I’m happiest barefoot. In fact, I pay so little attention to footwear that I willfully lose more shoes than anyone I know.
And very often, I get confused and forget what shoes are mine and what shoes belong to, say, the person whose home I’m visiting.
But that’s just me.
It’s a psychological block that stems from a childhood trauma.
I DO NOT INTEND TO STEAL PEOPLE’S SHOES. It just happens.
Let me reiterate:
Sometimes I get confused when it comes to footwear. I panic and grab the first pair of somethings that I see, and I PUT THEM ON MY FEET. Then I leave without giving it a second thought. THAT’S NOT STEALING.
It’s delusional, catch-as-catch-can dressing.
Most everybody knows about this odd little peccadillo of mine. They know I don’t do it out of spite. And they still love me.
I’m in a fugue; I can’t help it.
A somnambulist’s fog.
I become Bizarro James; the mad shoe-stealing James.
But later, you can always come to me and talk it over with me and I’ll express my surprise, my shame, and my overall willingness to return the lifted item and do what I can to make up for any discomfort I’ve caused.
I’m that kind of guy.
All of this is leading to that fateful morning at Mavis’s, when I put on the wrong pair of tennis shoes.
A simple mistake.
Except I had been wearing patent leather thigh-high boots with seven-inch spikes, but, hey, after three days and twelve grams of Special K, who can tell the difference? In my panic, they really seemed like something I would have worn.
So I took them.
Was it really that wrong?
Was it worth ending a beautiful friendship over?
When I got home, I took two Rohypnols and was out for the count.
I didn’t hear the knocking at my door, or the screaming outside my window. I didn’t know about the rowdy crowd of angry friends who were trying to help the poor, shoeless Peter-Peter Boyfriend Stealer back at Mavis and Freezes.
But I did hear my window smash, and I felt a patent leather boot hit me on the head. I still have the bloodstains on my pillowcase and a disfiguring scar right there, on my temple …
MAVIS BROKE MY WINDOW, IN 30-DEGREE TEMPERATURE, WHEN I HAD NO HEAT IN MY APARTMENT, AND THREW A BOOT AT MY HEAD.
I heard peals of laughter and the sound of many feet running away.
It was the last straw.
It was so mean-spirited of her. So nasty and ill warranted.
It was officially the end of our sisterhood.
I mean, who knew Mavis had such a mean streak?
Who knew Freeze could get so petty and rude?
Well, I guess I did. I shouldn’t have been naïve. They fought all the time and their fights had always been fearsome, frightening, unexpected. They came out of the blue, and always, but always, occurred at the most unbelievably inappropriate times— baptisms, bar mitzvahs, sweet sixteens … wherever we happened to be that evening pushing their wares. They didn’t care. They were demons. Possessed.
I should have known they’d turn their anger on me someday.
But this! Breaking my window? Well!
It’s just like them.
One time, I will never forget it, this was when we first met, they were fighting over a minor clerical error in their bookkeeping. Freeze didn’t give a hoot. He was exhausted and all for just letting his generous nature and faulty mathematics slide for the night. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll get it back. I’ll just eat the difference out of tomorrow night.” Or the next night. No big deal. There was always more money out there to be made. He just wouldn’t get those new chaps he had his eye on.
But Mavis wouldn’t let it go. Oh no. She kept at him. Pecking away, trying to find out where that bag of coke went, and who owes what for how many grams of K.
Yada yada ya …
Skrinkle skroddle doo …
She could really get on a guy’s nerves. Especially when the heroin and the roofies were kicking in and he was feeling so lovely.
But then, just as his eyeballs began their blissful roll into the back of his head and his oh-so-heavy lids began fluttering to a close, just as the warmth of that evening’s leftover drugs began creeping through his limbs like a warm ray of sunshine—
Mavis pounced.
She beat him with her bony fists. “I want my fucking money, you lying, junkie, son-of-a-bitch!” She clawed at him, and pawed at him, and generally made quite a show of it.
Oh, lady! My!
This went on for about five minutes. He didn’t even wake up.
