Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir
Page 10
LL Cool J was one of the guys who would just come by whenever he felt like it. He was a local boy from Queens and always so much fun on-air that it really felt like he was one of us. He agreed to let me interview him for a television show, and he could not have been more open and genuine. He even let us film him going back to his grandmother’s house where his mother raised him. He showed us his room, which was a corner of the laundry room where they’d hung up sheets for walls. He pointed out his old electric drum pad where he made up his beats, and his bowling trophies and schoolbooks—everything was perfectly preserved and arranged, a little island of shelter frozen in a time capsule. It was incredibly sweet and touching, and I was also impressed by how much love and gratitude he had for his mother and grandmother. Like Ed and Dré, he was someone who never forgot where he came from and maintained a strong sense of who he was as a person.
I also loved Salt, Pepa, and their DJ Spinderella, who were our first guests when we started the show. They had a special relationship with our show after that, and they’d often fill in for Ed and Dré when they were traveling. Now it’s commonplace for a celebrity to host an hour or sit in on a radio show, but in 1996 it was a very big deal. The energy of the show—which was normally filled with male humor—flipped when the four of us took over and all squeezed in behind the console. We’d call it ladies’ day, and we talked about everything, including hair weaves and kids. In fact, once I was telling them how I thought they were superwomen, having these big careers and taking care of their kids, and then I had the bright idea to tell them that they should all bring in their kids the next morning.
All at once all three of them said, “Oh, no. It would be chaos.”
Salt said, “Oh, Lisa, you don’t want that.”
Pepa said, “Lisa, you’d resign. All you’d hear on the radio is ‘Tyran, no! Tyran, stop that!’” Then she told us all about how Tyran, her son who was probably about five or six at the time, had managed to make a $2,000 phone call to Japan from a limo one time. They teased me that only someone who didn’t have little kids would think it was a good idea to bring them into a studio.
Their kids may have run them ragged at home, but you wouldn’t have known it when they were in the studio. It amazed me how much energy they had in the morning, even if they’d been up late performing or promoting the night before. The running joke was that every five minutes or so Salt would say, “There’s no place I’d rather be at 7 A.M. than on Hot 97!”
We had some great people in our studio, but of all the guys who came and hung out with us, the craziest and most lovable were Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Flavor Flav. I became an adopted member of their wacky extended family—so much so that ODB and Flavor Flav would constantly call me in the middle of the night when they’d gotten themselves into some mess. I don’t know if they thought I was their mother, their sister, their aunt, or some combination of all three.
At the time, I was dating a real straight-arrow guy named Jed. He was a totally nice guy, and definitely not used to the kind of insanity that I experienced at work on a daily basis. So when the phone rang in the wee hours and it was some rapper telling me he’d just been arrested, Jed was not amused.
The first time it happened, it was Flavor Flav, and the conversation went something like this:
Me: Hello?
FF: Hey, Lisa, it’s me.
Me: What? Who?
FF: It’s me. Flavor Flav.
Me: (looking at the clock) Flavor Flav? It’s 2:30 in the morning!
FF: Yeah, well, you know, sorry about that.
Me: What’s going on? Where are you?
FF: Rikers.
Me: Rikers?!
And so on …
It might seem crazy that Flavor Flav was calling me from Rikers, because after all, what was I supposed to do about it? But in a weird way, it was actually responsible of him. He was often our guest reader for the traffic report, so he was just giving me a friendly heads-up that he wouldn’t be making it in for work the next day.
For some reason, it was always 2:30 in the morning when I got calls like this. Once it was ODB calling to tell me that he’d been arrested for stealing sneakers in Virginia. He was slurring, obviously still high, and insistent that he was innocent. He didn’t need me to bail him out, he just wanted me to know, and he wanted me to tell Ed and Dré when I went to work the next morning. So when I got up for work two hours later, I propped my exhausted eyes open and passed on the news to Ed and Dré like I was a loyal sister protecting my naughty kid brother at the breakfast table.
