by Jarett Kobek
“Bring him along,” said Aubrey. “Tom’s great with kids.”
Down in the streets of Brooklyn Heights, I asked Baby what he and the old man had discussed. “If you can believe it,” he said, “we argued about boxing.”
“Why ever were you talking about that?” I asked. “You don’t know a thing about boxing.”
“I read his book The Fight,” said Baby. “I thought I could wing it. Boy, was I wrong. That fat little fuck really put me in my place.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“I guess he read my book,” said Baby. “Trapped, I mean. Boy, say what you will about that fat little fuck, but he’s a hell of a literary critic.”
Poor Baby. He’d traded one club for another.
APRIL 1995
Trouble in Club Land
As it’s fallen to yours truly to document the dread year 1995, it must be remarked that it was an annus horribilis for clubland.
Our dear old mayor Rudy bulldozed into office shouting promises to clean up the great unpoliceable city. The reign of terror kicked off pre-election style on 16 Septembre 1992, when Giuliani appeared beside the Brooklyn Bridge, addressing a crowd of off-duty NYPD officers. The boys in blue had gathered to protest then Mayor David Dinkins’s attempts at police reform. Some held signs that read, “Dump the Washroom Attendant.” Many had drunk themselves stinko.
Rudy summoned his inner fascist and delivered a hellwinder of a speech, twice employing the word bullshit. I will bring law and order. I will bring an iron fist. I will oppress those who misbehave. Given the context, and what followed, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Those Who Misbehave were earmarked as poor folks, disgraceful queers, and people of color.
The new mayor came into office with a list of targets. Clubland was one of his biggest.
Club USA sat not far from the corner of West 47th and Broadway. Owned and operated by Peter Gatien. Cyclops had pumped eight million dollars into the club’s construction. Barely two years later, in the early weeks of 1995, he shuttered its doors. Only another casualty of the New Times Square.
The one-eyed man had demonstrated weakness before a bloodthirsty beast, enraging the animal. The NYPD declared war. The next casualty was Sound Factory, sending Junior Vasquez, the resident DJ, into a tailspin of ennui and depression. More losses mounted.
Undercover officers infiltrated the clubs. Imagine all the junior cops from Far Rockaway induced to glam up and dress in feather boas.
I was repulsed by Rudy’s efforts to clean up the city. Yes, the crime had been terrible, but the solution upon which he’d fallen was full authoritarian fantasy. Let us not forget that the man was a former prosecutor raised in a deep Catholic household. Four of his uncles were cops. He was hardwired for punishment.
When he looked over his throbbing domain of New York City, the man simply quivered with the sense that someone somewhere might be committing a Grade E misdemeanor.
New York is Alexander Hamilton’s town. The rich have always ruled, but I hearken to the velvet glove. I preferred that our overlords exhibit some sense of shame and proportion.
On the other hand, I believed that Baby would be served best by the evaporation of his grotty little scene. He might yet progress into the warm light of adulthood.
I must admit that Baby’d begun a gradual withdrawal. The defining moment was in April, on Michael Alig’s birthday, when Alig threw a party at Limelight called Bloodfeast, named after an atrocious Herschell Gordon Lewis film. The flyer for Bloodfeast depicted Alig with his brains bashed out, a hammer beside him. One of his gaudy little club kids, a completely bald-headed young lady named Jenny Talia, holds up a fork with ersatz brain matter suspended a few centimeters from her mouth. She’s covered in blood, as is Alig. Above her right shoulder red text reads: LEGS CUT OFF!
Baby attended this dreadful party alone. Even his she-beast Regina had begged off from making an appearance. She’d started her own removal, having finally graduated from NYU and entered into a serious relationship with a lesbian from the Bronx.
People attended in outfits smeared with fake blood. Giant knives hung from the ceiling, suspended above the blood-smeared coffins and beds in which some of clubland’s lesser denizens reposed for the entire evening.
Baby didn’t say much other than that he’d found the event distasteful. Even with the drugs that he undoubtedly consumed, he was unable to delude himself into appreciating the strange vibes. Shortly thereafter, his attendance dwindled. He was going, at most, once a month.