Then she froze in midmaul, and changed tactics. I could see a lightbulb go on over her head.
She climbed off of him with an icy, cool resolve.
She picked up the plate of glass from the glass-top table and held it high over her head (where she got the strength and the balance to do it, I’ll never know) but she just stood there, for about ten or fifteen minutes (or so it seemed at the time), with the glass gleaming wickedly in her eye and that terrifying expression on her ugly old mug of pure lesbian rage unbound.
Then she brought it down—
SLAM!
SMASH!
—into a thousand little shards, that we would never fully pick up or account for… our feet were, and would remain, bloody nubs again for months to come.
Wow. What a sight.
Now, let me back up for a minute and explain that Mavis—poor provincial, aesthetically challenged little Mavis—really only cared for three things in her whole entire life: her waterbed, her five-piece sofa sectional, and her piss-elegant glass-top table with the granite gargoyle legs.
Oh, how she loved showing off her beloved home furnishings—the fruits of her labor! Each one, lovingly handpicked, then paid for with her hard-earned grocery money. These sacred items—her bed, her sofa, and her table—symbolized her independence, her taste, and her past. Three things she was tragically, and inordinately, proud of.
So you see, for Mavis to smash her beloved glass-top table like that—well, you just can’t imagine what it must have taken! (Well, actually you probably can imagine: two grams of crystal meth over a four-day period, and one chronically irresponsible business partner, to be exact.)
But the raw emotion she had displayed! The sheer intensity! From whence had it come? In what dark corner of her soul had it been hiding and festering and waiting to show itself? How long had it sat, and counted the snubs and slights and personal affronts, before it chose to rise up and explode in indignant fury: “NO MORE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO MORE!”
Hmm.
Well.
As interesting a question as that is, there was really no time to sit back and chew on theoretical rhetoric. In a flash, after the shattering glass just narrowly missed hitting him, Freeze leapt to his feet. His eyes were blazing and his arms were raised in what every gorilla would instantly recognize as the attack position of the alpha male defending his domain.
Hello, who was this new Freeze?
What happened to the old one?
Why, not just a moment ago he was nothing but a bump on a log. A lobotomized sea cow. An utterly useless waste of leg room. He couldn’t even fend off her puny little attack, much less retaliate with a counteroffensive of his own. I guess the K, the Rohypnol, and the heroin all decided to vacate his bloodstream at once, leaving Freeze suddenly stone cold sober and madder than a wet hen.
Look at his anger!
Look at his intensity!
Can it be measured? Can we gauge its depth and might? Can we chart it, plot it, figure it out, so that we can make sure that it never gets too far out of control?
The power of his emotions was staggering! Anything could have happened at that moment! Why, he could have killed someone!
In the months to come, I would see that look of rage again—many, many times again, once he became hooked on crack. But I never got used to it. And it always sc
ared the beans out of me, every time I saw it.
So here now was my first glimpse of yet another version of Freeze.
I watched in mute horror as they slammed into each other with the force and fury of two Mack trucks colliding. My goodness, you might have thought the tectonic plates were shifting, or a herd of water buffalo was dashing through the East Village, such was the sound and the fury! Throw a kitten in a blender and you’ve got a pretty accurate description of what I was witnessing, ringside.
There was blood shed that day, and clumps of hair lost. An emotional hurdle was crossed, as well, and a precedent set.
A pattern was forming. It would happen again. And again.
After they moved into that awful, cursed Eleventh Street apartment.
—and Mavis began racing through her days like a rhesus monkey on a crack drip … shivering and shrieking and chattering away, for six or seven days. Hey, Mave! Thumbs up!
—and Freeze fell into his Freebase Free Fall (and was so happy for a time).
—when the bloom wore off the rose of their friendship …
—and the money got tighter …
They fought like this all the time. It became second nature to them. They fought until it was all they knew to do with one another. It was who they were now, what they had become: no longer Mavis and Freeze—friends helping friends—but two powerful, war-torn, politically divided, ideologically opposed mortal enemies, forever locked in the familiar box step of war. Loyalties were demanded. Sides had to be taken.
