Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  4

  T-shirts were just the beginning. Justin, Shawn, and Richie wanted to do music, film, to build a hip-hop empire! “It’s all about who you know,” they had told the reporter in the New York Magazine article, which I read half of later that night, after I finally arrived home.

  May and Felix were there when I walked in. Felix was on the couch, using my copy of This Side of Paradise to roll a joint, while May was at the stereo, turning up the volume and yelling over it. I sat down on the other end of the sofa and took out my magazine, but after a few pages, I gave in to the sway of them. Accepting the joint from Felix, I stuck the magazine, most of it unread, under the cushion of our collapsing couch. I took a long drag. Who you know, who you know . . . How I knew Justin, Shawn, and Richie, as Rudyard Kipling might say, is another story....

  I confess I haven’t actually read any Rudyard Kipling, but I did read this book of Edwardian erotica by Anonymous, which featured a narrator—a perverted “uncle”—who invited two curious schoolgirls he’d met onboard a transatlantic steamer to a French brothel where he was a regular, who used this phrase to great effect. But what has Rudyard Kipling or the prolific Anonymous to do with me? Absolutely nothing! Which is why I’m going to tell my story, with all its twists and turns, right now.

  II

  1

  Some say New York in summer is a wonderful town and cite the many free activities available all season. Film festivals in Bryant Park! Opera on the Great Lawn!

  “There’s also a truck in the East Village that gives free food to the homeless every Sunday. Maybe we should go there for brunch,” Lex said over the hum of the air conditioner.

  “What about Tuesday? They’re showing La Traviata in Central Park,” I said, looking up from The Voice.

  “If I want to see the opera, I’ll buy a ticket. Summer Stage is for poor people. It’s the rich man’s concession to the worker who can’t afford to leave town. They think if they distract us with free shit, we’re less likely to rob them while they’re away. Direct the poor man’s attention toward the stage, so he doesn’t notice the darkened windows of the apartments lining Central Park. Give us opera so we don’t go mad, throw a brick through the window, and haul off with their tea settings. It’s insulting.”

  “But it’s fun to picnic in Bryant Park. They’re showing His Girl Friday next week!”

  “You know who else picnics? Homeless people. They love picnics. During the Depression, people picnicked in the park all year round; they called it Tent City.”

  “Fine,” I sighed. “What do you want to do then?”

  It was June of 1999, the summer before my senior year. Classes had ended in late May and within a week all my friends disappeared, leaving the city suddenly quiet. Quiet in that noisy way, when you look around and see crowds of people talking, just none of them to you.

  Up until then, I’d enjoyed a full schedule of dates and parties; college was turning out to be an education more sentimental than academic. Lectures and seminars were few and far between, leaving plenty of time to go out. And I did, constantly, working at my social life the way others worked at their résumés. To leave Manhattan then, to trade in my hard-won glamour for over a month in the suburbs, was out of the question.

  “You Can’t Go Home Again,” I’d said, during my father’s birthday dinner weeks earlier. We were at our favorite Red Lobster in Long Island, where I’m from. My parents looked at me quizzically. “It’s a novel by Thomas Wolfe,” I explained, as a means of broaching the subject.

  And so, with my parents’ permission, instead of returning home that June, I signed up for drawing classes at the School of Visual Arts. Since my classes only met once a week, however, I had little to do.

  I took a lot of walks in the beginning. I lingered in bookstores, read novels in the park, and went frequently to the movies. I’d walk to Lincoln Center, which wasn’t far from my apartment, or else, if it were a Saturday, I’d walk the fifty or so blocks down to Angelika on Houston. On the street again after, alone in the warm summer night, I’d stroll the whole way back up to my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, past lively restaurants and bars with crowds of young people spilling out, hoping that by the time I got home I’d be tired enough to sleep.

  I looked forward to the free film every Monday in Bryant Park. I’d spend the whole afternoon flipping through magazines in the Mid-Manhattan Library and then at dusk, wander over. Though the park always filled up hours ahead of time—people would come early and spread blankets to reserve space for friends—I went just at the last minute. The great thing about going alone, I considered, watching Psycho between groups of screaming friends, was how easy it was to find a single seat.

