by Jarett Kobek
A loose circle of seven people surrounded this human pyramid, everyone holding cigarettes or a drink. Baby and his friends stood out, younger than the rest, fresh faced and stupid. Baby was wearing a pair of unfortunate lamé pants and a shining gold shirt, and his friends were done up in green-and-purple polka-dotted spandex cutoffs that emphasized their white tube socks and black hi-top sneakers.
“Adeline!” Baby cried out.
We hugged. His bloodshot eyes confirmed my suspicion that he was halfway between the sun and the moon.
“I see the a-a-a-ac-crobatics have st-st-st-started,” I said. “Is this why you dr-dr-dr-dragged me here in the middle of the n-n-n-night?”
“Can you stop doing that?” asked Baby. “It’s really annoying.”
“S-s-s-s-sorry,” I said.
“Anyhoo,” he said. “You’ve got to meet the host. He was just here, talking to his girlfriend. The actress, Jayne Dennis?”
“No idea,” I said.
“She’s on Days of Our Lives,” said Baby. “Oh, there he is!”
A decently sized young man emerged from the bathroom, his suit sleeves stopping well before his wrists. A few buttons of his shirt were undone, exposing his undershirt. There was a wet spot on his stomach. He wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks.
“Come on,” said Baby, pulling me across the apartment.
We came to a halt before the man, who stared at us, confused, unfocused. He’d been partying all night. Perhaps several nights. Perhaps with no sleep. Perhaps he never slept. Perhaps he didn’t know that sleep was possible.
“Meet my friend Adeline,” Baby said to the man. “She’s from Los Angeles, too.”
“Hey,” said the man. I’d been mistaken, confused by the suit. This was no man. He was a boy, about our age, plus two or three years. A boy like all the boys in my life, like all the little kiddies.
“Adeline,” said Baby, “this is Bret.”
“What school did you attend?” I asked, knowing my own kind, a fellow traveler in the privileged halls of private education.
“Buckley,” said Bret.
“You appear somehow familiar,” said I to him. “Were you acquainted with George Whitney?”
“I’m friends with his older brother, Timothy. Did you go to Buckley?”
“No,” I sniffed. “I went to Crossroads.”
Nothing evoked my interior snob like someone who’d paid for a traditional education, throwbacks to the days of company men, to doctoral candidates in engineering at Caltech and Stanford, men who would graduate and build missiles for Lockheed.
“What are you doing?” hissed Baby.
“Baby,” I said. “How many of these dreadful boys do you imagine that I’ve met in my short lifetime? Timothy Whitney! I used to give handjobs to his kid brother!”
One of Baby’s friends positioned himself atop the kitchen counter. Someone had turned on the enormous stereo, which blasted out “Only in My Dreams” by Debbie Gibson. Baby’s friend danced, avoiding any semblance of the beat, performing a drunken facsimile of the cha-cha with occasional Rockette kicks.
Baby pulled me into a far corner, by the bed.
“You don’t understand,” said Baby. “That’s not just anyone, Adeline. That’s Bret Easton Ellis.”
“What?” I asked.
“That’s why I invited you.”
“What?” I asked again.
“Look!” said Baby, indicating the zigzag bookshelves on the wall over the bed, wherein rested multiple copies of editions authored by Bret Easton Ellis. Foreign language translations. Menos que cero. Moins que zero.
“He’s so young.”
“Don’t worry,” said Baby. “He’s too drunk, I think, to have noticed. I’ve been keeping pace and I’m well past the point of being affected by social slights. Just talk to him again.”
“I’ll wait until the proper moment transpires,” I said.
Such transpiration did not occur for some time. Mine eyes played witness to human bodies stampeding through the motions of fun.
Great amounts of insipid conversation, far too many Billboard Hot 200 songs, and an awful lot of that terrible drunken party laughter which always forces one to consider what’s wrong with oneself and then forces one to wonder what’s wrong with everyone else.