With all these rappers coming by, some of them wasted, some of them not, it was my idea to have a “you know what I’m saying” bell. Every time one of the rap artists said, “you know what I’m saying,” I’d ding a concierge bell. Depending on their level of sobriety, “you know what I’m saying” could easily be every other sentence and that bell would be clanging all morning like Notre Dame at midnight. But by far the most popular segment on our show was something we called “Roll Call.” A listener would call in, we would freestyle a line, then the listener would fill in a line, and we’d go back and forth from there. People were obsessed with the Roll Call, and our phone lines would be all lit up like Christmas even before the show started. Even the celebrities were obsessed. Someone would come by to promote a new album and they couldn’t wait to get on the mike to do the Roll Call. Celebrity encounters now are all so scripted. They do a satellite tour and get the same stupid questions over and over. But this was live, totally off the cuff and unpredictable, and they loved it.
One hip-hop star got just a little too comfortable with his surroundings. I didn’t know Biggie Smalls that well, and one day he was in the studio and he started rolling a joint during a commercial break. So I yelled at him like a horrified schoolmarm. “Biggie, you can’t do that in here, we could lose our license!” Not to mention, it was 7 A.M. Biggie just kind of shrugged and smiled. “All right, Mom, no big deal.”
I couldn’t stay mad. Biggie was just being who he was, which was why he was so endearing to fans. I will never stop regretting that that was the last time I saw Biggie—I wish I could take back the scolding and that instead I had said something that better reflected how much I respected his work. It was a very short time later that I got a call from the station in the middle of the night. They needed me to come in and get on the air right away because Biggie had been murdered. The same thing had happened just a year before when Tupac was killed, and I couldn’t believe that we’d lost another talented artist this way. Ed was out on the West Coast—not far from where Biggie was killed—so it was just me on the radio, and I opened up the phone lines so that heartbroken fans could call in. The outpouring of love was staggering.
ONE OF THE THINGS I most appreciated about working at Hot 97 was how racially diverse it was. The people working there—both on and off the air—really reflected the makeup of the city itself, and there were very few media outlets where you could look for that kind of accurate picture. Ed and Dré used to joke about the show Friends and wonder how a show like that, set in New York, could be so popular when none of them had black friends.
It is true that the rap and hip-hop world at the time was really heavily male dominated, and I was the only woman on-air at Hot 97 in the morning. But outside the studio, there were a number of African American women on staff with whom I became friends. Once the publicity department for the shoe company Lugz sent us a bunch of pairs of shoes. I must have said something about giving a pair to the guy I was seeing at the time, and one of my friends shook her head. “Oh, no. Never give a man shoes or he’ll use them to walk out the door.”
I said, “What are you talking about? I never heard that before.”
All the women looked at one another, like Doesn’t this girl know anything? The best advice my friend gave me, straight from her mother, was “Don’t trip over dollars to get to nickels.” Oh my God, how brilliant was that? And how true! How many times in my own life had I jumped across perfectly ni
ce guys on my way to a bright, shiny jerk? Another saying I liked was, “Don’t put your purse on the floor, because your money will walk away.” I think that one works literally or figuratively. Either way, they’re words to live by.
LIKE SO MANY PASSIONATE romances in my life, Hot 97 was destined to burn itself out. After five years, I thought we could have easily gone on for five more, but the powers that be had other ideas, and Ed, Dré, and I went our separate ways. I wasn’t exaggerating at the start of this chapter—I cried real tears when this love affair ended. It was kismet, and I was so grateful every day I spent on that show. But better to have loved and lost, right? And now I knew what true romance really looked like.
I was constantly making cookies for the guys at Hot 97, so I had a hard time coming up with just one cookie that really reflected my time there. Then I realized something: to me, Hot 97 was the quintessential New York radio station—totally homegrown, fast paced, and spontaneous. And since black-and-white cookies are the quintessential New York cookie, it only made sense to include them here.
