Suddenly Jenny did what Jenny was sometimes prone to do in those days: she ran out of the house, in a blind panic, into the cold autumn night without a jacket. She was just lost in the sauce, poor dear. Of course, it broke the monotony and everybody ran after her to give her the attention she was demanding. She might end up at the Russian Tea Room or she might end up in a crack den, who knew? Jenny’s freak-outs were periodic, intense, and always anybody’s guess.
These incidents were important, in that they showed her and us that the drugs were secondary, that we were a family first and foremost, and we would be there for each other, always.
She wasn’t really craving butter beans that day in the trash can. She needed to know that we cared enough to drop the torch and find her a can opener … stop the madness and look for her shoes … thank her for her money and her support …
Give her a big kiss.
Another night, or maybe the same night.
Same situation, and same cast of characters: Michael, Mavis, Jenny, and me … others perhaps … Daniel? Peter-Peter Boyfriend Stealer? Who knows … Who can keep track …
Money—gone.
Drugs—gone.
Hope—dwindling.
Everybody! Empty your pockets! Give up that stash! Look again! Maybe you missed something the first three hundred times you checked. Still nothing? Who has a bank card? Checkbook?
How can it be? NOT ONE PERSON IN THIS ROOM HAS ANY MONEY LEFT? I find that hard to believe. Jenny, call your parents. Say you need … Books for school!
At three o’clock, Saturday morning?
Well, who can we call? Not Mr. Gatien. We’d already asked for “rent” three times this month.
Michael’s credit at the crack house had been exhausted. Michael’s CREDIT at the CRACK HOUSE was exhausted. And the club dealers were sick of us.
Uh. OK. Think.
Jewelry? Anybody have anything worth pawning?
Then.
An idea. The worst one of all.
The last idea at the bottom of the bottom barrel.
The antique grandfather clock. The one Peter gave as a Christmas present last year.
Who the hell needed that big old thing cluttering up the house? Who’d miss it? Wasn’t there a clock radio in Mavis’s room? That’s good enough for Michael.
Somebody, somewhere would pay dearly for such a treasure. Why, you could probably get seventy-five or a hundred dollars!
So Michael, still blue, still wet, with the crack pipe still in one hand—with the help of Mavis—dragged the clock from door to door in his apartment building, waking up tenants, to see if they wanted to buy a grandfather clock—as if it was all perfectly natural. Neighbors helping neighbors. Of course.
Michael had a little story prepared, about needing money for a plane ticket or something—but his neighbors were apparently used to Michael, and his three o’clock “emergencies.” At least this time he had bothered to put on a pair of pants.
Amazingly, some tenants actually gave him money. They always did. He could be very persistent, I suppose, or just riffling through the flour jar when their backs were turned and all … But he did pay them back. He put them on guest lists. He was famous. It was a funny story to tell your old college roommates when they called: That wacky club kid you read about in the gossip columns, you won’t believe what he did this time!
I don’t believe he ever sold the clock, but it’s a helluva story, huh?
You see, you can look at this little vignette and take it for what it is: a typical problem all drug addicts encounter, with an atypical solution due to the goods and means at Michael’s disposal.
Or you can look further and read into it a parable, an allegory maybe, a metaphor for how people and things were loved and discarded based upon their immediate value.
And maybe if we stretch it further, it could help us to understand how it was that Michael could agree to turn State’s evidence on Peter later on down the road. How he could sell out his best friend and mentor.
But, quickly, quickly, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
We have Michael and Mavis, together, as Grand Guignol.
Here we have Thanksgiving at Tavern On The Green, both of them under the lace tablecloth, taking quick hits off the crack stem. Here we have them being led out of the restaurant … shivering blurs, they were …
At hip little clubs, trendy restaurants, walking down the street … always, everywhere … lighting up their crack pipes, without regard to reputation or danger or possible legal retribution.
Until they were unrecognizable.
(“This is what I’ve always dreamed of,” Mavis had said nine months earlier, “Nothing could possibly go wrong …”)
Michael began having crack seizures.
Just for the attention, I was convinced of that.
Always at the MOST INAPPROPRIATE TIMES.
During MY PARTIES, or whenever I started having fun.
The phone would ring—DRAT!—and we would have to move the party once again to the St. Vincent’s waiting room. To jones and go through the motions of worrying about Michael, when we all knew perfectly well that Michael was indestructible.
Nothing could ever bring HIM down.
He would be released soon enough, and he would get right back on the roller coaster.
And certainly it was nothing major that signified his fall from grace. It was the little things, the ones I recognized from my own experience, that began adding up.
He stopped making nightly guest lists, an obsessive nine-year ritual that he dismissed without a passing thought.
He stopped returning messages, and when his answering machine broke, he just avoided answering the phone altogether. It was a relief actually, when the phone company turned it off for good.
