie. For special occasions, I’d get Fantasia smokes in rainbow colors and leave bright butts in various stubbed arrangements.
The argument with Dave over “That’s My Bush!,” which should have been a warning, did not stop me from showing up in Gabe Tesoriero’s Universal Music office asking for an interview with Em.
“Could I guarantee the cover?”
“Sure! When can he sit for a photographer?”
I’m pretty sure Dave had already called Gabe and apologized or asked him to ignore or block my access on behalf of Maxim, but that didn’t matter, outcome wasn’t the point. Maxim wasn’t the point, if I could just talk to Eminem. I worked the editor from my interview at Blender, Andy, with sixteen pitches—all one- or two-sentence hot-flash ideas, including an oral history of the song “Come and Knock on My Door . . .” from Three’s Company. My tone was always confident and insistent and thoroughly underresearched, like, “5) Pinknoises.com, online collective of female DJs and MCs. Superfly talent and hot ladies. Launched a week or so ago, would be good to get it in ASAP.” I ended my note to Andy with alright, I think this is enough. Tell me what to start working on. I’m on it. I have more ideas but I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much shit. He did not respond immediately or otherwise, and then I ended up getting extremely sick. I was in a feverish state, topping out at 103 degrees for about five days, a fire within. On February 5, still feverish, I wrote Andy, a couple more thoughts for you. I know you are starting with a bare bones staff and I intend to do the freelance dance and write whatever you assign me, happily . . . however when Blender is a flourishing, unstoppable success, can I please be considered for the West Coast Editor position? That, eventually would be an ideal position for me. . . . I am returning to New York Feb. 13 and will contact you when I land somewhere. It’s kind of fun to be a nomad. The pitches weren’t wildly off-base, they just weren’t thorough. There were too many and they all basically had a subject with no story. When I asked Andy later what his impression was, it was kinder than my assumption, which was that I’d caused myself pure professional embarrassment: “I would not say that you were ‘full-on’ crazy, as you put it. You were definitely eccentric and quite driven and energetic, but by the wonderfully forgiving standards of a) the music business b) New York and c) writers, hardly ‘off the charts.’ All the best writers were a bit bonkers. At least I always thought so (and still do).”
At the turn of the century when Carl Jung entered his apprenticeship at Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital at the University of Zürich, he wrote that his interest and research was dominated by the “burning question: ‘What actually takes place inside the mentally ill?’” I can tell you what was happening in me. I turned into a comet or a supernova, bursting, going in no particular direction, aimed at nothing but intensely moving forward on a trajectory to nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Everything was eclipsed by me. I was the sun, the moon, the solar system, the beginning of time and the end.
NOTES TO ANDY AND STUFF FROM CALIFORNIA.
What actually was taking place on a more realistic level was the beginning of a two-month manic cycle. I believed everything I spouted (I am God! I am a rock star! I love you! And you!) to be true. I remembered most of it; I had no inhibitions or boundaries or fear. My family, meanwhile, was scrambling to make shit work and to make sure I didn’t accidentally set everything on fire—physically or metaphorically. Marilyn went through stacks of files and was on the phone for hours to get my COBRA health insurance from Condé Nast reinstated.
“How can you say she willfully stopped paying the bills when stopping paying the bills is part of the disease—a symptom?” she would ask. Again and again and again until the insurance company relented. Can you imagine the tenacity it takes to break down the bureaucracy of insurance, to file the paperwork and jump through the impossible maze? Marilyn did it. She still has a thick file. There were logistical hoops and hard moments, but bright spots too. In particular Cody.
My dad and Marilyn had gotten a puppy, a Wheaten terrier named Cody. When I met him, he was a shaggy Muppet creature that looked like a boy in a dog suit. I believed he could talk to me, and I believed he understood me in a way many people couldn’t (like Nature before him, but deeper. We had a real connection.). I talked with Mike every night and we made plans for the future. I made it clear that I would return to New York to be with him. I fell in love with Mike and Cody simultaneously, and I told Mike that Cody looked just like him. (I also told Cody he looked just like Mike.) They had the same hair, the same scruffy goatee. I held Cody until I could hold Mike.
Things were teetering on bad, but I was well enough that Marilyn an
d Dad let me go on a short drive through the Hollywood Hills with David, who was just on the other side of Bar Mitzvahed. We drove up to the end of Beachwood Canyon to pay homage to the Hollywood sign. We lifted our arms and took a series of conquer-the-world photos, our hands reaching toward an ethereal Los Angeles sky, lording over mountains and cityscape and hills. I look deathly thin and overly enthusiastic in bell bottoms that were intended for a child. I could feel the flip from elevated, magnetic energy to agitation, scattered thoughts, distraction, obsession, anxiety.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. ME, WITH CODY.
I had to be back in New York for Valentine’s Day to collect my bride (Mike, obviously). No one thought this was a good idea. No one could stop me. I had a plan for Eden. I went to Oma and Opa’s house off Mulholland and picked bags and bags of kumquats to bring back to the city. I went to my maternal grandma’s house on Wade Street, near the Santa Monica airport where I used to take naps under the flight pattern, and picked avocados from her trees. Carrying the genetic seeds of the fruit trees seemed especially important to me. Both fruits: good barter potential and useful for winter survival. I bought cigarettes. I packed the few clothes I owned and told Mike I was coming.
On Valentine’s Day Eve, I arrived at Garfield and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope. We went to a bar.
“If I draw a really good portrait of you, can we get free drinks?” I asked the bartender. He would not engage. Mike ordered beers in the normal way. I drew a really unflattering picture of the bartender on a napkin. He was stone-faced. But we did not pay for the beer. We went back to Mike’s apartment to get his video camera. I looked like Janis Joplin had risen from the grave and dipped herself in gold.