Their apartment crumbled beneath them. Or so I heard. I was still persona non grata. I imagine though, that dishes were broken. Furniture was destroyed. Nothing was ever repaired. No mess was ever cleaned up. A friendship was buried in the rubble.
I told you the place was cursed.
Then, suddenly, word spread through the clubs that they were on the verge of going out of business. It seemed the money was mysteriously all gone.
How could that be?
Well, you may recall that Mavis, too, fell pretty hard for the old Crack Rock and Pipe Combo. That, and, oh, the seven or eight OTHER cross-addictions that they had acquired together. I’m sure they don’t even remember how much fun they had going broke.
It was gone now, though.
And since they weren’t even speaking most days, they certainly weren’t coordinated most nights. A fundamentally unsound way to run your basic Mom-&-Pop-type drug cartel, don’t you think?
How was Freeze to know that Mavis overextended her credit with the supplier? And how was Mavis to know that Freeze left his whole kit and caboodle in a taxicab somewhere west of Brooklyn Heights? He lost all their money, all their drugs—in fact, he pretty much just lost it period. It was the beginning of the end for Freeze. Mavis, too. Neither one of them ever recovered from that deathblow.
Each one bottomed out separately and alone. Their friends had all been driven away long ago.
But where would they go? What would they do? If they weren’t drug dealers anymore, how would they still be fabulous? Who would take care of them now?
Then Mavis got an idea. She saw a way out. She saw her savior, her little ray of hope.
She saw Michael Alig.
Mavis, that crafty old coot, convinced Michael she was the answer to all his prayers. She was the roommate he’d been searching for all his life.
God bless her.
I always knew she’d go far! I always knew she’d surprise us all in the end! … My gal, Mav! … I knew it from the moment I laid eyes on her! “That girl’s going places!” I said. “That girl’s got style!”
Of course, Michael didn’t know of her financial woes, her crazy-ass crystal habit, or her propensity for mass destruction. He thought that maybe Mavis was the answer after all. Here was somebody who he hoped would look after him, cook up the rock for him, and maybe even do a bit of spring cleaning while she was at it.
Fat chance.
The Mavis that moved in with him was a bitter old drug addict who didn’t give a flip WHO he was or HOW MANY times he was on Geraldo. Or so she said. That was the old Mavis, the country bumpkin who would slobber over any old Barney Rubble in a wig and twin set. By this point in the game she had fully figured out the basic rules of social interaction, and she was a whole new Mav, a whole new bag of chips. Gone was the perky little apple-polisher of yore, and in her place was a gravel-voiced, world-weary femme du monde. I tell ya, liver and lemons couldn’t have tasted as bitter and as tart as our girl Mavis!
If you didn’t know her, you’d swear when you saw her out and about that she was a genuine, Old School member of the highest, bitchiest order! Yes siree. She had the part down pat. Why, if she had walked into the Limelight with Dianne Brill herself, I would not have been the least bit surprised. She was that good. To the manner born.
To Michael’s credit, once he figured it out, and realized that it would be HE who would be taking care of HER, he accepted his fate stoically. In fact, they even made a rather touching couple.
COUPLE OF MONSTERS!
HA!
I didn’t see her for at least a month after the devastating shoe incident. I only heard the daily rumors of her famous falling-out with Freeze, and her subsequent phoenixlike return to the top.
Then one day, I was walking down Thirtieth Street, past Michael’s apartment, I don’t know why. I was just pulled in that direction.
I didn’t particularly want to see either of them, but I wanted them to see me—maybe looking out the window, or driving past in a cab. I wanted them to miss me.
But, damnit, there she was, surrounded by an all new entourage—strange, hippielike girls. I didn’t recognize any of them. They were piling out of a van. I turned to run, hide, but it was too late.
“JAMES! DARLING! YOU LOOK FABULOUS! BIG KISS! BOTH CHEEKS! THAT HAIR! VERY JEAN SEBERG!”
Certainly not the reaction I expected, but hey, I rolled with it.