He had two cats, one of them a long-haired Persian named Spikers—a pug-ugly little thing, really—with a smushed-up face that looked like it had been repeatedly hit with a frying pan. But Michael loved it and spoke to it in Skrinkle Skroddles, and saw to its every need. That ugly-ass cat ate steak tartare while Michael and Keoki lived on Sweetarts. Spikers needed to be brushed and cared for daily and when I saw him with matted and dreaded fur, pulling at his skin and raising sores—FILTHY, HUNGRY, PATHETIC—I knew Michael was sinking fast.
Keoki says he first noticed the irreversible signs of down-fall when he discovered Michael no longer took his teddy bear—Cozy Molly—to bed with him at night, and actually no longer even knew where the twenty-seven-year-old totem was.
In an article in the Daily News entitled “Fallen King of Clubs Still Aces With Mom,” written after the murder, Elka Alig says she was the last to know about Michael’s drug problem.
According to her she was SHOCKED to discover, in 1994, Michael’s spiraling drug habits.
Her first clue was when Michael “didn’t come to pick me up in a limousine” from the airport. She “knew something was wrong.”
Then she found all those empty vials in his apartment.
“They’re for my Lego,” he reportedly told her.
Funny, I remember things differently.
Michael was always quite open with Mom about his drug use. In fact, I remember in 1994, she arrived during a massive binge and didn’t bat an eyelash. We all carried on, business as usual.
“My baby looks so thin,” she said.
“It’s the damnedest thing, Elka,” I replied, “he eats and eats, you know, but every night when they pump his stomach, he loses all those nutrients.”
We all laughed.
“Are you at least taking your vitamins?”
“Well, Freeze cuts his cocaine with vitamin B12.” he answered. “Does that count?”
And we all laughed again, and I wheedled another bag out of Mavis.
“Would anybody care for a line of vitamins?”
I can quite easily recall her asking Michael to send her some “nose candy” many times over the years. I even remember her doing ecstasy with her son at the Limelight.
That’s rich.
“My mother hates you. Every time she calls she asks if I still hang out with ‘that old witch.’”
OLD?
I think it stems from that visit, when she fell into her first K-hole.
I suppose I was rather glib about it.
She was crying when they carried her over to me at the Limelight.
“Oh, no,” Michael was saying, “I think she did Special K!”
She was disoriented. Couldn’t stand. Couldn’t talk. There was a look of terror on her face.
“Yep, that’s a K-hole.”
“What can we do?” Michael wailed.
I didn’t offer my standard speech that I used to soothe K victims (“I know everything is confusing right now, but in only twenty minutes—yada yada ya).
Instead, I think I felt her up, looking for her stash.
“Just prop her up against the bar, Michael. Oh, by the way, do you have any drink tickets?”
Oddly enough, it was Jennytalia to the rescue. In a rare burst of taking charge, Jenny sidled up to Elka and came up with a stunning plan: “I’ll meet you down in the hole and help bring you back. Michael, get her some cocaine to help break the high, and get me a half gram of K. I’m going down.”
So Jenny is Elka’s favorite, while I am the evil drug fiend.
Isn’t life funny?
So.
If my incisors seem a bit exposed, and if you get hit by an excited spray of spittle as I rush to relay this next part of the story—watching Michael fall into the very same spiral of drug addiction that he used against me so often—understand that it was wicked of me to enjoy it like I did, but there was some ironic justice to be had.
Yes, this was the summer and fall of 1995, when crack was le dernier cri—and all the most fashionable folk downtown carried butane torches and glass stems in their Prada bags.
This was around the time of those posh penthouse parties that Peter would throw at all the chic hotels in town. Oh, you didn’t know? You hadn’t heard? Well, they were just BEYOND, my dear. BEYOND ANY MEASURE … Hedonistic pleasure pits! Drug-fueled orgies of epic grandeur! “Excess” doesn’t even express! “Gluttony” is too kind!
Now, having said all that, I have to admit that I was never invited. Never. Not once. Oh, I suppose I would have been a buzzkill, a lone K-nut on a completely different wavelength altogether, stumbling about, looking to connect.
No, these parties were about freebasing. It’s serious business, this—a group activity in which concentration, and dedication to the matter at hand, are paramount.
No time for trivialities during the preparation and eventual consumption of said rock. Conversation is limited to the quiet but insistent bickering over the proper rate of stem rotation and torch intensity. It could go on for DAYS….
Clearly, I would have been out of place.
So all I know of those parties is what was told to me afterward: the naked games of charade, the tens of thousands of dollars worth of drugs spread out like a Roman banquet, the fort building with the fancy furniture, Peter, naked, patchless … with one wild eye … hiding behind the curtains—
Nope. I wasn’t there.
The cheese stands alone.
But Mavis and Freeze and Jenny and later the new kids, like Gitsie and even Angel, I suppose, were all invited. And made the scene. And developed a taste …
Crack was introduced to the club kids that summer, with such panache, such dazzling style, it seemed inconceivable that after a marvelous and worry-free binge, it might someday turn into, oh, Jenny in a garbage can, hacking at a can of butter beans. Who could ever imagine that it would change your personality, take away all that was good and decent in your life, including your morals, your friends, your furniture, your job … I saw it happen to everyone around me, but to no one more so than a certain spiky-haired lesbian tofu vendor from Massachusetts.