About two thirds of the assembled congregation lacked any sense of Bret Easton Ellis as an author. He was simply the man who owned the apartment. The other third could not cease from peppering him with inanities. “Did you really go to Bennington?” “Is it exciting to be a writer?” “What’s Robert Downey Jr. really like?” “Where do you get your ideas?”
They’d ask these questions as they drank his alcohol and then, before he could offer a reply, shouted out follow-up statements. “My father went to Bennington!” “I’ve always wanted to write!” “I heard he’s an asshole!” “I’ve got so many ideas but I just don’t know what to do with them! Can I tell you a few?”
Here he was, our famous author, surrounded by the hottest accoutrements of the American 1980s. A downtown apartment, an enormously powerful stereo, an immaculate kitchen with stainless steel refrigerator, the obligatory Olivetti typewriter, a Les Mis poster, bookshelves stuffed with his own work, a suit cut so right that it was wrong.
For the life of yours truly, I could not see why the man had bothered. Suffocation by plastic wasn’t any better than shitting one’s self with the DTs and crying out to the great gods of dope for mercy hot shot of heroin. He seemed so very lonely.
The young author stepped out onto his balcony. I darted around a drag queen falling asleep on her feet and followed him outside.
“Would you spare one of those?” I asked.
“Why not?” said Bret Easton Ellis.
“I don’t want to bore you,” I said, returning his lighter. “But je t’aime The Rules of Attraction. It’s a to-die-for fave.”
“So you’re the one,” said Bret Easton Ellis. “Did you know that Tom Cruise lives in this building?”
“And?” I asked.
“Don’t you think it’s interesting that Tom Cruise lives in this building?”
“Not particularly,” I said. “No.”
Every apartment on the east side of his building had its own balcony, but none were close to the size of Bret Easton Ellis’s veranda.
“One night,” said Bret Easton Ellis, “I watched two gangs fighting down on the street. One gang had chains. The other gang had a guy with a car. The guy with the car kept trying to run over the guys with chains. It was kind of fabulous. Have you ever eaten at Cave Canem?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s across the street from the Lismar Lounge. It used to be a famous bathhouse, the Club Baths. They had parrots and palm trees inside. The city closed it down, you know, because of AIDS. My friend Hayne Suthon bought the building and opened a restaurant. She kept the décor but cleaned out the cum. Now they serve authentic Roman dishes, circa 79 AD. It’s very yuppie.”
“I know Cave Canem. They’re simply not my sort.”
“I attended the opening,” said Bret Easton Ellis. “Did you really like Rules? The Voice Literary Supplement gave it a horrible review.”
“It’s excellent,” I said. “Though it demonstrates the same characteristic weakness of Less Than Zero.”
“And what’s that?” asked Bret Easton Ellis.
“You exhibit an undeniable strain of American squeamishness,” I said. “You believe in the venality and shame of sexuality and drug use, as if the clockwork of our blue planet stopped and started on what people under the age of twenty-five shoved into the various holes of their bodies. But brother, that’s okey-dokey, the world requires its prudes.”
“One of those queens has some cocaine,” said Bret Easton Ellis. “You could go into the bathroom and shove some sparkling white lines of cocaine into the holes of your body.”
“Why not,” I said.
MARCH 1989
A Radical Shindig at the Anarchist Switchboard
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I bleached out my hair and dyed it pink, courtesy of Tish and Snooky, then had it snipped snipped snipped into a Marilyn Monroe by Mark the Barber over at Open til Midnight. Later that very same evening, Минерва rushed into our apartment.
“Big change,” said she.
“George Herbert Walker Bush is our President. One must adjust to the new era,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. “Like all things, this too shall fade.”
She planted herself on my bed, talking as I dressed.
“Interesting thing about New York, bright girl,” she said. “I think Americans are not knowing how much Uncle Sam exports hatred to rest of world. Soviets hate Blacks because Hollywood hates Blacks. Ronald Reagan loved putting Negroes in cages. When I come to New York, I see race is myth. темнокожий are no different. Some terrible, of course, but when is teenaged male not terrible? When was last time great hymn and high Hosannas written to virtue of horny seventeen-year-old? And in person, I see many are quite attractive.”