“Well, that outfit, Mavis, it’s very …”
“You like? It was SO FUNNY. We were all going out with Todd last Saturday, and he INSISTED on opening up his boutique and DRESSING THE WHOLE GANG—too adorable—then when we got to Bowery Bar, Eric made us all give an impromptu fashion show! Well, afterwards it would have been too heartbreaking to give back all those memories, SO I BOUGHT EVERYONE THEIR OWN LITTLE TODD OLDHAM OUTFIT!”
Her little group squealed in appreciation and gave Mavis a BIG KISS, BOTH CHEEKS, as we walked inside.
Six months ago she was a sharecropper in Marietta, suddenly she’s Betsy Bloomingdale?
“But, what? I’m trying to impress you? JAMES ST. JAMES? Enough about me, let’s talk about YOU! Your favorite subject! Done anything interesting lately, dear? I haven’t seen you out in AGES! But then, usually it’s just Michael and me at Bowery Bar. Very dull, you know, but the food is free—Eric thinks we add ambience …”
They get comp’ed FOOD? At Bowery Bar?
Such a thing is possible?
She pulled me aside.
“Eight days,” she whispered, “eight days on the fiercest crystal meth …!”
Click.
Of course.
I thought I heard a rattle! Why, she was just a big old Mexican jumping bean, clattering about. Her face was a death mask, skin stretched so tight it looked like it might snap off.
Crystal? Blech! And eight days? I don’t have enough to do in my life that I need to be up for eight days. And there is nobody fascinating enough to spend that much time with …
I mean—you have to draw the line somewhere! At some point you just have to say: “Enough!”
But it looked as if we were friends again.
In fact, I followed her back to Michael’s later that night and saw the sad reality of their life together. And it didn’t look to be all Bowery Bar and impromptu fashion shows to me.
Quickly:
There’s Michael and Mavis, living together in a pile of garbage …
Watch them move about, maneuvering from the bedroom, through t
he kitchen, to the living room. Hazardous going …
The kitchen has been ripped out. There is nothing but mortar, exposed wires, and piping. Sharp and rusty things lay about, inviting tetanus.
Somewhere a long time ago, in a moment of inspiration, when inspiration was still around, Michael had decided to COMPLETELY REMODEL his condominium—the same condominium he hadn’t paid mortgage on for three years. The same condominium that was in the process of being repossessed. But, ever the optimist, and always one for luxury, Michael ripped up the carpeting in the living room and buffed and sanded and lacquered the floors and—onward ho!—he completely rethought the kitchen.
French doors, of course, and new fixtures, new tiles; the sink should be over here, and the cabinets, well, the cabinets were altogether wrong.
Rip them right out. There and then.
And then—
Well, like I said, that was all a long time ago—when little things, like running water and refrigeration, mattered. The stove still worked, but then that was a perennial, a given, of course. How else would he cook up his cocaine? Those damn butane torches only lasted so long …
Look at Michael, will you? In his filthy old underwear—awful bouncing, bobbling things, falling all about—making us sick. He’s all blue and wet and cold to the touch. Portrait of Michael as Clam Dip.
And Mavis, percolating nicely, like popcorn on a skillet—she is all over the place, pacing and racing about, barking orders to somebody about something … something …
Jenny, frozen, on a table, looking out the window. Waiting for someone to come. We don’t know who, but somebody was bound to come along and cause problems. They always do.
So I was ordered to keep watch at the door. I was posted there to warn them of impending company—people who were probably on their way right now, as we speak, to disrupt their fun, break up their party.
I opened it up, to take a gander …
“Close the door! Close the door! What are you MAD, man? Through the keyhole! Look through the keyhole, for God’s sake!”
So I was on my knees, forced to look through the keyhole, for imaginary friends and foes.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen Michael in such a state. It’s hard to believe this is the same Michael who used to SCOLD me for indulging in a bit of cocaine now and again. Who would have thought he, of all people, would come to this? But, it makes for a rather gripping drama. Riveting stuff. It’s hard to keep my eye on the keyhole. Impossible, when—
BLOODBATH Page 12