The typical New York black-and-white cookie, found in every self-respecting deli in the city, is easily 4 to 5 inches inches across. I like to make them smaller, and it doesn’t make them any less delicious. If you want the classic supersized cookie, just add another 5 to 10 minutes of baking time.
BLACK-AND-WHITE COOKIES
For the cookies
1 cup sugar
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 eggs
½ teaspoon vanilla
2½ cups flour
¾ teaspoons baking powder
½ cup milk
For the white icing
1½ cups confectioners’ sugar
¼ teaspoon vanilla
⅜ cup milk
For the chocolate icing
1½ cups confectioners’ sugar
¼ teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
⅜ cup milk
Offset spatula
Parchment-lined cookie sheets
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Mix sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl, mix together flour and baking powder. Add half of the flour mixture to the butter and sugar mixture. Then add the milk, and then the rest of the flour mixture. Mix until incorporated.
Using a small ice cream scoop, place heaping scoops of dough onto the parchment-lined baking sheet, about 1 inch apart (space them wider if you’re making them larger).
Bake for about 10 minutes, until just starting to turn golden at the edges.
Cool on wire racks.
Make the white icing first. Mix together the first two ingredients, then slowly add the milk, using just enough to make the icing easily spreadable. (If the icing gets too thin, you can add a bit more sugar to thicken it again.)
Using the offset spatula, ice half of each cookie with the white icing. Allow to set for about 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the chocolate icing. Mix together the first three ingredients, then slowly add the milk as you did for the white icing. Now ice the other half of each cookie and allow to set before serving.
Makes approximately 48 small cookies.
CHAPTER 10
IF YOU BAKE IT, THEY WILL COME
My reputation now is that I’m little Miss Sugar Cookie who sits at home and knits and plays with my cat. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that whenever people assume those things about me I think to myself: If they only knew. For years and years, home was nothing special to me at all. The lease to my apartment had someone else’s name on it. Even the furniture belonged to someone else. And when I wasn’t working, I was out having fun. All I did in my apartment was sleep and have sex, so who cared what it looked like or how I felt about it?
Another reason not to get attached to home was that in radio I never felt like I could really plan ahead. People were fired and moved off to radio stations across the country all the time. It was like being in the military or working in professional sports—you never knew when you might be transferred or traded. I knew people who would check with their boss before they bought a house—they didn’t want to sign on to a mortgage if their job was going to disappear in the next six months. To me, it seemed much safer to sublet an apartment than to make a commitment I might not be able to keep. I guess I had the same attitude toward real estate that I had toward men—I was always keeping my options open.
But just as I was starting to learn a little bit more about romantic commitment, I was beginning to see the appeal of having someplace that felt more like home. When I started at Hot 97, I was still living in my little studio alcove. But when things really started to take off, I felt like I could possibly do better for myself. So on a 100-degree day in the dead of a New York summer afternoon when every sane person was out of town, I went looking for apartments. I saw nondescript box after cookie-cutter box and nothing really moved me, until I walked into a one-bedroom apartment and I knew right away that it was the one for me. It had gorgeous prewar bones, wood floors, and it felt solid in a way that none of those other 1960s-era condos did. I took it on the spot. If only I could be so decisive with men, this would be a much shorter book.
I didn’t exactly decorate my new apartment—I definitely wasn’t thinking about color schemes or flipping through design magazines for inspiration. That was not my thing. But I took the major step (for me) of buying a few things from IKEA, and my mom gave me an old sofa and a coffee table. My desk was two filing cabinets with a board on top. I didn’t paint or hang curtains or buy a bedspread. I just had your basic white vinyl blinds from Home Depot. My only investment was a new set of very basic baby-pink towels. And my one nod to decoration was a set of old Japanese prints that my grandmother had left me. I still love them to this day, but it’s no coincidence that even when I had my own place I wasn’t really asking myself what I wanted it to look like—I was letting circumstances decide for me.