Even if I did desire for the scene to evaporate into thin air, putting faith in petite dictators isn’t the best way to serve one’s friend. I’d watched the NYPD beat the stuffing out of the homeless. How could I not side with those dreadful club people? I lamented the changing of the city. “Detachable Penis” played like a message from the gods.
The sense of impending doom only grew stronger. Great change was looming. Soon the city would be only a plaything for the moneyed, and I’d be one of them, darlings. I’d be condemned to suck the marrow until the bones broke.
MAY 1995
Adeline Has Lunch with Thomas Cromwell,
Touches the Berlin Wall (Again)
I made plans with Thomas Cromwell for lunch near his office in Mid-town. Keeping faith with Aubrey’s words, I brought Emil, pushing his stroller forty blocks. When we reached Mr. Cromwell’s place of work, he stood in front, perfectly groomed. He held a lead attached to an astoundingly wrinkled brown dog.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I have to take a rain check. I had to bring Oscar into work. We’re having our carpets cleaned.”
That was more than fine with yours truly. I worried about bringing Emil into a restaurant. I’d spent some great percentage of my years judging those mothers who insisted on bringing their screaming children into unfamiliar situations. With my own offspring in tow, I’d become hypersensitive to re-creating any situation that’d driven me bonkers.
“Let’s get some coffee,” said Thomas Cromwell. “We can go over to a park not far from here. It’s a hidden gem.”
We stopped at a deli. I left Emil with Thomas Cromwell and Oscar, buying two cups of coffee. I’d rushed in and out, terrified to leave my child with a stranger and his dog.
The fear was baseless. Cromwell hadn’t absconded with my child. He was bent over the carriage and talking in a sublingual babble.
I handed Cromwell one of the cups. How I admired the hideous faux-Hellenic design printed on the cardboard! I took a swig from my own, imbibing the vilest brew that I’d yet tasted.
We talked about nothing in particular, about his job in publishing, of which I understood very little. I spoke of Trill and its relative success, about the grind of churning out twenty-two pages a month plus a cover, about how I’d received offers for other work. Some of which I’d be insane to refuse, as work for Marvel and DC was ridiculously lucrative, but how I was having trouble managing my schedule and was unwilling to delay an issue of my own book.
The park was a green sliver wedged between two buildings. At its rear, water cascaded down, drowning out the city’s clamor and din. Add to that the trees, and one could delude herself into believing she was somewhere beyond the city. If one was the sort of person who wanted to be somewhere other than the city. Which one was not.
Emil climbed out of his stroller and chased pigeons before targeting his affections on Oscar, lifting the dog’s ears and hugging it around the neck. Cromwell said the poor thing was a Shar-Pei, purebred. I dared not inquire as to the cost of buying a dog created by pointless eugenics.
Dogs in the city evoke my pity. All of them, Oscar included, have a faraway look in their eyes, as if overexposure has leached away any possible emotion or thought.
I couldn’t help myself. I inquired about Aubrey, about how they met.
“At college,” said Thomas Cromwell, “which is a long time ago, now that I think of it. We didn’t start dating until years later. We’ve been together now seven years. I thin
k she wants a ring, but my parents divorced before I was born. Neither of them remarried. I don’t know about marriage. The word doesn’t mean anything.”
I whistled. “Seven years,” I said. “How about that. That’s perfectly swellegant. And you’ve never been tempted to stray?”
“I’ve strayed,” he said. “I’m not proud. It happened. Two years ago. I started seeing a girl from 143rd Street in Flushing. I liked the odd-couple aspect. Uptight white boy makes a play for Latina who doesn’t care about his industry or his profession.”
“Does Aubrey know?”
“Aubrey knows,” said Thomas Cromwell. “We spent a year in couples’ therapy.”
“What happened to your mistress?”
“Someone on MacDougal Street stabbed her in the thigh. I took it as a message against my unfaithfulness and repented the next day. I told Aubrey everything.”