“I thought you were a lesbian,” I said.
“Passing phase,” said Минерва. “No more nights at Cubbyhole. Enough kitty cat for one lifetime.”
“Are you looking for a boyfriend?” I asked.
“Eh,” said Минерва. “Maybe boyfriend is looking for me.”
I donned a black dress with matching jacket and gloves. I wrapped a tiger-print shawl around my neck. I tied old chains to my wrists like bracelets. Just above my right breast, I attached belt buckles like a soldier’s medals.
“This is more than enough,” I said, regarding myself in the mirror, worried as ever that I’d added poundage in the posterior. “Let us journey out into the evening.”
*
Revolution was in the air, pollen clouds shaken loose by the riot’s whirlwind. Минерва, sensing my interest, suggested that I accompany her to a radical shindig at the Anarchist Switchboard.
On our way, my dear Stalinist pal inquired about Kommie Kalifornia, asking if it were better than New York. “The weather is primo,” I said. “But LA is real dullsville.”
“What of San Francisco?” she asked.
“I’ve only been thrice, in high school. The people appeared a bit confused.”
“Fucking hellfire,” she said. “I am looking for graduate studies. Otherwise visa trouble.”
The Anarchist Switchboard wasn’t much more than an uncomfortable room painted stark bleeding red in a dingy little basement on 9th Street. Bare light bulbs offered illumination. People sat on broken couches and metal chairs.
Some were flat-out radical intellectuals, their lives consumed by multiple re-readings of Bakunin. Others were bearded weirdos, leftovers from the radical ’60s. A handful were obvious addicts, nodding off into psychoactive oblivion. The rest were kids dressed in the media-manufactured uniform of The Punk. They sent me. They really sent me.
We occupied two open cushions on a couch, the broken springs jabbing into my meat. Sitting beside yours truly was an older woman, a bottle of schnapps emerged from her coat pocket.
“Bad time keeping,” Минерва said, looking at her Swatch watch. “Fucking anarchists.”
An older man in a Yankees baseball cap started the meeting. We were there, he said, to consider whether or not the indictments of a few police officers made a lick of difference. “Show trials!” said the old woman, schnapps blooming as she opened her mouth. “Enough talk! I want to know what we’re going to do!”
“At least someone’s being prosecuted, right?”
Hisses and boos.
The Yankees aficionado mentioned that the city was making cash offers to victims of the Riot, all below $15,000. “It’s an insult!” shouted the woman.
She was not alone. People blurted out whatever ideas traipsed through their silly little heads.
Behind us, a young man spoke with a noticeable accent. New Jersey. Not particularly thick, but surely noticeable.
“The problem as I see it,” he said, “is that we’ve been living on borrowed time. There was a collective delusion fueling the Lower East Side, that we could exist here with impunity, that we were free to run wild and that our way of life was sustainable into perpetuity. We were mistaken. You can’t break the rules and get away with it forever. They’re going to steal it from us, slowly, over time. If you think it’ll end here, you’re wrong. It won’t be finished until every poor person is driven out of the city, until they transform all of Manhattan into something that we can’t recognize. We’re doomed. Sitting around talking revolution in an East Village basement is as good as twiddling our thumbs. The reason why the poor always get shafted is because we’re victims of human nature. We’d much rather squabble amongst ourselves than go the distance with the rich. The only reason the rich are the rich, as far as I can tell, is that they lack the social mechanisms of restraint. They do what they want. They tell poor people to jump and poor people ask, ‘How high?’ One thing I like about this neighborhood is that we’ve transcended restraint. We need to harness that energy and transform it into distinct political action.”
“Fucking Jon de Lee,” whispered Минерва. “Of Inverted Bloody Crosses.”
“Do you know him?” I whispered back.
“I fucking do,” she said.
“Would you be good enough to introduce us?”