  I worked on my drawing a lot, too. At the end of every session of animation class, the teacher would gather everyone around for a critique. When it was my turn, I showed a fifteen-second cartoon adapted from my comic strip, “The Naked Woman,” about the boozy misadventures of its title character, The Naked Woman: Against a flat expanse of white, a naked woman runs, trips, and falls every fifth step. Above her head, a thought bubble reads, “Open bar!” I looped it to go on forever. In silence, we watched her run, trip, fall, get up . . . run, trip, fall, get up. . . . The other students in the class, mostly middle-aged men interested in superhero comics, called it “odd.”

  I didn’t go out much. I didn’t have anyone to go out much with. There was Caroline, whom I’d met that winter when my party life was in full swing. We went out occasionally—to the karaoke night where we’d met and were both regulars, or the Tikki Room at Niagara where we’d put our cigarettes on the bar and I’d say, “Let’s smoke cigarettes and act cool,” before lighting up. But since she didn’t drink and had an actual job to go to in the morning, she often went home early.

  Mostly, I looked forward to Thursdays, to Lex’s ’80s party. I’d met Lex at the same karaoke party where I’d met Caroline. He was part of the celebrity set—musicians who covered their own songs, B-actors and indie-darlings who pretended they didn’t want to be recognized but bristled when they weren’t—that had made the party famous. “I liked your song,” I told him one night. “It reminded me of my youth,” I said earnestly. This made him laugh and he began inviting me to all his parties—“Soul Sucka!” a ’70s night at Twilo that served chicken wings and forties, “Soft Sundays,” an evening of easy listening upstairs at Moomba. I always dressed up with a nod to the era or style he was referencing. He liked that about me, he said.

  Thursday would arrive. I’d compose a fresh eighties outfit—acid washed jeans maybe and a T-shirt cut to fall off one shoulder—and suck down a few beers while I got ready. Then, with my courage duly fortified, I’d make my way downtown. Usually, I’d bring something with me—a funny article I’d cut out from the Weekly World News (“Oldest Man in the World’s Secret to a Long Life Is Drinking a Quart of Whiskey and Smoking Two Packs a Day!”), or a vintage Garbage Pail Kid I’d found at the Salvation Army (“Messy Tessy”)—and turning up beside the DJ booth, I’d shyly stick out my hand. “For you.”

  Lex would receive my gift with a laugh and welcome me with a kiss on the cheek, while pressing a few drink tickets discreetly into my palm. Then he’d pull back to get a good look at me. “I love the acid wash.” After that, I’d go to the bar and try to make friends, returning to him throughout the night to request songs.

  “Do you have ‘Word Up’?” “‘Self Control’ by Laura Branigan?” “‘All Night Passion’ by Alisha?” My requests were a code: I’m wiser than my years and I know what you know, Lex. All the songs from the 1980s that are closest to your heart; they are close to mine, too.

  From the outset, we’d bonded over eighties music and trivia; this had been his heyday and it had been mine, too. As a kid in Greece, I’d tagged along to discos with my older cousin, who was just a few years younger than Lex; I’d danced to the same music at nine that he’d danced to at twenty-five. Couldn’t he see? I was not like these other girls who came to his party ready to dan
ce to whatever he happened to play. They didn’t know what I knew, what we knew together.

  By July, I was spending less time alone and more time with Lex, who’d also been left behind for the summer. The way people without family feel about the winter holidays, Lex told me, New Yorkers without summer homes feel about July and August. I commiserated, leaving out the fact that it had been my choice to stay, that I was as thrilled by our condition as he was unhappy, that I loved the terrible heat, and that I always feel lonely no matter who I’m with or what the season, and that I felt lucky to be lonely in New York City with him.

  We’d meet up for brunch, for a movie, for a birthday party his friend was throwing on his roof. Lex would call and say, “I hate parties. Wanna come?” Or I’d hang out with him in the DJ booth at Lot 61 or Life or Veruka. And then, Thursday again. I’d say hello before setting up at the bar, dance by myself to Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself,” and then when I got tired, rest by sitting in the coin-operated toy car machine in the corner of the club.