Emil hugged my leg. I brought him into my lap. All the while I drank that vile coffee. I liked Aubrey, had taken to her, but oh, Thomas Cromwell, how I liked you, sir. How you moved me way inside with your hideous dog and your tales of tail from Flushing.
He mentioned the Elizabeth Murray exhibition up the street at the MoMA. Cromwell had seen it and liked it. I hated tearing another sister down, but I truly disliked Murray’s work. I said that I planned to avoid it.
“Give it a chance,” said Thomas Cromwell. “Aubrey still hasn’t seen it. If you want, we can all go together.”
“I’d be delighted,” I said.
Cromwell looked at his watch. “I can’t believe we’ve talked this long,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“I’ll walk you,” I said, “it’s the least that I can do.”
“Before we go,” he said, “take a look at this.”
He brought me over to three slabs of freestanding pieces of concrete. I’d noticed them when we’d come in, but hadn’t particularly cared for the mural. Public art gives me a bad case of the shivers.
“This is the Berlin Wall,” said Thomas Cromwell.
“¿Qué es?” I asked.
“These are parts of the Berlin Wall.”
“I’ll be,” I said, running my fingers across the concrete. I’d witnessed the thing when it stood in Berlin, as a young girl on a continental tour with Daddy, Mother, and Dahlia. My father insisted that his daughters touch the wall, despite neither of us understanding its import. I was too young. Dahlia, you’ll not be surprised to learn, was too dense.
“That’s Manhattan for you,” said Thomas Cromwell. “I need to get going.”
I strapped Emil into his stroller. We pushed through Midtown in silence, determined, comfortable. Oh so comfortable, darlings.
Two blocks before his building, Cromwell said to me, “The next time, you’ll have to tell me all about Baby. I read Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle. It’s surprisingly good, especially for a book with an elephant-headed man on its cover. How long have you known each other?”
“For almost a decade,” I said. “We ceased speaking for some while, but things are back to normal. Our lives are hideously entwined. He’s as much my blood as Emil.”
“How do you account for it?” asked Cromwell. “What keeps the friendship going?”
“That’s the simplest thing,” I said. “Both of Baby’s parents are dead. I’ve never asked the details, but I gather it happened with great tragedy. As in murder. My brother committed suicide. When you meet another person with that same awful gift, you never let them go.”
JUNE 1995
Dinner at Tom and Aubrey’s
Aubrey telephoned on Wednesday, inviting yours truly to Saturday dinner. “I’m trying a new recipe,” she said. “Garlic brown sugar chicken. You eat meat, don’t you?”
“I only abstain from the ruddy stuff,” I said. “Chicken is fine. Tell me, do you often cook?”
“Hardly ever,” she said. “My grandmother sent the recipe, so I thought I’d try it.”
I asked if she wouldn’t mind extra guests, meaning Baby and the baby. Aubrey said the more the merrier. She’d be delighted to meet Emil. He’d made quite an impression on Thomas Cromwell. The man couldn’t stop singing my son’s praises.
After hanging up the receiver, I contemplated whether Aubrey and Cromwell had attempted creating their own child. Perhaps the option was tabled for future days.
As I’d soon be within the warm embrace of their home, I considered a surreptitious examination of the medicine cabinet, a hunt for evidence of Ortho Tri-Cyclen. The appalling fantasy passed. I’d ceased raiding toilet-ries somewheres around high school graduation.
You may be asking, Oh, Adeline, why ever would Aubrey be calling you? Well, darlings, in my unfathomable perversity, as the weeks had passed, I’d experienced many more lunch dates with Aubrey than her fella.
Why, just a week earlier, we’d met at an exceptionally sterile restaurant on Seventh Avenue. The name escapes me but rest assured that it was bleed-ingly bourgeois.
Our mouths moved, the proper words came out, but as always the cut of her suit and the shape of her hair transfixed my human soul. I’d seen thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of women like her, young professionals clawing their way through the world, women who believed that New York offered them profound and infinite opportunity. I’d always fantasized about their lives, imaginating what they’d done and where they came from. Now I was friends with one! There she sat, eating arugula and talking about politics.