The speeches petered out. Constant recycling of anger. Минерва and I ascended to 9th Street, in the freezing late-March weather, and there I was, talking with Jon de Lee, him looking at me, and I thought, oh great God be damned, what a God damned attractive ruffian. I asked if he had a girlfriend and he laughed. I asked him what was funny and he said, I’m in a band. I’m an anarchist. Anarchist band members don’t have girlfriends. They don’t believe in relationships. I said that sounded like masculine bullshit. He asked what I was doing tomorrow.
And that is how I ended up with my third and final college boyfriend.
MARCH 1989
Adeline Goes on Three Dates
Sitting in a booth at the Jones Diner with Jon de Lee. Watching as he ate a $1.50 cheeseburger deluxe. My fingers picking, gingerly, at his soggy French fries.
The single previous time that I’d dared cross the establishment’s threshold was on the evening that Jean-Michel Basquiat died, five days following the bloody brouhaha at Tompkins Square. Word of the artist’s passing spread via telephone, particularly amongst the more motivated students at Parsons. Someone mentioned that our hometown hero had overdosed in his loft on Great Jones Street.
A handful of us drifted to his building. The corpse was long gone, putrefying somewhere in a morgue, undergoing a coroner’s autopsy. There wasn’t anything to see but a handful of crack addicts. As we stood in the street, one daft soul couldn’t cease her prattling about how this old rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, had lived on the block waaaaaaay back in Ye Olde 1960s.
“Bucky’s stuff is really a wonder. Even now,” she said. “Have you heard the Mountain Tapes? People think he’s crazy because he converted to Islam for a while and made annoying albums like Abu Dharr’s Tears, but that was only a phase. The most recent aren’t as preachy. The last one’s kind of weird. Bucky seems like he’s gotten super upset about NASA.”
Then another of our holy fools suggested eating at the Jones Diner. So that’s what Parsons’ Finest did on the night that old Jean-Michel gave up his ghost. We stuffed our faces with the most grotesque food you can imaginate, only a couple of hundred feet from where they’d wheeled out the body.
Do you wonder, reader, why had Jon de Lee escorted me into the diner’s confines? The answer is very simple. We were on our third date. The diner was his idea of fine food.
“So you’re rich, right?” he asked.
“The family has money,” I said.
“And Mommy gives you the cash?”
“You might say that.”
“For what, college and your clothes and food?” he asked.
“You might say that.”
&nbs
p; “So really,” he said. “You’re another gentrifier who believes for no apparent reason that the East Village is a place she can make her own.”
“What a charming line of inquiry,” I said. “Darling, a man who’s adopted the name Jon de Lee shouldn’t criticize the pretensions of others. It ain’t as if you were born within the ringing peals of the Most Holy Redeemer. Red Bank is a long way from the Lower East Side.”
“I was born working class,” he said. “It makes sense that I would gravitate to another working-class neighborhood. I know these people. I don’t see them as local color.”
Our first date, if it may be so called, had occurred on a Tuesday night when Jon de Lee invited me to witness the hallowed event of his band playing the Pyramid Club.
The Inverted Bloody Crosses shared the bill with Collapsed, Bold, and Nausea. I hadn’t the slightest. I somehow convinced Baby to come along. “You’re a groupie now?” he asked.
The Inverted Bloody Crosses sounded horrible but were the proper sort of awful, constructing signs and signifiers of post-riot LES discontent. Pronouncements, sans musique, about the cops, about the rich, about wars against the working poor. All delivered by Jon de Lee. Vocalist and lead guitarist. In the short moments between his prolonged bouts of ranting, the band cranked out dense eruptions of noise. Jon later explained that the Crosses were thrashcore, elaborating on the various punk subgenres and their distinguishing features. I tuned him out, bless his pretty little head.
“So what,” said Baby, “you’re going to fuck this guy because you saw his band?”
“Cease your judgments,” said I. “Only the good Lord Jesus Christo knows what shenanigans you’ve experienced at the Pyramid.”
“Adeline,” said Baby. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” I asked. “Of course you can.”