You could definitely trace the way I came into my own through the furnishings in my apartment. It all started with hand-me-downs and cheap put-it-together-with-a-wrench stuff that wasn’t designed to last. Then a really big step for me was to actually commission a furniture builder to make me an armoire for my clothes since I didn’t have enough closet space. It was this huge gray thing made out of Formica, and in truth it was absolutely hideous, but it was indestructible and it was built exactly to my specifications. It was still solid and useful long after I’d realized it was ugly as sin. Finally, years later, I offered it to my building super, but it was so immense that he had to break it up with a crowbar to get it out of the apartment. We should all be so lucky as to invest our energy in something that serves us so well and never gives up.
It’s also interesting to me that I had become the person who gives stuff to other people. First it was the armoire, and then it was a big leather sofa bed that had been my first major furniture investment, and which I gave to a coworker who was glad to have it. (He still jokes that he wishes he had a black light to shine on it and pick up the traces of all my sexcapades.) Is there anything more symbolic of growing up than getting rid of furniture that has run its course? Now I realized that I didn’t have to settle for stuff that didn’t suit me, any more than I had to settle for a man I didn’t love. I didn’t want to waste time, energy, or space on the wrong things—or people—anymore.
I KEPT UP MY baking for boyfriends, and now I was baking for everyone else, too. Baking became a way to relax and unwind after work, so I would bake even when I didn’t have anyone specific in mind to bake for. I was always bringing in cookies for the guys at work, and if you ask any rapper who stopped into Hot 97 what they remembered most about me, at least one of the things would be my chocolate chip cheesecake brownies.
I truly loved to bake, which was really important for me, because ever since I’d given up my violin I had nothing to be passionate about other than work. Work was all-consuming,
which was the way I wanted it. Slowly and surely, though, I was discovering that there was more to life than work, and that I was a person with more sides to me than the one that faced the microphone. It’s funny, because around this time, a boyfriend asked me a question that left me momentarily speechless. On the radio, it was second nature to me to make a quick snarky reply no matter what question I was asked. It was a constant competition to see who could snap faster. But here I was, being asked a kind of serious question in my personal life, and I needed to think about it for a minute. It went against all my training to allow a few seconds of dead air. Finally my boyfriend saw that I was struggling for an answer and he said, “Do you need an on-air light?” That was amazing to me. Had I really become a person who was only “on” when I was on-air?
But back to baking. Even though I was still getting up before the roosters every morning (if there were roosters on the Upper East Side), I decided that I wanted to get better at pastry, and to really learn how the professionals did it. I guess I hadn’t changed so completely from my workaholic ways, because I put my mind into baking the same way I did into my career—if I was going to do it, then I wanted to be really good at it.
Me and Bobby Flay.
I had become friendly with the chef Bobby Flay, whose Mesa Grill was one of the most highly regarded restaurants in Manhattan. I asked him if I could apprentice with his pastry chef, Alfred Stephens, on the weekends. Of course weekends were when I caught up on my sleep, so I was out of my mind to be doing this, but I jumped into it with both feet. And my God, I had obviously chosen to apprentice in one of the few jobs that was even more physically grueling than the one I already had. Added to the exhaustion of getting up early, as all pastry chefs do, was the sheer backbreaking labor of lifting huge bags of flour and massive trays out of hot ovens. It also seemed like everything in the kitchen was arranged for six-foot-tall men, so no matter what I needed, it was always about a foot over my head. The other thing I did not love about my apprenticeship was the quiet. When you think of kitchens and chefs, you picture everyone crowded in together and cursing like banshees. That, to me, is not so different from a radio station, so I would have been comfortable in that environment. But pastry chefs usually work in silent, windowless basements, hours before any of the other cooks are even awake yet. By the time the rest of the staff is rolling in, the pastry chef is heading home.