Could these women be happy working for the sole purpose of accumulating capital that afforded them certain luxuries, the maintenance of which required the further accumulation of capital? Where did it all go? Where would it go? Must we all own property?
Aubrey mentioned her disappointment in President Bill Clinton. “I voted for Jerry Brown in the primaries,” she said, “but we saw how that turned out, so I held my nose and went with Clinton, hoping that he’d be the lesser of two evils before he proved that he didn’t understand the job. Now the Republicans have Congress with their Contract with America. None of the issues that I care about will be addressed for twenty years.”
I said something noncommittal, a pleasant nothingness. Our conversation drifted elsewhere. I wasn’t so naive as to express my political opinions in polite conversation, particularly not to a woman who did legal work for major corporations.
By any measurable American spectrum, my ridiculously far-left convictions ranked me as amongst the certifiably insane. No one wanted to hear my opinions. Not even my own self.
We’d drawn each other further into the net, moving from acquaintance into friendship. When the idea of a mythical garlic brown sugar chicken came upon her, she telephoned.
They resided on the East Side, on 56th Street, on the twenty-eighth floor of a drab building constructed within the last decade. If you’re surprised that Aubrey in all of her proper taste would ever consent to such a nondescript building, please remember that New York remains New York. Every soul makes the devil’s bargain in the matter of living quarters. Even Norman Mailer.
In the elevator, riding towards the sky, questions danced through my head, tormenting me like visions of sugarplum fairies. Adeline, why are you dining at the apartment of an unavailable man? Adeline, why are you regularly lunching with his common-law wife? Adeline, what is wrong with you?
I’d not expressed my depth of feeling for Thomas Cromwell, not even to Baby, but I knew that I needn’t. Not with the young author, trained with a novelistic predilection for detail and human squalor. He’d been kind enough not to inquire after the obvious.
Aubrey opened their door, a clean white apron over her perfectly casual outfit. She hugged Baby, whom she had not met, and examined Emil. “Isn’t he lovely?” she said. “Tom’s getting dressed. Make yourselves comfortable.”
Like the New World, some realms are better left unexplored. The décor lacked any defining feature but was so of its very moment, hovering at the exact edge of a taste. Faddish technology du jour and reproducti
on posters from the Art Nouveau.
“Their television is fucking enormous,” whispered Baby.
“It’s far worse than yours,” I said, “which is an astounding sentiment.”
The bedroom door opened and out ran the great wrinkled beast. I put Emil on the ground. My toddler tumbled towards the animal, throwing his stubby arms around the dog’s neck and kissing its folds of flesh.
Baby cooed at the image, but even Emil’s joy couldn’t mask the cruelty of a fifty-pound Shar-Pei trapped in a two-bedroom apartment. We are all prisoners of our environs but typically the bars are not so visible.
Thomas Cromwell sauntered out, wearing a modest shirt and khaki pants. He still looked like one of America’s best-groomed men.
“I thought that I heard the buzzer,” he said.
“We’ve been here for a while,” said Baby. “We’ve been judging you and Aubrey by the books on your shelves. It’s something that Adeline and I do. You can learn a lot by what books people keep in their living room. The book’s physical presence is pure wish fulfillment. It’s a marketing device, like your identity refracted through a misreading of the author’s intent.”
“Baby,” I whispered. “Stop being a dick.”
“If you’re interested in my insecurities,” said Thomas Cromwell, “then you’ll want to examine the shelves in the other room. These are only the ones that I’ve worked on professionally.”
That simply set the tone, didn’t it, darlings? Baby mildly aggressive and possibly autistic whilst he and Tomás del Pozo talked shop. I’d whittled away enough time with literary people to know that soon enough Baby’d start spreading gossipy rumors about Jay McInerney and frozen water-melon, so I went out on the balcony, which wasn’t much more than a little 8 x 3-foot rectangle.
One could see across the East River, staring straight at Queens and Roosevelt Island, a view that one never caught in the East Village. The 58th Street Bridge, the tram, the United Nations headquarters, and the Pepsi-Cola logo blazing through the darkness, stationed atop a squat factory that bottled ghastly soft drinks.