  There, practicing loneliness, I’d watch the crowd until Lex came to fetch me, pulling me up to dance with him until the song ended and the record cut off. Everyone looked around, waiting for Lex to set up the next one. Lex had to work, so I’d return to the bar alone to pick up guys, which is an art as much as bullfighting. This was my Hemingway moment:

  They’d buy me good drinks, and with dignity we’d lean on the bar of this dirty, poorly lighted place, before a song came on, a song I could not resist, and I’d run to the dance floor to perform my high-kicks dance.

  Certain songs were anthems that brought everyone to their feet. The beat would find you chatting, sipping a beer, worrying, and you’d rise up, as if called. There, dancing under the swirling multi-colored lights, the song lyrics echoing in your ears like a Greek chorus, it felt as if you were part of something, as if youth were a revolution, and your drinking, your dancing, your laughing, even your tears, were a sacred duty.

  I’d get fantastically drunk and smoke cigarette after cigarette and talk and talk until I had no voice left, until the lights came on and it was 4:00 AM.

  The staff would start to close up, and I’d help Lex gather his records into the trunk of his vintage Buick parked out front. With me in the passenger side, we’d speed off into the night, stopping at our favorite diner to get cheeseburgers, or at the deli to get cigarettes and a six-pack—“my fuel.” And then we’d go to Atlantic City, or if we were feeling responsible, one of the illegal card rooms right here in Manhattan. Lex knew all of them. Lex knew everything.

  An empty catering hall with one table occupied: A fifty-five-year-old dealer whom everyone called “The Greek,” two DJ’s Lex knew from Gambler’s Anonymous, a truck driver, a soldier on leave, a public school teacher who said very little, Lex, and me. I’d look on quietly, drink my beer, smoke my cigarettes, and occasionally write things in my notebook—poems or snatches of prose for a novel I planned to write about desolation and how much fun it was.

  Settled in with my grilled cheese sandwich and beer, I’d watch Lex gamble away the morning, study the faces of the other players, and flirt innocently with the older man who ran the room. He liked me and gave me menthol cigarettes when I ran out of my regular ones, and then took me aside to a table next to the big one in order to share his stash of hard candy. He pulled my chair out and asked me to tell him all about myself, but then didn’t pause for me to speak and began telling me all about myself instead: I was a nice girl, he said, and I shouldn’t be hanging around all night with a bum like Lex in a place like this.

  “She likes it,” Lex yelled over, without looking up from his cards.

  I smiled and shrugged and chose a pink candy from the dish.

  After a while I’d return to Lex’s side where I’d dream about the wonderful novel that might contain us, the sordid romance of Lex and me in the underworld. Wasn’t I bored just to sit there? the others asked, not understanding how busy I was in my mind, polishing the night until it gleamed like a rare fiction. Bored? How could I be? I was the heroine of a great book.

  I’d pass out at Lex’s place, and in the morning or the afternoon or early evening, depending on when we woke up, hungover and tired, we’d go for breakfast around the corner. We’d eat pancakes and eggs and then, tired still, would return to his apartment to escape the heat and watch TV.

  In his living room filled with records, four vintage televisions sets, and his very own pinball machine, the air conditioner wheezed loudly as we sat on his stylish mod couch, ridiculing Ruthie of MTV’s The Real World.

  Ruthie always got too drunk. The camera followed her as she crawled on her hands and knees through a crowded bar. We cracked up laughing at her expense, before I asked seriously, cringing as I recalled my own actions the night before, “Am I that bad when I drink, Lex?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Not all the time, though,” he smiled.

  We’d walk his dog, a melancholic ridgeback named Lola. We’d walk her around the block but never over to the river, though it was only five blocks away. “What’s there to do at the river?” Lex asked, when I suggested it. “As soon as you get there, all you do is start walking back!”

  Walking to the river was not essential. What was essential was the invention and perpetuation of the good time. What was essential was yesterday—“In the ’80s, you could go to a party and meet anyone. Basquiat, Warhol . . . People were interesting then; creativity mattered!”