It became too much for her to handle. It became too much for anyone to handle.
Mavis left town. January ’95.
She got out, God bless her, and tried to save herself by running blindly cross-country, looking to retrieve the soul that had been sucked out of her a year earlier.
I really miss that girl.
Meanwhile: Freeze.
He lost the apartment on Eleventh Street. He couldn’t keep a roommate long enough to collect rent. It was dank and dirty and oh, full of fish heads and crack smoke. It was loathsome to visit, and detestable to live in, I’m sure. The crowd of base-heads who filled the apartment night and day were of such repulsive stock that it turned an already uncomfortable apartment into a true house of horrors …
Freeze was sinking into the quicksand: having lost his apartment, his status as a dealer, and the legion of toadying yes-men that came with it, he lost the will to dress up, go out, and have fun. In fact, he lost the will to make money, look for a place to live … even eating was beside the point.
When faced with eviction, he merely shrugged and slid quietly out the door without bothering to pack up his belongings…. Gone forever were the dozens of pairs of identical chaps, the armbands, the little leather vests, the platform boots, gone, without even a backward glance.
Thus we see the emergence of Freeze Number 3.
Remember—from his humble beginnings as the meek and mild milquetoast in Bella’s back room, into his heyday as FrankenFreeze—we see now before us, Freeze Number 3, the fractured sum of that man.
Of course I took him in. I didn’t have much of a choice. That’s how it worked, for both Michael and me. Of course we had quite a racket going for a while there. Finding new drug dealers … tossing them back and forth to each other … We would shuck them, break them in, toss them back, and leave their empty shells on the barroom floor. But, of course, in the end we had to take responsibility for the destruction we caused. Of course we had to take custody of our dealers after we broke them. We both shared in the responsibility of housing and feeding them. Michael took care of Mavis long after she stopped taking care of him. I took in Freeze.
We would do the same for anyone, of course.
For better or worse, we were all family by this stage of the game, and like all families we were capable of monstrous acts of cruelty to each other. But ultimately, when all was said and done, we were each of us, all we had. In our own way we looked out for each other. You have to believe this, or I won’t allow you to read any further. After all we had been through together, we all truly loved each other. And the worse times got, the tighter the circle became.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Freeze drifted into my apartment, my happy new swinging singles pad, and before I realized what was happening, he had dug in his heels, chased off my other roommate, and turned it into a reasonable replica of his Eleventh Street shithole.
In no time at all, my new home was a mess.
A mess!
And this—coming from me!
Me!
Who, very often, can be found just sitting in a dumpster, perfectly happy.
Me!
Well, I was fine with it even when it took the better part of an hour to navigate through rough terrain and stinking debris, to get to my bedroom. But when we had to call in the city plow to pave the kitchen with rock salt, I must say that I gave him a mighty mean frown.
Baseheads are a filthy lot.
He stayed four months, during which time we weaned him off crack and tried to rid him of his long-standing heroin habit. Three weeks in Dallas with our friend Brooke, and he was clean as a whistle. But once he got back to the city, he jumped right back on the horse.
Of course, of course.
When I’d had my fill of Freeze, he left and began his wandering. He quickly adjusted to his new status. He moved quietly, like a stealth bomb, you hardly noticed him when he slipped into your entourage. Before you could blink, he had thoroughly insinuated himself into your life—running
errands for you, making you zippy little outfits.
Cooking and cleaning and organizing.
Just as sweet as pie. Wish he had been like that for me. I might have let him stay.
He would sleep on a pile of rags if that’s all you had, and thank you gladly for the opportunity.
He didn’t eat much.
He was rarely sad, and if he was worried about his future, and where he would go next, he never showed it.
And when it was time to leave, he would smile sweetly, thank you politely, and walk out the door (but always, always, leaving a bag behind, on accident, so when he was desperate, trapped, alone, on the street—he could call and retrieve it—then once inside your door, he stayed until it was time again to leave).
Many people avoided him when they saw him coming.
Many of the same people who used to kiss his bronzed and plucked little butt.
He saw both sides of everybody’s worst side. From blatant ass kissing to the big chill in less than two moves.
Trust me, I know all about this: Once you’ve seen the absolute worst in everybody you’ve ever met, you sort of give up hope. Any good that you might see—well, you know better. You know what lurks beneath the surface, what’s right around the corner. You’ve seen the truth in everybody. Everybody.
So you accept that everyone is inherently capable of hurting you. They’re only out for themselves. You will end up hurt.
You can’t judge people in the same way that you once did—“this person is good”; “this person is bad”…
You embrace everyone, equally—
But now there is a protective barrier.
So that’s why Freeze would spend time with anyone. ANYONE. It didn’t matter if it was the Queen of Romania or the Prince of Port Authority.
He was himself, once removed. When he was presented with something good, he took it quickly—because he knew it wouldn’t last—and he steeled himself against the coming bad.
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