  Lex would frown and complain, but even his bitterness was not without style. “I went to the video store and there were all these videos. Too many! I didn’t know what to get. What’s the point of all that selection? If I owned a video store, I’d only stock Caddy Shack. Every video in there would be Caddy Shack. This way you’d never be confused about what to rent again. . . .”

  We’d run into his friends—B-movie actors, indie-directors, musicians and designers, or party promoters like him. In the middle of what for anybody else would be a workday, they’d stand on the corner, chatting about what to do next. No one ever had any place to be.

  “We’re going to go buy more mint-flavored toothpicks,” Bernie and her boyfriend told Lex, but not me. They twirled the ones already in their mouths.

  “We’re running out,” her boyfriend added, looking out across Sixth Avenue and blinking slowly.

  “She wants to be a DJ now,” Lex began, after they left. “She called me up the other night, and she’s like, ‘Lex, I’m deejaying at Veruka tomorrow. Can I come over and borrow some records?’ I’m like, ‘Get your own fucking records!’ The whole thing of being a DJ is building up a record collection, and she just expects me to loan her mine? If a club wants my records, let them hire me! I’m gonna give them to her so she can play DJ and make money she doesn’t even need?” We walked a few more steps in silence. I’d learned to keep silent until his anger passed. Then he added, “It’s a joke that they’re dating. He’s just dating her because of who her father is.”

  “Who’s her father?”

  “Bax Stubbs.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The guitarist of Xenophobe,” he snapped.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t know he was married.”

  “He’s not.”

  “How chic. I’d love to have a little bastard myself some day. Name him Edwin . . . make him sleep in the stables . . . ask the servants, ‘Where’s that little bastard Edwin got to?’”

  “When did everyone get to be so fucking fake?” Lex said, kicking at the ground.

  2

  Though Lex was thirty-six and I was twenty, in just a few years I would be too old for him. He’d had many “good friends” like me already, girls who eventually grew up and left him behind. Lex, always and forever, the boy behind the DJ booth.

  Some people said he was living in the past, that he didn’t revive the’80s, but had never let it go. And sometimes, behind his back, I called him “the denim gargoyle.” He had lines on his face and thick skin from too much sun, too
much partying and, finally, too much time. One of his tattoos, a thorn of roses circling his forearm, was fading to blue. In the mornings, before we’d head out for breakfast, I’d trace my fingers over it. I love you, Lex, I’d think, which is perhaps why I invented the cruel nickname.

  “If I met you back then,” I said, looking up from a photo, “if we were the same age, I don’t think you’d like me.” It was a Saturday night, and we were at his apartment, looking through a box of old pictures taken in the early ’80s when he first moved to New York. In each, he looked so young and handsome, he and his friends so effortlessly cool. I dropped the stack onto the bed. “I think you’d be mean,” I said, going into the kitchen.

  Lex and his friends dated models, fresh-faced movie stars, and the daughters of the rich and famous. Seeing him among them, I felt rough and embarrassed, as if my body were sewn from a cheaper material. I returned with a beer.

  Lex was laughing and handed me another photo. One of his friends, the preppy one, had gotten the Lacoste alligator tattooed onto his chest. He pointed him out.

  “That’s funny because I’ve been thinking about getting a one-legged alligator tattooed on mine,” I said frowning, “the insignia for the Lacoste knockoff on sale at JCPenney.”

  “What about the Polo symbol without the mallet?” he ribbed back. “We could get matching ones. You get the mallet, and I’ll get the rest of him.”

  “I don’t want the mallet,” I said, flopping down on the bed. I stared at the ceiling, at Lex’s face as it came over mine, as he kissed me.

  I would never be cool. And I wouldn’t have cared finally, if I knew that Lex didn’t. Still, I couldn’t blame him for being shallow; his life depended on it. Cool people, cool places, cool things. As a DJ and party promoter, being cool was how he made a living. And with no distinction between his personal and professional life, Lex, quite simply, couldn’t afford to date me.